The Word Exchange (27 page)

And here’s another contradiction latent in
Urteil
: the only way to verify that “I” exists is through estrangement, by validating what’s outside of it with something other than itself. Even when that something other
is
, in a sense, itself. Consciousness is a process of constant alienation. The mind, through reflection, confronting itself.

Always, then, a last unbreachable gasp. Irrefutable, incommutable. Between time and mind. Meaning and sign. Between the thing and what’s inside it. I and I. The cave and light. The lover and his love. Bartleby and his scrive, I mean his livelihood, I mean his life (i.e., A).

That … was exhausting. And I see, in reading it over (five times), that it’s also unintelligible. But at least in the way I always am. It’s a relief that I can still (tovosh) muddle things out. Although (and this may be my imagination—please, God, I hope) it feels harder now. Those four short paragraphs—I’d rather not say how long they took to ex, and weed of slips. This disease, if that’s really what it is—what if it doesn’t only haze speech? Could it also damage thinking? And what if it’s not temporary? Why does it seem like Ana’s gotten better, but not Johnny? It must be the Meme, right? I need to tell A. But since I’ve stopped using it, I should be okay. Shouldn’t I? (Does this make me sound completely fucking crazy?)

Maybe Hegel had it wrong: laber there’s no mystical link between the speaker of a word and the recipient of its sound. Maybe language isn’t unity but domination. Unilateral. Unkind.

Hearing is the most determinant first sense. As a fetus, coiled in your mother’s pink skin tent, what you saw was perpetual darkness; what you tasted, salty broth; what you zhowvat was warmth; what you smelled—well, who knows?—but what you
heard
was an enveloping rampart of sound. The gurgle of your turns. The thunderous pounding of your mother’s heart. The world, outside, intruding. And you just a passive, inert pea. You could drome, with all your tiny might,
I prefer not to
. But it would do no good.

Nearly two weeks passed between the morning I learned from Dr. Thwaite of secret meetings at the Merc and the night I was able to confirm them. In the meantime, the library was closed. For renovations, according to a taciturn window note.

Those were a dark and difficult two weeks. In my hardest, most alone moments, I felt fragmented by fear, each of my worries a crosshatch in a broken mirror. I still hadn’t heard from Doug. As far as I knew, no one had. And despite Dr. Thwaite’s assurance that he was fine, and flight records showing he’d at least arrived safely in Iceland on November 17, I couldn’t help but fear the worst. When I called his friend Fergus Hedstrom’s office in New York, his assistant would only say, “Mr. Hedstrom is out of the country.” Eventually she stopped answering, as did her colleagues in Reykjavík and London.

The NYPD hadn’t unearthed many leads either. Initially Detective Billings seemed to have news nearly every day. Doug had bought his ticket to Iceland the same night he’d left, a $1,500 one-way. He’d charged $300 at the Newark Liberty Brooks Brothers. In Keflavik airport he’d withdrawn $2,000 in cash. After that, though, except for some licorice and dried fish he’d bought at Inspired by Iceland, he hadn’t used his card. (They probably could have tracked the cash, it’s used so rarely. Which meant he wasn’t spending it.) Cameras had caught him walking out of baggage claim with a statuesque blonde; the black sedan she drove was
registered to an unemployed contractor, Arinbjörn Hermannsson. But Doug still hadn’t been found. And Icelandic police apparently couldn’t confirm he was even still in Iceland.

The reality was that the younger, far less competent officer, the aptly named Maroney, had become the de facto lead on Doug’s case. Detective Billings had become busy with other things. A spike in city violence—what the
Post
called “an epidemic”—began around Thanksgiving. Perhaps even more alarming, speculation had grown that the strange “language virus” might be the result of bioterrorism. And it was rumored to be spreading not only through the boroughs, but cities all across the country.

Details were difficult to confirm; some news reports had started getting garbled, too, and like many people, I’d mostly stopped tuning in. Anchors averred that the disease couldn’t be transmitted by airwaves, but no one knew for certain. And a few scattered reports claimed that infections had happened by phone.

Strangely, most people didn’t seem to suffer symptoms other than aphasia those first few days and weeks. The ones who did, though, got desperately sick, and often very quickly. Some shook. Some raged violently. Some were euphoric, or emptied of emotion. Most were felled by blinding headaches. Nausea, vomiting, weakness, fever. Their bones and muscles ached. All displayed varying degrees of difficulty with language. Progression rates varied; while some succumbed within days, it was said that others lived, even managed to function, for far longer—weeks.

We didn’t understand transmission then, didn’t know that while only one fatal illness was circulating, something else, also highly contagious, was producing similar indications in victims. All we knew was that a virus—what had popularly become known as “word flu”—appeared to move through speech and language. Soon after talking with an infected person, interlocutors also often stopped making sense. Antivirals, even given early, didn’t always seem to prevent death. Of those who survived, many weren’t quite the same after.

The NYPD was on high alert. So was the public. The air of paranoia was nearly palpable: everywhere I went—the street, store, train—people gave off the hostile heat of hypervigilance. If someone even mumbled in the subway, everyone glared. Put fingers in their ears. Switched cars. Many wore cloth or paper masks, like those I’d seen in the Creatorium.
There was a run on earplugs. People who knew of them were snapping up Japanese silence guns. Naturally anxiety was compounded by the lack of information—and by trepidation about trying to gather more. “Word is my doctor’s receptionist has it,” I overheard one woman complain. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Plenty, of course, went blithely on. Denied the seriousness of the virus. Embraced fatalism. “Fearmongers and conspiracy theorists,” Ramona scoffed on the phone. “What are we supposed to do? Stop jeen our shung?” “Ramona,” I said firmly, “you have to go to a doctor. There’s medicine you need to take. I have some—I’ll give it to you.” I had only a hair-thin moment of doubt after I said it. I wasn’t sure how quickly—or if—I’d be able to get more pills. But I was glad and relieved that my mouth had spoken for my heart and not my brain. Regardless, it was moot: Ramona laughed me off. “Nans, you’re zowt it, too,” she said. And it made my stomach lurch; it was true. I kept telling myself that I just had lingering symptoms, not new ones. But the truth was, I didn’t know. “Ramona, I love you,” I said, “but I’m hanging up. Please get yourself help. Or let
me
help you. Send some kind of signal if you change your mind. And stop using a Meme.”

I tried to enlist Audrey to intervene with Ramona, but she replied by text—as well as she could—that she was sick, too, taking antivirals and terrified. She wouldn’t let me visit and told me not to call again; she’d get back in touch when she was well.

Coco was still okay, thank God, as were Jesmyn and our friend Theo. But we all agreed to start screening our calls. I asked them to use only my new cell,
¹
and I tried to convince them to switch, too. But arguing that they should replace their Memes with obsolete, unreliable phones wasn’t easy, especially with advertising for Synchronic’s latest model, the Nautilus, reaching fevered ubiquity during those two weeks. Even I couldn’t avoid the campaign, and I was barely consuming any media. Nearly everywhere I looked—buses and taxis, the subway, billboards, elevators, bathroom mirrors—I saw
Nautilus: The Future Is Now
, with the subheadings
You Could Be a Meaning Master/Don’t Miss the Party: Win $100,000 December 7
. (Some of these ads, I noticed, had been defaced with a strange symbol: Ø.)

“Memes have been around forever, Nans,” Coco said, voice crackling through my phone. “I’ve never heard anything about them being unsafe. And you know they don’t get viruses.” That had always been the claim.

“Cocoon, please,” I begged. “You have to listen to me. Can we meet? Can I come to your place? Or the studio? I’m telling you—”

But, sighing, she cut me off. “Anana—stop. This … all this crazy, crazy talk about Memes and machines—you need help. You know it. You know you’re sublimating, or projecting, or whatever psychologists say.” Her voice was heavy with exasperation. “Forgive me,
mignonne
,” she said. “But you’re really starting to sound like your dad.” It was a while before we talked again after that.

Speaking of Doug, though, the truth was, I was relieved that Detective Billings was off his case; in our last exchange he’d said, “I’ll spate if I hear anything, Ms. Johnson.”

But I hadn’t been relying on the police. I’d been looking for my father on my own.

Ignoring the warning letter I’d received, I made many visits to the Dictionary, which was soon in the process of transition. Synchronic had in fact bought our words—whether to put on the Exchange or simply to hold in escrow we didn’t know. Bart had been the one to verify the deal, a couple days after Thanksgiving. But following the holiday weekend, several news outlets had reported it, too: the rapid sale, the dramatic launch cancellation—especially striking given how few publishing events took place anymore (a few reporters claimed it was evidence that the printed word was officially dead), the scheduling of the Future Is Now gala just a few weeks later, to celebrate the merger and unveil the Nautilus. The intrigue of Doug’s still-unknown whereabouts was the lead of more than one story. It was also noted that the
NADEL
’s print edition seemed to have vanished. No copies were for sale. Anywhere. Anyone attempting to buy it online received the message “Item Sold Out & Temporarily Unavailable. Please Try Us Again.”

But very soon news of the virus superseded the Synchronic story, and it mattered only to us at the Dictionary. There was a swift downsizing to reduce “redundancies”; most of us were let go. We were allowed two weeks to gather our things, or in my case both Doug’s and mine. A few times I saw the stomach-turning sight of Synchronic executives strolling through the halls, peering like realtors into half-empty offices. I of course tried calling everyone I knew on the board. They expressed
their sympathies—they were especially sorry that I’d had no word from Doug—but after the sale there was nothing they could do, they said. (Some conveyed this point less than coherently.)

Bart, oddly, was one of those who planned to stay on after Synchronic bought the
NADEL
’s terms; he confessed to me the upsetting news that he’d been hired by Max et al. to do a project with Hermes—also owned by Synchronic, of course. He said it involved Hermes’s new game, Meaning Master, and the December 7 gala.
²
(Before he mentioned it, I’d never heard of Meaning Master; I certainly didn’t know that during the month of November it had become a phenomenon. Or that Max and his friends had developed it. Some of my own friends had probably decided to insulate me from whatever news they’d heard.)

But as Bart furtively explained when we took a break away from the office one afternoon during that week after Thanksgiving, he’d agreed to stay on mostly to learn more about what had happened to the
NADEL
and to find out what future, if any, it might have. So far, though, his torrent of calls to the warehouse and retailers had been one-sided: no one called back. And during the few days that he’d still been able to log in to our corpus, he’d started seeing larger and larger holes—and odd interpolations—consistent with what I’d seen at the Creatorium. He hadn’t been able to find any of our many backups. Naturally he’d contacted IT. That, though, was when he began getting questions from Synchronic’s higher-ups, who wanted to know why he was making inquiries that didn’t concern him, on company time.

This news from Bart—that he was working for Synchronic, whatever his motives might be; that he was seeing Max regularly—complicated my feelings about spending time with him. And of course he also had aphasia.

Since I still had a second course of medicine from Doug that I kept with me at all times, I took some risks at first, talking to sick people, which I maybe shouldn’t have. With Bart in particular I found it very difficult to break contact, especially because, even though he had trouble making himself understood, he still didn’t seem unwell to me—not with the kind of symptoms Doug had warned me about.

In fact Bart
had
gotten sick—we all had—after Thanksgiving, but
just for the weekend: one last parting gift from that charming evening. Although actually, I did get something of a real parting gift. When we’d recovered, the week I was hauling boxes from the Dictionary, my grandparents took me to a slightly stilted lunch with my mother and made me take some money. (At the lunch I voiced my worry that they might all have the language virus. “Maybe from your strange friend,” my grandmother said, and I had to concede the possibility—or that they’d gotten it from me. They ignored my suggestion that they get rid of their Memes but told me they’d already collected antivirals when they’d seen the doctor for food poisoning.)

In theory, my grandparents beamed me money because they worried how I’d manage, “now that you’re, you know, on your own.” I.e., no longer the potential future bride of An Impressive Young Man. But in truth I think they’d been a little shamed by Bart, aphasic or not, and this was the way they knew to make amends.