Gone? Perhaps.

 Fiction:

Photo: Martymaine

RA. Nyreath Salmon was a woman who firmly believed language was more than just a tool for communication. She held that language was more of memory ingrained into sound. Since she’d initially wanted to become a linguistic anthropologist before finding herself amid blueprints and models, searching for proportion and light, whenever time permitted, she’d bury herself in dead scripts, converting and translating what she could, and mourning the loss of indecipherable things. However, as time progressed, Nyreath’s interest in linguistic anthropology intensified when she began hearing and seeing recurring syllables in languages demarcated by millennia and continents. That was when she realized: something was being said in code—something someone, or a group of people somewhere, didn’t want the average human being to understand just from staring. 

Nyreath’s first experience was with a repressed language of the Imazighen, which was initially a symbol on a 19th-century Rongorongo tablet from Easter Island. She discovered that the symbol was carved into an obsidian rock in a Mayan graveyard: a circle, three curved lines, and a dot at both ends, pronounced like you didn’t mean to hitch with your breath. She’d have missed it because they were meaningless on their own, until she realized they struck her as similar. Repetitive. One constant, carried across the wings of time. Nyreath decided to call it The Primus—The First Word. The seed of all syntax, encoded into language like a spectral imprint. 

Nyreath never published what she’d discovered. Instead, she’d become intrigued and decided to follow the pattern, moving in confidentiality from Egypt to Istanbul, then Greece, then Jerusalem, then back to Paris, all in her bid to chase linguistic anomalies. It became an obsession—one that cost her a tenure position, her batch at the office, most of her close friendships, and nearly her sanity. She barely made a meal like she loved doing. Barely visited fancy restaurants to document her experiences on her blog. Barely slept. And when she did, she dreamt of the molds and remnants of the Byzantine Empire, of different foreign cities folding inward, as if reality were a language stripping itself of its very being. 

Then came the radio.

An arenaceous, broken Russian antique Nyreath found in a rowdy market in Paris, where the stall owner had lost two teeth on each side of his mouth and had a pinky finger on his right hand. He’d seemed weird to Nyreath, and if it was on days when she cared enough to judge, she’d have taken a photo of him without his consent, forwarded it to the girls’ group chat, screaming, “Vous ne croirez pas qui j'ai vu aujourd'hui!” But not that day. She’d barely even noticed the stall owner’s abnormalities until he reached to give her the item she’d purchased. 

It was midnight when Nyreath sat lonesome behind the huge desk in her study, rummaging through old and new scripts, disjointed tablets, scrolls, and papers, some of which had been dumped close to her window by people whom she had no clue about. And while the wind blew against the stone balconies of Saint-Germain-de-Prés, her fingers slightly quivered as she shifted the frequency on the aged Russian radio she’d bought at the market. It shouldn’t have worked, the seller had told her that, but the radio wasn’t even plugged in when it roughly hissed The Primus back to her. 

The voice wasn’t that of a human. Not in the way Nyreath interpreted the speech. It was a husky, reverberated rhythm which slid past her ears and settled below her spine like a revelation too archaic for syllables. When she first heard the radio spew words, a monotonous, outstretched sound that had appeared in seven different proto-languages, secluded with no explanation; same dialects she’d spent half her life studying, same dialects that were similar in every culture; she was inert. A few times in the past, Nyreath had concluded that it was a mere coincidence that those symbols were alike. But now, the voice from the radio had spoken those words directly to her, and she didn’t know what to do next. 

Instinctively, she leaned in to hear more, but the radio sharply screeched before dying abruptly. Nyreath’s heartbeat was steady, which was so unnatural in a case like this, and as she gazed upon the items scattered across her ebony desk, she realised everything seemed unrelated, yet they all referenced The Primus. When she noticed the pattern, she draped her scarf over her head and tightened it, put on her medicated glasses again, and began searching for her abandoned journal—the one where she wrote about the recurring phases from her dreams and nightmares. When she found it, she scanned through its pages until she got to the middle of the journal where she’d scribbled: 

“As soon as the world obliviated speech, it adapted to screaming.”

Immediately Nyreath sat down to process the entire situation, the burner phone on the table chimed. An unknown caller. She hesitated, wondering who it was, before answering. A feminine voice hushed on the other end. “Nyreath. You found it. They’re coming.” Then the line went dead. That was when she recalled. About two days earlier, her apartment was broken into. Nothing in particular was stolen, so she didn't think much of it at the time. Just her notebooks and backpack were fossicked, her research tossed apart like someone had been demoralized, or afraid. In no time, Nyreath gathered all that she owned and dashed for the door. Leaving her lights on like she was still at home, just in case. But it never mattered where she went, the person or people who wanted her would always find her. 

A couple of weeks later, just when Nyreath thought they must have forgotten about her and her research, a message came through to the Fairmont Nile City Hotel where she was staying. A nameless black envelope with a crow’s feather attached to it slipped beneath her door. No address. No number. And inside bore a single sparkling sheet of paper with an ancient Akkadian glyph that she’d only recently been able to translate:

“To speak is to know. To know is to awaken. And to awaken is to risk.”

Nyreath knew what the message implied. She'd crossed a boundary. Discovered something that was supposed to remain hidden. And as soon as she began to pulsate and her legs began to shudder, the lights dimmed, and the air thickened. A glass splintered across the room in creeping motion, raining like microscopic grains of salt. The hotel curtains, lined with dark auburn Persian designs, heaved inward, and the sound of every word ever spoken out loud—laughter, cries, prayers, pleas, moans- spiraled into a single tone that rippled through her guts.

Then came the sudden stillness and her blurry vision. When Nyreath got the morale to look down, she realised the Codex she’d lately stolen from the Vatican Archives to review had turned to ash. She tried to fathom why all these things were happening to her in less than two months, when she heard the voice. Not outside her, or from a dusty Russian radio. But from within. 

“You have spoken. You have remembered. You have documented. And now, they’ll forget you.” 

Nyreath disappeared the following week. There was no trace of her; her apartment was abandoned, her research and blog were erased from every database, her name was taken out of academic records, and her closest colleagues and friends swore she never existed. When media personnel asked her employers, they said, “We have no idea who you’re talking about. There’s never been a Nyreath Salmon that worked here.” 

By Precious Nelson Esate