The Word Exchange Page 15

  But when I checked my email, some of them were really chig. A few seemed like spam, full of random unintelligible words. I only opened one of them because it seemed to come from Johnny. Really hoping that doesn’t bite me in the ass. There was also one from Ana, inviting me to Thanksgiving tomorrow at her mom’s. Is that even possible? Did I make it up? Guess I’ll check again in the 3owshong. But it was the last one—a mass message to the NADEL staff—that disturbed me most. It said the party scheduled for Friday at the New York Public Library—the third-edition launch party, for this Friday, two nights from zyve—is apparently “postponed until further notice,” due to “Douglas Johnson’s unexpected absence” and “other factors.” Holy. Fucking. Shit.

  F

  Fa•ther ′fä-thƏr n : Something sought but not often found; in some contexts: G-d; in others: D–g

  As I scurried up to the blue door of the Midtown North Precinct on Tuesday, the familiar curl of Bart—hunched under the flagpole, hood tugged up against the cold, a white puff of breath clouding his face like an omen—made my stomach swirl with shy gladness, even given everything. I was so relieved to see him after the past few terrible days—to have an ally who cared nearly as much as I did about finding my dad.

  I was also a little embarrassed. The last time I’d seen Bart, Saturday morning, the morning after Doug went missing, my dirty hair had been thatched in knots; I’d hardly slept; I’d had on no bra. Since then the only time we’d spoken had been Sunday, when I’d been so sick I couldn’t roll over in bed. I barely remembered the call, but standing beneath the briskly whipping stars and stripes, I could tell from the startled, sheepish look on Bart’s face—a mirror of mine?—that whatever I’d said had been in some way untoward. At least the call had done the job. There we were at the station, about to be interviewed by the cops.

  Bart gave me a little, melancholic smile, looking more than ever like Buster Keaton. “How are you feeling?” he asked, and I felt a warm wave of blood flood my cheeks, which confused me. Since when did Bart make me blush? I had a flashback to his look of pleased surprise as he’d rummaged through the box of detritus from my earlier life, and to him slumbering on my floor, the soft pink soles of his feet showing.

  As if to save me the trouble of answering him—or maybe, I realized later, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to—he didn’t wait for me to respond. (This was, of course, the day before Bart himself started to be aphasic.) Nodding, he said, “Come on, let’s get you out of the cold. Rodney’s waiting in the lobby.”

  But when we went inside, we were told that Rodney’s interview was already in progress. Bart and I took metal chairs near the door. I was still shaky: I’d been laid out for two days. Maybe sicker than I’d ever been. It was only that morning that I’d woken feeling a little more like myself. I’d managed to shower and eat some dry toast. I’d even made a trip to TriBeCa, to an old cell-phone store on Church. That’s why I’d been late to meet Rodney and Bart.1

  When I started to describe my sickness to Bart, he looked troubled; then he leapt up and vanished. At first I was a little hurt, afraid he was trying to get a safe distance away. But I also understood: he had a lot of health problems—allergies, maybe asthma; I didn’t know what else—and whenever anyone in the office started sniffling, he always kept a wide berth. That day at the precinct, though, he soon returned, gripping a white paper cup dotted with flowers, jostling water on the floor. “Here,” he said, his trembling hand dribbling a few dark blots on my coat. And off he went again, to find a paper towel.

  Diffidently, between sips of water, I tried to ask him about our Sunday call—whether it had been what I’d said or the way I’d said it that had thrown him off. But before I even mentioned the Creatorium, I watched his thin face hollow in concern, and with rising alarm, I wondered if I was still having trouble making myself understood.

  I didn’t have a chance to ask, though: a scrawny officer escorted Rodney out to the lobby and called my name. I had just enough time to nod to Rodney—and watch him step toward Bart—before the cop whisked me away. As we squeaked down the hall, he introduced himself as Officer Maroney. He was about my age, with a shiny, slightly underbaked face, a heavy mustache, and dark brown hair dense as turf. He stood aside to let me pass first into a tidy office done up simply, with no plaques or degrees.

  A handsome man lumbered out from behind a large metal desk, hand first.

  “Detective Billings,” he barked, squeezing my palm into submission before pulling out my seat. His blazer was decked out in brass buttons and a special badge, and he had on a black tie, knotted tightly at the neck. His bald head gleamed with a star of glare. He had some extra padding beneath his jacket. Not as much as Doug. But I tend to trust a man of appetite, and I put implicit faith in the detective.

  The interview, though, was short and discomfiting. It started straightforwardly enough. Officer Maroney stood back near the door, and Detective Billings asked me to describe the night Doug went missing. But as I spoke, Billings kept hooking his hand behind his ear and asking me to repeat myself. A few times he glanced over my head at Maroney. And at one point he interrupted to ask if I felt all right. When I nodded, he motioned for me to go on; he was recording notes, so I seemed to be conveying something.

  But I was scared. I’d been taking the pills Doug had given me, and I felt better. It seemed I was still sick, though—with what I didn’t know. Something that had come on as I’d used that preternatural coil. (It seemed crazy to link the two; also crazy not to.) I remembered Dr. Thwaite mentioning a disease—a pandemic, he’d said. And I felt my chest and neck grow warm even before my exchange with Billings took a more unsettling turn.

  It happened as I was trying to explain that Doug’s late meeting on Friday hadn’t been in his date book (like about half his meetings). “But I’m sure his visitors are on the security tapes,” I said, or managed to express after a few attempts. “You must have discussed all that with Rodney.”

  Detective Billings hitched one corner of his mouth to the side. Then, again, he looked at Maroney. After a moment he raked his bottom lip with his teeth. “Tapes are blank,” he said flatly.

  “Blank?” I said, incredulous. “Did you talk to Rodney?” My pulse picked up.

  “Did we …? Ah, talk to Mr. Moore. We discussed it with him, yes,” Billings said, voice dry as flint. “We’re interviewing him further—that night’s visitors’ log is also empty.”

  “That’s impossible,” I blurted. I saw his jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. I could feel him studying me, and I wondered if he was conducting a test. Trying to get me to say something that might discredit Rodney. Or myself. If I hadn’t already. With a mouth of rubber, I said lamely, “Rodney’s the best there is.” Explained—or tried to—that even to get to the Dictionary’s elevators, all guests had to sign in. That surveillance was always on. I’d even seen some of the recordings myself, when an intern-turned-pickpocket had stolen my necklace one summer.

  He didn’t interrupt me this time, but I didn’t know whether it was because I was making sense or he’d just decided not to. I tried to press the detective for details—did they have any leads on when or how the recordings might have been erased? Had Rodney been able to identify suspects?—but that was it: by then Billings’s lips were sealed. He politely deflected all my attempted questions, gently yanking at his ear as if he’d just been swimming.

  “Rodney’s not under investigation, is he?” I finally couldn’t help but ask. Detective Billings put his big hands on his desk. Knit his mammoth fingers together. Said, “At this point, we’re not ruling anything out.”

  My stomach flipped. I wanted to ask if I was being scrutinized, too, but that seemed impolitic. So I asked instead what they’d thought of the Creatorium.

  Again Billings squinted, one brow dipping down. Same errant corner of his mouth ticking up. “The what?” he asked.

  “Creatorium. In the subbasement?” I tried. “At the Dictionary?”

  Detective Billings shook
his head.

  I said it again, and when his expression remained blank, I started to wonder if the problem wasn’t that he didn’t understand me but that Bart hadn’t mentioned the Creatorium when he’d first talked to the cops. If not, why not? Had he thought I made it up? That I was delirious, maybe. Or nuts—like Doug. Maybe the police just hadn’t followed up on it. But it seemed most likely—and unnerving—that whatever I’d said to Bart on the phone, I hadn’t managed to convey the Creatorium at all. That at that very moment, no one knew it was there. Or had ever known.

  I shivered, scrunching my neck in an uncontrollable twitch. Then did my best to explain what I’d seen Saturday in the subbasement. Described the hall where I’d found the hot, crowded room. Sweatshop workers in blue. The Slavic foreman. Our electronic corpus, overwritten term by term. Hundreds of books burned. The hulking, knuckle-cracking figure of Dmitri Sokolov. As my account haltingly uncoiled, I don’t know how it sounded to Detective Billings, but to me it sounded more and more crazy. If he doubted its veracity, his mistrust had gone subterranean. He listened game-faced, stopping me only to ask for clarification, expressions stowed like carry-ons.

  I thought of him the next afternoon, Wednesday, when I went in to work for the first time that week, late, and got a call from one of his colleagues. Cops were searching the twentieth floor for clues about Doug, so a few of us Dictionary staffers had been allowed down on fourteen. I’d just started combing through hundreds of emails, hoping to see one from my dad or someone who might know where he was, when my new cell phone rang, startling me.2

  “I was just down in the basement,” the officer said gruffly, his voice harsh through the metal holes of the alien earpiece. “There’s nothing there. What’d you say you saw?”

  I held the phone away, frozen for a moment. As blood surged through my head, I heard a faint rumble, like distant thunder. Had I made it up? What would Billings think, I wondered—what doubts about me would surface, or be confirmed—when this officer reported back to him? Which he probably already had.

  “I want to go with you,” I heard myself say. I said it twice, just in case.

  Hesitantly the officer agreed—he’d just gone down to the cafeteria for a coffee and asked me to meet him in the lobby in fifteen. When I shook his hand next to the security desk, I hoped he didn’t make too much of my palm’s clamminess.

  We plodded down the dim, echoing stairs, then traipsed along the damp, bleak hall below the dust-furred pneumatic tubes, exactly tracking my Saturday route. And it was true: the Creatorium was gone. All of it. Disappeared. The only signs it had existed were a black patch of soot on the floor near the furnace and a faint smoky scent. Everything else had vanished. The paper sign outside the door. Boxes, table, chairs. Workers. Even the message-routing station was closed down; a note hung from one metal tube that said, “Temporarily Out of Service.” A few glinting delivery cylinders littered the floor. Again I felt the specter of sickness. And that my mind was cracking apart. The officer just shrugged, unruffled, and sipped his coffee.

  And that was just the start. In the cafeteria line, surreptitiously buying a bag of candy for lunch, I overheard some etymologists discussing an anonymous editorial on Memes published the day before in the Times. As I started reading it in the elevator back up to fourteen, I could swear it was in Doug’s voice. I’d heard so much of what it said before that I almost could have written it. That was sort of reassuring. I hoped it meant he was okay—that I’d have an explanation very soon for where he was and what was happening.

  But my peace of mind didn’t even make it all the way to my temporary desk. As I rounded reception, biting into a soft licorice nib, Chandra from marketing came flying past. She looked pale. Mascara smudged. When I asked what was wrong, she seemed to understand what I said. Her hands went to her throat, and she blurted, “It’s canceled.”

  “What is?” I tried to ask, swallowing the sweet mash. My teeth probably black.

  “The launch,” she said, voice teetering. Fingers finding her temples.

  Silent alarms started going off in my head. Chandra didn’t upset easily; I was sure she’d heard something about my father that no one had told me yet. Trying to stay calm, speaking as clearly as I could, I asked what was going on. When she tipped her head in confusion, I asked again, apologizing if I didn’t make sense—I’d been so sick and anxious since Doug had been gone. She nodded, frowning, and put a hand lightly on my arm. She started to say that she didn’t know why the launch was being called off. But then, quietly, after a tiny drag of silence, she leaned in a little and added that it might have to do with “the deal.”

  “Deal?” I asked, perplexed. The op-ed was still open on my phone; I hadn’t finished reading it.

  For a moment Chandra’s expression flickered, a wrinkle trembling her brow. But right away her face reglazed. She swiped away the mascara. Said she’d meant it was because of Doug’s disappearance. Then, stilettos clacking, she vanished, too, calling over her shoulder that she had to catch a train. The email she sent later that night didn’t clarify anything.

  Back at my desk, already shaken, I finished reading the Times piece. That’s how I learned about “the deal”: that all our terms might be sold to the Exchange. I found it very hard to believe. And yet. A wavy picture appeared, of the Dictionary crumpling into cinder and ash downstairs. Of nonsensical strings of letters smothering our corpus. I knew in my heart that these things were related. But I didn’t know how, or what it meant. Where Doug’s disappearance might fit in; if he was in danger. Or—maybe almost as bad—somehow involved.

  Rattled, I tried calling Bart—someone had told me he was working from home that day. But I couldn’t get him: maddeningly, my signal kept dying.3 I sent another text to Dr. Thwaite. Again there was no response. Frustrated and on edge, I switched from the phone back to my Meme. Not using it was more than a hassle—I felt paralyzed. It was part of me.4

  And there were things I felt I needed the Meme for, things that nothing else could do. I.e., when I got home later that night, I used it and the Exchange to translate the strange, faded instructions on the pill bottles Doug had given me—in Chinese, traditional characters—and learned that the pills were antivirals, to be taken three times a day “for abatement of symptoms”—if not symptoms of what. I’d been guessing and taking them only morning and night.

  While my Meme had been switched off, I’d received a slew of texts and beams. Several were from Coco. One wondered why I’d never turned up in the studio Sunday; she’d sent a few invitations to things; and her last one, which made my throat tighten a little, said, “Are you all right, mignonne? I’m very worried. I love you.” The beam from Ramona, who was the only friend I’d managed to speak to since the week before, said, “U alive? What about yr dad?” There was also a text from the doctor, who said she had something free in two months. (I’d noticed that as the Meme put more and more doctors out of business, mine had become almost impossible to see.) And there was one from Bart, which gave me a boost; I opened it hoping he might have some news. But it was old, too, from the morning before, when I’d been late to meet him at the precinct because I’d still been down at the cell-phone store. (It asked if he’d gotten our rendezvous time wrong.) I beamed a Françoise Hardy song to Coco with the note, “Je t’aime aussi, I’ll call you soon,” and let the others go right then.

  The final one was from my mom, returning my weekend call and wanting to know if I had dinner plans. Unfortunately, the invitation was to join both her and Laird.

  I’d loved Laird when I was a little girl. He was an expert at coin tricks, he always brought toffees, and every time I did something even a tiny bit clever, he’d say (usually to no one but me), “See? I told you she’s more than just a pretty face.” He let me swing from his biceps and told me secrets (Vera had once dated a duke; Doug had a covert fear of heights). But by the time I was thirteen the scales had dropped from my eyes. Nearly everything about Laird seemed staged: bearing of a robber baron, voice from fo
rties films. He was the type who exfoliated and got his cuticles trimmed. Even his name was fake: he’d been born Larry Shifflett. He didn’t turn into Laird Sharpe until the late seventies, when he first appeared on Boston’s WNAC-TV. Over the years his appearance had also changed: his nose had become so thin it didn’t look like it could support wire-rims, and he dyed his hair an artful silver-gray. He was, in other words, the anti-Doug. Maybe that was what had drawn Vera in.

  That, and she liked the way he looked at her. Some might call it watchful—a good reporter’s steady, bready gaze, sopping up all the messy signals ordinary mortals might miss. It gave me the creeps. But I knew that in the past few years Vera had started to feel transparent, which was partly Doug’s fault. That was another thing, though: I didn’t like the way Laird plied my mother with attention. How he’d swooped so quickly in. Maybe, I speculated, before she and Doug had even split.

  I knew I wasn’t really being fair—that my prejudices were puerile, held over from younger years and then further warped by sadness for Doug. Laird was very thoughtful of my mom, making the rounds of all the Botanic Garden special exhibits that had bored Doug to tears, buying her the kind of simple silver jewelry she liked, and rare textiles, and endless potted plants, readily agreeing to attend galas and other parties, donating to all her causes (without sarcasm), taking her skiing, sailing, hiking—and then, when she had a fall, nursing her for weeks through the sprain: cooking; keeping her entertained. Heartbroken as it made me to admit, Vera seemed more joyful and relaxed with him than I’d seen her in a very long time. And that was worth a lot.