The Word Exchange (47 page)

I was so tired that the train ride was more of a dream. I chose a seat facing backward by mistake. A boy sitting near me was flipping through a book of Borges stories. A small girl babbled sleepily on her father’s phone. “Chelsea’s mummy won’t let me come over,” she was saying,
“because Chelsea’s daddy just got home from New York, and she’s worried and doesn’t want anyone to talk funny now.” Near Slough I thought I saw a man across the aisle staring. He was dressed in black. I caught his reflection in the yellow window glass. When I turned to look, though, he was focused on the screen in front of him, and I pretended to be studying a girl crimping her lashes. But my stomach wobbled like a water balloon.

It was December 20, more than a month since Doug had faxed his letter for me to Phineas. Nearly two weeks since the spike in virus infections and the cyberattacks. Five days before Christmas, which I’d spend away from home for the first time—alone, if I didn’t find Doug. Certainly without my mother or my Doran grandparents or a call to Gram and PopPop Johnson. Without the Dictionary holiday party. Without Bart. Without Max.

The letter. I’d angrily torn it to a houndstooth snow. I couldn’t believe Dr. Thwaite would lie on such a glowing, marquee scale. In the first, fake, shortened version he’d given me, he must have retyped whole swaths. Forged Doug’s signature. Sent it back through his fax. Doug had written it just two nights after he went missing; the date and time stamp read 22:12, November 18. But Dr. Thwaite’s glossed iteration hadn’t made its way to me for days, until I was out of my mind with worry and had started searching recklessly. Had such baroque scheming really been sparked by my own, much smaller lie, that Max and I were still in love? Or had Dr. Thwaite been motivated by something else? Whatever the cause, it made me doubt everything he’d said. Was he even friends with Doug? Could he be working for Synchronic? Had he bought my ticket to help the company find my father?

And yet one thought kept tugging me back from the cliff of doubt. I sensed the letter was authentic. For one thing, its idiom was pitch-perfect. Anyone who’d met Doug could fake his basic theses, all the references to ouroboros and accelerated obsolescence and the end of human memory. But it was seeded with personal details and lexical choices only Doug would make: his hackles up, the aegis of Synchronic, his purblind rage. I’d stumbled over one word, actually: “rogering” around with U.K. colleagues. It had raised my suspicions—gotten my hackles up—when I’d read the redacted version of the letter, too. (Surely Doug didn’t mean
that he was sleeping with our Oxford associates.) But then it occurred to me: “roger,” I thought, might be a subtle nod to my strange conversation with him in the downtown 1 train shortly before he disappeared. I clearly remembered saying “Roger?” when he’d christened me Alice, and repurposing the word would be a very Doug thing to do. At the time, he’d admonished me to be more serious. He was right, of course, and by then I knew. It couldn’t be more serious.

That was the real reason the letter had upset me. Things had gotten so much worse than even Doug could have predicted, and so quickly: the deal with Synchronic rammed through, the Dictionary more or less closed, and dissolving. Countless other digital documents, books, websites, texts—the archives of whole lives—destroyed. All the other assaults on infrastructure and machines. And even on the plane I’d heard a few small slips. As I boarded, a woman in first class asked her husband if he’d brought any pills—she was having trouble “shway” without her Meme. Before takeoff, a Midwestern businessman passed the jittery flight attendant $60 for a can of “jee.” The whole plane had felt tense, like a school basement during a terror drill. More worrisome, I’d heard a few scattered slips since arriving in the U.K., even from Brits. And I was afraid I’d gotten some strange looks, too.

On the Oxford train, a cartoon glowed above windows glazed with grime: one monkey put paws to his ears; another battened down his mouth. A billboard scrolled with grim red-lettered warnings:

It was after midnight when my train got in. The station was deserted, a single taxi idling. “Late then, in’t it?” The cabbie sounded affable as I ducked inside. But I was so tired I forgot to fake an accent, and his face contracted in the mirror. “You’re American?” he asked tersely, not pulling from the curb.

Sorrow hit me. It was late and still misting rain. I didn’t know where to go. I’d been to Oxford before; it was a quiet college town, ancient and safe. But the thought of making my way alone, in the dark, loaded me with dread. Since the virus, every place seemed threatening. And
there was something else: the man in black from my train. He’d gotten off just one stop before me, in Radley. And I could swear he’d mouthed “Goodnight” as he’d gone by. I couldn’t shake the cold shock that had raced up my spine.

I took a risk—I decided to tell the driver the truth. On my ticket stub I wrote, “Please. I don’t have a place to stay. I’m exhausted and alone. And I promise I won’t infect you. Will you take me to a hotel?” Prayed that what I’d written was legible. I must have looked stricken, because the driver surveyed the street, sighed, scratched his chin, and agreed to take me to a place he claimed had a vacancy. When we arrived, he watched me hard, eyes like marbles, until I’d stumbled out of the car with my bag. Then he sped off.

But the hotel was dark. I tapped the glass door, softly at first, as if on the tank of a shark. Then, peering over my shoulder into the black, empty alley, I began knocking. Banging. Clattering the glass. When the concierge appeared, he didn’t look happy. He was grinding his eyes with his knuckles and yawning. Grousing that no one knew anymore how to read. Only then did I see a tiny sign by the doorbell, exhorting,
NO CHECK-IN AFTER 11
P.M
. Fortunately, as I apologized, I remembered to inflect my speech.

“South African?” he asked, yawning deeply again. I shrugged, gamely smiled, and he ushered me in, saying, “My wife has family in Pretoria.” He was tall and wide, with white hair thick as a pelt. And the tired slope of his back reminded me so much of Doug that I caught my breath. Almost felt compelled to ask if he knew my father, but I stopped myself.

Taking down a set of keys, he introduced himself as Henry. Explained that I was in luck: a suite of rooms had just opened up. When I asked how much, he said, “Just two-fifty,” and I nodded grimly. I had no choice but to pay with the cash Phineas had given me. (Henry insisted on that—no credit cards “with all that’s happening.”)

By the time I locked myself in for the night, I was nearly delirious with fatigue. But I couldn’t fall asleep. I tried to numb my mind by turning on the sim I found behind a heavy curtain. That was a mistake. The scraps of news I saw only prodded me further down the plank to wakefulness. But it was hard not to watch: I’d been cut off for days and days.

From the panicked, strangely blanched coverage, it was clear the U.S. was in a state of emergency. But few facts could be confirmed. Because of border controls and contagion fears, virtually no British journalists had
been able to report firsthand on “the American crisis,” i.e., the cyberattacks, the virus, and their effects: rioting and violence, curfews and food shortages, deaths. U.S. news networks were of course in shambles—many crews and anchors infected; some networks afraid to broadcast the illness to viewers. What got out was mostly hearsay. The BBC was playing part of an interview on loop, a tear-jerking clip of German parents whose two teenaged stowaways were found dead in a Bremerhaven-bound container ship held up in New York Harbor. One mother, sobbing, said through an interpreter, “She was just visiting her cousin. For two weeks only. She was coming home last night for her brother’s wedding.”

The camera cut back to the studio. A trim brunette in a fuchsia blazer soberly intoned that the WHO had recommended a temporary global ban on all Meme models. Several countries, including Great Britain, had increased antiviral production; a medication specific to word flu was in initial testing. Doctors were also trying to develop a safer method of microchip extraction, but so far attempts had gone poorly. Then the anchor dipped her chin, frowned, and gravely described the terminal muteness that had afflicted some virus sufferers whose illness had reached an advanced stage. Victims of Silencing often never spoke again, she said, most passing first into comas and then to that greater silence, death. They had no chance to describe their suffering. Say goodbyes. Expiate their sins.

Over her voice, shaky footage appeared. It was soundless and color-leached: rows of pale, plaintive people wrapped in sheets. Then the camera moved to a hospital waiting room. The shifting lace of letters floated over a woman’s chest, identifying her as
Angela Meekins, Member of the American Deaf Community
. She looped and bunched her stocky, nimble fingers through a locutional ballet, white letters swarming to keep up. “It’s very frightening for patients and families,” the letters read. “I’ve tried to teach the few I can some ASL, to make things a little easier at the end.”

The number of casualties had continued to rise, though figures varied. Some sources claimed that six thousand were dead or terminally ill; others put the total near fifteen thousand. Those with compromised immune systems seemed more prone to serious sickness, but young, healthy people were dying, too. So far fatalities seemed to have remained isolated to the United States, the reporter said, but deaths were expected elsewhere soon. “There are many unknowns,” she continued, smooth voice
belied by clear distress. She couldn’t keep from blinking, riffling papers, sipping something from a cup. “It’s still uncertain, for instance, if the naught-triple-one virus will affect only English-speakers and those with Meme devices or if others should be on alert as well.” Then, face tightening, she pressed her fingers to an ear. “And now breaking news,” she announced. “The president is about to make a statement.”

For a moment the screen went blank. Then, picture quivering, the president was at a podium, a glowing glyph of the White House looming up behind him. He looked dignified and tired, loose sachets of skin hanging like small rinds below his steely eyes. As flares flashed around him, he cleared his throat.

“Good evening,” he said, gravely greeting the public and the press—a far sparser crowd than he was used to addressing. “The American people have been enduring an unimaginable, unfolding tragedy,” he began solemnly. “I’ve been in ongoing contact with the vice president, the FBI director, my national security advisers, leaders of Congress, and world leaders, as well as health authorities. And I’ve directed the full resources of the federal government to investigating and responding to the crisis.” With a characteristic light shake of the fist, eyes sweeping the room, he declared, “All measures are being taken to protect our people.” He asked us to remain calm but vigilant.

Then he said, “I’m confident that we’ll contain and eradicate the S0111 virus. I syong all vasher est kap—” and the sound abruptly stopped. It was picked up again a moment later, as the president was saying, “—virus. May God bless the victims, and America. Thank you very much.” But the damage had been done. I stared at the screen, stunned. The brunette anchor went silent, too, for what felt like more than ten seconds, until the camera cut to someone else.

On the name of the virus, at least, it seemed the press had been briefed. The BBC had an expert on hand to explain its etymology: 0111 was a sliver cut from the longer string of binary code that had been extracted and translated from the Nautiluses of sick patients. A similar code had been detected in Memes and appeared in the names of files infecting many online sites. And the S was a sobriquet, too, for a three-letter cipher that had replicated all across the web—as, for example, on the home page of a pharmaceuticals giant. The BBC flashed to a screen shot that looked like this:

Then the camera returned to the brunette, who seemed to have regained composure. Pursing her pink lips, she said, “Steven Brock, founder and CEO of mega-corporation Synchronic, Inc., could not be reached for comment about a possible link between his company and the so-called S0111 virus. The company’s communications director released a statement remarking only that its attorneys are researching the matter.”

After that I started dozing off—in an effort to protect itself, my psyche closed up shop. With the lights blazing, in all my clothes, shoes smudging the duvet, I heard bits of news buzz through the rumpled shroud of sleep. Other deaths. Armed robberies and shooting sprees. Suicides. People crushed in riots, beaten in clashes with police. Apparently many Americans blamed the virus on globalization and “foreigners.” (The irony, of course, is that essentially the opposite is true.) There were rumors that we were in a cyberwar, being attacked with invisible signals sent through glass fibers and air.

I slept all night and into the next day, smothered by predictable, terrifying dreams: children soundlessly screaming, urgent messages I couldn’t read, my father desperately trying to tell me something in a language I didn’t speak. I woke soaked in sweat and starving.