Barter of Names

Mara Calder learned the Remembrance House the way other people learned a city map: by the creases and the worn edges where familiarity had been pressed into the stone. She could walk the corridors blindfolded and lay her hands on the cedar cases that held the tokens in their rows — coins and bottles and little sealed tins — and tell you, by the weight of a lid, whether the memory inside would be soft as a child's laughter or brittle as a widow's list of debts. The House hummed against the bones of the town like a thing that had grown there with the tides; it kept people who needed to remember and people who could not stop wanting to remember in tidy, numbered compartments. For Mara, who had been apprenticed there since she was nineteen, the work was a kind of careful cruelty. She recorded names, catalogued the shards of last words, and handled grief like something delicate and dangerous.

There were rules written in ledger ink that Halden kept in a locked drawer and rules that were not written at all. The written ones were administrative: how to store a token, when to seal a playback, what languages to transcribe. The unwritten ones were older and colder — do not play a token for someone who hasn’t requested it, do not mix tokens, do not keep a token longer than a month without curatorial note. Mara followed both sets of rules because it was easier than answering why her brother's name was still an empty space on the list of returned. Finn had disappeared five years ago, small as a missing comma in the family sentence, and his absence had turned the way she handled names into an ache like a loose tooth. She had been cataloguing other peoples' endings long enough to think she could measure what was safe.

The unmarked tin presented itself on a Tuesday afternoon, left unattended on the sorting table where the House accepted the unwanted and the inevitable. It was cold to the touch and plain; the kind of container the House used for simple audio fragments and perfume memories sold in cheap markets. Someone had written Finn's name on its underside with a hand Mara knew too well — her mother's, the way she pressed the n into the f with a little upward flourish that meant she had been trying to be brave when she wrote it. Mara's fingers stopped above the tin and did not move. For an hour she sat in the cataloguing room with other tins humming in their cases like bees, and every time a bell in the passage chimed she flinched as if she might hear Finn's step instead. Something in the tin smelled faintly of the sea and of old wallpaper; she thought of the small things she still kept of him: a flattened toy boat, a sock with a moon stitched on it, the emergency of his laughter. She heard her own breath in the quiet and it sounded like a name.

She put the tin under the playback hood as if she were placing a body on a table, hands steady though the inside of her felt unstitched. The playback apparatus here was older than most of the town's houses, an elegant, merciless instrument of brass and glass that whirred like a distant tide when it was engaged. Halden had taught her how to set the needle without scarring the wax of a token and how to listen to what the House would give without needing to own it. The speaker admitted only a fragment — a sliver of voice recorded with such intimacy it could have been a breath — and the first thing that came through was a laugh that belonged to Finn and no one else. It was small and immediate and then it broke into something that was not a thing he had ever said to her. He spoke a line with a rhythm she remembered from the way he used to tap his foot, and the line itself was not a child's sentence at all but something like an agreement: "I will keep what I take, so that what I leave may be given away." Mara's throat closed on the echo of it. She rewound and played it again, listening to the way the words layered themselves into the hum of the House.