Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Tale That Stops My Mouth
He has come within a syllable of telling a committee file's story a hundred times, and the stopping itself has become the story that hurts to keep not telling.
- perspective: first
There is a file in Committee Minutes 1971–74, partition R, and I can tell you where it sits without standing up from my chair. Third tray from the window, second depth, the spine that reads *Recurring Examinations: Sub-Committee* and then, in a hand newer than the rest of the spine, the year range. I have shelved it by hand eleven times. I have never opened it past its second page.
This is the tale that stops my mouth, and I am going to tell you about the stopping, because the stopping is all I have. The tale itself — the tale behind the file, the one the file was meant to receive and did not — I have carried for years the way you carry a full kettle across a polished floor: level, slow, both hands, no sudden turns.
I have come close to telling it a hundred times. I mean that literally; I mean I could write down the occasions. The first was a Thursday in the canteen, and the man across from me asked what the sub-committee had actually decided, and I opened my mouth, and I said, *well,* and my mouth closed on the word like a drawer on a jumper. He laughed, and refilled my cup, and thought I was being discreet in the ordinary way, and I let him think it, because the alternative was to explain the drawer.
The drawer is not discretion. Discretion has a key. This has a spring.
It works like this. There comes a certain point in every telling — later each time, I have kept count of that too — where the account arrives at a door of ordinary words, one door, one hinge, and behind the hinge is the thing I saw, or the thing I did not see, which may be the same thing. And my mouth, which has carried me faithfully through every other difficult thing I have ever had to say, stops. Not falters. Stops, complete, with my breath intact behind it, the way a lift stops between floors and the cable holds.
At first I thought it was fear. I have testicular enough for most rooms. Then I thought it was training — years of *not for circulation* had gotten into my jaw. Then, on the ninety-somethingth occasion, at my sister's table, saying it to a woman who had no power over me at all and no interest in it either, I understood what it actually was: the stopping was the story. The file in partition R had done its work. Somewhere in the machinery of this city, an account had been received, complete, on the proper date, by the proper hands — and any second telling is a duplicate, and duplicates in Murrow are not rounded off, they are subtracted. I do not know this. I want to be clear that I do not know it. I know it the way you know which stair creaks.
So each not-telling costs me more. That is the part nobody warns you about. You would imagine that a thing unsaid loses weight — that silence, practised, goes smooth as a stone. Mine gathers. Ninety-eight attempts now, and each one leaves a little more of me on the doorstep of that door of ordinary words. I have begun to schedule my not-tellings the way other men schedule dentistry. I do them in the afternoons, with a window open, because afterwards there is a specific tiredness, a tiredness in the jaw and behind the eyes and in the small muscle above the ear, as though I had in fact said the whole thing, at full volume, for hours, to a full room.
The worst of it is the near-misses at the ends. Twice now I have got past the hinge. Twice I have felt the first clause of the true sentence assembled and rising — and then the lift stopped, and the cable held, and I sat there with a complete unspoken sentence in my mouth the way you sit with a mouthful of water you are determined not to swallow and not to spit. My sister asked if I was all right. I said the tea was hot. The tea was cold.
Tomorrow there is a retiree's lunch, and Ted — no, I will not give even that name — a man from the old partition will be there, and he will ask, and he always asks, in the same kindly tone, whatever happened with the sub-committee. And I will say, *well,* and the drawer will close, and it will cost me a hundredth of what it cost and one more than I can spare.
There is a small thing I have never said to anyone, not even in the notebook I keep under the eaves, and I will say it here because it is the whole matter in one line, and a line is not a telling.
I think the file was closed before the meeting happened.