The Word Exchange Read online

  There was one thing, though, that had kind of come between Bart and me: I’d gotten the sense he didn’t think so highly of Max. Max respected him and thought they were friends, and Bart was otherwise so nonjudgmental that it seemed a little unfair. So out of my own sense of loyalty, I’d always felt a small degree of distance from him.

  But that was before Max and I broke up. Before Doug started acting so strange—and then vanished. And seeing Bart that first morning, steeped in sleepiness on my hardwood floor, I suddenly felt shy; I couldn’t quite believe I’d asked him to come home with me the night before. And I didn’t want him to hear me beg my Meme to call Max. You’re better than that, I told myself. I’d had a shortage of those kinds of thoughts since being dumped, and it gave me a grateful little rush of fortitude.

  Instead of calling my mom or Max, I was on the verge of calling the cops. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d say; I was already afraid, though, that they’d be involved eventually. But Bart blearily convinced me that they wouldn’t take us seriously until we waited at least twenty-four hours. Repeated what he’d said the previous night when we hadn’t found Doug home, about him maybe having plans he’d forgotten to mention. (Doug did have a few friends, like Ferg, who sometimes spirited him away.) Or maybe, Bart suggested, something had come up with the launch, and Doug had “gone into one of his tunnels” and hadn’t thought to be in touch. “I bet he’ll call in a few hours,” Bart said with a yawn. Then he rolled over and went back to his dreams.

  I’d tried to distract myself for another couple hours—streaming some of the music Bart had pointed out the night before, doing a quick sketch of him asleep on the floor, willing Doug to call—but the thought of waiting, pacing, trying not to panic, was making me feel unwelcome to myself. And that’s why, after running out of other ideas, I’d carefully crept outside to call Dr. Thwaite and found myself, coldly huddled in an old phone booth, agreeing to go to his apartment.

  I wrote the directions on my skin. That felt strange. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used my hand for transcription.2 I examined Doug’s pen, which I’d been surprised to find still in my coat pocket. It was branded with some kind of seal, an open book ringed by crowns. But soon I turned my attention back to writing; the directions turned out to be very involved: when I got to Dr. Thwaite’s building on Beekman Place, I should see Clive, the doorman, who’d send me right up. But if Clive wasn’t in for some peculiar reason, I should turn around and walk back toward the door, where I’d see a painting of a wintry scene. I should lift it to reveal a panel of buzzers and press Dr. Thwaite’s, gently but firmly. He’d be waiting on the sixth floor, a point he underscored. Then he hung up without saying goodbye.

  I hurried back home to collect Bart, but Bart wasn’t collectible: he was gone. In his place I found the faint, ferrety smell of boy. On the floor, a messy nest of blankets. Several poorly washed dishes in the rack. A dusting of coffee grounds on the counter. A bouquet of purple deli roses and a note on a scrap of paper bag. “A—Thank you,” it began in his slanty left-handed script. “I’m sorry the flowers are sort of forlorn. It was the best they had at that place on eighth. Hope you like purple. Hope you find Doug today. Talk soon?—B”

  Worried as I was about Doug, I smiled. Its taciturnity—so un-Bart-like—made me wonder if it said more than it said.3 When I’d seen him curled on the floor that morning, sleeping in all his rumpled clothes, I’d felt a warm, pleasant shock. He was the first person to stay the night since Max had moved out, and the nearby beating of another heart did something to sort of reset mine.

  As I’d started to sketch his face, I noticed for the first time that he looked a little like Buster Keaton. He had the same long, almost Gallic nose and small, bow-shaped mouth. Same dark, lightly waved hair gently receding from his forehead. His large, wide-set eyes bulged slightly under the lids, as if that were the price of closely observing things. I was so glad he’d stayed. Glad, too, that the night before, when he’d discovered my Box of Shame—relics of the nerdier person I’d once been—he hadn’t mocked me, had in fact seemed interested. As I’d carefully stepped over his legs and seen his soft pink heels exposed by holes in his dark socks, I’d felt a web of tenderness spring from me to engulf his whole tall, lean frame.

  Anyway, I was sad he’d left. And without him, I was also less sure about the trip to Dr. Thwaite’s. But the flowers, still hemmed in plastic, gave me a little boost of strength. I put them in a vase. When a bud fell off, I tucked it in my pocket. Kicked the gamey blankets beneath the table. Poured myself a black coffee—Bart had finished the soy milk—and made my way east.

  Clive, of course, was not in the lobby. But when I turned around to face the entrance, I discovered two paintings of wintry scenes; specific as Dr. Thwaite’s directions had been, I thought they might have included this detail. So my mind began to spin a little, especially when Clive didn’t turn up after several more minutes and people passing through the lobby started to look at me with twin glimmers of interest and distrust. I almost wondered if Dr. Thwaite was laying some kind of trap. Colluding with kidnappers, even. Maybe I was next.

  For a few moments I very seriously considered leaving. But to do what? Before I called the police, I thought I should at least speak to him, find out if he knew anything. I also thought my worry was irrational. It had been clear from his voice that he was an older man—a lexicographer; I was a former judo champion (a decade ago, it was true). Bart’s word for him, “harmless,” echoed in my head, which had started hurting again.

  The first painting opened after I fumbled a bit with its clasp, and buzzer 6B read P. THWAITE. Yet when I arrived on the sixth floor, no one was waiting, which again tested my resolve. I wandered the hall twice, then stalked outside B like a rookie thief. I’d forgotten to bring Dr. Thwaite’s phone number, and my Meme couldn’t seem to find it.4 I almost knocked—but, remembering his firm admonition to wait outside, I refrained. Finally, frustrated and confused, I turned back to the elevator. As if on cue, the door flew open.

  “I kept waiting for the bell,” said the man standing there. That could have been annoying, but his tone was so ingenuous and flustered and kind that I just mumbled, “Sorry.”

  He was older than I’d imagined, though not so much older than Doug—maybe mid-seventies. Daffy white hair. Petite as a jockey. The stooped posture of a person who reads. I liked him instantly. He offered me a Coke before I’d even crossed the threshold, then another when he took my coat a minute later. I declined both, my affection for him growing.

  For himself Dr. Thwaite poured a tall glass of water. Decanted some into a silver bowl on the floor. “Canon,” he called, and a shaggy calico dog with one brown eye, one ice blue, shambled in from around the corner. I reached out a hand, but Canon barely raised his head. “I’m surprised he’s not hounding you for treats,” Dr. Thwaite said, apologetic. “Your father spoils him rotten.”

  He led me to the living room, Canon clacking quietly behind us, and I could see that the apartment was palatial. Not quite as big as my Doran grandparents’ up on East Sixty-eighth, but much less cumbered with gilt and brocade things and so more spacious. (I think this had to do with the vintage of his family’s money: the older the gold, the less shiny it tends to be.)

  To the right of the foyer was a large, scarred, rustic table. It flanked the kitchen, which was paused on the early sixties: baby blue and cream, outfitted with a Formica island, knotty pine cabinets, stippled linoleum. Outside the kitchen, parquet floors unfurled in a glossy, endless chessboard: starting at the door, veering right, and disappearing down a dark hall, partly obscured in the living room by big red kilim rugs.

  Dr. Thwaite installed me on an L-shaped leather sofa. It faced a fireplace burning with a modest blaze. The wood gave off an earthy, turbid smoke. Music was playing—Brahms, or maybe Debussy. I’d heard it in the kitchen, too, but in the living room it was louder. (I’d expected a view of the East River and the mop-bucket gray sky, but all the drapes, heavy red velvet, w
ere drawn, which I found a little odd.) The coffee table was cluttered with crumbling newspaper clippings and defunct magazines. Bookshelves lined every free wall, volumes with gold-stamped bindings beside fuzzy paperbacks. But while the room was large, its shape seemed off. The layout lopsided. Almost claustrophobic. At the time I couldn’t put my finger on why. Assumed it was a trick of my sleep-starved and anxious mind.

  Dr. Thwaite stoked the fire with an iron poker that looked too heavy for him. I watched his thin back heave. He said something I couldn’t quite make out over the music. Then, after a moment of silence—maybe waiting for me to speak—he turned and slowly lowered himself onto an ottoman. “I presume you haven’t heard anything,” he said.

  I hesitated. For a moment I wondered again if there was any chance he’d had a hand in Doug’s departure. I studied him. Rumpled shirt. Worn velveteen slippers. Canon lobed at his feet. He reached down absently to scratch the dog’s ruff, his eyes clouded with what looked to me like real worry. I decided I should try to trust him.

  “I haven’t talked to him,” I said, shaking my head. It was throbbing a bit worse by then. “Not since yesterday, when I left work. We had dinner plans, but he never showed.” I felt a little loop of sadness, and something like regret. As if I could turn back time, wait longer at the diner, and make Doug appear. “You probably know this about my father,” I went on, “but that’s—that doesn’t happen. He’s very punctual.” Dr. Thwaite nodded. “After that, I went to look for him in his office …” But then I trailed off, not sure how to describe the sequence of events, if there was anything I should leave out. I wanted to ask him about the message he’d sent. I started to say, “Dr. Thwaite—”

  “Please,” he interrupted. “Call me Phineas. Phin, if you prefer. That’s what your father calls me. Also Thin, Phinny, Thimbleman … You get the idea.” He laughed.

  And that tiny revelation crumpled my heart. It was pure Doug. And it meant that my father had another life. Friends I didn’t know about. That I’d been neglecting him, or he’d been keeping me out. I felt selfish and jealous and guilty at once. And also relieved, and grateful to this odd, small man. Thankful that for the past year, since my mother had broken Doug’s heart—so much worse than Max had broken mine, I realized, as if I’d been moaning to a war veteran about a sprain—he’d had people in his life besides me.

  I’d done my best to support Doug. It had been hard to know how, and so sad. My mother still loved him, she said; she “just couldn’t do it anymore.” I’d be lying if I claimed I hadn’t taken sides. Vera started dating Laird so soon after she moved out.

  But my father, it’s only fair to note, wasn’t all panicles and dappled light. He could be very difficult. Overbearing and precise. Prone to fervors but also dark spirals. Both quiet and loud. And for a long time he’d all but vanished from their life. My mom got, she claimed, “the worst leftovers” of Doug. In happier times she’d complained about the hours he and I spent together at the Dictionary. “You try being his assistant,” I’d joked. She’d laughed, waving a wallet fat with dry-cleaning tags. “Oh, I have,” she’d said, a drop of acid in her voice. But how could I pretend I didn’t understand her side? Max and Doug were very different, of course. But the echoes were loud. I knew pretty well what her loneliness was like.

  Seated across from Dr. Thwaite, the leather of his couch squeaking under me, I swallowed hard. Doug had been “missing” for less than seventeen hours then, and while it was extremely unlike him to vanish so abruptly, he was capable of being both thoughtful and oblivious; he might call home every quarter hour if he was running late for dinner, but he’d forgotten his wedding anniversary at least once. With the impending launch he’d been under a huge amount of pressure, and I was still trying to hope his disappearance could be plausibly explained. But then I thought of Dr. Thwaite’s note to Doug’s office the night before, and those nerve-frying letters SOS.

  “This might sound crazy,” I said, my voice quivering slightly. “But I’m—I’m really worried about my dad.” I probably said it hoping that Phineas would reassure me. One of my methods for warding off destiny is to voice my fears.

  But instead he’d sighed. Kneaded the ottoman. “My dear,” he said softly, “so am I.”

  And a tiny white star of panic shot behind my right eye. “When was the last time you spoke to him?” I asked.

  “Your father and I had a different … method of communicating.”

  “Do you mean email?” I asked, worry stirring my sarcasm.5

  “No.”

  “Text?”

  “Almost never.”

  “What, then?” I asked. But it was disingenuous. Of course I knew what he meant. I’d seen his blind-stamped note come through Doug’s pneumatic tube myself. I probably had it in my purse. I just had a hard time believing they pinged paper missives back and forth. It’s true I had only a hazy sense of how the tubes worked. But wasn’t Dr. Thwaite’s building a co-op? It seemed unlikely that the board would have approved the infrastructure. And what about the City of New York? Nearly a dozen blocks separated Dr. Thwaite’s apartment from the Dictionary. I’d always assumed tube operations were confined to our building on Broadway, not to long underground expanses that tangoed with trains and rats and pipes.

  What I didn’t know then—what it would take me weeks to learn—was that in fact there once were miles of tubes beneath the streets, used by the postal system. In the early twentieth century, more than twenty-seven miles of them had connected New York’s general P.O. to stations stretching from Harlem to Battery Park and on to Brooklyn. Operators known as rocketeers sent twenty pounds through the tubes each minute, sixteen hours a day, from five a.m. to nine p.m. They conveyed telegrams and letters. Light packages. Supposedly once even a cat, who survived.

  The tubes had been considered a wonder technology. Acres of lines ran under Europe and in four major U.S. cities outside NYC—Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis—with initial plans to install them in at least eleven more, including Denver, New Orleans, and D.C. In Manhattan there were hubs at Madison Square, Penn Station, Grand Central, Wall Street. Station H was at Lexington and Forty-fourth, Station P in the Produce Building. There were Stations S, W—up to Y. For a time, in other words, the system enjoyed great popularity, and its developers had big dreams: to shuttle packages from department stores to housewives in the suburbs; to deliver hot meals, and “fresh flowers to one’s sweetheart”; to link every home in the country. They hoped one day to transport heavy freight, and eventually people.

  But in just a few decades the infinitely looping tubes found their end. Cars and trucks superseded them. The system faded nearly as quickly as it had come. (Ouroboros, Doug would call it: the serpent of progress eating its own tail, as it always does.) When the next decades rolled in, just a few vestiges remained—in hospitals, e.g., and banks. Some even lingered into the twenty-first century, like dinosaurs outliving their time. Komodo dragons coexisting with swimming pools. The tubes were all but forgotten, at least by most of us. What I didn’t know then was that some infrastructure was still extant, parts of it old, parts less so. And while I thought I was savvy about what New York money could buy—helicopters, things from the Ming Dynasty, a new nose or kidney—I still had a lot to learn.

  But on that day in Dr. Thwaite’s apartment, I had no hint of this. “I don’t like email,” was all he said. Then he eased gingerly off the ottoman, stood, and walked away. I was baffled. Half afraid I’d offended him, half convinced he’d just gone off to do something else. I waited on the couch, but minutes passed. I began to wonder if I should let myself out. It wasn’t until he finally reappeared and said, “Are you coming or not?” that I realized he’d expected me to follow. I understood then why I liked Dr. Thwaite: he showed signs of wear, like me. He was a little careless, like me. And like me, he didn’t put much stock in language. He knew words were fairly futile things. Best used sparingly.

  In the hall he started, in his cryptic way, to tell me something.
It was hard to hear—the music, I discovered, was pervasive, invisibly floating through the whole apartment. What I thought he said was, “He was most afraid of a pandemic.” But it couldn’t have been.

  “Pandemic?” I said. “You mean—of a disease?” As I said it, I thought of the bottles of medicine Doug had made me take, and I shivered reflexively. But then another, terrible thought occurred to me. I’d heard no warnings about a disease—no news bulletins, no public health announcements. And suddenly I was scared. Was it possible, I remember wondering, that my father had become sick—mentally? That his paranoia had morphed from a quirk to a pathology? Maybe something latent had surfaced, catalyzed by months of sad anxiety and stress. Was there a chance, even very small, that he might have hurt himself? Or someone else? That he was hiding out? How exactly did he know Dr. Thwaite? I shivered again, acutely aware that I was in a stranger’s home. Walking down a dark hall to a back room.

  Dr. Thwaite stopped and turned to study me. Frowning, he said, “You’re serious?”

  I nodded numbly, chastened into silence by his grim, dismissive poise.

  “I wonder,” he muttered to himself. “Why wouldn’t he …?” His eyes wobbled over my face. “The flu?” he tried. “Word flu? You’re sure he never mentioned it?”

  I nodded again, submerged in a molasses of nameless dread. My head started to pulse harder with brilliant, light-edged flowers of pain. And then something unlucky happened: my Meme rang. It hadn’t sounded in so long I’d forgotten it was on. Canon, who’d been standing silently behind us, began to growl.