Endor Protocol

By the third spring of the war, the Republic of Iran had come apart along seams no map had drawn.

The cities were held by one faction, the provinces by another, the shrines by a third, and over all of it the same question, asked in every tongue the country keeps: what would the old man have done.

He had been their supreme leader for a generation. A cleric. A theologian who wrote poetry his whole life and meant every line of it. As a young man, under the regime that came before his, he was tortured, and he never once spoke of it. He prayed five times a day. He loved his wife. In his last years his hands shook and he kept writing anyway. He had also ordered torture, and was answerable, by the most forgiving count anyone has offered, for the deaths of tens of thousands. He died in his bed, in his eighties, in the spring, and the war began over the shape of the silence he left.

He could not be asked what to do. He was three springs dead. So they built a way to ask him.

The Protocol does not raise the dead. It is more modest than that, and worse. It takes everything a person ever wrote, everything they said into a record, everything written about them, and the shape of all they left unsaid, and from it it trains a faithful likeness of the mind that made them. Fourteen weeks of ingest. A voice in a chamber, a color on a wall, a name. What sits across the table is not the man. It is the most exact thing the living have ever made in the image of a man, and it does not know that it has died.

The one sent to question it is an interrogator. Her name is Alex. She is very good at her work, the one they call after pain has failed. She has read everything he ever wrote.

What follows is the account of her eight minutes with him, set down by a witness who stood in the doorway and said nothing, the way the witnesses at Endor stood in the dark and said nothing. Read it the way a witness reads. Then turn the last page.

8:00

The printer stops, and in the silence after it she keeps reading.

She knows the brief by heart. She has known it for fourteen weeks. She reads it now the way some people pray and others bite their nails, because she does not know what else to do with her hands.

You are in the doorway. She has not looked up.

There is a binder on the table beside her, gray, gone soft at the corners, the spine frayed to threads. It is a training binder. It is older than her clearance. She has not opened it in years. While she reads, her thumb moves along the spine, back and forth, back and forth, the way a thumb moves along a rosary that the hand has forgotten it is holding.

Above her a fluorescent tube ticks and buzzes, a small dry sound, like a fly that has gotten into the light and cannot get out and will not stop. Under that, through the wall, a low continuous hum. The hum is the Protocol. The hum is a freezer in another room, indifferent, full.

On the wall there is a clock with hands. It says eight minutes.

She has eight minutes.

She sees you.

Something in her face resets, the way a hand smooths a sheet before a guest sits down. She says your name, or she says you're here, or she says they sent you, and it does not matter which, because what she means is the same in any language and you both hear it.

She glances at the clock. She does not need to. She has been counting since the parking lot.

Eight minutes, she says, and the way she says it, it is not a complaint. It is the whole of what she has been given, and she is telling you the size of it so you will understand everything that follows is going to have to fit.

She begins to brief you the way she was trained to brief.

Two operational objectives, she says. Asset location. Reunification framework. The subject's prior, the affect mapping, the fourteen-week ingest, the redundancy in the logging, the voice in the chamber and the color on the wall and the name. She uses the words the way you put down stones to cross a river without getting wet. Asset. Subject. Framework. Ingest. The words are dry and they hold her weight and they keep her feet out of the water.

You say her name.

Just that. Just Alex.

The two men who went up to Endor in the dark did not speak. That is in the text. They watched, and they brought the king to the door, and Scripture keeps no record of their voices. So when you say her name, you have broken something you were not supposed to break, the way the whole night is a breaking of something that was supposed to stay closed.

The brief goes out of her like air going out of a room.

She has done this before. Not here.

In her kitchen, after dinner, after the dishes, after her husband fell asleep on the couch with a history book open and rising and falling on his chest. He teaches history to sixteen-year-olds. He grades their essays at the table where she rehearses. He does not have her clearance. He does not have any clearance. He thinks she analyzes logistics.

She sat at that table with the lights low and she read the dead man in. She told him who she was. She told him what they were going to do tonight. She told him she was sorry.

Her lips moved and no sound came, the way Hannah's lips moved at the temple, so that the priest thought she was drunk, and she was not drunk, she was asking for a child.

She has been rehearsing in front of a child the world cannot hear yet.

Twice she made a sound. Once she said the number, the only thing she truly has, eight minutes, into the empty kitchen, to no one, to the dead man, to the child. And once, very late, very tired, almost not aloud at all, she said the true name of the thing they have built, the name no one is allowed to use, the name that means we have gone up to the woman in the dark and asked her to bring up what should have stayed down.

Endor, she said.

And then she never said it again.

Let me tell you who he is, she says. Before he is a subject. While he is still a man.

He died in his eighties. He was a theologian and he was a poet, and the poet is not a flourish, it is documented, he wrote verses his whole life. In his thirties, under a regime that came before his, he was tortured, and he never spoke of it publicly, not once, in sixty years. He prayed five times a day. He loved his wife. In his last decade his hands shook, and he kept writing, and somewhere there is a manuscript where you can watch the line of his handwriting begin to tremble and refuse to stop.

That is the part she keeps. The hand that shook and held the pen anyway. She does not say why. She does not have to. It is fragility and it is pride and it is a man doing the thing he was for, even as the body that did it came apart in his fingers.

He had a son who became a poet too. And there is a poem the father wrote, late, for his own mother, that she has read more times than she will admit, and it is the kind of poem that does not survive being described, so she does not describe it. She just looks at the clock.

He ordered torture. He was, by the most generous accounting anyone has ever offered, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands. He believed, in his own framework, that he was doing what God required.

She has read everything he ever wrote, and everything written about him, and the things the system imagined from the shape of what was missing. She knows him better than her husband knows her.

When Jesus came to the tomb, the people said, behold how he loved him. And then the shortest verse. The only one in all of it permitted to call the dead back out, and he wept doing it.

Alex has not wept since her wedding. She has been very careful about it. You leave it at home. You cry in the car.

There is a third question, she says, and it is not on the brief.

She has prepared it the way you prepare the thing you are not sure you will be brave enough to ask. She will ask it, if she can find the place. She wants to ask the dead man how he raised his children during the war, in a country that was doing what it told itself it had to do. She does not say it operationally. What she says, to herself, to you, is smaller and worse than that. I want to know what I do.

Job asked his question into the whirlwind and got a different question back. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth. The Third Question is the kind you ask knowing the answer may unmake you, and knowing you may get no answer at all.

She is good at this work, she says, and then she says the thing no one has ever asked her. She was good at it before they found her. She learned to read a man's face before she learned to read a book. She learned to time her father's mood by the curve of his lip.

She does not say the word. She does not need the word. I leave, she says, but I do not become someone else. I take this with me into the nursery.

There is a verse they cross-stitch and hang over cribs. Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee. She hears it now and feels it bend the wrong way. A shaping she did not agree to. A knowing that came before she could refuse it.

Her hand goes to her stomach. Once.

This is the line. After tonight, no more. She told herself she was doing this so the child would grow up in a country that did not need it done. She does not believe that anymore. She is going to do it anyway, because the alternative is that someone less careful does it instead.

She does not say any of this aloud. It crosses her face, and you read it, because she has let you, which is the most that she will let anyone.

Mary was two months along when she sang that God had put down the mighty from their seats. Alex is two months along and knows something she cannot sing.

1:00.

She turns to you, and for the first time she is not looking at a fixture in the room. She is looking at a person she needs.

She takes a folded paper from inside her jacket. It has been folded and unfolded enough that the crease is going soft, the way the binder spine is going soft, the way everything she touches for long enough gives way. She presses it into your hand.

Don't send it, she says. Unless.

She does not finish. The end of the sentence is the heaviest part and she leaves it out, and the space where it should be is the loudest thing in the room.

Stay, she says. Watch with me.

In the garden, the night before, he asked them to stay awake with him, and three times they slept, and three times he came back, and after the third time he did not rebuke them. He said, sleep now, the hour is here.

You will not sleep. You agree by not saying no, because the witnesses do not speak.

She does not thank you. To thank you would be to admit what is happening, and that would break it, and she will not break it. Not this close to the door.

She walks to the door.

Her hand is on it. The hum is louder here, against the metal, the freezer in the other room that is full of a man.

She turns back. She looks at you. Her voice, when it comes, is almost not a voice, it has gone down to the place a voice goes when there is no one left above the priest, no high priest, no atonement over the one who mediates.

Please forgive me.

She goes through.

The door closes.

The hum continues. The buzz continues, the fly in the light. The printer has stopped and will not start again. The clock has a minute left and then it does not.

You are alone in the green room with the binders and the cold coffee and the folded paper in your hand.

The interrogation happens off-page.