**NOTE: This story takes place in the fictional country of Ükür. The people of Ükür use the Roman alphabet, but linguistic distinctions are marked by diacritical accents. I’ve actually worked out the language of Ükür, but rather than go into exhaustive detail, I’ll just provide a rough pronunciation guide here. The name Dül is pronounced “Dool” The name Xéŗšé, is a local variant of the name Greek name Xerxes. The “r” is rolled as you’d roll it in Spanish, and the second “x” is replaced by “š”. Thus, his name is pronounced “Zair-shay” with a rolled “r.” Consonant blends are expressed with the “hachek” which appears in the Czech and Slovak languages. Č,Š, Ž represent CH, SH, and ZH. Ükür is not a Slavic country, but its native language, like any Slavic language, does not have the “TH” sound. The people of Ükür cannot hear or pronounce the “TH” sound. The “é” is analogous to the accented “e” in the word “resumé” The å represents the flattened, short “a” sound as you’d hear in such words like “cat” or “hat.” If the letter “a” is unmarked in Ükür, it is simply pronounced “ah” and the same letter with an umlaut over it would possess the long “a” sound that occurs in the English words “plate.” And now, on to part one of the tale. ********** “You’re more real than we are,” Dül ålé Hariién said quietly, pale fingers at play along the rim of his tiny, porcelain coffee cup. “And so you don’t have to worry about the stuff we deal with every day.” Samantha Braden smiled. She imagined—Dül thought—that her expression encouraged comfort: friendly ease. Americans were like that: always smiling, always hoping to avoid conflicts, even as they spoke the most incendiary words. Samantha, like her countrymen, probably found Ükür more solemn and dour than she’d ever admit to a local. On more than one occasion, Dül’s own truths forced smile-masks across her face, though confused disapproval sparked in her hazel gaze. “You look real to me,” she said, her expression a bit more uncertain now. “Real enough.” There was doubt in her voice, proof that she still groped her way through the complex algebraic knots of Üküré national logic. She spoke local with only a slight, Trans-Atlantic accent, and so she understood something. (Üküré jokes still left her confused. Local cartoons sent her scrambling for obscure anthropological texts, or fruitless searches on Wikipedia.) They sat in conversation around diminutive cups of strong kŏffë Türkée. Tori Amos sang of little earthquakes from speakers mounted at ceiling level around the café. It was late in the afternoon, possibly too late—by Samantha’s reckoning—for Turkish coffee, but she sat at the table, pretending not to notice Dül’s wordless intimacy with Xéŗšé. She picked at her dill cake, and Dül wondered if she found it too sweet, or perhaps too alien in flavor. He liked her for that: the way she tried so hard to adjust to the little things here—spice-flavors and the shapes of electrical sockets, of complicated door-locks, and what to wear among men of orthodox faith. It was easy for her to sit on cushions and drink kŏffë Türkée, however. It was a habit she’d acquired Stateside (so she’d said) in shisha bars, with friends who considered themselves worldly and refined. She was the only one among them to come here, and he liked her for that as well. Not only could she find Ükür on a map, but she knew it was not Turkish or Italian, Albanian or Agaran. It was a significant place, enough so that she sat—now—with brooding locals, rather than the professional expatriates who took their coffee and their harder drinks in trendy city-center cafes where you could go for full conversations without ever hearing a single word in Üküré. “But Dül’s point is that we are insubstantial,” Xéŗšé said. “And that in less than two years, we’ll be less than what we are now.” He spoke softly and with the inflection of one born in Ōmůt; Dül loved him for the casual insolence so easily carried in his voice. It was far—so far—from the shy, halting lilt he’d heard and learned during his childhood in Šeš. Samantha shrugged. “But you voted to become a part of the EU and you’ve been a member-nation for just over a year now. You’re ahead of Turkey in that respect, ahead of Agara. So I seriously doubt that your…substantiality is so threatened.” She glanced at Dül. Dül nipped at his coffee, tasting sediment. He placed the cup carefully at the center of its companion-saucer. “But Samanta…”—most Üküré could not pronounce the ‘th’ blend, Dül only recently learned how to hear it—“…if we were as substantial as you say, why do only three-million people speak our language?” Samantha shrugged again, this time dismissively. “Less than two million people speak Estonian.” “But it’s different.” “How?” “No one doubts that Estonians are European. No one mistrusts them, and they certainly don’t have strange things in their histories.” “So it’s an issue of trust, rather than substantiality,” Samantha said. Her tone was ambiguous and Dül read it as a question. “It’s a matter of history,” he said. “They’ve had their own country for longer than we’ve had Ükür. But in some ways, they’ve had less to deal with.” Another shrug, this one more dismissive. “The Czech Republic is only nineteen years old and now is first time in history that the Czechs have been a sovereign people.” Dül knew the argument. Expatriates always brought it up when they saw themselves threatened by the specter of provincial Üküré nationalism. It was always the same implied warning: You’re not like them…you were never a part of someone else’s empire and Soviet tanks didn’t roll through your capital, so shut up and accept your place in the world. “It’s different,” Xéŗšé said, more calmly than Dül could have managed. “How?” It was Dül’s turn to shrug. “It just is.” Because of the čötí: too heavy a word for this conversation. Samantha took a sip of her coffee. Her dill cake remained largely untouched. “Then,” she said. “Show me.” Dül, glanced down at his half-empty coffee cup and said nothing. “It is not so simple,” Xéŗšé said. “Why not?” “It may be dangerous.” Dül could taste brooding potential in those words. He felt their weight in his voice. “This is about those ancient machines, isn’t it…those little pieces of history that keep you just out of synch with everyone around you? The machines you never really talk about in polite, foreign company?” “Partly that.” And there it was! That word! Unspoken, but it lingered, it hovered in the air like a shadow without source. “And those are the things that keep you insubstantial? When something changes here, one of those weird devices springs into activity and shoots death rays and erases something?” Xéŗšé shook his head, taking the burden of answering from Dül. “Nothing so lurid. They’re more like clocks, like something I cannot say in English. Čotå. But this word does not translate.” And there it was! Xéŗšé was brave enough to say it. “There are Chotas in Agara,” Samantha said, muddling the local word with her pinched, hollow accent. “But the Agarans never seem to think that they do something…strange.” “The ancient Agarans used them for different purposes. And besides, Agarans are weird.” “They were clocks, if National Geographic has it right,” Samantha said. Dül kept his silence. Xéŗšé nodded. “So, if it helps me to understand what you guys are going on about, I want to see one. A wild čotǻ, and not some crusty and rusted thing in a museum display case.” “That isn’t your smartest idea,” Xéŗšé said. “They’re dangerous?” “Not particularly.” “So, I should see one.” Samantha reached across the table and clasped Dül’s fingers, while skewering Xéŗšé in her pleading, laser gaze. “C’mon…I need to get my head around whatever it is that has your boxers all wadded in a knot, and that’s the only way I can do it.” “There are other ways,” Xéŗšé said, with a strange lack of committal. “The museum čötí are safer. More predictable,” Dül said. “They’re not all crusty and rusted, and you can understand more if you see them in that context.” “Museums are their own context. Everything in them is removed from the world that created them. And if you’re arguing about something other than losing the líérh, in favor of the Euro, or being forced to eat bananas with EU-standardized curvature, you’ll have to do better than the superstitious-sounding whispers you keep dancing around.” Silence from Xéŗšé. Dül focused on the crumbs of his dill cake. Samantha shrugged. “Take me to see one of those things. You don’t have to be afraid for me, or of me…I’ll be careful, I won’t touch anything. I’ll behave.” *** “She’s a fool,” Xéŗšé said, a day later and moments after strolling into the Capital Library. He’d probably spent moments talking to Božaná and enduring her flirtatious jokes before finding Dül at work, re-shelving a cart-load of chemistry texts. It was scut work, mindless work, but it paid well enough and kept Dül occupied in a constructive manner. He enjoyed it, likening it to the singular task required of a dervish in pursuit of clarifying discipline and singular purpose. He was no dervish; what ecstasies and what moments he sought had little to do with holiest communion with the presence of Allah. On self-determined break, now, he sat with Xéŗšé, over tea and dill cakes, marveling—as always—at the wonder of someone like Xéŗšé connected to a guy like himself. “She’s offered a challenge she can’t hope to understand.” Where Dül wore flesh of almost alpine pallor, Xéŗšé was dark, with hair like a tight-black cap. There was African and little else in his bloodline: something eastern—Somali maybe, or Kenyan, something tribal, maybe, but it was there: in the lean set of his features; in the color of his skin; in the timbre of his voice. His voice was intoxicating, even as he spoke of dour and depressing subjects. “I don’t know how to talk her out of this,” Dül said. “And maybe it’s not our place to.” “She can’t learn anything from it.” “We can’t convince her of that.” “We should at least try.” “How?” Dül asked. “Take her into the fields and show her what she’s flirting with?” He paused. “Or maybe I should check the Āüráti Codex from its dusty shelf and let her labor through it until she gets bored and drops this obsession.” A shrug. “It’s worth a try.” “It won’t work.” Xéŗšé sat back and closed his eyes. After a moment, he opened them, fixing Dül at the center of his unblinking gaze. “You’re going to give her what she wants? You’re going to show her?” “She’s my friend. What else can I do?” Xéŗšé recognized the invocation in Dül’s voice: the same helpless incantatory summons of friend’s honor that Dül tasted, like bile in the meat of his tongue. A challenge to such an invocation could never stand, and though it was Dül who voiced the subtle words of it, Samantha had been the one to force its issue. “Whatever you decide to do,” Xéŗšé said quietly. “I’ll help you.” *** “I don’t understand why you and your boyfriend are so freaked out,” Samantha said. It was a week’s worth of days since their conversation in the café. For Dül, it felt as if he’d spent a month of sleepless nights between that day and this moment. And now, against all good judgment, he sat in Samantha’s kitchen with the taste of weak agreement on his tongue. Yes…I’ll show you what everyone in Ükür knows and accepts. I’ll prove my point… Xéŗšé’s point…the point of everyone who claims Ükür in their blood!” It was a sunny day and the air smelled of cinnamon from the shops along Āí Street. There was the smell of jasmine as well, and the interloper scents of stinkweed and fish. Trams groaned along their tracks, bells clattering their warnings to pedestrians. By the sounds and the scents, it was a normal day. All of Ōmůt went about its business—and somewhere, beneath the traffic noise and tram bells, Turkish-born Roma sang improvised ballads in exchange for a few líeri from tourist pockets and purses. “I don’t want to go into it again,” Dül said. “I still don’t understand. You’re EU now…if anything, that gives Ükür better economic options, greater maintenance of stability. So you switch from the líeri to the Euro…it’s no big deal—everyone’s done it, or will do it eventually. You country doesn’t lose anything, just because your money changes. And I don’t think your oh-so-mysterious monster machines are going to be sparked into some kind of reality-unmaking rampage because of it.” But it is a big deal! It does make a difference. That was all he could think; all-too-often there was no real defense against the lemming argument. Of course he couldn’t explain. What outsider could truly understand life in Ükür? How many Üküré, addicted to American MTV and négro rapp, and Angelina Jolie could grasp it? There were some, of course, archaeologists and historians…and nationalist idiots whose ideological footsteps veered dangerously close to arguments of national-ethnic purity and the harsh needs of such. He was hitting his head against existential glass, and the only way to stop it was to yield to Samantha’s crazy wish, and show her what she wanted. To reveal— No! Don’t name it now. It’s been named enough! “I won’t say more about it,” he said, leveling a gaze at her and feeling like a child at her kitchen table. She was making tea, and with her back to him, she shrugged in that way only Americans could manage. “So,” she said, after a long moment. “What do we do, and when do we do it?” “Tomorrow,” Dül said. “We’ll do it tomorrow. If you want.” He tried not to flinch, to let her see him flinch, and thankfully only his toes clawed at his sandals as his fists, beneath the table, clenched into fists. His nails bit crescents into his palms as he watched her nod. *** The night was loud with crickets and the jagged stridulating songs of other night-bugs: invisible things. There was traffic noise, and the sound of an argument on the street corner, where local Roma sold magazines to the straggler-tourists who came this far from city center in search of something local, something exotic, and maybe a little bit risky. They always came in small triads and quartets, with cameras, and pockets full of money invariably spent in the tea-houses, shisha-dens and massage factories deemed appropriately local in the guide books. They always came in search of the real Ükür, as if an entire country could be distilled into one tourist-trap experience. “It’s an hour, to Šeš, and another by bus to the fields.” Dül said, eyes half-closed. Xéŗšé had coaxed him onto the small, green Ikea-standard sofa and into half-hearted attention to some American forensics drama on television. The sound was low as and earnest lab technicians dissected this week’s dead body: some two-bit actress riddled with bullet holes. Dül had never seen a real murder-corpse and he doubted they were colorful as Hollywood painted them, so artistically brushed with glamorous, pity-inducing rot. “She’s made the trip down as far as Pé, already. She’ll be all right,” Xéŗšé said, quietly. He sat at the far end of the couch, kneading a playful massage through the flesh of Dül’s naked feet, and sipping Macedonian rakia. There wasn’t much in the forensics drama that kept his attention, and Dül was certain that he’d chosen the show at random, in search of little more than some kind of domestic noise: proof that life went on as normal, that tomorrow was an ordinary Saturday. But the lie was a flimsy one. A desperate one. They’d danced around the subject all night. Not the trip down, but the trip back. Samantha was stubborn enough to have her way and so the return was the strangest of existential terrors. There was no danger to her, no danger to them, and yet…. Dül tore his focus from that line of thought and distracted himself with a sip of his own beer and a glance down. It was always a marvel to see fingers as dark as Xéŗšé’s at play on his own pale flesh. Together, they were like coffee and cream stirred together but not yet broken from the suspension that kept them distinct. Xéŗšé was not so dark as coffee; there were strains of European in his ancient lineage, but still, there was a contrast between his flesh (like the shell of a pecan) and Dül’s almost alpine pallor. Dül smiled and closed his eyes as Xéŗšé’s fingers prodded themselves between his toes. It was Xéŗšé who kept the night calm, and made it happily naughty, when night-light filtered into the bedroom on the waft of a breeze. *** It was Xéŗšé who engaged Samantha in playful banter on the early train to Šeš. Dül watched them. He listened quietly, feigning an interest in the scenes scrolling by the window. Ükür was a small country, barely larger than America’s yin/yang shape of Vermont and New Hampshire, with a coastline neither state possessed. He’d seen the bog-lands and forest countless times. There was nothing new here, and he couldn’t bring his thoughts to bear on the stories of goblins and sphinxes and other critters that lived in those dark gnarls of verdant land. His mind had locked on what was to happen when the little industrial canker of Šeš broke the horizon like some strange and ugly folly. Xéŗšé spoke of the sphinxes and the goblin things: the āáppá—little salamander men who stole eggs from miscreant farmers, or left twigs and nettles in the beds of naughty children. The āáppá were a perennial cartoon favorite of modern Ükür. There were āáppá superheroes (in lurid red tights and purple capes) and even āáppá-variants of The Simpsons. A cultural jewel, Samantha maintained, that just didn’t really translate into American. “But I get it,” she said earnestly. “Well…at least as much as I can understand the in-jokes. But my Üküré still sucks, and so I just don’t get all of those supposedly-hilarious puns.” Xéŗšé waggled his chin in that way Samantha always said looked more Hindu than anything European. He smiled. “Humor is the same everywhere…all about farts and sex. Even in Ükür, we think intestine-gas is hilarious.” Dül laughed at that. And for the first time saw some hope in the day’s fool’s venture. “So,” Samantha said, snapping his picture with the small digital camera she carried around like a lucky talisman. Her secretary, she called it. She had a blog (what American didn’t?) and filled it with proof of her travels, thumbnail portraits of the little land full of farting mythical creatures no one had ever heard of. “These machines we’re going to see. They’re just laying out in the open?” Dül waggled his own chin. It was so much easier than shrugging. “Some of them: the broken ones that have lost their charge. There are others, in the old war bunkers that teenagers use for sex and drinking, or smoking skunk.” “And nothing ever happens to the kids who come across them?” “Nothing.” Another chin waggle. “So,” Samamtha challenged. “Why are you so uptight about them? If they’re nothing, they can’t hurt anybody, right?” Xéŗšé leaned forward. “You’re not Üküré, Samantha. They mean something else to you, or nothing at all. They’re not dangerous. Nothing bad will happen to you.” “But if something happens…if something goes wrong, it’ll make you less substantial?” It was clear that Samantha had a hard time understanding, a harder time—Dül thought—even imagining what he and what Xéŗšé meant He glanced down at the floor between his feet. “Something like that,” he said. And for the rest of the trip, no one spoke of the machines. Dül scarcely spoke at all. *** Special thanks to Tara, Marilyn, Mark, and Corey who were there when this story began to percolate through my brain. In fact, Tara and Marilyn and I were distinctly talking about languages, and that conversation marked the genesis of this story. As always, thank you for reading and commenting!