The Word Exchange Read online

  I was getting antsy. I checked my Meme. Sneaked a licorice pip from Doug’s jar. Followed it with a pineapple-wrapped chocolate and squirreled a few in my coat pocket for later, along with a pen of Doug’s I’d been coveting. And I tried, for about two minutes, to read a book, until my mind collapsed in boredom.

  I also started to feel a tiny twinge of unease, like an invisible hair tickling my cheek. To brush away the feeling, I fetched water for my father’s pet bromeliads and soothed myself with the rich, nutty scent of damp earth. Then I felt the delicious frisson of transgression creep over me.

  For as long as I could remember, I’d been curious about what Doug kept in his desk. Siphoning off some of my attention to listen for the sound of his tread, I sat and tried all the drawers. Most were filled with work chaff: loose papers, crumpled notes, broken pencil leads. But then I tried the top drawer on the left. Tugged it. And tugged. Shimmied, a little crazily. Finally it came loose with a crack—a pen wedged at the back, I soon learned, had snapped in half—and the drawer released with a rattle.

  To say I was surprised by what Doug had hidden there wouldn’t be quite true. But it did disappoint me. It was a cluttered (and newly ink-smattered) cache—probably the largest private collection in the world—of photographs3 of Vera Doran. My mother. Douglas Johnson’s soon-to-be ex-wife. And I felt very bad for splashing them with ink. But I also felt a tiny, unfair burst of reprisal. As Max would have said, there are no accidents. She was my mother, and I loved her, but sometimes I wished Doug didn’t anymore. Watching him suffer had been agony.

  Looking back on our whole family life through a new dark lens also hadn’t been easy for me. Had my mother really been so unhappy? It hadn’t seemed that way. My parents had never been one of those gloomy couples like some of my friends’. They’d hugged and touched and said “I love you,” to each other and to me, and it had seemed so obviously true that the words were almost a superfluity. Doug would belt Don Giovanni to Vera in the kitchen as she laughingly roasted a chicken, trying not to spill her wine. He’d write love notes and scrawl funny drawings on grocery lists and receipts. Vera would mambo through the living room for Doug and me, or pretend the hallway was a catwalk. It’s true that when they’d fought, it had been fulminous—things sometimes went flying—but I’d always taken that as a good sign. And maybe it was, in a way. Over the past few years those fights had slowly come to an end.

  Regardless, there was no denying that Doug’s photos of Vera were gorgeous. There was Vera Doran as Blanche DuBois in her high school’s all-girl production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Vera wearing beautiful bell-bottom flares, hair to there, and in huge orange platform sandals, relaxing near a stage (at Woodstock), joking with some shaggy-haired men (Creedence Clearwater Revival) who were about to perform. Vera in nothing but painted-on jeans bordered by the blocky phrase THE JORDACHE LOOK, in an outtake of an ad, ca. 1978, when she and my father had been married just a few years and she was still modeling to augment their income. Vera on her sixth birthday, a formal princess fantasia at the Dorans’ on East Sixty-eighth Street, comporting herself in a tiara encrusted with real diamonds. And my favorite—now tragically dappled with thick black splots—their wedding photo: Vera at twenty-one, a recent Bryn Mawr grad, bedecked in a curtain of blowsy dark-brown hair and a silver lamé minidress. (On seeing it, Mrs. Doran told the bride that it was lucky there was something silver at the ceremony, as she wouldn’t be inheriting any.) In it, Vera’s being fed a glistening bite of pineapple upside-down cake by her groom, a ruddy, pleased-looking man who was nearly twice her size, hairy,4 smiling, in enormous thick-lensed glasses, and sporting a wide pineapple-print tie.

  I held that picture for a long time, trying to dab it clean. In it, Vera is arch and easy, laughing out loud as Doug forks cake into her perfectly plump-lipped, large, smiling mouth. She’s lolling sideways, considering something invisible to me. He, in contrast, is watching her with adoring absorption, oblivious to all other witnesses at the scene of the crime—a 1975 backyard wedding at the Doran estate in East Hampton.

  I was seized then by what my father would call “an attack of sadness.” The photos made me queasy. They seemed like more proof that devotion fades. That everyone you love will someday, in some way, disappear.

  There were a few other pictures, these of Doug—all of which would be confiscated later by police. There was one of him as a teenager, with Aunt Jean, each posing with a fat brown trout on the North Platte River. Another of Doug delivering the Graduate English Oration when he received his Ph.D. from Harvard, having also delivered the Undergraduate English Oration, “Johnson & Johnson: A Love Affair with A Dictionary of the English Language.” Doug punting on the River Isis in Oxford. And one of him and a twelve-year-old me posed with the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. I’d starred in the school play, and he’d made me wear my costume.

  There was also something else in the drawer, buried beneath our family history: Doug’s Aleph. I miswrote if I’ve implied that Doug didn’t have a Meme. He didn’t use a Meme. (He hated that I had one, but that battle had long been fought. He had gotten me to forgo the optional microchip; it made me a little nervous, too. But I was intrigued to see what the new Meme would do—it was supposed to be coming out soon—and I’d contemplated getting one when I upgraded.) Doug did have an Aleph, though, which I’d forgotten about. It was the first model of the Meme that Synchronic, Inc. ever manufactured. It wasn’t widely distributed, but a few had been given to key publishing people when it came out.

  From what I understand, Synchronic chose the name Aleph because it represents the number one and the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But the name tested poorly—no one could pronounce it—and the device was full of bugs. It had a very early version of Sixth Sense software, and its Crown, called a Diadem at the time, had almost no sensors; it could only roughly gauge basic mood states. Even after training it for weeks to recognize preferences, the smart technology could guess what you wanted less than 10 percent of the time. “It’s not actually very smart,” Doug had said, “but it does have a good personality.”

  It didn’t, though: lots of users complained that a Chinese weather page loaded during games of Ping, or that they were redirected to Russian gambling sites while trying to watch live poker. When the software and hardware had been fixed about a year and a half later, the device was aggressively rebranded as the Meme, and Synchronic offered a steep discount to anyone willing to trade it in. As a result, very few Alephs remained in circulation. Doug’s was one of them. But the significance of finding it was initially lost on me.

  It was massive, nearly the size of a book, with clumsy raised buttons and keys. I flicked it on, guessed the password on the third try—one of Doug’s many pet names for my mother—and while I waited for it to load, I crossed back over toward Doug’s window. Wondered where he could be.

  The sounds of streets that blinked red and white below were blocked out completely by the nineteen floors beneath me. Sometimes high winds could send our building creaking, as if on high seas. I looked into the window glass, my reflection rising from the surface like an emerging silver gelatin print. The pane became a parallax. For whoever might look in, it made a still. For me, looking out, it was a mirror, my face floating over all the dim shapes outside. And maybe it was my distance from the ground. The sense, from that height, that human life was illusory. But I felt for a moment as if I were falling a long, long way down. As if the girl reflected on the inside of the glass were merging with the one being watched.

  The sensation faded but left a residue of sweat. I stepped back from the window with a shiver. Blood rushed through my ears in a kind of nautical orchestra, and I thought I heard a door slam shut somewhere. My heart surged. I grew still, listening for sounds in the hall, and felt the powerful urge to run. But I stayed where I was. Looked again at Doug’s satchel. Reassured myself that he’d be right back.

  Then four things happened more or less at once.

  First
I heard a familiar sound: the soft shrr-tunk of a metal delivery cylinder whirring through Doug’s pneumatic tube and the melodic metal ting it made as it struck another one already in the bin. Out of habit, I collected both cylinders and slid open the lids. The messages looked normal. But then I read what they said. The first had been typed on a typewriter.5 It was a definition. I still remember exactly how it read: “di•a•chron•ic dī-Ə-′krä-nik adj : a method of looking at language that’s becoming extinct.” That made no sense to me. It didn’t even seem correct grammatically. Was the method fading or the language? It also wasn’t clear who’d sent it; there were no initials. Strangest of all, it was smudged with a fingerling smear of dirt.

  Hoping to get a clue from the other note, I unrolled it, too. It said, “Received your SOS. Standing by.” It was handwritten and blind-stamped Phineas Thwaite, Ph.D. I knew the name; he was an outside contributor to the Dictionary. Nonplussed, I prepared to leave both missives on Doug’s desk, and I lifted the Aleph to make room. That’s when I noticed it had finally loaded. And it was open, curiously, to a page of the Dictionary. It was open, in fact, to a specific page: the one in the J’s on which Doug’s entry appeared.6 Self-involved as he could sometimes be, that surprised me: that he’d leave the limn open there.

  Although it surprised me more that he’d used the Aleph at all—I thought it had been years. He’d told me that after his last assistant, Sam, had optimistically programmed it for him, he’d tried it for just a few months before abandoning it. But it occurred to me that it wouldn’t even have turned on if it hadn’t been at least a little charged. I wondered why Doug had bothered—and of course why he’d been looking at his own entry. Thinking I’d rib him for it when he turned up, I scanned the screen, planning to quote from it. But it wasn’t there.

  I clicked forward and back through the pages. Scanned again. The entries skipped from Andrew Johnson to Earvin (Magic) Johnson. No Douglas Johnson. No toothy thumbnail photo of my father. No pithy biographical facts. He had vanished.

  Feeling the uncomfortable prickling of a premonition, I opened his satchel—and except for one natty brown shirt, it was empty. No pens or papers. No books. No wallet. The thought I had, unbidden, was that the bag was a decoy. He wasn’t coming back for it.

  The room began to shrink, and the red lights of tiny cars on the ground below seemed to rise up to blink in tandem with the red light on Doug’s desk phone.

  Which began, at roughly that moment, to ring.

  Panicked, but thinking that it must be Doug calling with an explanation, I leaned in to look at the ID screen. There was no photo, but the caller’s name appeared: Phineas Thwaite. Before I could decide whether to answer, the phone stopped ringing. The screen quickly blinked fifteen, the number of missed calls. It also said something else. Something that helped me decide—if an impulse can be called a decision—to flee.

  All office phones were set up with speed dials between bosses and assistants. That night the display on my dad’s phone looked strange to me. When I peered at it more closely, I saw it had changed. It said, “Hotline to Alice.” And I knew something was wrong. Because my name isn’t Alice. Alice is a fiction. One I never thought I’d hear or see again.

  Not long before Doug disappeared, he began behaving in a way some might say was strange. But my antennae, tuned to my own sorrows, hadn’t picked up the signals. In retrospect I could see that he seemed more secretive than usual, edgier, and withdrawn. On a few days, for instance, he’d wanted to talk only on the train. That presented logistical problems.

  One night the week before, as we were waiting for the downtown 1, he began explaining in a whisper that he’d recently received a spate of odd emails. They had different senders and subjects, but all were composed of incomprehensible strings of words.

  “Oh, Doug,” I said. “You’re not supposed to open those. Did they include ads for things?”

  “Things?” he whispered, looking guilty.

  “You know, for … enhancement? Or, like, pain pills?”

  “No,” he said, discomfited. “Nothing like that. But I wonder why no one told me. I had to stop using my computer. It started going berserk.”

  “Dad, yeah,” I said. “You can’t open those. They’re not real.”

  “So you’ve gotten them, too?” he said. He seemed concerned.

  “Of course. Those scams have been around for years. They’re as old as me, I think.”

  “Oh,” he continued, shaking his head. “No. Not that.”

  “No?” I said, unconvinced.

  “No,” he said. Then, changing the subject, he added, “But that’s not the only thing that worries me.” That was when the train had pulled into the station. As we boarded, he lowered his voice even more. I could barely hear him when he said, “I looked up our advance sales earlier, and they’re hard to believe. At one point before noon we were up to number 213 on Synchronic’s sales list. The second edition, too—up to 448.”

  “Dad!” I said, clapping his shoulder. “That’s incredible! Congratulations!”

  “No—but it isn’t!” he hissed, glancing at our fellow passengers. They mostly seemed indifferent. “It’s actually very suspicious,” he said more gently.

  “Doug,” I said, struggling not to sound annoyed. “Can’t you just be happy? This is good news. We should be celebrating.”

  He glanced cagily again around the train car. “If only that were true,” he said.

  I was expecting him to add more, but just then we’d arrived at Fiftieth Street—my regular stop, where I would have gotten off if I’d been headed home and not to an event with my father—and he nodded emphatically at the platform. I looked up. But all I saw was a motley stream of people on their evening commute. He strained his neck toward the graffiti-scratched window and whispered, “Tiles.”

  “Dad, what are you talking about?” I said in a normal voice. Vera and I had long since learned that the best method for managing Doug’s eccentricities was benign neglect.

  The train started gliding from the station, and he murmured, “The mosaic—look!” I peered out at the pattern, which I’d seen so many times I couldn’t see it anymore.7 In blue, black, red, and white lacquer chips, the Queen of Hearts accuses the White Rabbit, whose top hat hovers in alarm.

  “Okay,” I said, twiddling my jacket zipper. “And?”

  Doug waited until we’d rumbled back into the tunnel. “Did you notice?” he whispered.

  “Notice?” I said. “No—what?”

  He sloped in close to me, and I could smell the apothecary scent of licorice on his breath. “Alice,” he said. “In Wonderland?”

  “Doug,” I said, “could you please just spell it out?”

  “Alice,” he insisted. “If anything should happen to me—which it won’t—but if it does, I want us to use the name Alice. To communicate.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Got it?”

  “Roger.”

  “This is serious,” Doug said, sounding impatient.

  “Okay. And what do I call you?” I teased, feeling a tick of disquiet. I wondered if I should worry—if Doug had slid into a manic state while I’d been cocooned in heartbreak. When under stress, he was sometimes prone to swerves in mood. Frenzied activity. Paranoia.

  He looked a little startled, as if he hadn’t gotten that far. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just indulge me, please.”

  I nodded absently, trying not to betray my vague trepidation. And then something else happened. Something that laid the track for a certain fate. Though at the time my meter reading of our exchange hardly registered any spike in strangeness.

  Doug, likely sensing my concern, changed the subject, tossing off some light remark about the talk we were on our way to attend. I don’t remember what he said. I wish I did. But the way it faded so quickly from my mind, like a text wisping from a screen, is in fact one of the primary reasons I’m recording this history.

  Whatever comment he made, buried inside it was a word I
couldn’t quite place—a little reservoir of meaning I’d once known that had at some point cracked and drained. And in my brief moment of confusion, I made a stupid, careless mistake: I slid my Meme from my coat pocket and quickly peeked at the screen. (I knew that the Meme, having sensed my small mnemonic lapse, would have logged me into the Word Exchange to retrieve the forgotten term, displaying it in a brief, discreet definition that would quickly melt away.)

  I’m sure I thought I was being surreptitious; I knew that if Doug saw what I was doing, he’d give a dire jeremiad. But I’d become so habituated to this routine—one whose frequency had gradually increased without my noticing—that in fact I probably barely bothered to hide it.

  When I looked up again, Doug was grimacing. “Not you, too,” he said quietly, face blazoned with dark alarm. “The Word Exchange?”

  I felt my face spackle with heat, ashamed he’d finally learned my “secret.” “Dad, yeah,” I said brusquely, looking away. “So? Like most mortals—not you, I realize—I forget the meanings of obscure words sometimes, and I look them up—”

  “Obscure?” he repeated, nearly bristling. I could tell he was gearing up to elaborate—I was bracing for it—but then he didn’t. We’d roused the interest of a few fellow passengers (Doug’s wary glances alerted me), and as we slid into our station, he stopped talking.

  But I didn’t find his silence very comforting; a mild reprimand would have unsettled me less. It meant he was truly worried, which worried me. Did he really believe I was forgetting things—losing my mental acuity? It wasn’t a good thought. And it spurred me to remember the way I’d once made fun of friends who were dependent on the Exchange.8 I half hoped Doug’s lecture would come later that night, or at work the next week. But we were madly preparing for launch, and it didn’t. Then it never did.