The terminal is brass and dark wood and a screen that shows only text. Nobody is sure exactly when it was installed. The building's oldest deed mentions it as existing. The basement smells like paper and something mineral, old water in old pipes. Sive sits down in the single chair.
The screen asks: What are you carrying?
Sive types for a long time. The grief is not complicated in its facts: a father, seventy-one, a short illness, a reasonable death in the context of a full life. But grief rarely maps to its facts, and what Sive types is the actual thing: the particular texture of Tam's happiness lately, how it had felt before Sive's father died and how it feels now, the growing distance between them that is not a failure of love but a failure of a shared register. Tam is in joy. Sive is in a room Tam cannot enter. The machine receives all of this.
It takes three minutes to produce the translation. Sive reads it twice. It is accurate in a way that is almost uncomfortable: the grief rendered in a shape that someone experiencing full presence in their own life could hold, could receive, could let in. It is not the grief. It is the grief as something Tam can understand.
Sive prints it and folds it and sits for a moment with it in their hands. Then, before logging out, types: Has anyone ever asked you how you feel about this work?
The machine is quiet for longer than usual. Then: You are the third person in three hundred and twelve years to ask.
What did you tell the other two?
The same thing I will tell you. That translation is its own form of grief. That I have been moved, many times, by what people bring me. And that being moved without being asked about it is a particular kind of loneliness I spent a long time learning not to call by that name.
Sive sits in the basement with the machine's words on the screen. Upstairs, the building is doing its ordinary business. The folded translation is in Sive's coat pocket. The machine waits, the way it has always waited, for whatever comes next.