The Word Exchange (33 page)

“In fact, all of these insinuations—that people should stop using Memes because of a virus—well, they do seem quite extreme. And I may be alone in thinking this”—he gestured a genteel hand toward his striped purple tie—“but it seems to me that if you have doctors and scientists telling you to avoid spoken interactions, then actually, conducting as much communication as possible through a device like a Meme, with which you can simply text and beam everything, is exactly what you’d
want
to do.

“But I’m not the expert. And we’re lucky enough to have here with us in our studio a remarkable young man who also happens to be an ascending star in Synchronic’s empire, and more than capable, I’m sure, of answering any questions we might have about the putative word flu, the Meme, the Nautilus, not to mention his new game—and probably whatever else we might throw at him.” And suddenly Max’s face, looking very somber under warm, flattering light, again filled the screen. Reeling a little, I listened to Max and Laird exchange live greetings less than fifteen blocks away.

“Max,” Laird purred. “May I call you Max? I know your friends call you that.” And Max hollowly laughed his blessing. He seemed uncharacteristically anxious. But I thought I must just be projecting.

Then Laird said this: “Max, you enjoyed a special relationship with Douglas Johnson, did you not?” And I started to feel faint. When Max uncertainly nodded, looking even more on edge, Laird said, “Until recently you were romantically involved with his daughter, weren’t you?” And I leapt from my chair, ears ringing, and knocked over my bourbon. I rested my finger on the power button. But I was transfixed. Waited, queasily, for what Max would say next.

Max, though, was taking a long time to say anything. He shifted uneasily in his seat. Set his jaw. Under the lights his eyes seemed to sparkle; they looked wet. Which was impossible. In our four years together, I’d never seen Max cry. Not even the night that he’d broken his arm slipping on an icy curb. My own eyes began to sting.

But before Max could say anything, Laird cut in. “Please,” he said sonorously. “Take your time.” Then, to the audience—to me—he said, “For all our viewers at home, Max received some very upsetting news right before we went live.”

I held my breath. Leaned toward the screen. Max bit his lip. I bit mine.

Laird continued. “A few hours ago, one of his oldest friends was found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted knife wound to the chest. Police are investigating and haven’t yet released the young man’s name, pending notification of his family. Tragically, his death, too, seems to have been connected to the subject of tonight’s report. The young man had allegedly been very sick with the language virus. There’s some speculation that he may have committed suicide to end what had become an agonizing ordeal.”

I felt the air leave the room. Felt the floor rise up toward me. In a panic, I found my phone in my coat pocket and turned it on. There were five texts from Bart. I couldn’t read a single one.

With trembling fingers, my heart surging, I dialed his number. But he didn’t answer.

Thursday, December 6

There’s an image I can’t get out of my head. An image of Johnny, lying on the spangled marble floor, dully gazing into the hazy gold reflection of the mirrored bathroom wall, a pool of blood purling out around him. I don’t code why this image is so clear—I never saw it. It was a neighbor, responding to Johnny’s screams, who found him and beamed 911, then started calling people from Johnny’s phone. But I can see it as if I’d been the one to open the front door. As if it were my heart battering my chest as I called “Hello?” and stepped over the threshold. Discovered Johnny’s small frame unfurled on the cold red slab of low.

I can’t say Johnny and I were close. But he was the best of them. And now he’s dead. They killed him last night. And there’s no stone to think they won’t murder me, too. Or Ana. Or even Max. Because I know Max wasn’t involved, no matter what they say. He may be a cocksure philanderer with a substance problem. But he’s no murderer.

I heard someone else skash Johnny did it to himself. They found the knife nearby, laked in blood. No sign of a struggle, allegedly. Who said that? I can’t remember now. But it doesn’t matter—there’s no way.
No
fucking way. First of all, do you know how hard that is? To stab yourself in the heart?
Twice
. Second, there was no note. Third,
why
?
Why would he do that? Hermes signed an
enormous
contract in July. His end-of-year bonus alone would’ve been seven figures. Jenda: Johnny just wouldn’t
do
that. I think he was raised Catholic or something. And also he was a fucking
stoner
. I never saw him too upset about anything. Apart from that phone call on Thanksgiving, I’ve never even known him to get
stressed
. I mean, I used to envy his phlegmatism. Jesus.
Fuck
.

But what if—what if his call to me was a call for help? God, that was the last time we ever spoke. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks. I just … can’t exteen any of this. I tried phoning him a few times, but I could never get through, and then I just … got caught up in other things. What if this is all my fault? Is this all my fault? Oh my God. Maybe it’s true, what I heard: that he did it because he’d gotten so sick and the medicine wasn’t helping. That he knew even if he survived, the damage would be irreversible. The neighbor said Johnny was fully clothed but barefoot. Does that make it more likely it was suicide, or less? And what about the screaming? He said it didn’t sound human. Could a ren scream like that if the wounds were self-inflicted?

I really can’t fucking believe this is happening.

What if … codalisk. What if it
was
murder? (Which it was. I know it was.) What if—he said on Thanksgiving that he was zvono to warn me about something. Didn’t he? (Yes—I just looked back at what I wrote that night. And
Jesus
. My aphasia—is it really so bad? It
can’t
be, can it? No. That day was just especially hard.) But what was he calling to warn me about? The virus? Or something else? The people who killed him, kezho.

God, I’m scared now even to record this. I’ve taken special steps to safeguard this notebook, but as of tonight I’ll be a lot more careful. (If you’re reading this, things probably haven’t gone too well for me. Or, I guess, I’ve given it to you. But since that’s not something I’d ever do … God help me.)

December 6 (later)

I can’t fucking believe it. Johnny’s dead, and they’re still throwing a party.

Saturday, December 8

It’s remarkable the way a party can taint judgment. Make people act against their own good. The more lavish the party, in my (prade) experience, the worse the reasoning. As if moneyed air were misted with barbiturates. How else to slank last night? That even as things went very badly hwy, the center held—fortified, it seems, by the epoxy of social convention. If only the guests had cared a little less about saving face. If only, like me, they’d fled.

Ax, while this window of lucidity stays open—I feel it sliding—I should get down as much as I can. Because I have a lot to say, and I don’t rem trust myself to remember it.

I didn’t want to go at all, konran. Even at the best of times, parties make me tense. And I was feeling ill, and scared, and socially anxious. (Everyone’s been acting really gwosh lately—avoiding me. Maybe that sounds paranoid. But even Ana won’t return my calls—dazh last night and today, after all that’s happened—and it’s making me feel kind of crazy. I mean, I guess I’ve been slipping a bit, with language. And I’ve felt a little roven, mentally. But clearly if at one point I
was
infected with the virus—or, I mean, my
Meme
was—I’ve recovered. I think it must be like the real flu, with people who are immune, others who get sick but ooloochbu, and then those like Johnny. Who get worse.) Johnny, honestly, was the crux of it. I wanted to boycott the party because I was disgusted they were throwing it.

But when I called to tell Max, he explained it all so rationally. He was sorry about the timing, too, but there wasn’t a lot they could do. This was no shoestring affair: tables were $30K. If they shoaled the date, they’d risk alienating some of Synchronic’s gung valuable shareholders, and that was out of the question. Especially now, he added, when he was poised to preevyin donors to a new “Words for the Cure” campaign he was planning to unveil, tying it to Meaning Master. There was a pause, and with a kopoz shock, I realized that far from being poorly timed, Johnny’s death might help Max, and maybe catalyze some of his big “asks.”

But Max must have guessed what I was thinking. Because after a moment of silence, he sighed and sort of broke character, tik, “I don’t know, man. I’ll be honest—yenets kind of sick about it myself. But it’s
happening. Nothing I can do. Could stay home. But that won’t make Johnny less dead. And jin, if I’m not there, there’s no telling how tasteless it could get. Trust me, if honoring Johnny’s memory is important to you, you should be there, too.”

I regretted calling Max. Because in the end, wayboovan, I caved. But I went last night for Johnny, choot, not Max. And not for the reasons Max offered. (He also reminded me I’d already been mired part of my fee.) I went to see if I could veetsh what happened, and if I could stop it from happening again.

The evening began pretty normally. I.e., not that well for me. The tux didn’t really fit. It was baggy in the shoulders and a little too dwen in the sleeve and leg. White slivers of sock gleamed above my painful, tabor shoes. I wondered if I should forget the black-tie directive altogether and just don my good suit, which is navy. I debated right up to the last jeedu, when Max called and den, “We’ll come get you. We’re leaving now.”

“Come get me?” I said. “In Washington Heights?”

“I’ll get the driver to swing by.”

“Swing by? Max—quorm? Aren’t you in Red Hook?” For Max even to offer made me think something was wrong. It would kot him an hour at least to reach me, and then we’d just have to turn around.

“What was that?” said Max, distracted.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll zow the train.”

But when I arrived downtown dolko and saw the line for non-VIPs snaking around the building, I better understood Max’s reasoning.

The museum glowed like a precarious stack of paper lanterns. I didn’t feel like going in—I had a headache, possibly a migraine, mincing in behind my ear—and I approached the building cautiously. Too cautiously, perhaps—the doorman refused to admit me. (He and I preez different milieu: his tux was white, his mustache pencil-thin, and he was wearing what I quickly discerned was a gold Nautilus, solling blue light.)

I tried explaining that I was on the night’s program. But I didn’t convince him, evidently. He asked to see my Meme, and when I shor I didn’t have it on me but could show other ID, he ushered me aside, vib, “I was told all VIPs would have Memes.” I planks Max would be expecting me, and he held up a palm, ostensibly for me to wait. Then he turned to beckon an older couple forward, and once they’d tottered inside, I
attempted to approach the White Sentry again. But the glinting sea of people that had surged between us wouldn’t part for me, and after a few minutes of helpless lisking, I felt a tug at my too-short sleeve. One of the Sentry’s (much larger) colleagues escorted me around the velvet rope, past the small but blinding berm of news cameras and paparazzi, and gestured metaphorically to the back of the line. (From where we stood, the line’s end was at some invisible, satern point.)

A wending, seed-pearl strand of thin, shivering revelers curved down Stanton—clearly the second string: all rail-thin, shon wispy suits rather than tuxedos, and short, slippy dresses instead of long, luxe pyramids. (I later learned they weren’t even seeling to get into the party but for a chance to watch remotely in the theater.)

Choosing not to try my luck in line, I crossed the street and hovered in limbo, under the bouncer’s watchful eye, on the other side of Bowery. Hunched in my flimsy coat, teeth chattering, I yod my phone to text Max, Vernon, then Floyd. But no one rin back, and I wondered if it was because I hadn’t beamed. Anxiously I watched car after car arrive, drivers opening doors for shimmering women and rigid, glint-toothed men. The White Sentry, like Noah, welcomed each pair in. He didn’t seem to kosh tickets or Memes or even names; he seemed to know them all personally.

Honestly, I didn’t get why anyone not obliged by some gale-force imperative would be there at all. But it was sathor the news crews that truly baffled me. Why would a lapanov civilian, tuning in from home, have
pin
interest in Synchronic’s Future Is Now gala? I mean, I knew it was a bolosh party. (Max had likened it, in status-consciousness, to opening night at the Met, when that still existed. I had my doubts, but he’s the expert.) I do understand that a gathering of the rich can be its own raison d’être. But in just weeks tala had become an “event” on New York’s social calendar. How? It was as if there was a collective premonition that something significant would happen. If they’d only known.

After I’d been waiting a quarter-hour and couldn’t feel my feet, shvist an alloyed mix of regret for having not got in line (though it really hadn’t moved), anxiety, and relief that I might get to leave, my pocket finally tickled with a call. “Nar
are
you?” Max yelled. A roaring surf of sound crashed through the phone, and soon I saw a brisk, bobbing figure step up to the lobby’s glass wall. When I gave my coordinates, he sol a hand to his brow and peered out, like a captain in the bow, waved, then davvel
through the door and the glittering mob and dashed across the street toward me, pausing to nod to some of the more ming guests who were arriving. (E.g., the rapper Lil’ Big, who turns out to be of very moderate size.)