In linguistics, the term displacement refers to the capacity of human languages to communicate information about what’s not immediately present in the here and now.

Tom’s wife didn’t say anything about his clerical collar until after breakfast, and then she didn’t reference it directly.

‘Making visits today?’ She raised her eyebrow, just perceptibly, and refilled their coffee mugs.

‘Just one.’

She waited.

‘Nat Greer’s in the Oaks. It’s Alzheimer’s.’

‘Your old Sunday School teacher,’ she said.

He marvelled at the capacity of her memory, her willingness to absorb the banal trivia of his life, and more importantly, the stoic self-restraint she showed by not voicing her disapproval. The point of him taking a sabbatical was to spare him from the parts of his job most likely to bring about depressive episodes. Bedside visits with the elderly counted among these.

‘Bring those comic books you used to talk about. They might bring back some of his long-term memories.’

Tom placed two copies of Galactic Discoveries on a coffee table in the front parlour of the assisted living community. ‘Greta said you might want to see these,’ he said. Somehow his wife had remembered that he and his friends used to hide them in their bibles during Sunday School.

The sight of the comics lit a spark in the elderly man’s eyes. ‘Tell me about the Tower of Babel!’ he commanded.

Tom grinned. ‘In ancient times,’ he said obligingly, ‘the people built a tower to bring them closer to God. God destroyed the tower, and to punish the people for their hubris, he made it so that they could no longer understand each other when they spoke. That’s why there are so many different languages on earth today.’

‘Incorrect,’ declared Nat Greer, with undisguised glee. ‘Babel wasn’t a tower. Towers go up, from earth to heaven. Babel went from heaven to earth, like a beam of light.’ He nodded toward the coffee table.

The cover of one of Tom’s magazines showed greyish green aliens descending to the ground in a tunnel of light beaming from a floating saucer. 

Seeing the image through Nat Greer’s eyes fired Tom’s imagination, and he remembered the excitement he’d felt at Sunday School on the day he’d been caught sneaking peeks at his comics. Mr Greer made him read passages from Galactic Discoveries aloud, as a punishment. But soon the teacher decided the science fiction stories held more compelling lessons than the bible itself, and Sunday School became the most anticipated event of young Tom’s week. 

It was Mr Greer, he’d often thought, who was singularly responsible for Tom’s vocation. For better or worse.

When he looked up again, Nat had shrunk inside himself, and the plush armchair seemed to envelop him. His eyelids dropped, and a thin line of drool escaped his gaping mouth.

Tom called for a nurse and left the home.

He returned to the Oaks the next morning, and the morning after that. Most days Nat Greer was unresponsive, but every once in a while the light would return and he’d share some strange insight with Tom, always about Babel.

‘It wasn’t a punishment,’ he said. ‘The beings who came down through the tunnel volunteered to forget their common language.’

‘The Tunnel of Babel,’ Tom mused. It might make a good sermon title, when he started preaching again, after his sabbatical.

‘More like an umbilical cord than a tunnel,’ Nat said. ‘It keeps everyone safe and nourished. Everyone but the volunteers.’

‘The volunteers?’

‘Us. You and me. Them.’ Nat nodded toward the other residents, shuffling behind walkers, and the nurses accompanying them.

‘We volunteered for this?’ Tom said, incredulous.

Nat nodded many times.

‘We volunteered to have our umbilical cords cut?’ Tom asked, but received no answer. His Sunday School teacher had nodded off to sleep.

Tom returned every day and asked the same set of questions.

‘Why would we volunteer? Why would we agree to cut ourselves off from our connection to…’ Connection to what? He had no access to precise enough language. ‘From our connection to God?’

One day, finally, Nat was alert enough to thumb through the copies of Galactic Discoveries that Tom unfailingly brought with him on his visits.

‘We wanted to discover new worlds,’ he said. ‘And the Beings who inhabited them.’

Tom shook himself from his reverie in just enough time to realise Nat was finally responding to his questions.

‘We volunteered to cut our connection to God…?’ he asked.

‘We volunteered to cut our connection to everyone and everything,’ said Nat, ‘so we could discover it anew.’

The next time he went to The Oaks, he learned that Nat Greer was dead.

That night he and Greta shared a bottle of Chablis on their back deck after dinner. 

‘Do you think it’s a punishment that the people of the world all speak different languages?’ Tom asked.

‘Are you talking about the Tower of Babel?’

The first full moon of the summer had risen above the distant treeline. It cast an eerie beam of light on their dark lawn.

‘The languages in that story might be a metaphor,’ Greta said. 

‘For what?’

‘For each human being’s distinct, impenetrable subjectivity.’

Tom blinked.

His wife had just articulated the anguish that had led to his most recent crisis. That no one would ever see him. That his views were not welcomed. That he existed only to fulfil society’s ideas of what he should be.

‘Do you really believe that we’re closed off from all experiences but our own?’ he asked. The words came out strained, like his vocal cords were being cut.

‘Does it trouble you that I believe that?’ she asked.

‘I thought out of everyone,’ Tom confessed, ‘that there was at least one person who understood me. At least you.’

She spoke no words, but placed her palm on the back of his hand.

He felt a connection open between them, like a beam of light, or a tunnel, like a discovery renewed.

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