The Interpreters Room

I took a deep breath and stepped into the lobby of Reeview, a government facility sat at the centre of the city, it was a place so sterile it felt like a hospital rather than a modern office building. The air smelled faintly like a fruity air freshener mixed with old cigarette smoke. There were no windows except for the main entrance door. No furniture or decoration at all, just a low small reception desk and constant hum from overhead lights. I tried to steady my breathing before continuing on. This wasn’t like any assignment I’d taken before.

There was no receptionist present yet, with the absence of anything else, I hovered near it feeling a little out of place. Eventually a man with cold hazel eyes met me with a firm handshake. He was in a plain gray suit with a white shirt and then a black tie and shoes. Even his hair was styled short and simple, the colour a dark brown, not remarkable or showing any personality, perfect to fit in here. He led me down long, narrow corridors, the sound of our footsteps swallowed by the thick carpet.

“You’re here for the interpreter assignment,” he said without looking back. “Room 7. High confidentiality. You’ll have a headset and an observation room where you’ll listen and translate. There will be no contact with the subject and there are no notes to be taken outside of the facility.”

No contact. No notes. The rules felt like chains tightening around me. What kind of job strips away all the tools I rely on? But I’d been told I was intuitive and chosen because I could fill in gaps others couldn’t. Still, a voice in my head wondered if I really could do this.

I nodded, forcing a calm I didn’t feel. I’ve done countless interpreting jobs; political summits, tribunals, diplomatic talks. Languages have always been my domain, a place where I have control. Clarity. Order. But here, in this place, control felt slippery almost just out of reach.

The man eventually gestured to the right before disappearing without another word and I stepped into the observation room. It felt like a box, the only window was actually a one-way mirror into another room. The lighting was a dull yellow, coming from a tall lamp sat in the corner. The chair was hard and unforgiving, not enticing me to sit for long sessions at all. The headset in my hands felt heavier than usual, as if it carried some unseen weight.

My supervisor’s voice came through the speaker, calm but clipped:

“We’re sending in someone speaking an unrecorded dialect. There’s no database or lexicon. But we believe you’ll understand. You have the intuition. Trust it.”

Trust it? The words echoed in my mind, but a flicker of doubt remained. How can I trust something I don’t even understand? I swallowed hard and clicked the microphone on just as a man entered the other room and took the chair in the centre of the room. The room he was in was somehow even bleaker than my own, with just a chair and lamp, no desk to speak of. The walls and floor were a nondescript white. He sat perfectly straight, both feet planted firmly on the ground and his hands laying on his knees. His hair sat at his shoulders and was a dull lifeless dirty blonde while he was wearing a plain white shirt with dark jeans and black shoes.

A low, rhythmic voice filled my ears through the headset, it felt neither foreign nor familiar. The sounds poured over me like water, but I couldn’t quite grasp their shape or meaning. It wasn’t like any language I’d ever heard; it felt more like feeling than words, like a current pulling at something deep inside me, begging me to understand.

And then, almost without thinking, the words formed inside me. I translated aloud. The sentences weren’t perfect, they felt disjointed, as if the meaning shifted with every breath.

After the first sentence, my lips parted and I whispered something I didn’t mean to say:

“I… I don’t understand.”

The phrase hung in the room, a confession I couldn’t take back. But if I didn’t understand, then why were the words flowing out of me so easily?

A cold chill ran down my spine. This wasn’t just a job any more. Something had started. And I had no idea what it was.

At the end of the day the train ride back to my flat was quiet. Too quiet.

Even at rush hour, the carriage was nearly empty. A man at the far end hummed tunelessly under his breath whilst staring directly at the wall. A woman sat beside him, hands folded over an empty lap, eyes closed yet her lips moved, repeating something silently to herself.

I looked away. I must have been more tired than I thought.

Outside the windows, I watched as the city blurred past. Familiar streets, familiar turns. But the signs looked a little strange. Like the letters had shifted slightly out of place. Words I knew but couldn’t quite read.

I blamed it on the lighting. Or perhaps it was the glass.

When I got off at my station stop, the night air was sharp, cooler than I remembered. I pulled my long blue coat tighter. The path felt too loud under my shoes with each step crunching and disturbing the calm night.

My flat was exactly how I left it.

But something about it felt… wrong. Like someone had been there, then tried very hard to make it seem like they hadn’t.

I walked through each room. The sofa was straight, the lights worked, the fridge hummed its usual tune. Even the bed was left unmade, yet my unease didn’t dissipate.

I eventually sat at the kitchen table, my head in my hands, desperately trying to digest the day. I don’t know how long I sat there for, listening to the building creak and shift but the sky was already getting light as I dragged myself to my bed.

The next day I returned to the room and as expected, the voice continued, steady and calm, weaving words I didn’t consciously know. Again, I translated, my voice beginning to shake slightly, trying to hold onto the meaning, trying to make sense of something that just…didn’t.

But the more I listened, the more the edges of my own language blurred. I caught myself pausing mid-sentence, searching for words that felt like foreign objects in my mouth, my tongue twisting this way and that. What had I just said? Did I mean to even say that?

Between the morning and afternoon session, I stepped out into the city, hoping to find some clarity in the fresh air. The streets were familiar with buses hissing to a stop with the steady noise from groups talking and laughing together while coming and going from little high street shops.

I stood at the counter of a small coffee shop, trying to place a simple order however when I opened my mouth, the wrong words came out. The barista blinked up at me, confused.

“What was that?” she asked.

I blinked back. I didn’t know.

“Sorry. Long week. Just coffee, please”

She nodded, but watched me carefully, her forehead slightly furrowed. Like she was afraid of what I might do next. I shuffled from foot to foot awkwardly, hoping they would hurry along my order so I could go back to hiding. Clearly my effort for clarity had failed.

Once I returned with my coffee, I stared at the blank walls of the observation room as the man continued to speak through my headset. I pulled out my notebook and tried to jot down some of what I heard, only the symbols came out wrong. Jagged lines and curves that didn’t belong to any alphabet. I frowned and erased, but the strange marks kept coming back no matter what I tried.

At one point, I caught my reflection in the one way mirror, yet I couldn’t tell if I was seeing myself or in fact, someone else, all the features seemed somewhat distorted, the eyes too wide and too far apart, the nose a little crooked and the mouth tilted in a half smile that I didn’t realise I was doing.

A creeping panic rose within me as I switched off the headset and dropped it unceremoniously on the desk. I closed my eyes, pulling my hair and trying to calm my breathing. I had to remember who I was. I was Daniel, the interpreter. The man in control. The man just here for a job. But the room felt smaller, the silence louder. I could almost hear my heart pounding.

And then the phrase returned, soft, like a whisper creeping from the back of my mind:

“I don’t understand.”

Was it me? Or was it the voice, trying to reach me through the layers of language? I didn’t know any more. Nothing made sense.

My hand twitched. I looked down. The notebook lay open, filled with those alien symbols. Without thinking, I traced one with my finger. The paper felt cold beneath my skin, like a warning.

The headset crackled. The voice started again.

I pressed the mic. And for hours more, I listened.

That night, I paced. I tried to cook, tried to read, even tried to watch mindless television. The symbols from the notebook appeared everywhere, in condensation on the mirror, scratches on the coffee table, taking over everything. I closed my eyes, and still saw them glowing behind my eyelids until I eventually passed out on the bed, my mind exhausted.

That night I dreamt I was back in the observation room. Only this time, I was sitting behind the glass. I was the one speaking, lips moving in that strange language. My voice was calm, rhythmic, inhuman.

In the other room, a man sat listening. His eyes were wide. I couldn’t see his face clearly—only the way he whispered back:

“I don’t understand.”

When I woke, my mouth was already moving, murmuring something into the darkness.

Back at the facility the room pressed in around me, cold and unyielding. I kept hearing that voice—not the refugee’s, not mine, but something else. Whispering, always whispering:

“I don’t understand.”

I tried to speak to the supervisor again, but every word came out twisted or incomplete. They told me to rest, that I was just adapting to the material. But I could already feel the edges of myself fraying.

I stood and paced the room. The observation window loomed, reflecting not just me, but a shifting, distorted figure behind the glass. I banged my fists against it, trying to garner a response from the man on the other side but he didn’t even twitch a finger.

The headset crackled on the desk. Against all reason, I put it on again. The voice returned, clearer, more insistent. The words flowed like venom, poisoning the space between sanity and madness.

I stumbled back, clutching my head. The symbols from my notebook swam before my eyes, morphing into faces. Faces I couldn’t place. Faces that smiled as they whispered words that didn’t make sense.

I collapsed onto the floor, breath ragged. The room faded around me.

In the mirror, the refugee’s face smiled back.

Not my reflection. Not real.

I whispered, defeated,

“I don’t understand.”

And for the first time, I believed it.

The next session began like all of the others, quiet and quite clinical. I put on the headset and braced myself. But the voice that came through this time was different. Slower. Repetitive. Almost chanting.

I tried to translate, but the words tangled in my throat, struggling to come out. Sentences that once flowed now caught on invisible edges.

What am I even saying?

I sighed heavily before glancing down at my notebook. The strange symbols had seemingly multiplied overnight despite them remaining in this room, alone. They crawled across the page like a language trying to bleed into my own. I tried to write my name in the corner and the letters jumbled, twisting into shapes that didn’t belong. I just stared, unblinking at the result.

“Daniel?” The supervisor’s voice crackled in my earpiece, sharp and distant. “Are you there?”

I blinked. The word “there” made no sense. Where is there? Am I there? The room around me seemed to pulse, the walls breathing.

I opened my mouth to respond, but I couldn’t find the words, couldn’t put the letters together quite right.

“I… uhnk tan—”

I stopped. Panic flared. What was that? I tried again.

“No… I don’t…”

But even my denial felt fractured, incomplete.

The voice on the other side shifted, mocking or maybe coaxing. The refugee spoke even slower now, almost deliberate. The rhythm of his speech burrowed under my skin, rewriting the space between thoughts.

Images flickered behind my eyelids: mouths moving without sound, words turning into smoke, faces smiling with too many teeth.

I yanked off the headset, gasping. The room was silent except for my ragged breathing.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking. I tried to steady them by pressing fingers to my forehead. The notebook lay open. One symbol caught my eye, a triangle sat within a square, a wavy line settled underneath.

I traced it with trembling fingers. What did it mean?

The dream returned for a second night. Or more accurately, the nightmare.

I was speaking, again. But this time I could hear the translation in my head, a few moments before I said it. As if it were feeding me the words.

And there, behind the glass, sat not a refugee, but me—the man I remembered being. Tall, slim and pale with large glasses perched on my nose, my light brown hair cropped short.

He mouthed something through the glass:

“Please.”

I woke up gasping.

Echos stayed in my mind. Please. Please. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I had to go back, had to find answers.

The headset buzzed softly, the room bathed in the same yellow light, unchanged yet it somehow felt different today. Maybe just remnants from the dream. Maybe just my imagination.

I listened to the recording, my voice translating the refugee’s speech. But the words twisted and warped, slipping through my mind like smoke. I strained to recall what I had said, to grab at the thoughts but the memory dissolved, leaving only fragments and distorted truths behind.

I glanced at the mirror. My reflection wavered, uncertain. For a heartbeat, it flickered, the face tilted, the eyes more hollow and a faint, unsettling smile dancing.

The phrase repeated in my head, clearer now, but coming from nowhere and everywhere:

“I don’t understand.”

I reached out, fingertips brushing the cool glass. The surface rippled like water. My breath caught and yanked my hand back.

Was I even still here? Was this still the dream? I couldn’t tell and that was terrifying.

The room seemed to fold inward, time stretching and fracturing.

That night I sat in my apartment, lights off, trying not to speak. Not even to myself. But the language was in me now. Like a song you hear once and can’t unhear.

I caught myself muttering phrases I didn’t know the meaning of. Not even aloud—just in thought. I didn’t want to go back to the facility. But the feeling of being away from it was worse. Like trying to hold your breath while your lungs fill with smoke. So I packed my bag. Not because I wanted to return, but because it was no longer up to me.

I arrived without thought.

At some point, the hallway was under my feet again. Same scuffed carpet. Same soft buzz in the walls. I couldn’t remember passing the front desk. I couldn’t remember the train. Maybe I never left at all.

Room 7 was waiting. The door open, humming softly, like it had been breathing in my absence.

The mirror had changed. Now it just reflected, no longer able to see through into the other room.

There was no desk with a headset now.

No subject.

No voice to translate.

Only a chair. Facing me.

And something behind the glass I couldn’t name.

They watched me. That was the feeling. Not just eyes, but attention, dense and collective. As if the room itself were tilting inward, peering close.

And then the voice—soft, toneless, inside the walls:

“Begin when ready.”

I waited for someone else to enter. But no one came.

Eventually, I spoke, not because I knew what to say, but because silence had become unbearable.

The words fell out—not translation, not interpretation.

Confession.

And as I spoke, the room began to write me down.