The Ledger of Unspoken Breath

The Ledger of Unspoken Breath

Where the silence is kept in neat, numbered rows

The ink on my finger is black, but the word it defines is grey. I sit at the desk in the room with the single window that looks out onto the brick wall of the adjacent building, a wall that has not changed since 1994. The year is irrelevant, of course, because the language I am preserving does not have a word for “year” in the sense of linear progression. It has only keth, which means the pause between two heartbeats, or the space between two stones in a wall. I have written the definition of keth in four thousand pages. I have cross-referenced it with the dialects of the valley, the coastal villages, the high pastures. I have mapped the erosion of its meaning with the precision of a cartographer drawing the coast of a country that no longer exists.

There is a smell in the room. It is not the smell of old paper, which is vanilla and almond, but the smell of damp wool and cold tea. It is the smell of the house where I first heard the word spoken. The woman who spoke it is dead. Her daughter is dead. The grandchildren are dead. The last speaker died three years ago, and she did not speak keth. She spoke the language of pain, which is universal and therefore worthless. I recorded her voice. I have the file. I play it when the silence in my own apartment becomes too loud. It is a dry, rattling sound, like a leaf dragging across pavement. It is not keth. It is the sound of the end.

I look at the dictionary. It is a heavy thing, bound in leather that I chose because it seemed permanent. Leather does not rot. Leather does not breathe. It is a skin that has forgotten how to be a body. I run my hand over the cover. The texture is smooth, cool, unyielding. I am a curator of a museum that has no visitors. The exhibits are not dead; they are never alive. They are suspended in the amber of my syntax, preserved in the perfect, sterile condition of the page. To write a word is to remove it from the mouth. To define it is to strip it of its context, its warmth, its accidental beauty. I have killed the language to save it. I have built a tomb and called it a home.

The rain begins to fall against the window. It is a steady, rhythmic tapping, a code I cannot decipher. I think of the word luma, which means the light that enters a room through a crack in the shutters, illuminating the dust motes that dance in the air. I have described it. I have noted its angle, its intensity, its duration. But I have not felt it. I have not stood in that room and watched the dust dance. I have only watched the description of the dust. The description is more real to me than the light. The description is safe. The light is fleeting, and therefore, to me, it is nothing.

I pick up my pen. The nib is wet with black ink. I am about to write the entry for sola, which means the feeling of being alone in a crowd, the specific loneliness of a city street at midnight. I hesitate. The pen hovers over the paper. The ink threatens to bleed, to spread, to become a stain. I lower the pen. I write nothing. The silence in the room is absolute. It is not the silence of keth. It is the silence of the void. It is the silence of the page waiting to be filled with words that will never be spoken.

I close the dictionary. The cover makes a soft, final sound. I sit in the dark. The rain continues. The ink on my finger is dry. It is a black mark, a scar, a proof of my existence. I am here. I am writing. I am preserving. I am destroying. The two actions are the same. The dictionary is full. The world is empty. I wait for the next heartbeat, the next pause, the next stone in the wall. There is no next.