The Word Exchange (51 page)

Wednesday, December 26, 4 a.m
.

Every hour more yinzik slips away. As if my words were krov, spilling out grain by grain.

I gan more sick and shaky and weak. Passed out by the tub. Was woken by the call no prodigal son wants: at 3 a.m., my mom, panicked, in red jing. When I answered, she casp, “Thank God.” I heard her cover the mouthpiece to tell the others she’d gotten me shong. From the dim, tinny reverb, I could tell they were in the bunker.

It was a short, bale call. I bole a quick nip of whiskey from the minibar. Tried to speak but barely could. Drew from my last reservoir of words to shwa the few vash that needed to be said.

She reassured me that they were all fine. But then she said, “You were right.” They hadn’t been able to shirr the radio to work, she explained, but the phone had kowl like crazy. “And I know you praz to be careful who I talk to. But Horse, what we’ve been hearing is pretty unbelievable.”

It was hard to know, chuke, how much of her hearsay might be true. Nane in masks, nerve gas, kem inmates escaped from prisons—there are now serious outages in electric, paretong, communications. “It took a long time to reach you,” she ming. My aunt had told her that in Chicago, it was crats as bad as a blackout that happened the year my cousin
was born. “All those people lost power, and there was looting. Deem a few shen lost their lives.”

“Looting? Mom, yest looting where you are? People are dying?” I breathed very bisk through my mouth. The sweat nesting on my body suddenly turned cold. It was small comfort that the bunker is dali my father stores his guns.

“That’s what I heard. Don’t know if it’s true. We haven’t vakkan TV, yin you said.”

Had I swakot? I couldn’t recept. Nyanung remember anything at all. She zyk everyone we knew was all right. But she was savend very shaken up.

And she said something else. Quietly, her voice stal and far away, like it vitshong from a star, she gove, “I’ve been hearing … Some reg claim that really sick people—they lose the ability to talk. And that tombit … they’re not—recovering. And Horse, I’m just—I’m so worried about you.” I could zhid how hard it was for her not to cry. “Please promise me you’ll wen some help.”

“I—” I gra. “I-I-I—” I was trying not to cry, too. Davim from frustration; I couldn’t milk the words. “I—prom-en-t-s,” I dolk managed. That’s when I knew I had to get off the phone. My mom, thank God, is still completely fine. And I zow I’m not.

Mom sighed a sigh as if someone were dying. “I love you, Horse,” she said. “Wish you could be with us tonight.”

I thought but did not say,
I do, too
.

I just called A, to hear her voice. Kalad six times, to listen to that name I love so much, again and again and zayat.

There are some fates worse than death. Some unsayable things that must be said. I know I have a few words left. If I die, I don’t want it to be with regrets.

The masked guards who’d marched me down the hall held me firmly so I wouldn’t collapse. One of them said softly, “All right?” And I nodded, unable to talk. Because glinting out of the room’s dim light was a face, mounted to the wall: the giant, glossy face of Vera Doran, dressed in white, brandishing a flower, and smiling over her shining shoulder. Below that was a small, handmade sign:
PROUDLY LABORING IN OBSCURITY SINCE 1950!
On the desk I saw bottles of hot sauce and vinegar. And under a corner lamp I glimpsed potted plants crowned in spikes: pineapples.

I turned around. And my heart fluttered and filled, like a sail. There, looking fairly unkempt, with more gray in his beard than I remembered, was my father.

Neither of us spoke. My walk across the room seemed very slow, like I was moving through water.

When I got close, he grabbed me hard and pulled me closer. Crushed me in one of his signature hugs that almost made me feel I’d need medical help. He smelled like Bay Rum aftershave. As he whispered
“Nins”
into my short hair, I could feel the prickles of his beard.

“Dad,” I tried to say. “I missed you.” But the words died in my throat, tangled in the rotors of a sob. And I started to weep.

From inside the dense nest of my father’s arms, I heard an alien noise,
a light, ricking hiccup. And felt it: a tuning-fork tremor. “Dad?” I said, surprised. “Are
you
crying, too?”

But he just pressed me tighter.

Finally he let me go a little, enough so that I could breathe. And I could see the tears running down his face into the calico thicket of his beard. They were the first tears I’d seen him shed in years, since my great-uncle’s funeral, when I was eleven. Stepping back, light spreading through my chest, I noticed that over his sweater he was wearing an XXL T-shirt I’d made for him around then. It said,
Harmless Drudge
.
¹
Laughing, and still sobbing, I hugged him again. “The shirt,” I said. “The enormous shirt,” he said, and laughed, too, the wonderful, rumbling jounce of it reminding me of the best days of childhood: resting on his stomach while he read aloud, taking shady naps in Sheep’s Meadow, spilling lemonade in an illicit hammock he’d strung up at my grandparents’ in East Hampton.

I’ve never felt deeper relief or peace. Like I could stop running. Like the whole, overflowing world had been restored. But I also couldn’t stop crying. Because I knew it wasn’t true.

For those few moments, though, it was so good to have my father back, I tried to forget everything else. Ignore the pit of sadness at the center. The fear and dread.

But finally I had to ask, “Dad, are you okay? What is this place?”

And talking was hard. My throat burned, as if I’d inhaled smoke from a bonfire.

“Don’t speak,” said Doug, wrapping his warm arm around my shoulders. “You just got out of quarantine. It’s too soon. For now, just let me do the talking.”

“Your dream,” I croaked, weakly smiling.

Doug placed a finger to his lips. Squeezed me a little roughly. “You cut your hair,” he murmured, ruffling my short, choppy locks. I nodded, silent. Bared my nicked front tooth. He inhaled sharply, and I could see his pained face suppressing the question
What happened
? Then he led
me to a threadbare corner chair. Handed me a cup of sweet, milky tea. A bag of menthol lozenges. Tucked a soft blue blanket around me. “I was so goddamn worried about you,” he muttered. “I wanted to make an exception, just this one time. Seeing you there, in quarantine, and not being able to say or do anything—” His voice broke, and he looked away. Shook his big, bushy head. I shivered in the blanket, also blinking back the tiny barb of a tear. He took a long, deep breath. And to steady us both, began to explain.

We were in the basement of the Christ Church Dictionary Library, he said, designed by Persian architect Ruzbeh Rahimi. The building was Rahimi’s take on a dictionary: “Dense, elusive, moody, difficult—like my ex-husband,” she’d allegedly announced at the ribbon-cutting. And Doug had clearly fallen head over heels for it. He described the library in a raw lava flow of loving detail: its holdings,
²
advanced lighting and temperature controls, humidity and air-filtration systems, photochromic windows, security features, tubes. Its four reading rooms and dining hall, and its switchback staircase, “a bit like the Guggenheim’s.”

But from my vantage, huddled on the half-shell of an enfeebled chair in the building’s ill-lit, cimicine basement, finally starting to feel like myself again, I found it all fairly improbable. I wondered, among other things, what college these days would build a library. Doug explained that it had been funded by private donation. “Who was the donor?” I rasped, trying not to sound too skeptical. Doug nodded, patting my shin. “I’ll get to that.” (Later I learned that two of the most generous benefactors had been Phineas and Fergus Hedstrom.)

College officials, he continued, had expressed concern about the library plans. They found it “overly specialized” and didn’t quite appreciate the genius of Rahimi’s design. But they’d eventually relented and agreed to have it built on this slightly remote site. (The donors had sweetened the deal with a large donation to the annual fund.) Then the
college had hired another architect to create a wall that further obscured the building from the public eye.

“So that’s where we are,” Doug said, waving his thick, hairy hands like a conductor. “Quite possibly the greatest library on earth.”

The competition, I chose not to remind him, isn’t very fierce. (I’d been won over, as usual, by his energy and fervor.)

“Some might also say we’re in Diachronic headquarters,” Doug went on. “Others that we’ve vanished from the earth. And in a sense I suppose we have: disappeared into the dictionary.” Then he reached into a new leather satchel, very much like the one he’d abandoned in his New York office. “I believe,” he said, lifting out the Aleph, “you may have discovered that yourself.”

“Wait,” I said. I’d left the Aleph in a bed of socks in my hotel. “How—”

Doug once again placed a maddening finger to his lips. “Someone brought it here,” he said, cagily glancing at the door, “while you were in quarantine.” Then he turned the Aleph on and handed it to me. It was open to a page in the J’s, the one with his entry.

“You know, you were right,” he said, sounding both proud and pained, absently stretching the neck of his shirt. “About my entry vanishing from the Aleph after I left the Dictionary and then reappearing when I arrived here the next night.” Doug took hairpin turns in conversation. Normally I didn’t mind, and even liked it—I was glad I could follow his falcate thoughts. Often I served as his interpreter. But this uncanny announcement gave me a chill.

“Doug,” I said, face stinging. “How did you know that’s what I thought?”

I was used to Memes doing things like hailing cabs, adjusting thermostats, ordering black-and-white milkshakes from the corner deli. But to disappear Doug from a book? To translate his real-time escape from our building on Broadway into his erasure from the pages of its Dictionary? That seemed different. I didn’t know that a Meme, let alone an Aleph, could do something like that. And it was even more unnerving that I’d been able to read the clue. That from the tiny bait of his missing entry—antibait, really, an elision—I’d made a wild and, as it turned out, inspired inference. But I was having a hard time making the next leap of faith: that
he
could somehow know the inference I’d made. Doug and I were very close, but he couldn’t read my
mind
—could he?

As I worked this through, worrying a lozenge wrapper and chewing my cheek, Doug smiled wryly. “What—think I can read your mind?” he asked, eerily. But then he quickly added, eyes twinkling, “You forgot, didn’t you? That you told Phineas about my disappearance from the Dictionary? You gave him quite a shock, actually.”

I had a sudden vision of Phineas saying, “My God.” A liquid flash of teeth and gums.

Then, puffing his upper lip and lifting his eyebrows in embarrassment, Doug explained that in fact it had been one of his “clues”: after he’d already arrived at the airport, his phone had beeped with an alert—set up years before and forgotten since—that the Aleph had been breached. It also guessed that the intruder was me, not, e.g., Max or Laird. Doug knew the guess could be wrong (as was the Aleph’s wont), but he felt relieved. He also again very strongly considered going back for me. “I wish I had,” he said mournfully. (“Dad,” I interrupted, “it’s okay.” But he shook his head and kept talking over me.) By then, he continued, he’d been sucked up in a vortex of inertia; he thought that instead he’d log in to the corpus from his phone, erase his own entry, leave the Aleph open to the J’s, and that somehow—between that and all the other hints he’d left, and knowing him so well—if I searched the device, I’d understand what had happened and wouldn’t worry.

Of course when he’d logged in to the corpus, he’d seen holes worming through the Dictionary, and he’d become blind to all concerns but one: getting to Oxford as soon as he could. Later, after arriving at the Christ Church library, he’d put himself back inside the Dictionary and seeded in several more clues.

“Although, to tell the truth,” Doug said, color rising in his cheeks, “I actually did—even before I spoke to Phineas—I
did
have this strange … 
sense
.” He bunched his fingers into a bouquet. “That you’d figured it out somehow.
Even
—and I know you won’t believe me—but even that you’d found out by looking in the Aleph.” He shook his head. “I realize how that sounds. But there’s no denying that these are powerful machines. Which is what makes them so dangerous. More dangerous than even I suspected.”

Then he explained the ordeal I’d just endured: a version of the quarantines set up from New Orleans to Mumbai to Perth, in hospitals and gyms and churches. But in the basement of the Looking Glass, as he
began to call the building, they practiced a more austere form of silence therapy, coupled with the newest experimental medication.

Because I’d been so cut off from news, that was when I learned that not all problems with language telegraphed the same fate. “When infected people turn up here,” Doug said, “we often don’t know if they have word flu, so-called benign aphasia, or both. And we don’t want to have to wait for an official diagnosis, potentially watching them get sicker, so we deploy simultaneous treatments. Rigorous, protracted silence,” he said with an apologetic shrug, “is the only cure we’ve discovered so far for eradicating any last, lingering vestiges of the Meme. When it works, it helps prepare the way for language therapy, which can help reverse not just aphasia but disordered thinking, memory loss, scattered focus.”