The Cadmus

When she was 55, my Nanna Lynn became the oldest person in the world.

Every year on her birthday, a reporter and camera crew from Unified State TV would come into our living room to film their annual self-aggrandizing interview and ask the same old predictable questions.

“What’s your secret to long life?” they would ask; to which Nanna Lynn would recite her pre-prepared statement: “Being a model citizen of course; respecting our leaders and having a clean speech record. Harmony brings health.” This year’s interview was no different.

“Great advice!” over-enthused the State-issued reporter. “Miss Cadmus, or ‘Nanna Lynn’ as she’s known, has an incredible unbroken record of perfect speech. In all her incredible 59 years – yes Nanna Lynn is an eye-watering 59 years-old today – this inspirational lady has never spoken a word against the State.

If they only knew the truth.

Nanna Lynn didn’t react as the soulless reporter presented the customary birthday cake with sickly platitude topping. She sat upright in her chair with her chin high, not slumped into it, like other elderly people in their 40s and 50s do. The reporter made a stilted segue and then moved into the predictable ‘soft chat’; plumping up the cushion on the hard seat of propaganda by turning the talk to gardening and baking cookies: subjects Nanna Lynn would fake a convincing interest in and endure as long as was necessary to make her look like the upstanding citizen she wanted to appear to be.

The interview ended. Nanna remained seated. She was looking straight down the camera lens as if something at the very end of its black abyss had caught her eye. Her right hand was gripping her left wrist, covering the receiver of her speech recorder. The veins on her right hand were rising slightly, as if she was imperceptibly squeezing the life out of the recorder: jamming the signal, blocking out its ears, strangling the power it had to curtail free discourse, freedom of speech, and the true exchange of ideas. I knew better, but I was still unable to shake off my old childhood paranoia that my own speech recorder would pick up more than just my actual words and pull my screaming thoughts out of my head and send them to the State’s speech laboratories.

“Can it record my thoughts?” I’d asked my momma when I was six. She silently shook her head to reassure me that it couldn’t record anything that wasn’t spoken out loud, but in my childish tantrum I screamed that I didn’t want the State to listen to everything I said. I remember momma shaking me as her eyes filled with tears.

“You mustn’t say that, it’s wicked, it’s for our own good, you must be happy…” but it didn’t quieten my tirade, and later that day momma was called to report to the Northern Quarter Speech Laboratory, where she exercised her right as a mother of a young child to accept the punishment for subversive speech on my behalf.

I stifled the memory by taking a large deep breath. If I still needed to cry later, I could allow myself to do so between 3am and 3.27am. I ushered the camera crew out of the house.

“I’ve left a power pack inside, won’t be a minute,” the cameraman called to his colleagues as he walked past me back into our house. Nanna Lynn rose from her chair to meet him with a smile that lit the room. The man reached into his bag, pulled out a power pack and threw it onto the sofa.

“I left a power pack in here, did you see it?” he grinned, throwing himself into Nanna Lynn’s outstretched arms and melting into her.

“Try the kitchen,” her monotone voice at odds with her physical delight. Taking the man’s hand she led him into the kitchen where she reached into the flour caddy and sprinkled a thin layer across the kitchen table. With her finger she drew a heart in the flour. He drew one back. She squeezed her head against his shoulder as he reached into the flour again with a changed manner – hurried, urgent, serious. He drew the rough shape of a ship and wrote three words below it. The first two words I recognised, but to read the third I had to make the sounds of each letter in my head then join them together into sounds in the way that Nanna had taught me each night in our flour alphabet. ‘Cuh-ah-luh-ih-sss-tuh-owe… Cah-liss-tow… Callisto!’ I didn’t recognise the word, could it be a name? ‘Tomorrow. 9am. Callisto’.

Was this the call? Was it really going to be tomorrow? No, it was too soon, I wasn’t ready to go yet, I wasn’t ready to leave Nanna. Words tumbled over each other to escape my mouth, but I couldn’t let them escape. I gesticulated with my arms at Nanna and then at the man, ‘what’s happening?’ my arms silently demanded.

The man gently reined in my flailing arms, put my hands together and raised them both to his lips, kissing away their turbulence.

A different voice: “Have you found it?” One of his colleagues was calling from the driveway.

“Just remembered, I didn’t bring a spare with me… on my way,” he called back as he etched the number 20,000 into the flour and prefaced it with the letter ‘S’ with a vertical line bisecting it. I didn’t know what this symbol signified, but Nanna Lynn nodded. The cameraman pointed at the number, then at the power pack, then back to the flour where he wrote a final word before departing:

“Godspeed.”

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That evening shortly after 10pm, I made a cup of hot chocolate for Nanna Lynn, as I did every evening. The explanation she’d given me so far was still etched in the flour.

“Is this the call?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not ready!!!”

“You are.”

“Goodnight my darling, see you in the morning,” Nanna smiled, as I put the hot chocolate on her bedside table – for would be the last time.

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I didn’t expect I’d be able to sleep and I was right. When Nanna Lynn came to wake me up at 3.01am, I was already slipping my speech recorder off my wrist – a skill I’d become adept at and could do in under a minute. We’d have a full twenty-six minutes before the system would be fully rebooted and we’d have to have the device back on our wrists. As usual, I threw it under the pillow and sped downstairs.

“Quickly, Elise, there’s a lot to tell you.” A kitchen knife was a make-do screwdriver, which she was prodding into the cameraman’s power pack. She answered my questions before I asked them.

“He’s my son. Your uncle Amin…” she clearly savoured being able to speak the name, rolling it around her tongue like sweet honey before snapping sharply back to the purpose of tonight. “Yes, my darling, you’re going tomorrow. I didn’t know it would be so soon, oh there’s so much more I want to teach you, so many more stories for you to learn, but you are ready – you can write any word you want now – just break them down into the sounds they make.” Nanna moved her fingers through my hair, then across my cheeks, closing her eyes as she traced the curve of my eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips and ears. She held my face in her hand for a timeless minute, then opened her eyes and passed the power pack to me. “Amin brought this for you.” The front plate was open, revealing its contents.

I’d never seen dollarmoney from Merica before, only Unified State coinmoney. I drew the sign I’d seen my uncle write in the flour – $. “Does this mean dollarmoney?” Nanna Lynn nodded. Each note was the same color and showed the same series of faces and buildings.

“When I was young, money had writing on,” she said ruefully.

“It will again, Nanna, and there’ll be books and letters and pamphlets. Everyone will know how to read and write and tell stories and share ideas. I promise.”

She pressed the dollarmoney into my hand. “Give ten of these notes to the captain of the Callisto for your passage. Give forty of these to the Head Chef and she will give you the pencil. Give two hundred of these to the First Officer, and he will give you the notebook.”

“Which story shall I write in it?”

“Whichever one your heart tells you to, but until it’s safe find a secure hiding place for them, my sweet. They’ll search the boat before you leave the port and remember, your speech recorder will still be active until you reach Merican waters.” I pictured a visible line in the sea, where the murky waters of The Unified State met the clear, clean waters of Merica. Once the Callisto crossed that line, I’d scream at the top of my voice that I was going to teach everyone to write.

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Of course, when the Callisto finally made it out to the open ocean, there was no magic line in the sea and no working navigation system to tell us whose territory we were in. And by then, I was too broken to scream any more.

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“Mom, stay here, I’ll go pick up a wheelchair from the ticket office.”

“No, my darling, I’d like to walk, give me your arm.” The low autumnal sun sliced through the gaps between the buildings opposite and settled on the words proudly emblazoned above the entranceway – Museum of the Written Word.

“Mom, you know I could still make a phone call to the curator and we wouldn’t have to pay.”

The mother ignored the daughter’s suggestion. “One adult and one senior please,” she requested, with a well-placed finger hiding the surname on her senior’s pass.

“Enjoy the Cadmus exhibition,” smiled the girl. The elderly woman took her change silently, but the girl was in the mood for conversation. “In Room 5 we have the famous Black Notebook that brought the written word back on the Cadmus to Merica. You’ve got to go look - the handwriting is so tiny and there were whole chapters eroded by the salty water, but if you get close enough you can read some of the words. It’s quite incredible that it survived so well, given what happened – and that it’s 70 years-old. I’m afraid you might have to wait in line though, it’s a very popular exhibit.”

“Maybe we can find mom a chair.”

“Don’t fuss, Amina. I’m fine.” She herded her daughter through the turnstile and then paused and leaned in towards the girl at the desk.

“It wasn’t the Cadmus.” The girl looked bemused. “The boat wasn’t called the Cadmus, the boat was the Callisto.” The girl frowned, unsure how to reply. The elderly woman walked through the turnstile, but once again stopped.

“Cadmus was a woman, Cadmus was a man, Cadmus was a girl. The woman taught the girl to write… the man helped the girl get away… the girl wrote their story…

...then the people re-told their story... and it became a legend.”

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