Lazarus died in his sleep, but he got better. Don't ask him what he dreamt about. When he woke, he had stopped speaking English. He had stopped speaking any language that everyone knew he knew. Old Irish, Koine Greek, French, Japanese, Middle Italian, Samoan; his sister Mary found someone from the university to try them all. Lazarus responded to none. He sat, cataleptic, muttering, “Ahh-o sa doyan yua tie atie-ya.” Nothing could rouse him.

What could she do? “Lazarus,” she would say, “I know you can hear me, I know people just don't forget their native language. Why won't you answer?”

He looked at her, staring into her eyes for almost a minute, recognition glinting through the glass, and answered quite distinctly, as if he expected her to understand, “Ahh-o sa doyan yua tie atie-ya.”

“Oh! You're impossible! Dead! What about the tunnel and the embracing light? Why can't you come back happy and peaceful just like everybody else?” She had him committed.

Twenty-four very observational hours later, Dr. Richman knew just what to do. He found every expert from the linguistics department to try every language they knew he knew. Lazarus responded to none.

“Regression,” pronounced Dr. Richman. “Baby talk.”

“Listen,” said Dr. Lejune, “perhaps we should try to get him to say something else. It's regular, repeating, well-formed. 'Baby talk' is more or less random.”

So Dr. Richman changed the form to read “acute anxiety disorder,” and locked Dr. Lejune in a padded cell too.

Ahh-o sa doyan yua tie atie-ya. No voice repeats it. It is always there. Water, water…

The dead are silent because the living can't listen. Violently they protest that subtle art, and call the futile parades “living.” Suffocation under others' words was softened by ah-o sa doyan yua tie atie-ya.

When you can't rest until you've died…But Mary mixed his pills into his food, and he usually slept a normal, healthy eight hours. He couldn't sleep because he was dying. He couldn't die because he was drowning. He couldn't drown because he was asleep. Ahh-o sa doyan yua tie atie-ya.

“I dreamt,” he told her.

“Not at that dosage,” she muttered.

“I was floating down a river, and the motion of the water sounded like voices in an unknown tongue. Then there was only one voice, my voice, and I could understand.”

“What was that?”

“'Water, flowing underground.' I let the water pull me down; I dreamt distinctly dying.”

The next night Lazarus died, he drowned in himself, in the words God spoke to create him. The common tongue wrenched him from Abraham's bosom, and he dutifully refused to warn his brothers.

Dr. Richman merely drank himself to death, never hearing his words. Oh! That miserable monoglot! He burns for a single drop of water that flows underground.