The Word Exchange (2 page)

I’d seen a lot of Max lately. Ordering coffee. Waiting for the train. Resting his arm on someone stunning. Only it was never him. Just a phantom, made from the smoke of old memories. Real Max had moved to Red Hook, deep in the leafy reaches of Brooklyn, to that stretch known as the Technocracy Sector. When I saw that night’s version of him in profile, I decided I was wrong. Then I hurried on to the Dictionary.

The glass door to the lobby pushed back bodily when I lurched to open it, and let in one low, ghostly scream of wind as I made my way to security. Rodney was alone behind the desk. “Evening, Miss J,” he said. Dipped his grizzled head politely.

“Is he still up there?” I asked, dabbing my nose with my mitten.

“Haven’t seen him come down,” said Rodney. Looked at me quizzically.

The twentieth floor was dark and desolate. It was after eight p.m. on a Friday and everyone, even the lowliest, loneliest etymology assistant, had left hours earlier. Everyone, it seemed, but Doug. I shuffled down the dim corridor toward his office. Past my cubicle. Past the conference room, which was a disaster. Chairs everywhere. Table littered with cold coffees.

Light spilled from under Doug’s door, and I opened it without knocking. Started to ask, “Where were you?” as I stepped in. But then I stopped talking. Because he wasn’t there.

I can’t say what atavistic anxiety shivered through me, but I suddenly didn’t want to leave the bright oasis of my father’s office. I also didn’t want to stay. But mostly I didn’t want to go. I locked the door and dialed the lobby.

“Hmm,” said Rodney. “You want someone to come get you? I can’t leave the desk, but I could call Darryl down from twenty-two.”

I almost agreed, but I felt crazy. And Rodney sounded strange—angry, maybe. Then I spied a familiar item on Doug’s armchair: his brown leather satchel. “Forget it,” I told Rodney. Wherever Doug had disappeared
to, I thought, mollified, he’d be back soon. And in the meantime I had a rare opportunity.

To be in Doug’s office without Doug was extremely unusual. And unlike his apartment, which was still unnervingly spare more than a year after his separation from my mother, this room was filled with my favorite father detritus. The jackalope hunting license that Aunt Jean had sent from their hometown—and my father’s namesake—of Douglas, Wyoming. The glass canister by the phone stocked with both sweet and salted licorice. And next to the desk lamp, the small, stoppered bottle of well-aged sherry vinegar that Doug said was for salad but from which I’d many times seen him take a straight swig.

Near the door were his pneumatic tubes, which emptied into a bin marked “In.” This label always struck me as gratuitous. But the same could maybe be said of the whole system. One of the first things Doug had done when he’d started at the Dictionary in 1974, at just twenty-seven (my age), was campaign to have pneumatic tubes installed, for fast, secure transport of “sensitive data” (e.g., neologisms, disputed antedatings, particularly thorny etymologies, etc.). Also the occasional fortune-cookie fortune. Comic book. Chocolate egg. The Dictionary had occupied two floors then, and Doug had argued that the tubes would increase efficiency. He decried the idea that they might be anachronistic, costly, and inconvenient. Dismissed the “rumor” that computers would soon allow the electronic shuffling of information. And against all odds, both his board and the building executives had okayed it. Doug could be extraordinarily persuasive. (Though my mother might disagree.)

It hadn’t been easy; the Dictionary shared the building with different entities—in those days, mostly publishers. As a nonprofit run on government and other grants, the
NADEL
was fairly separate. (It also got a bit of a break on rent; executives liked having its prestigious name on the directory.) But after the tubes’ success at the Dictionary, they were soon put in throughout the building. And initially nearly everyone used them; stations on each floor, as well as a few offices, like Doug’s, were set up for direct delivery. An operator in the subbasement routing terminal directed documents back and forth, and it was a boon to get contracts, memos, notes moved so quickly and easily. Later, when computers had indeed become prevalent; the Dictionary “streamlined” to one floor; and the operator started splitting his day between the terminal
and the (also obsolescing) mailroom; tube use, already dwindling by then, stopped almost completely.

All of this was familiar to me. What I didn’t yet know that night in my father’s office was that ours wasn’t the only building in the city with tubes; at least a couple of other places had them as well—and had installed them far more recently.

Wending past Doug’s in-tray, I surveyed his books, too. He was one of few people I knew who still read that way, from a book, instead of streaming limns from a Meme or some other smart screen. Even Dictionary staffers didn’t do much analog reading. Except Bart, I should say. Bart was my father’s protégé. (I’d always envied that slightly.) He was head of Etymologies—what Doug called the Department of Dead Letters—and the Dictionary’s Deputy Editor. Bart also had lots of books. He and Doug weren’t alone, completely. There were other holdouts. And collectors, of course, who hoarded all kinds of antiquarian
objets
.

On one of Doug’s shelves, in front of a Samuel Johnson biography,
²
was a half-empty bottle of Bay Rum aftershave, Doug’s preference for which, he claimed, required a visit every few years to Dominica, the West Indian island where it’s made. Seeing it that night, I felt a deep pang. It reminded me of a trip Max and I had taken there once, right after we’d fallen in love. That bottle, in fact, was probably an artifact: we’d shipped Doug back a case. “An offering for my future father-in-law,” Max had said then.

While we were there, we’d also stocked Doug up on pineapples. He had a special affection for them. There were a few pineapple etchings in his office—I could see two from where I stood—and a big bronze pineapple bookend. He also had a small stash of pineapple-print ties, some pineapple-patterned shirts and socks. A small bowl of stale oblong chocolates done up in yellow and green foils. He kept eight potted pineapple crowns under special lamps. That night they were a little dry. I’d tell Doug, I thought. If he ever showed.

I was getting antsy. I checked my Meme. Sneaked a licorice pip from
Doug’s jar. Followed it with a pineapple-wrapped chocolate and squirreled a few in my coat pocket for later, along with a pen of Doug’s I’d been coveting. And I tried, for about two minutes, to read a book, until my mind collapsed in boredom.

I also started to feel a tiny twinge of unease, like an invisible hair tickling my cheek. To brush away the feeling, I fetched water for my father’s pet bromeliads and soothed myself with the rich, nutty scent of damp earth. Then I felt the delicious frisson of transgression creep over me.

For as long as I could remember, I’d been curious about what Doug kept in his desk. Siphoning off some of my attention to listen for the sound of his tread, I sat and tried all the drawers. Most were filled with work chaff: loose papers, crumpled notes, broken pencil leads. But then I tried the top drawer on the left. Tugged it. And tugged. Shimmied, a little crazily. Finally it came loose with a crack—a pen wedged at the back, I soon learned, had snapped in half—and the drawer released with a rattle.

To say I was surprised by what Doug had hidden there wouldn’t be quite true. But it did disappoint me. It was a cluttered (and newly ink-smattered) cache—probably the largest private collection in the world—of photographs
³
of Vera Doran. My mother. Douglas Johnson’s soon-to-be ex-wife. And I felt very bad for splashing them with ink. But I also felt a tiny, unfair burst of reprisal. As Max would have said, there are no accidents. She was my mother, and I loved her, but sometimes I wished Doug didn’t anymore. Watching him suffer had been agony.

Looking back on our whole family life through a new dark lens also hadn’t been easy for me. Had my mother really been so unhappy? It hadn’t seemed that way. My parents had never been one of those gloomy couples like some of my friends’. They’d hugged and touched and said “I love you,” to each other and to me, and it had seemed so obviously true that the words were almost a superfluity. Doug would belt
Don Giovanni
to Vera in the kitchen as she laughingly roasted a chicken, trying not to spill her wine. He’d write love notes and scrawl funny drawings on grocery lists and receipts. Vera would mambo through the living room for Doug and me, or pretend the hallway was a catwalk. It’s true that when they’d fought, it had been fulminous—things sometimes went flying—but I’d always taken that as a good sign. And maybe it
was, in a way. Over the past few years those fights had slowly come to an end.

Regardless, there was no denying that Doug’s photos of Vera were gorgeous. There was Vera Doran as Blanche DuBois in her high school’s all-girl production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Vera wearing beautiful bell-bottom flares, hair to there, and in huge orange platform sandals, relaxing near a stage (at Woodstock), joking with some shaggy-haired men (Creedence Clearwater Revival) who were about to perform. Vera in nothing but painted-on jeans bordered by the blocky phrase
THE JORDACHE LOOK
, in an outtake of an ad, ca. 1978, when she and my father had been married just a few years and she was still modeling to augment their income. Vera on her sixth birthday, a formal princess fantasia at the Dorans’ on East Sixty-eighth Street, comporting herself in a tiara encrusted with real diamonds. And my favorite—now tragically dappled with thick black splots—their wedding photo: Vera at twenty-one, a recent Bryn Mawr grad, bedecked in a curtain of blowsy dark-brown hair and a silver lamé minidress. (On seeing it, Mrs. Doran told the bride that it was lucky there was something silver at the ceremony, as she wouldn’t be inheriting any.) In it, Vera’s being fed a glistening bite of pineapple upside-down cake by her groom, a ruddy, pleased-looking man who was nearly twice her size, hairy,
⁴
smiling, in enormous thick-lensed glasses, and sporting a wide pineapple-print tie.

I held that picture for a long time, trying to dab it clean. In it, Vera is arch and easy, laughing out loud as Doug forks cake into her perfectly plump-lipped, large, smiling mouth. She’s lolling sideways, considering something invisible to me. He, in contrast, is watching her with adoring absorption, oblivious to all other witnesses at the scene of the crime—a 1975 backyard wedding at the Doran estate in East Hampton.

I was seized then by what my father would call “an attack of sadness.” The photos made me queasy. They seemed like more proof that devotion fades. That everyone you love will someday, in some way, disappear.

There were a few other pictures, these of Doug—all of which would be confiscated later by police. There was one of him as a teenager,
with Aunt Jean, each posing with a fat brown trout on the North Platte River. Another of Doug delivering the Graduate English Oration when he received his Ph.D. from Harvard, having also delivered the Undergraduate English Oration, “Johnson & Johnson: A Love Affair with
A Dictionary of the English Language
.” Doug punting on the River Isis in Oxford. And one of him and a twelve-year-old me posed with the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. I’d starred in the school play, and he’d made me wear my costume.

There was also something else in the drawer, buried beneath our family history: Doug’s Aleph. I miswrote if I’ve implied that Doug didn’t have a Meme. He didn’t
use
a Meme. (He hated that I had one, but that battle had long been fought. He
had
gotten me to forgo the optional microchip; it made me a little nervous, too. But I was intrigued to see what the new Meme would do—it was supposed to be coming out soon—and I’d contemplated getting one when I upgraded.) Doug did have an Aleph, though, which I’d forgotten about. It was the first model of the Meme that Synchronic, Inc. ever manufactured. It wasn’t widely distributed, but a few had been given to key publishing people when it came out.

From what I understand, Synchronic chose the name Aleph because it represents the number one and the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But the name tested poorly—no one could pronounce it—and the device was full of bugs. It had a very early version of Sixth Sense software, and its Crown, called a Diadem at the time, had almost no sensors; it could only roughly gauge basic mood states. Even after training it for weeks to recognize preferences, the smart technology could guess what you wanted less than 10 percent of the time. “It’s not actually very smart,” Doug had said, “but it does have a good personality.”

It didn’t, though: lots of users complained that a Chinese weather page loaded during games of Ping, or that they were redirected to Russian gambling sites while trying to watch live poker. When the software and hardware had been fixed about a year and a half later, the device was aggressively rebranded as the Meme, and Synchronic offered a steep discount to anyone willing to trade it in. As a result, very few Alephs remained in circulation. Doug’s was one of them. But the significance of finding it was initially lost on me.

It was massive, nearly the size of a book, with clumsy raised buttons and keys. I flicked it on, guessed the password on the third try—one
of Doug’s many pet names for my mother—and while I waited for it to load, I crossed back over toward Doug’s window. Wondered where he could be.

The sounds of streets that blinked red and white below were blocked out completely by the nineteen floors beneath me. Sometimes high winds could send our building creaking, as if on high seas. I looked into the window glass, my reflection rising from the surface like an emerging silver gelatin print. The pane became a parallax. For whoever might look in, it made a still. For me, looking out, it was a mirror, my face floating over all the dim shapes outside. And maybe it was my distance from the ground. The sense, from that height, that human life was illusory. But I felt for a moment as if I were falling a long, long way down. As if the girl reflected on the inside of the glass were merging with the one being watched.