Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  Chloe had started to.

  Ela had been true to her word, and Chloe had begun painting bricks, a late-afternoon to early-morning shift. She listened to the people around her for twelve hours a day. The Esagila was going to save them. That was the only topic. Their children would live. As Chloe painted brick after brick demon-chasing blue, she pondered that. People would do anything for their children.

  The violence got worse.

  One day a woman came to work, missing a hand. Some other woman had stolen bread from her children, and they had gotten into a fight. The other woman was dead. After that, Chloe didn’t look at the faces of the women she worked with—we’re rats, she thought. Rats who are burying themselves under sewage and garbage and stripping the land of everything it has.

  Cheftu stopped coming home, except every few days. He was haggard and short-tempered. Chloe cursed herself for this whole plan. She’d dragged them there. She’d been responsible. She’d gotten sick and sold him into slavery. She was torturing his soul.

  She’d just fallen into bed, the moon was past its zenith, when Cheftu returned. He didn’t kiss her or inquire about her day. He sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders hunched, his hands clenched together.

  “Chérie, I think I have the sunflower-eye illness.”

  She bounded out of bed and held a torch in front of his eyes. They looked the same, but how could she tell? The copper color the patients’ eyes turned was the color Cheftu’s eyes already were. “Why? What can I do? What—”

  “I can’t remember anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The languages in my mind, I learned so many as a boy.”

  “Eighteen, if I remember you correctly.”

  “Such arrogance. I thought they would help me—no matter. That is the past, or the future. At any rate, I don’t remember them.”

  She put her arms around him. “You’re tired, you work too hard, you—”

  “Chérie, I have completely forgotten Latin and Chinese. Not a word remains in my mind.”

  “You knew Chinese?”

  “Mandarin, Szechuan, and four lesser-known dialects, yes.” He sighed. “It’s this madness. You’ll wake up, and I’ll be staring at the wall and drooling, like my patients.” His tone was bitter.

  “Get some sleep,” she said.

  “I cannot—”

  “I’ll go tell them you are too ill to come to work.”

  He didn’t argue. He passed out almost immediately.

  Chloe got up, washed her face, and started up the stairs to the roof, then changed her mind and took the staircase down to the ground. It was dawn by the time she got there. Cheftu had told her once before where he worked.

  She asked a child for directions and sucked in her breath when she saw his eyes. Sunflower eyes, this must be the beginning. An icy chill passed through her. His pupil was black. Surrounding it, like petals of a flower, were copper-colored plates that had started to obscure the brown of his eyes. She followed his directions, and stared into the gazes of everyone she saw.

  By the time she’d reached the sorry excuse for an infirmary, she wanted to scream. Every other child had the beginnings in his eyes. A lot of adults, too. She worked for a while in Cheftu’s place, feeding those who could swallow, milk from the copper pot. She quit when she reached the bottom of the pot; it was corroded and black—almost gone. Milk, with rotted copper fibers swirling in it, was all that was left.

  She strained what she could, fed the man, and almost ran home.

  They couldn’t stay another day. If only she’d known! If only—

  Chloe stopped in her tracks. Someone was speaking Arabic. To someone who was speaking Latin. She didn’t know it, but she could figure it out. Their conversation was punctuated with misunderstandings. One man was asking for more bricks. The other man thought he was being told to make more bricks. He was not a brickmaker, he was a bitumen pourer, he protested.

  I’m losing my mind. This is it. Completely gone. She rubbed her temples and walked on. She heard a crash and turned to see the Arabic speaker storm away, swearing to take his family and leave these idiots to build Esagila. Only in Arabic, it came out: the stairway to heaven.

  Bab-ili. Gate of the gods. Stairway to heaven. Babel. Babylon.

  Carefully, afraid of her head falling off because of this revelation, Chloe looked up. Images from art appreciation class slipped through her mind. A thousand artists had painted the Tower of Babel. Escher had made it impossibly tall and narrow. Doré had made it look like an ice-cream cone, upended. And Brueghel had left it abandoned and crumbling on a lush plain, the guts of it spilling out.

  But no one had portrayed it accurately. No one in the future had trusted the ancients to be as clever or more clever, as creative or more creative, as ingenious or more ingenious, than they themselves were.

  For the first time, Chloe realized what had struck her as so strange about this place, but she’d never really identified what that strangeness was: I always understood everything here.

  Not because I knew the languages.

  Because everyone spoke one language.

  To her side, someone cursed in German. She wasn’t fluent, but she knew how to swear. The person he was speaking to answered in Sanskrit. Sanskrit!

  The sun was blinding. She should get some sleep, but she had never felt less tired. She turned down one pathway and saw a family packing up. They were speaking in some Asian tongue, a tonal language punctuated with sharp vowel sounds. Their neighbors seemed bewildered and talked about how they’d started babbling.

  Babble.

  The tent city was breaking up. People were screaming at each other in tongues she didn’t know. They left their garbage and their waste and cursed the ones who’d been their friends. And they left.

  Chloe raced to her work, to see the same thing in action. Bricks were thrown, punches exchanged, hair pulled. And people left.

  The forty bricks she should have painted in one day ended up being ten. Even those weren’t delivered to the wall, because the wheelbarrow man and the woman who brought the bricks couldn’t agree where they should go. A jangle of sounds.

  When she reached the top of Esagila, she noticed it hadn’t grown taller today.

  Chloe ran back to their room.

  “We’re in Babylon,” she shouted. “That’s why we’re here!”

  “We’ve known that,” Cheftu groused. “We’ve known that all along.”

  “Cheftu, listen to me. The languages you can’t remember. Did you ever use them here?”

  “Why would I do that? We speak Sumerian.”

  She patted his thigh. “Think about it. Latin, Chinese, did you ever have a conversation with anyone in those languages. Here.”

  He sat up, groggy and grouchy. “I don’t think so.”

  “But you’re not positive?”

  “Why would I do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know, but Cheftu, I don’t remember a word of Greek.”

  “Wonderful. I’ve poisoned you, too. Your eyes will be sun—”

  “Silence yourself!”

  She had his attention now.

  “Every dinner I’ve had with Ela and Samu, we’ve… well, we’ve spoken a different language.”

  “You’re more ill than I am,” he said, reaching for her pulse.

  Chloe ducked back. “It always seemed so far-fetched that I figured, yes, I was losing my mind, because no one ever reacted. Conversation just flowed, the way it always does with multilingual people. One word, change language, slipping into another. But Cheftu, every language I’ve spoken with them, is gone.”

  “From your mind?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “What?”

  “It is impossible for a language to be stolen from a mind, or even a mouth. It takes years to learn, to—” He crossed his arms and closed his eyes. “I’m going back to sleep now.”

  Chloe glared at his closed eyes, then got up an
d paced the eight-by-eleven room.

  “We time-traveled. That’s impossible,” she said.

  “We saw water turn to blood. We saw firstborn-only die. We’ve seen a sea part. We’ve met immortals. We’ve watched a civilization vanish in a day and a night. We’ve seen lightning harnessed. We’ve watched people we’ve known from history live and breathe.

  “Cheftu, for God’s sake! We live in other peoples’ bodies! Our lives are built around impossibilities.”

  He didn’t move.

  She was pretty sure he was playing possum.

  “Try this on for size, Mr. Impossible. The Tower of Babel is a co-op, and baby, you’re living in it.”

  * * *

  When she went up to the top at sunrise, Chloe saw that a third of the tents were gone. A third of the people had left. Some of them so recently, she could see them still walking north or south, east or west, or any of the eight compass points in between. They’d stopped felling the trees. They’d stopped draining the river. They’d stopped building. Mostly, they argued. Their voices floated up to her, and she wished she had a list of the languages Cheftu spoke so she could know which ones were out there.

  But she knew one thing: which way was up.

  “Latin,” he said in her ear, then slipped his arms around her waist.

  “Do you remember it?”

  She felt him shake his head. “No, I just know enough to identify it. That voice is speaking another Chinese.” He rested his forehead against her neck. “Forgive—”

  “No,” she said and turned to him. “Nothing is wrong. No forgiveness required. That,” she said, as they listened to the rising racket, “do you remember that?”

  “Aztlantu. A precursor to Greek.” His arms tightened around her. “I thought I’d lost my mind. I would have these flights of fancy in which I would conduct conversations in these languages. I knew it must be impossible. I must be going crazy.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, inclining her ear.

  “Sanskrit. One of the firstborn from the original Indo-European tongue. English is related to the Teutonic languages, German, Dutch, Scandinavian tongues. Latin, you know—”

  “Yes. Yields French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.”

  “Also Greek, Russian, and Baltic-states tongues.”

  Above them, thunder rumbled.

  “Arabic and Hebrew are related.”

  “As are Chinese, Burmese, the Asian languages.”

  “The season of rains begins,” Cheftu said.

  “There were only three in the beginning. The roots,” Chloe said. “And they become, grow into, three hundred languages.”

  Thunder drew closer; they saw a flash of lightning.

  “God gave us minds like his.” Cheftu smiled in wonder. It started to rain. “Endless possibilities.”

  “Since one of those possibilities is being struck by lightning, I suggest we go downstairs,” Chloe said. “But one more question—was there any specific person around, in those conversations?”

  “No, no.” He shook his head.

  Chloe started down the stairs. There was for me, she thought. Who was Ela, really? Or should I be asking what was Ela?

  * * *

  It rained for two days. Cold, winter rain that soaked through wool and made the entire camp smell like a sheep farm. The sick had been left, so Chloe worked at Cheftu’s side as they watched the patients grow more and more ill.

  They hadn’t gone back to the tower; there had been too much to do. Wind followed the rain, and Chloe spent half her time tying down skins and rushes, trying to keep the patients dry. Finally, both wind and rain abated, and Chloe and Cheftu slept.

  Chloe was pouring the remnants of milk into the copper pot before the children awoke, when Cheftu attacked her. “No! Put it down!” he shouted.

  She dropped the pot and pulled away from him, the corroded copper spoon still in her hand. “You really have lost it! You made me spill the milk!”

  “It’s poison, Chloe.”

  His eyes were bright, his shoulders back, he looked like a different person. “The copper, it’s what’s killing them.”

  Chloe looked around at the few awake patients who all stared at her with the same copper-tinted gaze. Sunflower eyes, copper plates on top of brown irises, extra copper in the body. Copper—she looked at the ladle, at the pot. The milk had pooled on the ground, and tiny fibers of copper stood up from it.

  “Copper,” he said. “I’m such a fool! I’ve seen this before.”

  She was confused, and looked it.

  “As a boy, when I was in Egypt, as Jean-François, my brother and I… ah, the details don’t matter. We were walking with a French physician. A woman begged him to make her child well. He looked into the eyes of the child, and refused to help.”

  “That bastard!”

  “No, he was wise actually. He knew the child wouldn’t live, the copper was too much in its system. If he took the case on, and the child died, the Egyptians would just have an excuse to retaliate. We would be child murderers on top of tomb robbers. The child’s eyes, they were the same as these people’s.”

  “So we don’t feed them any more copper-poisoned food, but, what do we do to make them well?”

  Cheftu scratched his head, pushed hair out of his eyes. “Water, to flush it out. I don’t know what else. Something must bind with the copper to remove it from the body, but I don’t know what.”

  * * *

  Lightning struck the Esagila.

  The unfinished top caught fire and fell to the ground, landing in one of the bonfires in the middle of the night.

  Then and there, the remaining people scattered.

  Chloe supposed there were a hundred or less who were hanging on, maybe who still understood each other. The patients, whose systems they were trying to wash out by feeding them copious amounts of water, were improving. Or dying.

  Winter had arrived. Cold, wet. Frost on the ground.

  I’m standing in the shadow of the Tower of Babel.

  Cheftu, just rinsed, stepped out of the protection of the infirmary tent. “They’re all sleeping.” He’d buried a few more the previous night, but the sorrow of it wasn’t attached to him anymore. He whistled as he went about his rounds, he smiled and joked with the healing patients. Though he proclaimed he hated medicine, Chloe had to admit she hadn’t seen him as satisfied and eager to go about his day, in years. What he hated, she realized, was being inefficient and ineffective in medicine. He loved to make people well.

  “You saved sixty people’s lives,” she said.

  “You saved mine.”

  They joined hands and walked to the edge of the Esagila, where bricks were left in the rain, wheelbarrows frozen in their tracks, garbage everywhere. The flies were fewer, the rats, too. Operating during mostly daylight hours prevented Chloe from seeing too many insects.

  The top of Esagila had been burned black, and they didn’t know how much structural damage had been done. Neither had taken time away from the copper patients to climb up.

  “It was all for this,” Chloe said. “Your knowledge of languages, my knowledge of languages. Everything. Circles and cycles. Wheels within wheels.”

  Cheftu stared at the building. “Do you think we saw the fathers of the nations here?”

  “Yes.” She chewed her lip. “We read it so wrong, in my time.”

  “The Tower of Babel?”

  She nodded. “We ridiculed the idea of God’s jealousy and fear that the people would actually make it to heaven. When you realize that heaven isn’t a location, that it’s nothing but space up there, that statement seems pretty silly. We need a cleanup crew around here.” She kicked dust at an emboldened rat. He ran away. “We started it here, the tradition of not learning. We never do.”

  Cheftu looked at her. “I’m sure I agree, but to what are you referring?”

  “Abusing the planet. Look at this. Piles of… yuck. Just left. Garbage. People on top of people.”

  “God told the people
, after Ziusudra, to spread out and multiply.”

  “Instead they multiplied and clumped together. And worked on ruining the land.”

  “Now, they will be divided but alive.”

  “You were the tool,” she said.

  Cheftu looked at her.

  “All those languages, all that time, the memory, the experience, disseminated here.”

  “Ah, circles you said.”

  “Though, I’m a little confused how just speaking them made us forget them. How the words were stolen that way.”

  “Egyptians thought words were items, tangible presences.”

  “The Sumerians—us—words are power, here. Writing them is controlling them.”

  “Speaking them releases their power to the air,” Cheftu said. “At least, that is my guess.”

  “Somehow when we released those words, they were imprinted on the minds of other people? I’d say that’s impossible, but—”

  Cheftu laughed, and said something in French. He looked at her, as though expecting agreement, then spoke in Sumerian. “You don’t remember French?”

  She shook her head. “One of those dinners with Ela.”

  “I must confess, I no longer know English.”

  He raised his head, and Chloe heard a fight taking place in some other language. He looked at her. “Some of your work. Those are Frenchmen leaving now.”

  The other part of the fighting group—a stout, black-bearded man, came barreling toward them. “Imbeciles!” he shouted. “No sense of how to structure a city!”

  Sumerian, he spoke.

  Chloe and Cheftu grinned at each other. God, however He was called, had made up the list of citizens for this place and designated them clearly.

  “We need latrines so we aren’t defecating in the street like animals, we need some organization of children and someone to plant the fields. Those palms are going to rot, left in the rain. Waste, such waste.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Chloe said.

  He beamed. “What a delight! Someone who doesn’t babble!”

  Not anymore.

  * * *

  Nimrod arrived three months later. Enki, the black-bearded man, had organized the cleanup. Most of the copper patients were on their feet, doing small tasks. A garbage dump had been designated, and the Esagila had been partially dismantled for building materials.