Once upon a time…

You’ve always liked buildings that pretend to be arguments. The water tower with the rusted ladder that insists on never being climbed. The library whose windows promise a view they never deliver because the stacks are taller than the sills. Your friends say this is an architectural problem, a personality test you keep failing, but you think it’s a matter of translation: you like places that make you say the same thing twice and mean something slightly different each time.

You don’t know what you expected when you accepted the job. “Interpreter, Tower of Babel construction logistics,” the email said, a subject line so absurd you assumed it was a scam or an art project until the .gov domain settled like a signature of the inevitable. The contract was short. The nondisclosures were long. You asked your sister to read them over. She said, “It’s like they’re trying to keep you from telling the story of your life.” You said, “Maybe they just want me to keep track of other people’s words.” She said, “Don’t be dramatic. It’s a tower. They’re building a tower. You’re not Jonah.”

The Tower stands on an island you had never heard of until you arrived, where the river widens and the fog tastes like grated aluminum. The island is a fan of mud under a sky that changes color like it’s being watched. The Tower isn’t a spire so much as a column of rooms strapped together with scaffolding and politics. It is new and it isn’t new. People argue about its age in committee minutes and in the comments sections of articles about zoning. The story goes that the original foundation was discovered during a routine flood defense survey. The story goes that the original foundation was salt, or ruin, or the precise shape of a promise. In the materials room there are stones in crates stamped with dates older than numerals. In the break room there is a couch that looks like it was carried there during a long lunch in the 1990s and has not moved since.

The contract says you’re to facilitate communication among stakeholders. It does not define stakeholders. It does not define communication. It says you will be assigned to teams by a rotating lottery. It says you will sign a daily attestation that you have not added to or subtracted from the meaning of any exchange. It says that meaning is a matter of intent, that intent is a matter of record, and that records are maintained by people who are busy.

Your badge reads Interpreter but everyone calls you Babel. It’s affectionate, like a nickname given on a playground for the way you hold your shoulders when you run. Your office is a narrow desk at the edge of a mezzanine that overlooks the loading area where pallets of cable arrive like a new species of muscle. The stairs make your calves ache. The coffee is a resin that threatens to fossilize your tongue. The first word you translate on your first morning is “anchor,” and three people say it at once, and each time it scrapes in a different place in your ear.

The Tower is said to change height. Planners tell you they measure daily. The tape measures disappear when they are not looking. Someone in procurement orders a laser rangefinder that arrives with instructions in a dialect no one can read. The Tower is said to lean a fraction of a degree. Engineers argue about whether the fraction is imaginary. There is a meeting, and then another meeting, to determine the meaning of the fraction. You are there for both. You watch people become precise as they talk, as if precision is something that can be pulled on like a sweater when the room gets cold.

You learn to carry a notebook like a talisman. You draw lines in it, bridges of ink connecting small islands of speech. You write “shoreline?” in the margin when someone mutters, “We’re losing ground,” as if the building itself is sliding slowly off the island into a softer version of the river. You tabulate phrases like an auditor: “scope creep,” “heritage,” “compliance,” “community input,” “vista,” “sky rights,” “carbon.” The words make a structure in your head. You wonder who will live there.

On Thursdays you interpret for the labor council. The translators for the most common languages are plentiful; your specialty is in the edges, in the narrow spaces between languages that share a root but not a branch. You translate what Ukrainian welders say to Ghanaian crane operators who have learned German on a dock in Rotterdam; you translate between a carpenter from São Paulo and a structural analyst from Chengdu when they are both speaking English but not to each other. You translate under the fans that push the smell of cut stone into your clothes. You translate knees, fingers, eyes. You translate silence. They thank you in the end with food. It is always spicy, or sweet in a way sugar is not. You carry home a Tupperware of plantains you do not return and a pickle you are still thinking about.

On Fridays, you sit in on meetings with the Heritage Committee. They talk about authenticity in careful voices, the way one handles a newborn or a live wire. “We have to balance the integrity of the original footprint,” they say, “with the demands of twenty-first-century life.” They say “footprint” and you think of the footprints you have been careful not to leave on the newly poured slabs. They say “the original footprint” and you write in your notebook “original’s original?” There is a priest with a laptop who has memorized every mention of the Tower in literature. There is a professor of urban planning who cries quietly over a map. There is a donor who dramatizes his sighs. The donor’s children have a dog named Syntax.

On one of your days off, you go to the farmers market where a woman sells tiny roasted pears on sticks. She asks you what you do and you tell her. She laughs and says, “A Tower? That Tower?” You say, “Yes,” and she says, “Get out of here.” Then she says, “No really, get out. Far from any tall thing that promises an answer.” But she is smiling, and she is biting into a pear with such concentration you realize she has no idea what you have said, only the texture of it.

You keep your life outside the Tower light so it doesn’t sink you. You live in a studio above a bodega where the owner is reading his way through the books you leave in a crate by the mailboxes. Each time you see him, he tells you which character he hates the most. You decide not to bring him the stories where buildings fall down. You develop a habit of talking to the Tower as you walk toward it each morning. You tell it jokes. You tell it gossip you heard in the scaffolding. “A stonemason thinks the project is a prayer,” you say, “but to whom?” “Someone in scheduling is sleeping on level 16,” you say, “under a tarp, with a cat.” The Tower never answers, but sometimes the wind shifts when you are not supposed to be outside, and you feel like you said something fitting.

On a Wednesday in autumn, a crane operator named Ephraim tells you in Sorani that he has found a nest inside the rib of the Tower. You walk with him, climbing rungs until your forearms sing. You find a shelf of rebar where a bird once slept. There are scraps of paper, the polite torn edges of a memo, the corner of a poster that says, “Safety begins,” and a page from a novel in a language you can’t place. The nest smells like rain. He tells you his grandmother believed that birds move prayers upwards like cargo. You write in your notebook, “What if the Tower is a freight elevator for wishes?” Then you cross it out because this is not a thing you can say at a meeting.

The meetings are delicately interminable. The city is suing the Tower for being itself too much. The Tower is suing the city for failing to be a city. People say they never should have dug up the old foundation. People say the old foundation was a metaphor and you cannot dig up metaphors without flooding things. People say going up is the only way to go. People say staying is harder. You translate a conversation between a representative of the local tribe, who wants a portion of every story told on the site, and a developer who says stories are unbillable. You translate a photographer who wants to put mirrors on the lower levels so the sky appears below your feet, and a safety officer who says, “Absolutely not, we will be catching people all day.” At night, you write down the sentences you want to remember and realize they look like lines from a play. You start writing the names of the speakers as if you will cast them later.

One afternoon you are assigned to a tour for a group of children from a public school. They are small and varyingly sticky. You are the only interpreter on duty who can sign. You learn the sign for “tower” is a flat hand rising vertically along a palm - building made by building. Someone in Facilities has left a box of hard hats with dinosaur stickers. The children are unafraid of height. They run to the edge of what cannot be called an edge because there’s a railing, but they bounce against it like it is a membrane. You tell them the story the way you’ve told it to yourself: once there was a tower; people used to speak one language and then they didn’t. You say some people think the languages came from a punishment, and some people think they were always there, like a forest with more species than you can count. You say that the Tower is not a staircase to God but a way of seeing how far people will go together before they remember how to sit down. A child signs, “Will we finish?” You sign back, “Everything is always finished and unfinished.” Another child asks out loud why the Tower doesn’t have a bathroom on every level. You nod. You write in your notebook: “Priorities.”

You meet a woman named Luz at a photocopier that keeps printing what you didn’t ask for. She is in procurement, which means she knows everyone, and how much they cost. She wears a necklace with a pendant shaped like a comma. She says she likes commas; they give people a chance to change their minds. You have dinner with her and tell her the story of the nest. She says, “I once saw a welder crying into his mask. He said the bead wouldn’t hold. But it held. Some tears don’t count.” She asks you how you got so good at listening. You say you once loved someone who only told the truth when he was asleep. She touches your wrist and says, “The Tower must feel like an honest man to you.” Your body forgets, for a moment, that it is always holding several things at once - breath, pen, other people’s sentences.

The Tower goes up and it goes sideways. It grows concatenations. It collects stairs. The workday is supposed to end at five but the light does things at six that make the arguments sticky. At eight you can hear someone singing on level 22. The song is in a language you don’t speak, about salt and fish and the name of a dog. You do not translate it because no one has asked you to. You think of calling your sister, but your phone is full of alerts from the weather app. The wind is coming in a pattern the building codes do not recognize. The cranes are tied down like ships. Someone’s hard hat skitters along the concrete like a mint.

The disaster is smaller than the word. It is a broken pulley, a chain reaction of little habits. It is a voicemail left unheard because the person who left it was sure he was repeating himself. It is a quantity of concrete arriving at a temperature too warm to pour. It is a beam that should have had five rivets and has four. You translate a foreman saying, “I’m sorry,” in a language you learned at a kitchen table in a city that now only exists on paper. You watch six people run with intention. You watch three others stand very still like that’s how they can keep the building from learning about gravity.

Someone falls. It happens between a question and its translation. The question is, “Can you hold that?” The answer is, “For how long?” There is a noise you will later be unable to describe. There is a rush, a movement like a phrase truncated at the wrong time. You make the call, and then the other call, and then you are making calls you didn’t know there were numbers for. Afterward, when the sirens have left the air raw, you find yourself holding a bolt the size of your palm and thinking it is the only solid object in the world.

In the days after, language slumps. People come to your desk with sentences that have left home. The safety officer stands in front of you and says, “Explain,” as if you have the kind of verbs that can lift weight. The priest with the laptop wants to know if there are new references now. The donor’s son sends an email that says, “The optics,” and then nothing else. The labor council asks for raises and a day of mourning. The professor of urban planning says we should stop. Luz puts a paper cup of water in your hand and says, “Drink,” and when you cannot, she drinks it and fills it again. You translate “we,” “we,” “we,” until it sounds like a noise a flock makes when the plane casts a shadow on its field.

A week passes. The Tower holds. The person who fell is named Daniel. He is, as his mother says at the memorial, the kind of person who picked up other people’s change from the floor and returned it to them as if it were a sacrament. He was thirty-five. He had a scar on his left elbow shaped like a river with a tributary. He once told you, while you waited for the elevator that never came, that he thinks in diagrams when he is anxious because diagrams are kinder than sentences. You write “diagrams are kinder than sentences” on a Post-it and stick it to your notebook and then move it to the inside of your locker where it curls like a leaf.

There is an investigation. The Tower’s lawyers are careful with their words around you, as if your ears are a court reporter. The city’s inspectors come with clipboards and questions you answer by answering other questions. People look at you like you can read a whispering floor. You feel like the Tower is the only listener you trust. You try talking to it less. The silence that follows is threatening, like someone holding breath too close to your face. On Monday, while you are helping two masons from Aleppo and Paterson resolve an argument about a false line in a true table, the power goes out. For a moment, the world dilates. The only sound is the river telling an old story to the banks.

You begin attending the night shift. It is not part of your job. No one has asked you to help interpret a crew that mostly speaks the language of insomnia. But there is something you need to hear; that is the way you justify it to yourself. The night shift carries quieter nouns: trowel, grit, spall, bloom, drift. People talk about the shapes of shadows. They talk about a light you cannot name that comes off the closed windows of the city across the water. A painter tells you that he loves painting things to look like they’re new when they are and like they are old when they aren’t. He asks you what you love and you say, “The moment when a word lands and no one feels alone.” He nods like you have admitted to having a very normal vice.

One night, high up, you find the weld where Daniel’s hand last held heat. It is not marked. There is no plaque. The welder there now is a woman with bright blue earplugs who tells you how to tell if two metals want each other: the sound changes when they do. You realize you have added this piece of physics to your definition of romance without asking permission. In your notebook you write, “Enchantment is what you call it when the practical works in a way that also happens to be beautiful.”

Your sister calls you out of nowhere and says, “Are you still there?” You say, “Where else would I be?” She says, “When we were little you wrote a book about a town where all the houses shared a basement.” You remember. It was a flipbook with crayons and a staple that made your thumb bleed. “Everyone could hear everyone else,” she says. “It was a mess.” You say, “Maybe I was precocious.” She says, “Maybe you were lonely.” You think of the Tower like a basement, and the city like a row of houses above it all pretending they are separate.

Spring ties itself to the beams with soft pieces of string. The island smells like machine oil and flowers that did not agree to be here. The Tower makes a sound at dusk that is like a choir learning a new arrangement. People argue less and sing more, quietly, half into their masks, into their wrists. The lawsuits move through their stages. The donor withdraws his promises the way people withdraw their attention from a party where someone has started crying. The Heritage Committee declares the Tower a Work of Our Time, which everyone understands to mean that it is both necessary and doomed. You return the Tupperware. The welder with blue earplugs shows you a trick with a magnet that you cannot stop thinking about. Luz gives you a second key to her apartment and then loses the courage to admit it. You find it in your bag and say, “I suppose this is part of procurement.” She says, “You can’t return it. We’re out.”

You have the dream three times. In the dream you are on the topmost level, if there is one, and the air is a geography. You can see, not the city, but the language above it, the patterns people have pulled across their days like wire. Nothing is aligned and everything is connected. The Tower is not reaching for heaven; it is holding everything steady enough for you to look. You wake understanding that enchantment is not the magic; it is the lens that makes the mundane reveal what it has been all along. You look at your hands. They are ordinary and precise. You get up and make coffee that tastes like a decision. You put on your boots.

On a Tuesday that has the decency to act like a Tuesday, an earthquake off the coast that no one feels makes the river hiccup. The Tower flexes, a movement like a shrug. A panel slips and catches. The alarms misunderstand themselves and then remember their job. People pour out in the practiced way of water in a tilted glass. You translate into four languages at once, a math that feels like a trick you can only do when you avoid looking at your hands. When the all-clear comes, you are the last to go back inside. You put your palm on the sun-warmed concrete and think of diagrams. You think of Daniel’s mother. You think of the birds who have nested and moved on, carrying torn edges of memos into a sky that doesn’t care where paper used to live.

You collect what the Tower gives you. The overheard sentence. The visual rhyme between a coiled rope and a sleeping cat. The thud that means the elevator is now your friend again. The moment a welder’s tear didn’t count but something else did. The commas in Luz’s laugh. You collect these and you realize that if you told this story like a newspaper, it would be about liability and zoning and unions and donors and the symbolic burden of large objects. It would be about meaning quantified and injuries unquantifiable. It would be about a city making a decision about itself. But that is not the story you are telling. You are telling the story of a person who stood in a place and listened until the place told them how to hold it without naming it to death.

Some evenings, when the wind is wrong and the river is loud, you think, “We will not finish.” The thought is neutral. It is not an indictment or a grief. It is a measurement, the kind that understands that what is measured is changing as you look at it. You stand with your shoulder against the Tower and feel its temperature. You think of how many words for “anchor” you have learned. You have lost count. You think of the first day, of the voice on the phone that said you were hired, as if the decision were something the Tower had made, and all these people were its instruments, all of you playing a song you were learning together, out of tune and somehow right.

You walk home in the half-dark. You pass the bodega. The owner is emptying a crate of apples that smell like a memory. He says he finished the book where the lighthouse keeps talking but no one hears it. He says, “The light is for ships, not for people who live on the shore.” You say, “Some nights the shore is a ship.” He laughs and says he’s going to put that on a T-shirt and make a fortune. You climb the stairs to your studio, take off your boots, and stand at the window that frames a slice of the Tower like it is pretending to be a painting. The cranes are still, their arms like question marks too shy to ask.

You take out your notebook and write a sentence you do not cross out: “You are living in a disenchanted world that keeps enchanting you anyway.” You don’t know if the Tower will stand. The foundation might argue with the river again. The lawsuits might proliferate like bad metaphors. People might stop singing and go back to a kind of speech that only bruises. But you have learned the angle at which you can hold your head to hear the thing beneath the thing. The Tower taught you. Or maybe the people did. It doesn’t matter. The comma of Luz’s necklace catches the last light. You go to sleep with the window open to the sound of a city promising nothing and delivering it beautifully. In your dream, the Tower does not reach the sky. It reaches you, which is enough.