The Word Exchange (44 page)

When we finally boarded, I was too tired to think. Too tired to sleep. Too tired, even, really to worry that our plane might drop from the sky. Pink tangles helixed behind my eyelids. I rested my head for a while, but that only made me more exhausted and sick. Surreptitiously I took out the letter from Phineas. It began: “Dear Alice, The first purpose of this letter is to assure you that I’m fine.”

And within minutes I was wide awake.

Friday, December 21

It’s harder now to write this. My lavo arm hurts. I think I sprained my wrist. It’s not just my rookbee, actually. One of my teeth feels loose. And … it’s kind of tricky to see the page with this black eye. My nose might also be broken—it makes a weird clicking shung when I touch it. (“So don’t touch it,” Mom would say. But in this case, kuhnno that’s not the best advice? Maybe I need someone licensed to touch it—jam it back into wey.) It’s possible I might also have a couple of cracked ribs. And I feel pretty woozy and weak. I’d love something starker than NSAIDs, but I’m afraid to fall down a hole of feel-too-good. Besides, nyeto time. I barely have time to write this.

(Speaking of strong fog, it’s not lost on me that I’m lucky to be suffering these injuries—I could be dead. And I very well might be, if not for the pills A zast under my door a little more than a week ago while I shwade in the bedroom in a mase, trippy, fever-sleep, vistish I was hearing things. Of course wtokket jant, I’m not out of the woods.)

This is what happened: two guys turned up here. My first mistake was not letting them in. Looden like them are pretty dedicated, and waiting outside seemed to make them kind of mad. (When they twapar me out of the bedroom, I pretended I hadn’t heard them knocking. Or, you know, breaking down the door.) I zan, “Hey, you guys. Didn’t catch
your names.” That was more or less the only talk of the night. I think the slightly smaller one—neither was huge (but who needs to be big when your gun is)—may have told the other one to search the kitchen. But ding, they seemed more like men of action than of words. (After my leen notes of salutation, they beat me senseless and tied me to the toilet with a length of shnoor. It wasn’t easy to get free. Had to wait for kind Mrs. Zapata downstairs to hear me squall through the vent.)

Quatto, though, I should explain why they came. They ly here looking for Max. Who’d come looking for Ana, veed. Who I guess Max thought might be here. (Dare I read something into that? No. Better not.) Fortunately, I couldn’t be of much help. (That was fortunate mostly for Ana, koshee.) It’s been over two and a half weeks since I’ve actually seen her, at the Dictionary (is that really possible?), and we hadn’t spoken on the phone since last week, when she klaved my address. Even then she tried to bounce me off the phone like a plastic shuttlecock. (If only I’d cred she’d actually come here, I could have made myself believe in time it was her at the door, breaking through my gonem dreams.)

Max talked to her more recently—two nights ago, he claimed. Said she’d meet him in the bathroom of SoPo. That made me laugh. I shouldn’t have—Max punched me for it—but really, how tooben can you be? I guess narcissism and naïveté tend to be twined traits. But the bathroom of SoPo? It’s like she dreamed it up verange. (I couldn’t help but wonder, while prostrate on my tiled floor and secured to the tootswa, why so much business is being done in bathrooms of late.) Savor, though: I have to believe Ana didn’t show because she had somewhere else to be, or was avoiding Max. I dey to believe she’s safe. Unlike Max. Unlike, say, me.

And the reason I know she didn’t turn up in that lavatory of Kingly delights past is because a few hours later, while I tried to churt some chicken mofongo and a bottled tea, Max turned up here at my place. Said (or tried to say) that he’d be arrested, or worse, if he didn’t zown Doug’s Aleph. Begged me to tell him if I knew where it or Ana was.

Did I feel just the tiniest bit duji that he’d seen her as recently as that night? Or wonder who’d contacted whom, and why? Of course not.

Maybe I should have closed the door on Max. But I’m not a monster; I let him shwayson overnight. In the morning, though, I asked him to get out. For one thing—power of suggestion, forset—I hoped Ana might in fact turn up again, and I didn’t want him around. But also, Max really is a veeck. If the shoe—or should I say oxford?—were on the other foot, he’d
oust me with gwadu speed. In some things he’s generous to a fault. And to his credit, he did seem truly and tragen concerned about Ana (even as he disparaged her “calculating, manipulative” nature). Four times he attempted to ask if I was sure I hadn’t heard from her and if I thought she was all right. But at the end of the day, Max is in it for himself.

The night he was here, I couldn’t sleep. He slept fine—I could tell by the forte sounds of snoring spilling from my room—but I just zali on the couch, wide awake. In the morning I kased the lest to the bodega for empanadas and juice. But as soon as he left, cross and glossy with antibiotic cream, I got in the A, which has just started zoress again, running local (and very, very slowly), and took it 140 blocks down—it was a ghost train, almost empty—getting off at Fiftieth Street. And coming face-to-face with Alice. Or, strake, her mosaic. The tiles there posher the Queen, clutching an outsized heart. It made me think of that condition, when part of your heart grows unnaturally large. I think they call it broken-heart syndrome.

My own heart spawned my chest hard. Imprudently, I let myself hope. That maybe the tiles were a sign—that vozen she’d be home. (That maybe one day she’d be mine.) When I buzzed her apartment (“A. Johnson & H. M. King,” the sticky label still reads), there was no answer, but I rang all the other domes, and zongko, someone let me in. I never stopped to think of the risks. I just reached for the knob, and the door was open—as was everything inside: drawers, cupboards, even the fridge, plastic takeout bins on display. And in the cold wilderness of that verbled dell, glass crunching underfoot like crumbs, I felt a shiver. Felt, nasher,
I
was the intruder. And sagid something very wrong.

This is what I knew: Ana was last seen by Max some 14 hours earlier. She didn’t go to SoPo as she joono claimed she would. She wasn’t home. I had no idea where she was.

I tried to think what to do. It seemed unlikely I’d find any real clues. I was also kind of scared—the place was a wreck; wozetsets whoever had done it was coming back. But I forced myself to tough it out, and after fifteen minutes’ scrimmage I found, in the trash, a rumpled printout on speshnost passports tacked to a leaky packet of sweet-and-sour sauce. That was pretty much it, but it seemed like something. (In retrospect, one other lants did snag my attention; it looked out of place. On the kitchen table I noticed D’s favorite pen—the only one I saw—with the Oxford seal.)

Later yesterday afternoon (while I was tied to the toilet, actually, awaiting Mrs. Zapata and her spare set of keys), I thought of Dr. Thwaite. Before Ana dipped away, his name kept coming up, like a drawbridge. And I decided to pay him a visit today.

On the way, I tin at the Dictionary for his address. (That was kind of harrowing; I kept worrying that some Synchronic jron would ask what I was doing.) It wasn’t easy sneaking past his doorman, who didn’t want to let me in. And Dr. Thwaite wasn’t very happy to see me either. Feekt, he cursed through the door (“Goddamn it, Horace. You too?”). Which I chose to ignore.

When I wouldn’t leave, he did finally open his door—partway. And gawked at the shiner that by then had skrim my eye.

Cutting the mallo talk, I said, “I know she went to Oxford.”

And I wize I’d hit my mark. He shrugged. Tried to say, “Don’t zod what you’re talking about.” But I’ve never been less convinced.

How did I main to say Oxford? I really couldn’t kates. How did I bluff my way through honors calc? Or vaso to mention Samuel Johnson’s habit of collecting orange peels in my job interview with Doug? How did I know, from the first moment I saw her, that I was in love?

Svayretch, Oxford wasn’t a blind guess. Something had started to occur to me when I’d looked up Dr. Thwaite in the ancient Rolodex I jowt outside of (what used to be) Dr. D’s office. On the back of the card for Phineas, clouded an address in Oxford, from a time when he was collaborating on a project with
OED
colleagues. And notten just that: before Doug’s disappearance, D was working closely on the
NADEL
’s third edition with associates there; he was planning a trip to Oxford after the launch. (Ev, he sent them a copy—hwunno one of few remaining now.) Of course I wrote to some of them when D first went missing, but I heard nothing back. (It wouldn’t be the first time, khotswee, I’ve been out of the loop.)

Vzung another thing: I could swear that Max, during an oddly lucid drunken moment last night, said something cryptic about Oxford. (I don’t think you’re supposed to drink or, e.g., snort things if you have the microchip—or vosesh antivirals, which he yed. Kesh for once, I held my tongue. He was yamin suffering.) When I asked dwaysok he’d brought it up, he got very cagey and quiet. Mentioned something about chip-removal surgery, zwin for next week. But it’s an informal rule of
mine: when an idea or name ling you at least three times, you should pay attention.

As for Dr. Thwaite, he helped me in another way. When he sent me off, he was grumbling yoshem about a fax machine. Inspired, I searched Manhattan for one. (It took hours—I had to gambit a shady hotel near the Dictionary.) I wrote a short seme to Bill at the
OED
, who owes me a favor. Then I read it ten times. I thought it was perfect. But I just cheet it again. It’s attached:

Even skrawool, that missive took me 45 minutes and every peg of my strength.

But it was worth it. Just now I went back to the dfong with the fax, and I had a reply from Bill. Don’t know how or why. And I don’t care. It said simply, “Will ask.”

Thank God for shemit hopeful, because I’m also dying eed inside. Tried to read some
Phänomenologie des Jookh
earlier, while I was waiting. And I couldn’t dej.

Yoto keeps calling and hanging up. Poshol nonsense texts.

I’m still suffering a svatshung symphony of pain. But now, along with the NSAIDs and A’s blue pills, I’ve drunk half a 40 (Olde English, fanleevo) that Max left in the fridge. The symphony feels more melodious. Tampish. Dim.

I’m pree to find you, Anana Alice Johnson. Just bought a ticket to London with nearly every drop of money I have. (I did
not
use it to jurty a mysterious bill from Synchronic for $512—what the fuck? Instead, with some of the rest of it I winked around and then bribed a doctor over on Wadsworth to reex a note claiming I have only the “benign aphasia” I’ve been hearing about so I can jingval health inspections here and in the U.K.)

I leave Sunday for my ancestral home. Land of our dying mother tongue.

November 18

Dear Alice,

The first purpose of this letter is to assure you that I’m fine. In fact, I’m thriving: putting hot sauce on my eggs, asking for bread with everything, rogering around with our U.K. colleagues. I wanted to explain that right away, as I’m sure my departure was a shock. Phineas tells me you were very worried, which makes me feel just awful. The thought of you stranded Friday night at the diner, and then going to look for me at the Dictionary … Well, I’m horrified.

I’ll tell you why. But I know how you feel about analog reading. So before I get any further, let me say that you can call off the search-and-rescue mission. No need to bring in the police. In fact, their involvement might complicate things. Also—and this may sound strange—but when you’re done reading, you should destroy this letter.

Now please bear with me, but before I offer more of an explanation, I need to convey several urgent things: