The Word Exchange Page 8

  The little dram of color in Dr. Thwaite’s pale face leaked out. “Is that …?” He raised his brows. “You brought a Meme into my house?” he asked in a flat, distant voice that made my stomach drop. I didn’t know why.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought I’d turned it off. I’ll do that now.”

  He shook his head. “I should have explained. You’ll have to leave it out in the hall.” He sounded calm, but his eyes were on fire. Rattled, I nodded, and he escorted me to the door. Once outside, I considered bolting. But I’d left my coat in his apartment. And I still wanted to know what he knew.

  Because he was watching, I powered down my Meme without looking closely at the screen. But I did see I had six missed calls—four from the same 800 number, all unknown. Of course I thought—hoped—they were from Doug. But Doug always left long, rambling messages, and this caller hadn’t recorded a single one. It wasn’t until later, seized with horror, that I realized my voicemail was still full of old messages from Max that I hadn’t yet been able to let go. Too late, I erased each one.

  There were also two texts. One from Bart, which said, “Any news?” The other, like the calls, anonymous and indecipherable. “PT will have more. Don’t use this”: that was it. It was the second message, tagged urgent, that had made the Meme ring; sensing that Dr. Thwaite was hostile to its presence, it had turned itself silent until then. I considered asking Dr. Thwaite if he knew what the text meant. But I thought better of it. Or maybe worse, as it turned out.

  “You really shouldn’t use that thing,” Dr. Thwaite warned from the door. It was a familiar refrain; in my mind’s ear, I could almost hear Doug launch into Lecture #449: “No reliable, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials have tested the long-term consequences of Crown use or Sixth Sense technology. We do know users become not just psychologically attached but physiologically dependent on Memes in a very short time … We don’t know if the device poses other risks … Norwegian scientists have just discovered [blah blah blah] … Consequences for memory and language …” And on.

  “Where should I leave it?” I said softly, glancing around. He pointed at the welcome mat. I thought he was joking. He was not. Awkwardly hunched, head pounding as I bent down, I tucked my Crown and pretty silver Meme beneath the scratchy tan sisal on the floor. Then, not sure it was the smartest course, I followed Dr. Thwaite back inside.

  In many ways his office seemed derivative of Doug’s: the clutter, the calendar still turned to September, the magnifying-glass collection, the wooden head with its leggy pairs of bifocals. Floor-to-ceiling dictionaries and other books, including the North American Dictionary, one of its volumes open on a lectern. He also had antique machines: typewriters, giant cameras, a record player, and what I thought was a tape deck—things I couldn’t identify. Slanting stacks of spiral pads and International Journal of Lexicography back issues. Old scraps of quotation paragraphs and neologisms. Relics of the way dictionary-making once was for everyone.6

  But there was a way in which Dr. Thwaite’s office differed from my father’s: it was filled with framed photos of naked women. Or of one woman, actually, shot many times. And in fact I was afraid at first it was my mother. She had the same swirling dark hair as the young Vera Doran. Same creamy skin, high breasts, violin-thin waist. I’ve been ambushed by her likeness all my life. I have her memorized. But the woman wasn’t Vera. I was relieved but still uneasy. For Dr. Thwaite, though, she was wrapped in the modest mists of iteration. He seemed blind to her nakedness, the coyness in her shining eyes. Blind, at least, until he noticed me staring. Then, with a hint of diffidence, he said, “You’d be surprised how long it can haunt you.” The pictures did look old—forty years or more. “I was sorry,” he continued, “to hear of your own recent heartbreak. Certainly it’s for the best. But it must be very hard.”

  “Wait,” I mumbled, stunned. “What?” I felt a cold tremor of shame and indignation. I was shocked that Doug would breach my trust. Confide in this strange stranger. Our father-daughter privilege apparently worthless.

  Dr. Thwaite’s brows went up, pleating his forehead. “Oh,” he said. “No?” His voice was strained. “I thought I’d heard you were alone now, too.”

  “No,” I said, trying to sound fine. “I’m not alone.” I don’t know why I lied. Maybe it was lingering embarrassment, or wishful thinking. Maybe reflex—protecting my privacy behind a seemingly small untruth. I’m not sure, because it just came out, unpremeditated, and then I felt committed. I wish I hadn’t said it. The consequences were surprisingly serious. But at the time it didn’t occur to me that Dr. Thwaite might have mentioned my breakup on purpose. “I’m not at all alone,” I repeated, evading his eyes.

  “I see.” When I looked back at his face, it had clouded inscrutably. “Well, my apologies. I must have misheard.”

  “Yes,” I said stiffly. “Well, that’s all right.”

  We lapsed into a scratchy silence. I felt my face grow hot, and I reached down to stroke the dog. But that wasn’t enough to break the static. And Dr. Thwaite wasn’t helping out. I glanced again around his windowless study. That’s when I saw his pneumatic tubes. The familiar brass matrix tucked in a crowded corner, which emptied into a large, shellacked bin marked “In.” In my father’s handwriting.

  Suddenly I was exhausted. My brain smogged with anxiety and concern. The pain in my head was getting worse—I was afraid it was a migraine—and my Meme, with its new Pax® prescription, was in the hall. I was tired of being in Dr. Thwaite’s apartment, and I felt in my pockets for the folded scraps of paper that had come through Doug’s tubes the night before. “What can you tell me about these?” I asked, handing them over.

  He hefted a magnifier that gave him the eye of a giant. Read in silence. Then, gravely, lowered the glass. Slid out a drawer in his desk. Removed a folded slip of paper and pressed it into my palm. It read: “diachronic: a method of looking at language that’s becoming extinct.” This, Dr. Thwaite claimed, was Doug’s SOS. The phrase they’d all agreed on.

  “All who? Agreed to what?” I asked. I felt ill. The white light behind my eye flashed brightly. It wasn’t impossible, I realized, feeling a little faint, that Dr. Thwaite had typed both notes himself—that I was in the company of someone crazy, and not harmless at all. How else to explain the circumlocutions, bizarre references, vacillating mood? And yet. He struck me as sane. But he didn’t reply. He studied me for a long time, eyes tightening. It occurred to me that he was covering for Doug, or someone. And I was flunking his character assessment.

  “Dr. Thwaite,” I said. I was fed up, afraid. “Is my father in trouble?” It made me breathless to get out the words.

  After a moment he said, “I don’t know.” I thought that would be it. But then his eyes softened. “He might be,” he said gently, turning up a corner of his mouth. “I think so.”

  My heart started to pound, the hammer of my headache striking with it. “And this little slip of paper—it’s supposed to be proof?” I volleyed back, fear sharpening my tone.

  Again Dr. Thwaite’s eyes narrowed. “I sense you think I’m engaged in hyperbole,” he countered. “Is that right?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just very scared, and I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t know what the police are going to be able to do with these … SOS’s. And I’m really worried about my dad.” I tried not to, but I choked up a little.

  Dr. Thwaite seemed to tense. He passed me a hankie, looking away. “It’s all right,” he fretted, sort of raking my back with his hand. Added, “No need to involve the police just yet.” And the strangeness of this statement coupled with the strangeness of his touch worked to sober me up. He asked me to tell him again exactly what had happened the night before, and I did. Only this time I mentioned the Aleph. And when I described how Doug’s entry had vanished from the Dictionary, Dr. Thwaite became completely still. The words “My God” flew from his bloodless lips.

  He wouldn’t tell me why he was so upset. But he didn’
t have to. Because as I watched him, the nameless dread I’d been feeling coalesced. The Aleph, of course, had been custom-programmed for Doug, to map the fluctions of his brain: preferences and decisions, spending habits, reading history, walking routes, contacts’ names. I’d heard rumors that people’s Memes sometimes froze at the moment they died. Or deleted their profiles on Life. Purged files. And that’s when I knew that Doug’s disappearance from the Aleph’s Dictionary had a meaning in the real world. All of a sudden I was sure I’d never see my father alive again.

  Our devastation seemed to knit us in a fragile, cobweb trust. After we’d calmed down enough to talk, Dr. Thwaite asked if he could see the Aleph for himself. I wanted to see it again, too. But I’d left it at home.

  When I said I had to go, he nodded kindly. Put a hand on my arm. “Alice,” he said. In his craggy voice, the name felt right. “Would you like a Coke for the road?”

  I said I would. Kept the cold can pressed to my aching head most of the bus ride back instead of downloading Pax® from my Meme, getting gently jostled among a noisy passel of kids dressed as Pilgrims. I hurried the last few blocks by foot. Ran, panting, up the four flights to my door. Went straight for the Aleph, plugged in beside the toaster.

  When I flicked it on, though, I noticed something wrong right away. It was still open to the same place in the J’s. Same curled, feral letters crouched on the glowing page. But this time Doug was there, neatly tucked between the seventeenth president of the United States and a former point guard for the L.A. Lakers. There was Doug’s pale, short-sleeved button-down with a welter of hair spilling from the neck. And there was the tiny dot on his pocket that I knew was a pineapple lapel pin. There were the massive glasses, a ghostly prick of glare glinting whitely in each lens. And the signature smile of a man overflowing with exuberance. And there, most reassuringly, was the lemma: “Johnson, Douglas (1950– ),” with no death date.

  I felt a swell of gratitude. I was filled with the uncanny certainty that Doug was alive. But I didn’t know how to contextualize my discovery. At first I assumed I’d just overlooked his entry the night before, unsettled as I’d been. Then I remembered that Bart had seen—or not seen—it, too. His theory that Alephs are defective seemed most plausible. But that left me wondering again if Doug was all right. And where he was.

  I wanted to ask Bart what he thought. I turned on my Meme, hoping there’d be a message from Doug. There wasn’t—just a beam from my friend Ramona of a RoBoLoVe song, tagged with the poetic caption “Ware r u slut?” I told my Meme to phone Bart. But even before it dialed the final number, I was struck by another thought—bitten, even, as if by a pinched nerve.

  Doug was back inside the Dictionary. Last night he’d left our Broadway office for some reason. But now he was back. Not missing at all.

  The idea was so risible I blushed. Even without witnesses to the workings of my mind, alone in my tiny kitchen. But as I dialed Doug’s extension, I held my breath. It rang three times. Four. I kept waiting for his rich bass voice to come on. Give a shaggy-dog account of where he’d been. Suggest Fancy lentil soup with rye. But then the ringing stopped. And a pocky, awkward recording of my own voice told me Doug was unavailable. I tried the office lobby, but no one picked up.

  I knew, though, that Doug was in the Dictionary. The feeling was palpable, like warm wax. I was so sure that I rehearsed my rebuke. Planned to propose he start seeing a shrink. Indulged in imagined apologies to Bart and Dr. Thwaite. Sighing, I zippered back into my coat. Braced for the eight cold blocks up to the office.

  But as I neared the Dictionary, I became less convinced. Slowed. Caught a glimpse of myself in the building’s black glass. I looked frail and frightened. I wasn’t used to seeing myself that way. But just as hearing an unexpected tremor in one’s own voice can turn, unbidden, to stage fright, that nervous, shadowy likeness undermined my assurance. The lobby looked darker and bleaker than it had ever seemed. I wished Doug had answered. Or that I’d asked Bart to come with me. I lingered on the sidewalk. But it was freezing out, and gusting. I told myself that what I felt was just the sticky remnants of last night’s nervousness. So I took a deep breath and held my Meme to the door’s ID reader.

  Inside, I thought I smelled the tiniest note of smoke; I assumed I was imagining it. The security guard on duty was a woman. I’d never seen her before. I said, “Where’s Rodney?” with a mouth that didn’t feel like my mouth, and she said, “He ain’t here.”

  I went up to twenty. Circled the whole dark floor. Called, “Hello? Anybody here?” But there was only silence. I was shaking by the time I reached Doug’s door. I tried the knob. It wouldn’t turn. And I realized, heart surging, that someone else must have been there. Maybe still was. I balked, and nearly ran for the exit. But then I remembered that I’d been the one to lock up the night before. I raised a hand to my pounding chest and exhaled. Fumbled in my purse for the keys, fingers trembling so badly I dropped them on the floor. They struck the carpet with a muffled bang that burst my heart all over again. The blackness swarmed. My vision pinholed in. I heard the sandpaper sound of my own breathing, and when I finally got the door open, I was alone: Doug wasn’t there. No one was.

  But everything else also seemed unchanged. The phone blinked red in accusation. The desk drawers were shut. Doug’s satchel was limply slumped on his armchair. As I scanned the room, my eyes rested on his pneumatic tubes, the in-bin a perfect double of its East Side twin at Dr. Thwaite’s. I thought of sending a progress report, if I could. But then another thought popped up, like a cork: I should visit the routing terminal in the subbasement.

  I don’t know why a chill went through me, like a too-cold sip of water, or what I hoped I’d find. At the very least, I thought I might learn if Doug’s distress signal had been sent from within the building or outside.

  It’s probably no surprise, given the strange wind that had blown through my weekend, that I did find something down there. Much more than I’d intended.

  I’d been to the subbasement before, but I couldn’t recall ever visiting the terminal, where the few pneumatic messages that still got sent went first, to be hand-sorted. It was also used for storage of what was called “dead matter”—old passes of print manuscripts—and occasional shipments of books. The idea that I should go down there, alone, conjured a heady mix of courage and fatalism, and at an even stronger titration than at Dr. Thwaite’s. Like the hot, robotic bravery that would overtake me before judo tournaments or stepping onstage for school plays.

  Which is how, after riding the elevator back down to the lobby, then walking the two flights belowground to the subbasement and tracking the tubes past the server room, Repro, and Security, I found, at the end of a long hall, on the second-to-last door on the left, the Creatorium.

  * * *

  1. It was one of few left in New York. In Hell’s Kitchen, still home to a few XXX peepshows and lots of corporate law firms, the demand for anonymity remained high.

  2. Dr. Thwaite scolded me for this later, when I took off my mittens. But I couldn’t tell if he was angry because pens “release toxins into the bloodstream” or because I’d published the location of his apartment on my body.

  3. Max used to buy me roses, too. But he always got red ones, never purple. And purple is my favorite color.

  4. “Cannot confirm existence,” the pop-up informed me.

  5. Doug remained committed to email—claimed it was the last, best bastion of “civil discourse.” He’d always threatened to revert to letter writing—until mail delivery was cut to twice a week.

  6. Dr. Thwaite, a relic himself, was probably retired, or at best freelance. The NADEL was the last of its kind. All other U.S. dictionaries had of course been folded into Synchronic, Inc.’s Word Exchange by then—all language reference “tools” consolidated in one digital “marketplace.” And even Doug acknowledged that the third edition, about to be published, would be the final one. He’d reached the end of the end of a cycle of grants. From then on it would e
xist only online, in constant flux. “Edition” would lose its meaning.

  D

  dic•tio•nar•y ′dik-shƏ-ner-ē n 1 : one of several commodities aggregated on a privately held exchange 2 obscure : a reference book used for decoding arbitrary linguistic signs; a culturally significant artifact

  As I descended the stairs, I once again thought I smelled something burning, which was odd—I knew the furnace must be off; it was Saturday night. There might be no one in the whole building but the woman up at lobby security and me. And it was cold in the stairwell; my breath ghosted out in front of me. My teeth clattered like cabinet china.

  When I opened the subbasement door, though, the air felt a bit warmer, and the burning scent intensified. Confused and a little alarmed, I stepped into the hall. My footsteps rang loudly on the concrete. I craned my neck up to the exposed ceiling, eyes shrinking from the white honeycomb of light. The brass pneumatic tubes hung down like fat, dusty snakes. They lazed the length of the hall, then curved abruptly left, out of sight. I followed beneath them, my head trained slightly up, ears tuned to my resounding progress. Splashing once or twice into the shallow puddles, ubiquitous in the subbasement, that I’d heard were the result of groundwater seepage after renovations, requiring everything down there to be stored on pallets or shelves.

  But that night I barely noticed the water. As I turned the curve, the sound of my steps was soon swallowed by another noise: an indistinct thudder. It got louder as I neared the spot where the metal snakes stopped, heads plunged hungrily in plaster. It had also gotten smokier and hotter, my breath evanescing as I walked.

  I found myself outside a blank door. That surprised me. I’d expected arrows, cues, signs in blue, as at ID, REPRO, and SECURITY. But the whole scuffed hall seemed unmarked. Signs may have existed once—there were a few small holes drilled in walls, squares where paint seemed slightly brighter—but someone had removed them. Then I noticed a drooping piece of paper tacked up. When I flattened it out, I saw a single word scrawled in red: CREATORIUM. And beneath it the door was hot. The roar and hum I’d heard from down the hall was clearly coming from inside.