The Word Exchange Read online

  That wasn’t entirely the end of our conversation, however. “Just one last thing,” he said, frowning. “You’re not going to like this.” Quickly, furtively, he took two small bottles of what I soon realized were pills from his satchel. They were mottled with characters I couldn’t read, and he pressed them on me in such a way that I all but had to take them.

  “You’ll never need these,” he said. “But they’re good to have. A few years expired, but it shouldn’t matter.”

  “What will I not need them for?” I asked, disturbed. “Do they make me bigger or smaller?”

  “Neither, I hope,” Doug said wearily. “But knowing you have them will make me feel better. And in the extremely unlikely event that you start to feel sick, and like something’s just very … wrong—you’re tired or confused, you have muscle aches or fever, even mild hallucinations, and especially if you’re having trouble speaking clearly, or if you have a very, very bad headache—just start taking these within forty-eight hours—the sooner, the better—and you should be fine. I’m giving you two courses just in case.”

  “In case of what?” I asked, getting very worried. Doug’s behavior was officially off the charts. (Although in my defense, not entirely without precedent: every few years he’d press boxes of old flu medicine on me. So even this, hard as it is for me now to believe, didn’t raise the red flag as high as it should have.)

  But now I’m digressing. What I meant to say was this: we (he) had settled on Alice,9 and I’d stored this conversation on the shelf in my brain where I keep certain stories about Doug.10 Then I sort of forgot it—until the following Friday, when I found myself alone in his office, staring frantically at his phone.

  Barely thinking, I scrolled through Doug’s missed calls. Wrote Phineas Thwaite’s number on the back of his blind-stamped note. Then, abandoning Doug’s satchel, trying to make as little sound as possible, I unlocked the door and peered out into the dark hall. It took all my will not to make a break for it: run flat out. I forced myself to tread quietly, cursing the husky rustling of my coat. I could barely breathe.

  As I neared the elevator I passed Bart’s office, and decided, almost as an afterthought, to leave a note. His door was open, and I didn’t bother with the light. I meant to hurry in and hurry out. Get to the elevator and pump the button. Descend to Rodney in the lobby. Visit Doug’s apartment and, if he wasn’t there, call the cops. But something stopped me in the doorway.

  Sticking out from beneath Bart’s desk was a skinny pair of legs.

  * * *

  1. The second edition, published in the early nineties, had been Doug’s first coup: twenty volumes, and weighing in at 748 pounds. The New York Times had raved: “A scholastic Delphi; the new Dr. Johnson proves he’s not just standing on the shoulders of giants.” But the third edition had received unprecedented interest, probably because it was initially being published only in print, not as a limn. The launch, which would be held at the last remaining branch of the New York Public Library, had become a major social event of the season, surprising me, Doug, my mother, and pretty much everyone. Except, allegedly, Chandra in marketing.

  (I feel compelled to disclose that these footnotes are part of my linguistic rehabilitation. I’m told that if I annotate this document, I can cut back on my hours in conversation lab—footnotes are kind of like a conversation with yourself. They can also help improve memory.)

  2. This other Dr. Johnson had authored the first comprehensive English dictionary in the eighteenth century. He and Doug shared lots of affinities: curiosity, doubt, physical rotundity, heartbreak, and a genius for lexicography. Doug often said the name had been his destiny. And he’d come by it honestly: Gram and PopPop Johnson had learned of Doug’s eponymous literary ancestor only when he’d begun his undergraduate honors thesis.

  3. Doug hadn’t made the switch to digital in this realm either. When I was a kid, ca. 2002, we used to make prints together in one of the city’s last darkrooms, down in Chelsea.

  4. His nickname at Oxford, where he’d gone for a master’s, had been Ursie, for his resemblance to a bear. Curly reddish blond hair grew on nearly every inch of him, from finger and toe knuckles to chest, back, and ears. The abundance of it had sometimes spooked me on childhood trips to the beach.

  5. I’d only learned to recognize the brisk, erratic letters recently; a few weeks before his disappearance, Doug had dusted off an ancient Olivetti. I later tried it, to see if its typeface matched this enigmatic note’s. It didn’t.

  6. Not all dictionaries published biographical entries—they were absent, e.g., from the OED—and Doug would have preferred to omit them from the NADEL, too. But bowing to certain trends in the North American lexicographic community, as well as pressure from our board, Doug had allowed entries on some notable people into the second edition. He’d never approved inclusion of his own entry, however—he was nowhere near notable enough to warrant it, he said—and considered making a correction when he saw the “error” in the final printing. “We define words,” he’d written in an angry memo to the staff. “We should leave the defining of people to them.” But he’d ended on a softer note: “I enjoy laboring in obscurity (with all of you).”

  7. The image had transformed, for me, into a harbinger of home: the two short blocks from the subway to our apartment and, as I walked in the door, Max calling out a pet name that I’ll omit.

  8. “Can you pass the, um … the, um … the—” Ramona would say, gesticulating. “I think the word you want is ‘fork’?” I’d tease, handing one to her. Flustered, she’d sigh and say, “Just—my Meme.” But at some point it had started happening to me. I began relying on my Meme to anticipate when I’d need it to beam me a word or meaning I’d forgotten “temporarily”—while reading, writing, listening, speaking—often barely registering that it had logged me on to the Word Exchange.

  9. Nicknames, I should note, were one of Doug’s things. Growing up, I’d been Apple and Aps, Pin, Needle, and Nins. Vera was Veils, Vittles, Nibbles, and a million other things. Bart’s real name wasn’t even Bartleby, which was a Melville reference. But Doug had given me the name Alice with none of his usual ebullience.

  10. Normally this one would have been cross-referenced under the subcategories “subway,” “Alice,” and “crazy.”

  B

  Bar•tle•by ′bär-tƏl-bē n 1 : a scrivener 2 a : a man with many friends and casual acquaintances : BART b slang : life of the party ; a person who is never lonely, especially not on Friday night

  Friday, November 16

  Has this happened to you? You’re taking a nap. Maybe you’re having a dream about someone you know, and maybe you don’t feel like revealing all the particulars right now, but let’s just say it’s a nice one, very vivid, that you’d like to go on dreaming for a while. You don’t get that chance, though, because just when you reach the nicest part (praying later you weren’t making any incriminating sounds), you’re wakened by what turns out to be a woman’s screaming. And what happens next, or roughly at the same time, is that you sort of forget where you were napping, which was underneath your desk, and when you try to rise up quickly, you clock yourself so hard in your (admittedly large) forehead that while you’re still half asleep, you nearly concuss, and the screaming seems still to be going on and on, like a siren song, until it reaches an apotheosis, and it isn’t until you’ve managed in a bruised approximation of panic to crawl out from below your desk (maybe with the vestige of an erection) that you realize the person standing there in the dark is the star of your once pleasant, now departed dream.

  “What the fuck, Bart?” she says when she sees you, which seems a little unfair, considering.

  You can’t help but notice what she’s wearing, because you always can’t help but notice. Tonight her sartorial choices are regrettably voluminous: baggy red pants—pajama bottoms?—and an olive-green coat quilted in figure-swallowing chevrons. Her hair looks unwashed, though you can’t really call the
kettle black on that one, and she seems to have on two different shoes. This change in mien is pretty recent; in fact, you think you can date it to the day Max moved out of their Lilliputian apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. (A lamentably apt neighborhood for Max, less so for this variegated seraph.)

  Not that your heart doesn’t still do an ovation each time she walks by your open office door. And in fact, on those rare occasions when you might shut said door to concentrate, just the buttery clop of her clogs on the carpet outside is enough to carbonate your blood. Her congenital restlessness, thank God, tempts her from her desk a couple times an hour—to check on Doug (and, on the way back, chat with someone, usually Svetlana or Frank), to visit the kitchen for endless cups of tea (and subsequently the ladies’), and, more often than really seems possible, to take covert trips to the cafeteria for candy.

  In the month since Max left, though, her restlessness has changed. These days you sometimes see her slowly come to a bewildered halt halfway down the hall. She’ll shake her head as if lost, then turn around and go back—sometimes only to stumble by again a few moments later, muttering something unkind to herself, face beset with disappointment.

  And what a face. A face that (if it weren’t so chauvinistic to think it) you might find yourself believing should be exempt from mortal disappointments. The kind of face that one could easily make the mistake of describing, e.g., as a “radiant, pre-Raphaelite cynosure” (as you may have done on one of this journal’s earlier pages). It does conform to a paint-by-numbers kind of cardinal “beauty.” You could imagine it atomized by the teen blogs you’re sometimes forced to consult for neologisms, with its [sic] “perfect heart shape,” “rich, golden complexion,” and high “crabapple cheeks,” its huge “sea-green” eyes, straight, slender nose, and pointy chin, lips so ridiculously full they could be in an ad for tire gauges, and the long, blondish hair that “halos” the whole thing, nearly condemning it to simple, plasticine convention. But it’s saved, naturally, by its defects. I.e., her slightly crooked front teeth; her unusually dark brows, which help perpetuate confusion about her hair’s natural color (you’ve seen it in shades of brown, black, platinum, red, and, once, blue); her oddly cramped smile, the tightness of which is somehow accentuated by a peculiarly pleatlike and asymmetrical dimple; and especially the small, brownish pink, strawberry-shaped mark on her left cheek. It’s always the scuffs in the marble that make its inner light seem to glow more brightly.

  (Twice you’ve heard her described as “plain”: once by Ana herself, which was a little grating, but once also by Svetlana, which you found far more mystifying.)

  So, no. It’s not the neat collection of ideal features that makes your guts do a little leap. It’s the way her upper lip tends to dew with sweat, especially when she’s nervous, e.g., during a book launch, or when she has to give a Dictionary tour to someone kind of famous. It’s how Doug’s Dougish little jokes and pranks can get her to bray with bona fide mirth, and the ambrosial if tuneless songs you sometimes catch her humming in the hall. In other words, it’s the way your insides feel when she sees you and smiles.

  (Okay, enough. I’m now officially embarrassed by much of the above, but especially of writing in the second person. Somehow it seemed so much more evocative and—ugh—literary a few months ago, when I finally succumbed to Doug’s aggressive encouragements and started keeping this journal. But let’s face it, I’m no Camus or Faulkner or Calvino. And anyway, my use of “you” derived not from an interesting effort to “subvert narrative expectations”—i.e., call attention to the consentient artifice implied by the act of reading—but probably just from a misguided attempt to short-circuit my own neurotic self-censoring tendencies by sort of pretending I’m someone else. But now I’m stopping, officially.)

  Hence: “Ana,” I say, rubbing the lump rising on my forehead.

  “What were you doing?” she asks, in what I can only describe as a suspicious tone. I notice she’s holding something crumpled in her purple mitten.

  “Well …” I begin. But it’s at about this point that I realize how not only small and unwashed but how truly harrowed Ana is looking, and it doesn’t seem worth explaining about the train up to Washington Heights taking 30 minutes, times two to come back, and having at least another few hours of work for tomorrow, rendering the cost-benefit analysis of napping in the relative comfort of my sagging, squeaky full mattress at home versus (as I generally do) on the floor beneath my desk to lead me most often on weekends to the latter course. (I occasionally sleep in the guest bed of Dr. D’s apartment, in Ana’s old room, but I’m not sure she knows.)

  It goes without saying, of course, that Ana isn’t merely pretty. Both in the sense that she supersedes mere prettiness (see above) and in that she’s not merely pretty. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, “a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment.” Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it’s perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others’), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana qua Ana is, basically, flawlessness qua flawlessness, sui generis.

  Maybe, before launching into an accounting of tonight’s events, I should start by explaining how my acquaintanceship with Ana began. Maybe. But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.)

  How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My early impressions, if I could even accurately access them, would come across now as vulgar. Not in the sense of lewdness, of course, but I’m ashamed to admit that some of her subtler and more refined charms—maybe, e.g., her brains—were a little lost on me when Dr. D introduced us in the hall outside his office, Ana wearing just a yellow slip of sundress.

  Unfortunately, in one of the more disappointing turns of my early adulthood, Ana met Max soon after. (His appearance, like Ana’s, tends not to elicit a neutral response. He has sort of woundedly Rimbaudian eyes, oddly paired with a warm, impish, slightly gap-toothed smile. That, and he’s tall and blond. Honestly, he and Ana don’t look altogether unrelated. A fact I’ll diplomatically refrain from remarking on further.)

  He turned up at the Dictionary unannounced—to visit me, funnily enough. I think it would be fair to say that Max was also less attuned at the time to the sapient-creature side of Ana’s nature. Unlike me, though, he didn’t really outgrow his first impressions. In part because he didn’t have to: within a week, as he’d crassly wagered several friends, he and Ana were “together.” Also, though, Max is incapable of anything more probing than first impressions. He claims his powers of perspicacity are such that he “gets” everything—women, philosophical precepts, etc.—from the most superficial of initial perceptions. Any deliberations one might undertake beyond the seminal “gut reaction” should be dismissed, he says, as perseveration.

  (On the afternoon Max and Ana met, when it was already clear where things were headed, Max cornered me outside the office men’s room. “Going in for a grunter?” he said, very loudly, which made me blush. The men’s room is near Neologisms, and several women work in Neologisms. I don’t like calling attention to these visits, especially given how often they occur. Once he’d embarrassed me, Max gripped my shoulder in a way I found menacing, and oddly intimate. “Don’t tell her about me,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to fuck this one up. So don’t you fuck it up for me.” I promised him, of course, that I wouldn’t say anything, which I wouldn’t have anyway, because of the sheer unpleasantry of divulging an unattractive truth to an attractive person.)

  Let me begin instead, then—yes, appreciating the irony—with Hegel. First, it bears acknowledging that G. W. F. H., born in St
uttgart at the end of August 1770, has enjoyed only fleeting upticks in popularity. Depending on whom you ask, his work is part of the canon or it isn’t. He’s been hijacked by the left or the right. Some claim he’s an apologist for the abuse of state power, even totalitarianism. At the moment of his death, he’s supposed to have said, “And he didn’t understand me.”

  GWF is often remembered only for the reductive thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, when that phraseology wasn’t even his but Kant’s. Carl Jung (of all people) called him crazy. And more philistines than one could count have accused his writing of being inelegant or difficult—or incomprehensible. As every serious scholar knows, to read Hegel in anything other than the original German is an amateurish offense. There really is just no appropriate translation for Begriff, Urteil, or even Geist, let alone Aufhebung.

  According to my reading of Hegel, language is our servant, submissive to the master of reason. Max, among others, likes to remind me that this judgment is considered conservative; it apparently fails to account for historical context. And I guess it could seem contradictory to argue that Hegel is only Hegelian in the gusty vigor of his native German. It might be more rational to make a concession here to at least the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (I feel a certain kinship with this version, frankly, if weakness is its defining feature. The day Max bench-pressed me was a humbling day indeed.)

  So, okay: I give in. Language can influence the content of communication. But really I was defending Hegel against charges of inelegance, not difficulty. What’s Aufhebung in English? Only “to raise up.” In German it connotes (i) raising higher, literally and figuratively; (ii) taking away, i.e., canceling or annuling; and (iii) (thanks to Hegel) sublation. Viz., this one small, soothing word and its multifarious meanings are in some ways the kernel from which Hegel’s whole philosophical enterprise springs. Its aleph, if you will. Aufhebung. Aleph. They even sound like simulacra. (I don’t mean, of course, the electronic device. Although I’m sure that’s why the word is on my mind—from the strange conversation Ana and I had a couple hours ago.)