The Word Exchange (30 page)

The meeting room we shuffled into was bright, overheated, and crowded. A card table crammed with samovar, coffee urn, and dusty cookies governed the sole corner not lined with books. A curtained window rattled, letting in a draft. A hive of fluorescents buzzed above. More than twenty mismatched chairs were pinched into a circle, and several people stood.

Dr. Thwaite hurried for a plush brocade, leaving me stranded at the door. But Victoria Mark tapped the metal chair beside her, rings clacking with the archaic sound of chalk on a blackboard. Being affirmed by her seemed to grant instant credibility; several strangers turned to look at me with friendly curiosity.

But as I sat, shrugging off my coat and glancing around the room, I discovered that Victoria and Dr. Thwaite weren’t the only people I knew. A few chairs to my left I saw the crooked smile and frizzy amber curls of Clara Strange, from Bart’s department at the Dictionary. She waved. To her right was elegant, white-blond Tommy Keach, one of the pamphleteers I’d met on the street; there were several others. And on Clara’s left was the older man I’d seen reading the paper on the mezzanine. “Franz,” he said gruffly, leaning across the circle to extend a warm, onionskin hand. “Garfinkel?” I asked, amazed. Franz Garfinkel was a god of lexicography. He nodded, more astonished than I was at being recognized, grim face crumpling into a smile.

I also saw a stranger I’d been noticing around lately. The woman with
red glasses and chin-length silver hair was seated right across from me—and staring me down with bleak, smoky intensity. I shifted uneasily in my seat, turning to see if there was someone behind me. There was not.

And yet another person’s presence threw me off even more. A person I wasn’t very glad to see. Across the circle, long legs stretched out in front of him and working to prop up a silver-handled cane, was Max’s business partner and friend Vernon Peach. It had taken me a few moments to notice him; his signature glasses were peeking from his shirt pocket instead of perched on his face. Despite the room’s heat, he also had a black watch cap tugged tightly down and a gray scarf looped around his neck. As if trying to go incognito. When I did finally see him, I felt a flurry in my chest. I’d always liked Vernon. But I’d seen none of Max’s friends since he’d moved out, and it made me anxious. Not least because he was a Synchronic employee.

But he quickly caught my eye and smiled. “Hi, Anana,” he mouthed. “So good to see you.” Pressed a hand to his heart. And a lump surprised me by rising in my throat. “You, too,” I mouthed back, swallowing hard.

By then the meeting had been called to order, and Victoria was introducing me. The people I didn’t know gave their names. Except the woman in red glasses, who was still glowering. It was Victoria who explained that she was Susan Janowitz, also once of VIB.

Then Susan confused me by sharply saying, “I expected her much sooner.”

Someone mumbled, “Renovations,” and I saw Victoria’s eyes dart to Dr. Thwaite, but she just said, “It doesn’t matter. We’re glad you’re here now, Anana. Susan is just …”

“Susan is just what?” Susan said. Crossed her thin arms.

Victoria placed a gentle hand on Susan’s knee. Then said that as I’d already guessed, this was a meeting of the Diachronic Society. “Most of us are colleagues,” she offered. Then amended, “Former colleagues.” Adjusted her gold bracelets. “We’ve been holding these meetings for a long time now. First as the Samuel Johnson Society—”

“Or the
Douglas
Johnson Society,” a dark-haired man I didn’t recognize said, and laughed. It struck me as oddly tone-deaf and unkind, especially after I’d just been introduced. But when he saw he was the only one laughing, he quickly quieted, and Victoria carried on.

“During the years when we were the Samuel Johnson Society,” she
said, “our meetings were largely attended by lexicographers and Johnson enthusiasts. We discussed his
Dictionary
and letters and essays. Occasionally a biography. But mostly the meetings gave us a chance to talk about the pleasures—and the difficulties—of still working in publishing.”

Difficulties that quickly proliferated as time went on, Clara Strange chimed in, especially with the rise of Synchronic—buying up terms for the Exchange, precipitating the closure of many dictionaries, and maybe even publishers. Synchronic’s monolithic online limn store put a lot of pressure on the price of books.

Victoria nodded gravely. “Over the past few years, all of our lives have changed quite dramatically.” Many had lost jobs, she said. Several had been forced to leave New York. “They couldn’t afford it anymore,” she explained, hand rising to her throat. “They had to go back to their home countries, where it’s still possible to make something of a living working with words.”

“Pavel,” Franz angrily muttered. “And Yuki.”

Victoria inhaled sharply, closing her eyes. The dark glasses balanced on her hair reflected the crosshatchings of the overheads and made her look like a stately, lethal insect.

“So as all that began to happen,” Vernon said, picking up the thread, “the focus of the meetings shifted.” He leaned back in his chair. Crossed his extensive legs at the ankle. “We talked about Synchronic nearly every week—that became our new focus, making sure the public knows what they’re up to.” He seemed impartial, and I wondered how. As a founding partner of Hermes, why didn’t he sound defensive?

He clearly noticed my confusion. “Anana, you don’t know what a fierce apologist I used to be for Synchronic,” he said, shaking his head.

He’d come to his first meeting a couple years earlier on a lark, he explained, as a Johnson scholar, when it was still mainly a literary group. Enchanted by the characters he’d found—“He means Luddites,” Dr. Thwaite interjected; “Weirdos,” Franz expounded, quivering his hands—he kept coming back. Slowly, as complaints about Synchronic’s tactics took up more and more of each meeting’s agenda, Vernon initially felt duty-bound to defend the company’s “new vision” for language: making it “accessible,” “easy,” and “fun.” That aim overlapped with what he and Max and the others had been doing at Hermes.

“In the beginning I kept saying that there was every reason to believe
the Exchange would only expand people’s vocabularies—any word they might need was always right at their fingertips.”

“But not,” Franz noted, “in their brains.”

Vern had argued that to insist on old lexicographic methods was naive—reactionary, even. “People want their words
now
,” he’d said at the time. “They don’t want to have to work so hard for them. They want entertainment and learning integrated. What’s so wrong with that?” What’s wrong, the Society’s members had replied, is that it wasn’t how it’s done. Vernon had rolled his eyes. “See,
this
is why you guys are getting left behind,” he’d said.

It had been Doug who’d convinced him, over months, that there was more to it than Vernon thought. Not just dragged feet and a few lost jobs. “You’re restructuring supply lines,” he’d said. “Understand? Once you go down that road, you can’t go back again. The road’s gone.” “Like that invisible bridge in
The Last Crusade
,” Vernon had teased. But Doug wouldn’t joke with him, which was sobering.

Moving all our words onto one consolidated exchange, changing the way we use and access language, through Memes—it wasn’t just affecting our economy or culture, Doug had explained. The technology was actually rewiring people’s brains. Changing neuronal pathways and reward systems. They were forgetting things, or not learning them in the first place. And if we didn’t really have a shared, communal language—if we had nothing but a provisional relationship with words, a leaseholder’s agreement—what would happen, Doug had asked Vernon, if something went wrong? If, God forbid, there was a cyberattack on Exchange servers and language “went down”? How would we communicate then? A point he’d underscored by reminding all of them about the computer virus that had more or less shut down the whole island of Taiwan for close to six months a couple of years earlier. Annoyed, Vernon had argued that Synchronic had the best firewalls money could buy. “Better than yours,” he’d shot back at Doug. “Probably,” Doug had responded grimly.

“Eventually I just … couldn’t really defend them anymore,” Vernon said, absently tapping his cane. “Especially when more and more friends”—he nodded at the room—“started being negatively affected by their policies. And then I started seeing things—at Hermes, and later Synchronic—that I found pretty alarming.” Things like negligible oversight, shady contracts, breaches in security, changes to the game
of Meaning Master that didn’t seem quite ethical or legal, deals with foreign partners whom Vernon had his doubts about.

“But when we decided on our name, the Diachronic Society,” he went on, “it wasn’t meant only as a sort of jab at Synchronic. It was really more of an homage to diachronism.”

“Taking the long view,” Clara Strange offered.

“Connecting with the labor,” added Franz, making a hoop in the air with his hands.

“Doing things ‘analog,’ as my daughter would say,” offered a man whose name I hadn’t caught. “Leaving a paper trail,” said Tommy Keach.

“Which is why these meetings have recently become more secretive,” Victoria explained. “And why everything we say here is confidential. Leaving a paper trail isn’t always very safe, depending on what those papers say. Some members have made the very brave and deliberate choice to share what information we’ve collected publicly. But we’d like to keep that a choice for everyone. Especially as some of us have received explicit threats.” She glanced at Dr. Thwaite, who pretended not to see. I wondered what that look was meant to say. I thought of Rodney, and of the squad car on my block. I also couldn’t help but think of Doug, who’d just been spoken of so much. And who wasn’t there.

I cleared my throat. My heart was beating painfully. “I know a lot of you,” I began, my eyes traveling around the crowded room. “Some of you I’ve just met. And I hope you’ll forgive me for repeating myself, because I’ve already asked most of you this question. But I’ve spent the past three weeks looking for my father. And there’s nothing I want more than to find out where he is. But at this point”—and here I, too, let my attention settle on Dr. Thwaite—“I just want to confirm that he’s—he’s still okay. So if any of you know anyth—”

“He’s fine,” Dr. Thwaite cut in abruptly. His eyes shooting, for some reason, to Susan.

“Phineas,” Victoria said darkly. “You haven’t told her?”

“Told me what?” I asked. Tiny white dots started sparkling in my vision.

“That he’s talked to your father,” Clara hurriedly explained, curls gently quaking. “And he really is okay, don’t worry—Phineas, tell her—just at an ‘undisclosed location.’ ”

But Dr. Thwaite was still staring silently at Susan, who was staring back with equal intensity from behind her red glasses.

And before I could ask what was going on, my phone began to ring.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, groping at my coat. And I kept apologizing—everyone was watching—until I’d finally turned it off. I saw that the caller was Bart, and that I’d somehow missed two other calls from him.

Susan turned her stern gaze back to me. “We don’t allow phones,” she said coldly.

I knew some people were afraid the virus could be transmitted that way. I nodded, but then I continued on. “The reason I’ve been even more worried lately about my dad”—and myself, I didn’t add—“is that I heard a story last week that was really pretty frightening.”

After what Victoria had just said about receiving threats, I felt compelled to tell them what had happened to Rodney, although I didn’t use his name. As I spoke, the tensile energy of focused listening filled the room. “And this same man who stabbed my friend I-I saw him,” I said shivering. “The night after my father went missing.”

The room’s silence took on a different quality, as if changing from amber to red. Then Susan, her face flushing slightly, said, “Tell us what you mean.”

Which is how I found myself describing what I’d seen that night in the Creatorium: the disassembly line; the furnace; the workers with their strange coils (Nautiluses, several Society members confirmed); “paradox” vanishing from our corpus. I confessed that I’d gotten sick after using the foreman’s device but quickly added that I’d taken a course of treatment. And for the first time since I told it—to Bart, and later to the police—no one seemed to doubt what I said. Which I almost regretted. Because when I looked at Dr. Thwaite, he was extremely white. In a strangled voice, he said, “This is very serious.”

“Why?” I asked, shivering again. “What does it mean?”

“Mean?” Dr. Thwaite said, a little stridently.

The dark-haired man who’d started off the meeting with the flat joke about Doug broke in. “I think the Chinese mafia is involved—or the government. Maybe the Russians.”

“Involved? In what?” I asked, trying not to sound too incredulous or judgmental.

“Please,” Franz said, raising his big hands. “We don’t know who the partners of Synchronic might be. Let us not make assumptions.”

“Come
on
,” the man jeered, eyes bulging slightly. “You think it’s a
coincidence
all those workers were Russian and Chinese?”

“They weren’t all. They were—”

“I’m not saying it’s the
workers’
fault,” the man continued, talking over me. “I’m just saying, let’s use our heads, for Christ’s sakes. Doesn’t this remind anyone else of the Russian-Georgian cyberconflict back in ’08? Or, I don’t know, the attack on Taiwan in 2016?”

“But that was just a computer virus,” I cut in again. I remembered it well—the many patches we’d had to implement after.

“It wasn’t just a computer virus,” Rob responded, pulling his long gray ponytail over his shoulder. “It was a large-scale, ongoing cyberattack. Devices that got infected with the virus were recruited into botnets and used to stage assaults on more secure networks.”

I’d read that in one of the Society’s pamphlets, but I didn’t see the connection. “That may be,” I said. “But that’s not what’s happening here—”