The Refugees
Campfire Stories: Volume 2, Issue 2
Daily Prompt: “Malaise,” from English language dictionary screensaver.
I excused myself from dinner early, as did almost everyone else. It has been a long week. Noemi’s lumpia brought all of our spirits up, and we brought out some crab from the freezer and made a giant Crab Louie salad to go with them. It just wasn’t enough to bust us out of this funk. I don’t think we are depressed, in shock still, maybe, but we haven’t had the time yet to learn of enough tragedy to make us depressed. We survived an unprecedented self-inflicted disaster, but that’s not it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I don’t feel well. We ate dinner in silence. We cleaned up in silence. And like ghosts, we quietly evaporated from the room.
I feel tired and weak and think I might hurl this dinner back up. From everyone else’s looks at dinner, we’re all in the same boat. I’m lying in bed, scrolling through old pictures on my phone, rolled up in my blankets like an alligator. All telecommunications networks went down today, so we must entertain ourselves or listen to the radio. Not a huge inconvenience – since most everything was already not working after the explosions took out all of our satellites. I found this album of my family before I came here on a temporary work assignment, and I’ve just been hiding under the blankets and staring at them since dinner. A quick promotion to the next pay grade for six months motivated me to move away from my family and take this assignment at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.
I had always loved deciphering lost languages, translating them, and making them accessible to modern humans. Had. Then I took this assignment. You may recall that we sent a probe called the Voyager into space with a golden record. When the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena arrived in our stratosphere and began a low orbit of the planet, Voyager was dropped into the central courtyard of the Pentagon with a note painted on the exterior in the same fifty-five languages we sent out our record in.
The note said, “The High Council thanks you for your cooperation.”
I was brought on this temporary duty assignment, along with nearly every linguist that works for the government in any capacity, since I was willing to take a significant pay bump – the cost of living allowance here is almost the same as my salary – and try to solve a puzzle; I left my family behind in Ithaca, New York, where I was a crypto linguistics post-doctorate at Cornell. I had been studying some lost languages for the university and some cryptologic code for the Navy.
The Department of Defense did a full ultra-high definition photogrammetric scan of the Voyager and sent it to us at the Foreign Language Center. The inside of the Voyager was utterly gutted. None of our technology was left inside the probe. It was completely covered in writing that we had never seen before. Every square millimeter of the interior and exterior of the hulking space probe had been covered in meticulously engraved script. Undecipherable, meticulously engraved, alien language script. We know they have deciphered fifty-five of our languages, but we have met a brick wall attempting to solve theirs.
I spent six months with some of the most intelligent linguists I’ve ever met, just trying to decipher any little bit of their language. I’m just sitting here under the blankets, feeling this malaise, with a metallic taste in my mouth, and scrolling through photographs of my family. Pictures of us at Morrill Hall the day I left Ithaca to come to Monterrey for this assignment. I’ll start working a little more; no harm in it. I’ve got about ten or so lines of the script memorized. As I’m drawing them carefully on my notepad, Noemi walks in.
“I’ve seen some of those symbols before.”
“WHAT? Where? How? When”
“Slow down, child. They were in a cave on the island I lived on as a child, and they might still be there after all this time.”
“Where are you from, Noemi?”
“I grew up in Sulawesi. Anyway, I came to ask a question.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Did dinner taste like you were putting coins in your mouth, or was it just me?”
“Me too.”
“I’ve asked everyone else about it now, and I think we have a problem here.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look at yourself, child; you are wrapped in a blanket like a little burrito. You hardly move or speak, you don’t feel well, and your food tastes metallic.”
“Okay…”
“I was a nurse in the Philippines before we moved to America, and I can tell what is happening here. We might have radiation sickness.”
“Shit.”
Noemi chuckled a little at my blunt reaction, then stood up from the corner of my bed and started to leave my room.
“Where did you see the symbols on Sulawesi?”
“The well behind our home went dry, we went down to dig, and we found the opening of a big cave. Inside the first large room of the cave, there is a linga carved with those symbols. Good night, sweet child.”
I wrote down everything she told me, then went to talk to Rob. I asked him about where his mom grew up. What town, if he knew the address? Rob was eager to help me and wrote down the address of his grandfather’s farm on Sulawesi, near Balocci. He was even able to tell me some stories about the area. Rob had been there many times, as a child and an adult, and had fond memories of the farm.
He told me the well was filled with water now. The digging mission undertaken in his mother’s time had succeeded. He told me how his mother came to America with him. She became a nurse and sent most of the money she made back home to the Philippines to support the family farm. Rob started working and sending money back home to the farm in Balocci just as soon as he was old enough to start working in the gift shops at one of the many nearby parks. Now he manages the concession operations at several parks, and his parents rely on him for everything. And here, I thought I was under pressure to support my family.
Upending Wordism 