The Word Exchange (13 page)

“Yes,” he said. Winked. “And where did you think you were going?”

Trying to think quickly, I blurted the wrong thing. “I was looking for Security,” I said. Or meant to say.

He studied me with cold confusion. A dimple appeared in his forehead. And after a viscous pause, he said, “I do not know what this means, ‘obaysin.’ ”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Security?” I repeated, my voice crumbling out from under me.

He frowned. Scratched his chin. The rasp of nails on stubble set me on edge. Staring down at me, he slowly cracked the knuckles of both hands. Then, enunciating, he said, “Closed.”

My stomach shrank as if it had been trussed with string. All I wanted was to leave. Get to the street. Call the police. Find my father, alive.

“Look, I really should be going,” I said, reaching into my pocket. Surprised for half a moment by the presence of the coil case, and hoping it didn’t show in my face, I gently removed my Meme. But there was no signal; strangely, it was asleep.

He glanced down at my screen, and I could tell he saw what I saw: the half glow. No connection. “Really?” he said. He seemed amused. “You should be going?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to bridle my voice. “My boyfriend’s waiting.” I shook my Meme.

“Boyfriend?” he mocked, eyebrows rising. “So you are meeting your boyfriend now?” He nodded lightly, the corners of his mouth dipping down. With a sickening tremor, I realized he didn’t believe me. As if he knew no one was waiting.

Furtively I glanced up at the ceiling, and I realized, chest tightening, that there were no cameras in that hall. If Dmitri decided to take me back to the Creatorium, no one would know. It would be days before anyone even noticed I was gone. I could see the headline: “Father and Daughter Both Assumed Dead.”

Dmitri said nothing for a long time. I tried to read his face, but it was illegible. Like a letter in a dream. I braced myself, every particle trembling with potential energy. I might not be able to fight him, but I wondered if I should try to run. If I made a mistake, I knew I’d be in much more trouble. I was in the rubber-band lag of a decision, imagining pushing past him and pounding down the hall. About to do it.

But then the long, murky silence passed. He gently clapped his big hands, gave a sly half smile that brightened his blue eyes, and said, “All right, Ms. Johnson. Go see your boyfriend. Give my best wishes to him.”

We hovered there another few seconds, him blocking the hall. Then he took one small half-step to the side, not enough for me to get by without our bodies touching. He smelled of cigarettes and fried onion, a trace of cinnamon. I shouldered past with tensile force and made myself walk with steady, resounding power. I felt his eyes on my back, almost felt him smiling. But I didn’t turn around.

And I didn’t start running until I reached the stairs—then sprinted all the way up, heart feeling like a thing struggling to be born, holding my Meme like a torch. When I reached the lobby, I ran so fast across the marble floor I nearly fell. I realized only later that the woman who’d been at the front desk before wasn’t there anymore. No one was.

Out on the street, I coughed and coughed on the wind, eyes tearing. Lungs sloughing off the inhaled atoms of my father’s life’s work. Signal restored, my Meme buzzed with two texts from old cell phones. One,
sent by Bart, felt like a tiny life raft: “Any word? Hope you’re okay.” But the other was from Dr. Thwaite. “Alice,” it said, “do not use your Meme. And stay away from the Dictionary.” I tried calling, but he didn’t answer.

My Meme hailed a cab, and once I was inside, it locked the door. It was a car with a live driver, and I saw him study me in the rearview mirror. We had trouble communicating; I had to give him my address three times before he finally nodded, unsmiling. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I didn’t feel well; I was sweaty, lightheaded. My Meme rolled the back window down. But I still got a little sick on the floor, and when I arrived outside my building, the Meme beamed my driver a 40 percent tip.

I thought I was just depleted. After I made it up to my apartment, I was so exhausted that I climbed into bed in all my clothes.

But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept taking me on punitive loops around a gruesome track: terrible things that could have happened to Doug, that might have happened to me if the night had gone differently. I begged my brain to stop, told it I needed rest so that I could get myself together enough to call the cops and keep looking for Doug. I even tried conjuring good memories, which sometimes helped me drift off. But most were quickly hijacked by anxiety, and after a while I reached into my coat for my Meme.

That’s when my fingers brushed the coil’s case again. And I wondered if
it
could stream something to take away my consciousness. Dr. Thwaite’s warning, to avoid Memes, floated up in my mind. With a small stab of bad faith, I told myself that he hadn’t said anything about this device. I doubted he’d approve of it either. But my stomach dipped as I thought of the heady serenity I’d experienced in the Creatorium when I’d taken the older woman’s coil. I felt an almost compulsive need to use the foreman’s.

It didn’t seem to have an on switch; I just opened the case, removed it from its strange, clear solution, and placed it on my forehead. Once again I felt pinching, buzzing warmth. And I soon had a flurry of impressions that weren’t quite mine, far more distinct than before. A thin, topless woman rippling in one corner of my vision called up a twitch of lust and mild languor. It almost seemed I could smell her perfume—juniper and fruit. On a different visual plane, two boxers bludgeoning each other stirred me much more: I felt a strong pull of excited rage; optimism, as if I were about to win something; a vague throbbing in my jaw.
In another corner I saw a pair of small children paw each other, vying to tell me a story in squeaky singsong, in a language I somehow nearly understood—maybe about a horse that had stepped on someone’s foot. (I sensed that I preferred the girl to the boy.)

All of these memories—my memories, “our” memories—fluttered away very fast, like ash. But one thing vanished before I was ready: eerily lovely music so familiar I could almost name it—not quite. I wanted it back.

And the strange thing was, after waiting what felt like only moments—it must have been far longer; maybe as much as half an hour, I was later told—there it was again. A flashing caption said it was
Spiegel im Spiegel
, a piece for piano and violin by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Vera had fallen in love with it for a while when I was a child and played it over and over for months.

That music unlocked the gate to a menagerie of sensations and memories, some that I’d been trying to summon to lull myself asleep, others that I’d forgotten, or that were half invented by the machine. But all incredibly rich in vivid, sweetly melancholic detail. Afterward I could recall only a few of them.

In one Vera hummed along to
Spiegel im Spiegel
as she baked lemon bars;
⁴
nearby I lay stretched on my stomach on a sun-warmed patch of floor, drawing a many-eyed dragon-wolf and occasionally glancing up at thrashing green trees outside the window, utterly absorbed, content, and sure of my place in the calm, perfect world.

In another, even earlier one, from what must have been my fourth or fifth birthday, she and Doug took me on the train from the Upper West Side to the East Village for my first real art supplies. As they swung me between them on the sidewalk, Vera joked, “I think they sell colored pencils in our neighborhood,” and I felt a little guilty and happy and giddy with excitement.

While this memory played, other images arrived on different planes: a subway map from that year, side by side with the most recent one, glowing with the changes (the Second Avenue line, the M, the extended G, the T and U). The weather report for that afternoon appeared (partly
cloudy and 62°), morphing into current conditions (windy, 38°). I saw saturated color swatches alongside ads for glyph projectors that could re-create them faithfully. And some works I loved floated past—by Gerhard Richter, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Isamu Noguchi, Picasso, Caravaggio, Rubens—with the names and locations of their museums and collectors. There were even other memories, playing on smaller “screens” simultaneously: my first excruciating college crit, the tannic wine served at my thesis exhibition, tossing rolls of grasshopper cookies to Coco over our studio wall one night when we were both camped out before a group show. (I heard a muffled “Ouch,” and winced; then, a moment later, “Thank you, amour,” mumbled through a full mouth.)

There was a freezing one, of Vera, Doug, and me flapping on the powdery ground of Riverside Park, making what Doug called “snow hippies,” not angels, because he claimed they always looked like they had bellbottoms on. (For the same reason I called them snow moms, after jeans Vera had once modeled.) In another few, Doug drew elaborate maps to the Natural History Museum and the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin—three and seven blocks away, respectively—rubber-banded them to my wrist, and made me recite the routes back aloud. In yet another, my favorite, Vera had the flu and Doug and I tried to make her chicken soup. We took her a bowl in bed, and she tasted it bravely, but when Doug said, “It’s terrible?” she nodded, laughing, tears running down her cheeks, soup spilling on the sheets, and she set down the bowl and opened her arms and we both crawled into bed with her.

There were lots of others, including many of Max and me. Our first kiss, beside a busy Hell’s Kitchen handball court to a noisy soundtrack of hooting kids. Max insisting that we find a place to go fishing the first time he went to my grandparents’ house in East Hampton and then making everyone, even my grandmother, eat our meager catch. Riding our bikes over the Brooklyn Bridge at night, handlebars jumping in my hands, and nearly being crushed by a car on the Brooklyn side, heart surging with the twin intoxicants of survival and love. Max singing Donny Hathaway’s “A Song for You” in the shower of our Dominica hotel room one morning when he thought I was still on the beach.

All these memories—most of which skewed toward sentimentality—were elaborately layered, sprouting “added content” and ads. And the experience was strange in other ways. At one point, when Ramona
appeared in a sequence from a middle-school field trip to the Bronx Zoo, I thought I even started to place a call to her—I heard a series of beeps followed by ringing—but the device said it was 2:37 a.m., and I made sure to “hang up,” which I did just by willing it (feeling very relieved that it hadn’t dialed Max).

At the same time I was also aware, if less distinctly, of my body in my bed, the coil stuck like a third eye in the center of my forehead. I could feel its pulsation on my skin, like a constant, low-grade jellyfish sting. Although in fact it didn’t feel like only surface prickling; it felt somehow
deeper
than that. Which I later learned it was, in a sense.

One thing I did feel was that my head hurt. Tremendously. More and more, until I couldn’t ignore it. And not a normal headache, like the kind I’d had at Dr. Thwaite’s. It was as if my brain had been plunged in ice. My forehead, though, was warm. Very warm, and getting warmer. Finally a moment came when not just my head but my whole body was burning, and I discovered I’d been sweating—for some time, it seemed: I was bathed in it.

And then suddenly I swerved toward feeling very cold. My teeth started to rattle, hard. Head bursting with white shocks of pain at each clatter. And a message that I sensed I’d been evading suddenly got larger and started throbbing red. It said my temperature was 101. (The diagnosis, though, came back “
unknown
. ”) With barely any warning, I felt violently ill; I hardly made it to the bathroom before beginning to retch.

I don’t know how long I stayed curled on the cold tile; it felt like I was sick for hours, intermittently flushing the toilet, rinsing my mouth with water from the tap. It wasn’t until I finally sort of came to, splashing water on my face and toweling dry, that I made what was at the time a very upsetting discovery: I felt nothing on my forehead anymore.

Helplessly I searched the sink and floor. Then all over the apartment. Until, panicking, I rushed back to the bathroom and stared, defeated, into the empty toilet. Slumped to the floor. And thank God I’d flushed it, half delirious, by mistake. If I hadn’t, I might have gotten much sicker—it could even have killed me. But at the time all I felt was annihilating regret.

I crawled on all fours back to bed and slept straight through to the next afternoon. But I woke up still unwell: fevered, joints aching, my head staved by pain. I’d slept on my arms; it felt like I’d held hands with an electric man. Needles and pins.

With my Meme I made a round of calls from bed. There was still no sign of Doug at his building or in the office or with friends. Aunt Jean hadn’t heard from him, and I couldn’t reach my mom.

All these calls were strange. I kept being asked to repeat things. The last person I dialed was Bart, who answered instantly, before the phone even rang. He offered to call the cops, and I agreed, tearing up a little from gratitude and worry. “There’s something else you should tell them,” I said, and began to describe the Creatorium. But from the silence on the other end, I could sense that Bart didn’t understand what I was saying. Self-conscious, I tried to yoke myself to telling. But the story kept slipping its reins and running away from me.

“I think you should get some rest,” Bart suggested gently. “Stay home tomorrow.”

After I hung up, the pain in my head became so intense that I did start to cry. I wondered if I could die from it—if something had burst. I thought of calling Bart back, or dialing an ambulance. But in a tiny, crumpled pocket of my brain I remembered Doug’s obscure warnings about a sickness—a very bad headache, I thought I remembered him saying—and the vials of pills he’d had me take.

With my last remaining strength, I dragged myself back to the bathroom and swallowed a blue pill with a cold handful of tap water. Then, my legs collapsing out from under me twice, I struggled again to bed, a slightly bitter, metallic taste in my mouth.