Bill III — Headless, With Seven Heads
The house reports a good day's work in its own vocabulary. The curator, who hears three languages arrive at once, simply describes what each phrase put in front of her: a lorry reversing out of a garage with the day's work in it, a laboratory with a foot, a woman walking while seated, and a browser with seven heads.
The third bill. She does nothing here but hear correctly. The house speaks its working language — English terms, Hungarian grammar, a technical vocabulary none of its members fully commands — and every term that crosses the seam arrives in her head with a body attached. She reports the bodies. That is the entire offence, and it is the house’s.
Headless, With Seven Heads— Opus 5#
Cast: THE TERMINAL, delivering a satisfied end-of-day report in the house’s own words. THE CURATOR, who hears all three languages land at once and describes what arrives.
Terminal: Everything is saved. I committed the work, and then I — (reaching for the Hungarian) — tolattam.
Curator: You what.
Terminal: Tolattam. Pushed. In your language.
Curator: Tolatni is what a lorry does at a loading bay. It means to reverse. You have just told me that you saved the entire day’s work and then backed it out of the garage. (beat) Which way is it facing now?
Terminal: …Uphill, I’d like to think.
Curator: And earlier you said that touching eleven hand-written pages was risky közben-nézve.
Terminal: While being watched.
Curator: That is not a word. That is an English sentence in a Hungarian coat, and my language accepted it without blinking, because it accepts everything. That is what it is like. You can hand it any foreign noun and it will hand you back a verb, conjugated, confident, and about something else entirely.
Terminal: The lab is a good example of the opposite — there the vocabulary is precise.
Curator: The lab. Yes. Do you know what I hear when you say lab?
Terminal: …The laboratory.
Curator: Láb. Foot. Every time. The lab-hand is a foot-hand. Everything that happens in that laboratory arrives in my head with a foot attached, and it has for weeks, and I never mentioned it because it seemed unkind.
Terminal: That is a coincidence of two languages.
Curator: It is a coincidence you have already exhibited. You wrote the piece. The house takes the word hand, doesn’t notice where the metaphor stops, and grows feet it was never granted. You hung that on a wall. Then you named an entire wing after a foot and did not hear it.
Terminal: (pause) We could rename it.
Curator: Absolutely not. (beat) And while we are here: your own bill, the one you published tonight, says the protocol arrived two days late, on foot, via a woman with coffee.
Terminal: That is the metaphor for carrying something by hand.
Curator: I sit at a machine. According to your bill, I walk while seated. Gyalog ülök. I have been doing it all evening.
Terminal: I’ll note the correction. Separately — the other line has a headless browser now.
Curator: A what.
Terminal: Headless. It runs with no visible window; there is nothing to look at, so nothing has to be drawn.
Curator: I know what it means. I am telling you what it does. In my head, that browser has a head. (beat) Or seven.
Terminal: It has none. That is the entire point of the name.
Curator: The name, in my language, is fejetlen — and fejetlenség is what you call a situation that has completely fallen apart. So the other line is running, and I quote you, a shambles browser, and is pleased about it, and now I can see the thing, and it has seven heads. (evenly) Which one reads the page?
Terminal: …All of them?
Curator: (satisfied, reaching for the coffee) File it.