The Word Exchange Read online

  I guess all I’m trying to say is that language may be large, unwieldy, and in a perpetual state of transformation—in other words, language is like love—but, unlike Dr. D, I don’t think it’s greater than we are. I think it’s our duty, in fact, to corral it into coherence; to suppress its more unruly tendencies; to verify its meaning and, more importantly, its efficacy; to test its subjectivity-bridging potential. (Again, we should treat it very much like love.)

  And on this point maybe Max and I aren’t so far apart. We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you’re an ass.

  I met Hermes Maximilian King and Hegel at roughly the same time, in Professor Lockhart’s terms four and five seminar on the mythologization of the philosopher, in which Lockhart argued that Hegel was one of the most important—and misread—thinkers of the past 200 years. (Max remained skeptical. His attachment was to Sartre. Who, by the way, was also influenced by Hegel.)

  You might think the thin coincidence of two people sharing a syllabus wouldn’t automatically occasion some kind of lasting friendship. But to understand my relationship with Max, it’s important to know that, apart from us and David Lockhart, there were only two other people in that class. And 24 other students on campus—total. No girls at the time. No distractions. No chances for escape, or much escapism. An actual policy promoting isolation. Such was the nature of our college, way over yonder in that lonesome California valley.

  I didn’t really know how lucky we were to be at Deep Springs. Even then, a decade ago, professors at other schools were slowly being replaced by computers and machines. Now, with the Meme, kids just download everything. For us there were nights we stayed up until four in the morning reading. And you could feel the work we did: an afternoon of hefting alfalfa bales will leave you sorer than a beating. That’s why it’s hard for me to understand Max’s plans to take over the world. (Kidding. Kind of.) But I guess it fits on the logical continuum. Let’s just say he can claim an inimitable and, to many, intoxicating admixture of volubility, rigor, pathological charisma, and dismissiveness. He was—is—worshipped. Then, by Professor Lockhart, by probably 22 of the 26 pupils at our school, by all their moms and sisters and girlfriends, and yes, debasing as it is to admit, by me, even if my hero worship was shot through with a note of very serious doubt. The first thing Max ever said to me? “You look like my great-uncle Gustav, man. I think he has those same suspenders.”

  The truth (and I find this maddening) is he just has that thing. I can’t explain it; I just know what it is. I’ve studied it. But it’s proven hard to replicate. It partly has to do with eye contact, and the ease and frequency with which he touches people. Partly with how he smiles when he says names. And partly it’s a scintillating skill he’s perfected: of first showering you with, and then withholding, affection. But there are other variables, too, beyond human ken.

  Over the course of that semester, it was functionally impossible not to get to know Max well. Far more intimately, I thought at the time, than anyone else ever had—including the (impressive number of) women with whom he’s been involved. (As it turns out, Max has an almost alchemical ability to morph nearly every relationship into one the other party feels is the closest they’ve had.) Because fate dictated that we serve together on the Curriculum Committee (Max was, of course, Cur-Com chair) while we also both had Boarding House duty (somehow I always did most of the dishes), we spent more time together in those two months than I’ve spent with almost anyone. And I’ll say it: I was honored to be his friend.

  For all his faults (and faults happen to be a specialty of mine), Max is something of a marvel. That observation clearly isn’t very new. But while others might try to explicate Max by listing what I see as carefully cultivated traits (e.g., that blend of magnetism and energy that together convey “authenticity”; his fearlessness; his weird, somewhat contingent brand of integrity; or even his blazing and unconventional intelligence, which probably constitutes real genius), I consider all that secondary—just part of the mythology. When I met Max, what impressed me most was something far more essential and surprising: I imagined I recognized a true generosity of spirit.

  In retrospect, I realize he kind of reminded me of Florian Reiter, my closest friend from Carbondale Community High. Florian spent just junior year in Illinois; he was on exchange from Salzburg, and I wasn’t sure at first that befriending him was the best idea. My stock was pretty low already; I was afraid if I joined forces with a brash, fashion-challenged foreign kid, we’d plummet through the earth together.

  But Florian had an outsider’s willful blindness to social boundaries, and he had confidence. As it turned out, he could get along with everyone—and he chose to get along with me. (When I understood that later, it was humbling.) Also, he was hard to avoid; he was in most of my honors and AP classes, in Science Club and on Math Team, and soon he started coming to the couple of college courses I audited at SIU. Later I helped line him up with some waitering shifts at the Lodge. (They loved him there. I think the accent helped.) He even joined Debate, which was maybe the one thing he didn’t really excel at, but which he did with the same ribald enthusiasm with which he did everything.

  Because he was stuck with the god-fearing Knupps, he was never free on Sundays. (He was also forced to wear sweaters, courtesy of Mrs. Knupp, featuring reindeer and snowflake fantasias, which quickly keened his American slang, esp. inc. the phrase “your mother.”) When he could get away, he was the only person able to convince me to go camping in Trail of Tears State Forest or fishing and hunting at Horseshoe Lake with my dad and Tobias. He called everything a “woodlands adventure,” even visits to the shooting range.

  Florian was also the only other person my age I’d met who could operate a record player, and the things he listened to blew me away: the Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich, Mozart. But Slick Rick, too, and the Notorious B.I.G., Fela Kuti, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees. He’d engage in endless rounds of Which Is Better with me: Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton, Pantera or Slayer, Vertigo or Rear Window, Best of Youth or The Wire, Settlers of Catan or Advanced D&D, deep-fried pickles or deep-fried bacon, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, etc., ad infinitum. After a while, sort of reluctantly, I gave him things I was writing, and he’d tell me what he thought. (Sometimes crushingly, sometimes not.)

  But I was most impressed by the casual way he dispensed wisdom. Here, e.g., is some Florian mint: “If your brain is smart but your body is stupid, you will be a very sad man.” “The most important thing in life is to be decisive; what you decide matters not as much.” “Interesting women get more attracted by humor, dark humor, and—how do you say?—geschicklichkeit, plus true capacity for intimacy, than some big red trucks and hulk muscles.” And: “Meat: this is the best gift God gave to us. Maybe after sex.” One he lived by (and that I did not at the time): “You must be willing to take a punch.” Admittedly, these aphorisms might sound a little unnuanced to an adult ear. But at 16, just sitting with him in my living room felt like prospecting for gold.

  And I guess the point is this: until I met Max, I’d never met anyone who seemed as real, as fully himself, as Florian did. But more than that, he was a really good person. The day he left, I drove him to the airport, and I teared up a little on the way home.

  A friendship like that was what I thought I’d signed on for with Max.

  After our term together in the Boarding House, Max went on to be a Feedman, Butcher, and finally Cowboy. I followed a different trajectory: as Dairy Boy; then assigned endless alfalfa duty; until finally answering my prescribed calling, as Librarian. Because I have a slight self-loathing streak, I ran against him for student body president. Max won (if I remember correctly, it was 21 votes to 5) and served popularly and well—until he was suspended, disciplined, and stripped of the position. (Some of our classmates were actually crying as they cast their ballots to unseat him.)

  Basically, it came dow
n to embezzling fairly insignificant sums of grocery money for drugs. Our college has only two self-enforced rules, established with the school’s founding a century ago. One: you can’t leave campus during term except on official school business or matters of religion or illness. The other? Drugs and alcohol are strictly forbidden. When Max was ousted, I asked him why he did cocaine (and, it was rumored, crack). Most of the other stuff I could fathom—the drinking and pot, bribing the visiting writer to drive him to the town of Bishop for trysts, even the prank with the pinball machine and Samantha, one of our pigs. Some of it I’d known about before it was exposed. But maybe because I’m from a part of the country where there are more meth labs than drive-throughs, anything harder than cough syrup always makes me nervous.

  (When several of your cousins, and even an uncle, have been arrested for possession, and when, in the middle of the night before debate finals, you’ve accidentally stumbled on your mom quietly weeping in the kitchen over an empty carton of Neapolitan ice cream, wondering where she and the family went wrong and how she’ll come up with Uncle Jack’s bail—should she see about being a greeter at the mall? [my mom is a retired history teacher and part-time librarian, and while she absolutely loves people and has an impressive threshold for boredom, I think a greeter job might crush her soul]—and you offer her your small nest egg earned from grueling hours of waiting tables and tutoring, and she tearfully accepts it, which both of you regret, and when her tear-striped face is the first thing you picture whenever someone mentions drugs, this anxiety doesn’t seem so wildly misplaced.)

  But all Max said, smiling, was, “It’s fun.” We were in the Boarding House; I remember he was chugging milk, which irritated me for some reason. Like everyone (and maybe more than everyone), I felt betrayed, but also slightly complicit. As if the fun part had been fooling us.

  And it made me mad. Madder, in fact, than I could ever remember letting myself get (including the time Tobias accidentally crashed my car even after I said he couldn’t borrow it). The feeling was strangely fortifying, like a vitamin. Compounded with a noxious mix of righteousness, disenchantment, worry, and curiosity. (I’d never really done more than drink—beer, parental spirits, the occasional wine cooler. The couple times I’d smoked pot, it had rendered me jangly rather than high.)

  My forearms were tingling. I felt light, and larger than myself. I felt, in other words, like I could take a punch. Or throw one. But I also felt just the tiniest flicker of doubt. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him—much of which I’d seen—I was in an interregnum of belief. Maybe Max had done some of the alleged things. But for him to steal from us? I just couldn’t accept it yet. I mean, Max loaned money all the time. It didn’t make sense. And questioning that aspect of the charges against him made me question everything.

  So on that afternoon in the BH, I wanted him to explain himself. Or at least pretend to try. But he just squinted into the distance. “Man,” he said, laughing, “you think too much.” He had a milk mustache, and his laugh was loaded with heat-seeking derision.

  “Yeah,” I said (and I still regret this). “Well, that’s kind of the point.”

  Max just shook his head, said, “Jesus, Horse—keep it light,” and walked away, taking his milk glass with him. Through the window I watched him toss it in a hedge.

  And that was it. All his “complications”—the paradoxes that had once made him seem so exceptional—fell away. It was the end of any real friendship that existed between us. After that it was mostly soap and shadows, as Ana might say.

  That was nine years ago. Not much has changed. Like everyone who imagines he’s a hero, Max has a fatal flaw: he likes to tempt fate. If not lashed tightly to the mast, he’ll always cast himself overboard. He’s convinced he can swim, but he nearly drowns every time. After a while, though, he’ll surface again and walk from the water unharmed. It’s the rest of us trying to figure out what just happened.

  To illustrate, let me offer a more recent example, from about four months back. It was late on a Friday night, around ten, and I’d fallen asleep again on a scrap pile of neologisms. The desk started gently rumbling (maybe a 2 on the Richter of insect earthquakes), and through cracked lids I could see my cell phone bluely shimmying toward the edge of the desk. I picked it up, thinking, If it’s Ana, I’ll die. It was Ana. But of course (as if on purpose?) I missed the call.

  I sat starkly upright in my swivel chair, gulped a few times, smiled, felt sick, promised God I’d say 10 Ave Marias if Ana left a message—this all took about 14 seconds—then decided I’d call her back regardless. As I flipped open my phone, though, it started vibrating again; the screen said it was Max, and should I Answer or Ignore?

  Against my better judgment, I answered. I almost always answer, which Max knows.

  “If Ana calls, don’t answer,” Max yelled into the pink domicile of my ear. The juggernaut tones of a party or bar thundered from behind his yelling to crush several dozen cells of my auricular hair.

  “What?” I said, hoping to play dumb. It never worked. Max was inured.

  “Or actually, dude, come meet us,” Max shouted. “This party’s pretty talented” (one of Max’s many euphemisms for noting a given venue’s density of attractive women). “We’re at SoPo.” Then he hung up. And since Max was fond of “losing” his Meme (“Can’t have the old lady always calling,” he’d enjoyed saying in front of Ana), my tenuous connection to him (and thus possible escape from a lie/Friday night ad nauseam) was gone with a beep. I headed to SoPo to meet him, annoyed before I’d even buttoned my coat.

  The walk from the Dictionary was short and gloomy, scattered with chicken bones and profane requests for cash. When I arrived at SoPo, the first thing I discovered was Max, ringed by several more and less beautiful women, doing lines in the bathroom.

  Max and his partners were celebrating: that afternoon, after weeks of secret negotiations, they’d sold their start-up, Hermes, to Synchronic, Inc.—for more than $100 million, I think. (Actually, I’m trying very hard not to think about it.)

  Maybe it sounds uncouth that Max named a company after himself. But really it’s apt: Hermes was the god of words, commerce, and thieves. And Hermes Corp. is in the business of selling language. (Like me and Dr. D, I guess. But a little more profitably.) At least their new parent company, Synchronic, certainly is.

  I don’t actually quite get why Synchronic was so interested in Hermes. Although I also don’t know that much about what Hermes does, per se; its nebulous mission statement—“Redefining communication for a changing future”—isn’t exactly a decoder ring. They initially did some stuff with voice commands or something, working on better ways for Memes and people to “talk.” And I know they’ve had a few big successes with online games, too, which they did seemingly on the side: Word Warcraft™, Wordloxx™, Whorld™. But that doesn’t really explain it. I think they’re maybe designing an interface between Synchronic’s Meme and its Word Exchange? (To be fair, this has been explained to me several times.)

  In the bar, the Hermes boys were in full swing: Floyd, calling “Strippers for everyone!,” was getting lap-danced by a bleached, sinewy, possibly Belarusian teen; Johnny Lee was drunkenly slumped over the Time Crisis console, his girlfriend watching graciously nearby; and Vernon, garishly waving his cane, was chatting up some girls who claimed they really liked to read. (One waggled her Meme at me flirtatiously, and when I said, “How do I know you don’t just use it to watch movies?” she said, “Same thing.”)

  Apparently no one had thought to inform Ana of the night’s festivities. When she called me again later, I was pretty much swaying on off-brand lager and a few/four bourbons bought for me by Max. (Max was in one of his generous/jacked-up moods, and I was in one of my—extremely rare—drunken moods. I’d even spent a couple hours speaking to a skinny but otherwise comely Meme developer with very pink lipstick. I was feeling like a wine-knight. I was having a good time.)

  “Heeeeelllllooooo, Ana,” I answered. Max, who was sitti
ng beside me at the bar, his hand inside the shirt of some squash-blossom blonde, turned around to flash a warning glance. I winked back conspiratorially (which, I confess, made me sick).

  “Do you know where he is?” said Ana. “Did something happen?”

  From the twangy tension in her voice, I guessed she’d been crying. The sick feeling redoubled, punched up by a feeling of panic. For some reason I don’t really understand—had he come up earlier?—I thought she was talking about Doug. It took me, evidently, too long to reply, because she whispered, “Oh, God,” and then she did start to cry, and I knew those were Max tears, always kept on reserve, and I wanted to die.

  “No, no,” I said, waving agitatedly. My skinny companion raised a skinny eyebrow and took a long, challenging sip of her sloe gin fizz. Scissoring off my stool, its duct tape sticking to my slacks, I exited the bar almost at a run, then breached the pocket of smokers loitering near the door to reach a quietish bubble down the block.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, sounding, I thought, cartoonishly sober. “I was just passing a very loud bar. I was at the office late”—I looked at my watch and discovered with an ulcery pain that it was three—“and, you know, the trains at this hour.” Then I thought, morosely, about the trains at that hour. It would be four-thirty at least before I got home.

  “So you haven’t heard from him, I guess.” Her voice then was so Ana, so quavering, conjured her so perfectly, that I imagined it as an audible strand of her DNA. If I could only capture it somehow as it passed through the tiny holes of my phone and make it manifest, I could re-create her whole there on the sidewalk, probably wearing a leather vest or a silk kimono or a pair of vintage orange velvet hot pants (not that I’ve been keeping track), something else impractically fashionable for the July night, and I would kiss her.