The Word Exchange (12 page)

She was speaking loudly and quickly in Chinese. Everyone had stopped to stare at us.

“Listen,” I said, shivering, still a little anesthetized. “You can’t do this.” I stepped back over to the girl, and I pointed at her monitor, shaking my head. Continuing to speak English to them seemed not only useless but antagonistic—patronizing. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “I don’t know how you got the passwords,” I babbled on. “And I’m sure this is all saved somewhere”—I had the unsettling feeling that I was reassuring myself—“but this is bad. Very bad. You have to stop.” Again I pointed at the screen and shook my head, embarrassed by my condescension. But also upset, and overwhelmed.

What was happening? These weren’t building employees, that much seemed clear. So how did they get in? How long had they been there? Hours? Days? And what were they doing? On whose orders? Even if their intention wasn’t to destroy the
NADEL
—and how could it be? It was an insane thought—accidental deletions would also be devastating. Each term represented untold hours of painstaking labor. Nearly three decades of Doug’s work. And Bart’s and mine. And dozens of others’.

And insane or not, nothing about what was happening looked accidental.

If many words were tampered with or erased—my mind went blank. The scale of the damage could be tremendous. Especially, I thought, my stomach getting tight, if the backups had also been harmed. The server room was down the hall. The Dictionary offices, with all the files of our digital archive, were just upstairs. The third edition was supposed to launch in less than a week. The first copies had been printed. But after that? How would we restore the missing terms? Every scenario I imagined,
even the best ones, would require months or more of monumental effort to replace what had been lost. Time we didn’t have—our funding was already almost gone. I wasn’t sure any of us besides Doug would even know where to start.

As I thought of Doug, I felt my breath evaporate. I coughed again, violently, eyes watering. A sob lurking near the surface. “Dad, where
are
you?” I whispered to myself, wiping my eyes. Looking down the table at the line of laborers who’d gone back to inking up volumes, I finally let myself believe the worst. I found myself gripping the table edge, not sure I could stand. Staring into the frightened face of the girl I’d interrogated, who was still blinking. Now blinking back tears.

But it was at about this time that the man who’d been standing near the pneumatic tubes hurried over, shouting at the workers as he approached the table. I couldn’t make out most of what he said—he was speaking something incomprehensible to me—but I thought I heard the English words “How? Who let her?” as he jabbed his hand through the air at me, a few white dots of spit jumping from his lips as he looked toward the door a little frantically. Then, with a final flurry, he motioned with both hands that they should get back to work. And he stalked toward me, anxiously glancing once more at the door.

I steeled myself.
Wood and glue
, I thought. It’s what Doug would have said to me.
²
You don’t know anything
, I reminded myself.
Never let uncertainty get to you
. I swallowed hard and stared at the man’s eyes. Unlike most of the other workers, he looked Slavic, with a strong nose and cleft chin. And he was short—about my height—but very solidly built. “Everything is all right,” he said gruffly. “Naypek problems here. Yes?”

I still had a hand on the edge of the table, and he put his next to mine, setting something down: a silver case like the one in which the older woman had just forcefully cleaned her device. In the other hand he was holding his Meme, with whatever he’d been watching on mute, but when he noticed that I’d noticed it, he put it in his pocket.

“Look,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. I found myself peering at
the silver case. Wondering for a moment why he wasn’t using the coil inside it. “I work here, upstairs. My father is Douglas Johnson, Chief Editor of the
North American Dictionary
.” As I said it, my voice crumbled a little, like a dune, a warm sluice of pride spreading through my chest. (
Wood and glue
, I repeated to myself.) “Can you tell me—what is all this?” I stared at him. “It looks like they’re in our corpus. And as I’m sure you know—”

“Nothing,” he said, cleanly scything my line of inquiry. “Myno is happening.” The specter of a smile played on his lips. He looked again at the door, and the smile slipped away.

Exasperated, I shook my head. “I don’t mean to contradict you—” I started to reply. But he placed a hand firmly on my shoulder. A shiver flickered down my spine.

“Everything is okay,” he said, a bit more brusquely. “You don’t see what you think you see. Time tyaz for you to leave.” But then he grimaced strangely; letting go of me for a moment, he gripped his head in both hands. Very quickly, though, before I could process what was happening, the odd fit subsided. He reached across my body and roughly turned me toward the door.

And that unexpected shove ruptured some psychic membrane that had been convincing me I was safe; it made me freshly aware of where I was: two floors underground on a Saturday night. No one in the outside world knew I was there.

But I didn’t move any closer to the door. I held my ground, tensing slightly but nodding. Looking over my shoulder at the foreman, I said, “I’m sorry,” relieved to hear that I sounded calm. “I just need to know what’s going on.”

He studied me, eyes sparkling. He’d stopped pressing my back. But his hand lingered there lightly, as if on a horse’s flank. The heat in the room was amazing. I felt shaky. Turning again to face the door, I tugged the neck of my shirt back over my nose for a few breaths. Sweat tickled my temples and the back of my neck, and I watched the men toss boxes in an inky curve through the shifting scrim of smoke. Stuck here and there to the concrete floor were boot-smudged pieces of paper. Pages from books. I watched the weak light dance in a few shallow puddles, and I tried to will the man’s hand off me. I found myself wondering if I could use a judo throw to take him over my shoulder if it came to that.
I’d thrown men larger than me, but not in a very long time. And if I did, what then?

I didn’t have to, though. Finally he lifted his hand. “I think it’s better we don’t call Dmitri. You agree?” I twisted again to face him. “He’s coming back yankor. He doesn’t like when we call.” Then he lightly patted the baggy pocket that held his Meme—or something else. And that implied threat, together with the mention of another man, finally, fully pierced my armor. Maybe he was bluffing, maybe not. But he seemed very agitated, and insistent that I should leave—worried, I imagined, that he’d have to account for me to the other man: Dmitri. And frightened people can do very frightening things.

“All right,” I agreed, groping in my pocket for my own Meme. Mentally filing details I could tell police. “I’m going.”

“Yes. Good. You need help?” he asked.

I shook my head and smiled. He smiled back. Our smiles said vastly different things.

What he didn’t know was that mine was also a feint. He’d left his silver case exposed on the table, and while we spoke, I very slowly edged my hand closer to it. As I demurely agreed to leave, lowering my eyes, I slid my palm over it. In one quick twist, as he glanced again at the door, I slipped it into my pocket with my Meme.

On my way to the exit, stepping over puddles and sheets of sullied paper, weaving quickly through the dirty concrete pillars, I looked back. He was still standing at the head of the table, watching me, one hand pressed to his head. Any moment he’d notice what I’d stolen. My pulse was thrumming so fast it made me sick. The floor seemed far away and pitched. Each screen I could see glowed with a smearing nimbus, and the smoke seemed to grow hotter and thicker. The room’s loud thunder softened, as if it were coming through cotton. Time dilated.

But he wasn’t following me. I turned back to face the door; it seemed to have crept farther away. Stumbling, I hurried past the last pillar, the ziggurat of boxes, the men shifting them, who were watching me. When I finally reached the exit, I forced myself to look over my shoulder one last time. The foreman made a shooing motion, and prickles of relief stung my face. I nodded. He turned back toward the tubes, reaching into his pocket to retrieve his Meme. And I stepped out into the bright, cool hall.

But I didn’t shut the door all the way. And I didn’t leave. I waited a few minutes, doing my best to get calm. I tore my coat and sweater off, fanned the hem of my shirt. Coughed. Leaned shakily against the wall. Closed my eyes against the painful light and pressed hard on my eyelids until I saw a luminous snow that lingered a moment after I opened them. I counted to twenty twenty times. Took a few ragged breaths. Glanced up and down the hall. All I saw were dingy white walls, blaring fluorescent bulbs, exposed ceilings busy with dusty tubes and pipes, gray concrete floor.

For a moment I thought I heard an impossible noise, like running water. But it was hard to hear over the pounding drone of the Creatorium. I peered farther down the hall—not in the direction I’d come but the other way—and the floor did look wet; I saw a glittering reflection of the overheads. But I was more concerned that no one was coming and quickly turned back.

I flapped my shirt a last time and tugged my dark sweater back on, leaving my green coat husked at my feet. Pulled the sweater’s hood up over my hair. And slipped quietly inside the Creatorium again. There was something else I needed to see before I’d let myself leave.

The workers passing boxes in a line along the wall weren’t wearing lighted coils, but a few had safety glasses on, and most wore cotton masks to filter out the smoke. I watched a man slide a box from the towering mound near the door. Sine it in a flowing motion to the next man down, who tossed it gracefully to the man nearest him, and so on.

As I hurried along the line, looking over my shoulder every few seconds at the foreman—he was back on the room’s other side, again turned toward the tubes, watching his Meme, but at any time he could look my way—I felt the temperature rise and the air grow even harder to breathe. By the time I reached the apse where a hunched worker was slicing boxes open, I was coughing without stopping. Sweat slid off my nose.

Gazing through wavy lines of heat, eyes stinging, I made another awful discovery. As I watched in horror, barely swallowing a shout, books were wrested from boxes and tossed into the raging orange mouth of an old and badly ventilated coal furnace. I squinted at one of the boxes arcing by, and my heart ballooned. A white sticker affixed to the side read:
N. AM. DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: 3RD—R
. The worker who’d just caught the box looked up at me, eyes widening over his white mask. Before he had time to miss a beat, I placed a finger to my mouth.
Shook my head. Scurried back toward the door. Cast a last glance, before hurrying out, at the mountain of boxes. Each with a white sticker.

Back in the hall, I pressed a hand to my chest. Wiped wet ash from my eyes. Leaned into the wall, coughed, and struggled to breathe. Putting on my coat, I tried to understand what I’d seen. I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury’s firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library.

But this was no ordinary book-burning. Our digital corpus was also being dismantled, by pale, nimble hands. Who, I wondered, would want to destroy the Dictionary? Did Doug know? Was that why he’d vanished?

I wanted to get out of there. Call the cops to report Doug gone. Describe what I’d just seen. But I was addled and not thinking clearly, and I started walking the wrong way—not toward the stairs but in the other direction, which I only really noticed when I heard splashing and looked down at my feet. And as I snapped back to consciousness, I saw that the large puddle I’d noticed a while earlier wasn’t a puddle; it was a very small stream. And it was being fed by a few black hoses peeking through holes drilled in the walls. But it also seemed to be coming straight up through the floor. A little channel had even been dug into the concrete to let it flow down the hall, where it veered left into an open door.
³

Cautiously I peeked inside. It was just a dark, dank storage closet, cool as a cave and plangent with rushing water. I hesitated for only a moment, to search for the light switch; I wanted to see where the water went. But before I could find it, I heard a man’s hard Russian voice call from down the hall, “You want to know what we hide there? Keep snooping and you’ll find out.”

And that was it; I knew I’d been caught by the Slavic foreman. I felt
oddly calm—the resolved, green tranquillity of waiting for a hurricane. Slowly I backed out of the closet, trying to invent some kind of story. But as soon as I turned around, I saw what my ears had already sensed but not yet quite transmitted to me: it wasn’t the same man. And when he saw me, he seemed surprised. But not as surprised as I was when he said, “Ms. Johnson.”

I’d never seen him before. He wore the uniform of one of our guards. Introduced himself, in an accent thick as cream, as Dmitri Sokolov—the man, I deduced, whom the foreman didn’t like to disturb. He was massive: a dense three hundred pounds, six six or six five. The same physique and sad, soulful eyes of my favorite painting professor from college. I put him in his mid-forties, hair less pepper, more salt, but with eyebrows so dark they looked drawn in with charcoal. Clear blue eyes. Chin glinting with a scurf of day-old beard. His nose looked like it might have been broken once or twice. But he had a puckish, lopsided smile. And he teased, “I wasn’t expecting the pleasure of seeing you tonight. What are you doing here?”

No story had materialized. “I got a little turned around,” I said. My mouth felt unreliable and dry, as if I’d been eating salt. But I was still keeping a diamond focus.