The Word Exchange (53 page)

On the night of November 16, after Doug had used his feigned illness to slip out of the meeting with Synchronic, he’d hurried down twenty-two flights to the Dictionary’s subbasement. When he’d found the wordrouting terminal locked, and strangely papered with a crude sign reading
CREATORIUM
, he’d hurried along the damp hall, ducking into a small, cool storage closet in which it was possible to hear running water. The same closet I’d found the night I first encountered Dmitri.

When the light was on, one could see a small runnel flowing along a narrow groove in the floor and out through a large, jagged hole, two or three feet wide, in the base of the wall. From there it flowed a short way to the sewer. It was also possible to see plastic pneumatic tubes coming out of bores in the wall shared with the word terminal. They, too, made their way through the hole.

This closet, Doug explained, was sort of a portal, a bit like the small door behind Phineas’s boiler. And as with that little door, the route beginning at the crumbly opening wasn’t very easy to follow.

Doug had made his way through the rabbit hole only once before, a few years earlier. Several months after the tubes that connected the Dictionary to the Merc were installed, he’d attempted to investigate what had happened when they’d stopped working. He should have consulted the crew that put them in. (And shortly after his adventure, Phineas did.) Because while he managed to discover the site of the malfunction—
a section torn from the F train’s storm drains—he wasn’t as fit (or as lean) as he’d once been, and he almost got himself killed, in a few ways. On the night of November 16, as he stood hunched in the dank closet, the only thing that spurred him to try again was a more frightening threat of death—not just for himself but for the Dictionary.

On his previous attempt he’d made it barely halfway along the tubes’ course. So it was with no small trepidation that he forced himself to squeeze, scratched and panicking, through the uneven drainage hole, first looking anxiously over his shoulder for some sign that he was being followed. He wormed his way, hyperventilating, along a short, wet, and quite tight corridor—“Tighter than I remembered,” he said, self-consciously patting his stomach—tubes jutting into him, until it opened up enough for him almost to stand.

He was in a sewer that led him, a bit indirectly, the few blocks to Columbus Circle, and he broke into a careful, crouching jog along the dark, brackish passage, wrenching an ankle, craning his neck every few seconds to look over his shoulder, bloodying his feet with blisters by running in dress shoes through suspicious water. At a point when the tubes went through a passage that was too narrow for him to follow, he surfaced quickly through a heavy manhole cover (harrowing in its own right—it opened not on the sidewalk but in the street). Then he made his way back down again, into the subway.

He strongly contemplated taking the train, but he was still very close to the Dictionary and afraid someone looking for him would appear at any moment. So when the F didn’t come for several long, agonizing minutes, he walked to the end of the platform and carefully climbed the ladder there down to the tracks. Then he followed the F’s route—and the tubes—the distance of two terrifying train stops, to Rockefeller Center. There he decided that he was done risking his life in just that way, and he climbed back onto the platform, went up to the street, and walked the last block and a half to the Merc, drawing plenty of strange stares for the way he looked, and smelled.

When he arrived outside—filthy, disheveled, and “about five systolic points from a stroke”—his hands were shaking so badly that he had a hard time unlocking the Merc’s door. Once inside, he hurried down to the basement and quickly found the typewriter perched on a stack of Prousts. Then he pecked out the same cryptic note twice. It read: “diachronic: a method of looking at language that’s becoming extinct.” He
sent it by pneumatic tube to his office, where I discovered it, and also to Dr. Thwaite. (The week before, in a Society meeting, they’d decided that this would be their SOS. At the same time he’d renamed me Alice.)

But Phineas hadn’t replied right away, and Doug didn’t have time to wait: he was hoping to intercept me at the Fancy on his way to Newark Liberty. Before he went, though, he wanted to leave at least one more hint. So he bounded up the narrow, winding stairs to the mezzanine and cast around for inspiration. Stranded on the piano was a big, outmoded atlas, and beside it the skinny book of U.K. postcodes. “Probably left by some sentimental old codger,” Doug said. “I used to catch Franz poring over it.”

In a hurry, hoping I’d be able to unbend the OX1 IDP clue he’d left in his office, Doug thumbed to the atlas page mapped with Great Britain and slid the postcode volume inside. (“How did you ever expect me to decipher that?” I gently teased. “To be honest,” he said, “I was so out of my mind at the time, I was afraid it was too obvious.”)

Then, frenzied, feeling the minutes run by like rivulets of rain, he scrawled out one last note, addressed to
Alice whose name is not Alice
, and tucked it in a place he thought I might look: the
J
volume of the
NADEL
’s second edition, on the page for “Johnson, Douglas.” But Phineas had beat me to it and later stole that salutation. I still have the evidence. (“What did the note you left for me say?” I asked. Doug was incredulous. “What?” he responded. “You never found it? Are you sure?” When I nodded, he frowned and said, “Damn. I should have left it in the brass pineapple chandelier in the bathroom. It said, ‘Dear Alice whose name is not Alice, I’m going through the Looking Glass.’ ” The note, he said, was the reason he’d started calling the Christ Church library that silly name.)

By the time he finished stashing the last of his clues, Doug was watching the clock even more frantically. He rushed back down the stairs and out to the street, and, with difficulty, hailed a taxi. After directing the driver back across town—and pretending, as they neared the Dictionary, to hunt, bending down, for something on the floor—he arrived, breathless, at the Fancy. But I was already gone, and all he found was the stern Marla.

At the airport he learned that tickets to London were sold out for the night. The best he could do was a layover in Reykjavík or Frankfurt.
Resigned, he booked the flight to Germany. But then, with a vital tightening in his gut, he reconsidered. Had a thought. Maybe, he reflected, a stop in Reykjavík was the best possible option. After all, how else could he cross into England undetected, if not with the help of an old (and well-connected) friend?

He canceled his German ticket and went on harried walkabout for a pay phone. Finally, after a search that felt nearly endless, he found an old booth in a woebegone corner of the food court, its metal cord unspooled like the gizzards of a robot, and he was amazed to get a dial tone. Fortunately he had the number memorized, from back when learning by heart was the most efficient technology. He punched in 011, then the country code, 354, then seven digits. And after a fake-sounding series of rings, a groggy woman said, “Já?”

“Fergus, please,” said Doug. “It’s an emergency.”

And after a minute he heard Hedstrom’s gruff voice remonstrating, “This better be damned important.” But by the time he and Doug hung up, Hedstrom was promising that Eydis, in bed beside him, would be at the Keflavík baggage claim in six hours to meet Doug.

And so she was.

She’d driven Doug in a black Peugeot borrowed from her cousin Arinbjörn—who’d “borrowed” it from someone else—to Hedstrom’s compound in Selfoss, a town on the Ölfusá River in the south. Then, in the afternoon, when the sun had already set, Doug had been trundled, in the dark, from a white panel van to a champagne leather window seat on Hedstrom’s Bombardier. Doug, Hedstrom, and a small staff had flown to Kidlington Airport, just outside Oxford. And it seemed that Ferg had made the trip before: they were met on the tarmac by a grinning official in a navy jumper who greeted Ferg by name. With a wry smile the official accepted jars of pickled fish and other sundries—not to mention a certain zaftig envelope—and waved the group through customs, no questions asked. Then they made their way to the Looking Glass. Ferg even left Doug with two personal guards.

(At that point in his story, noting my nonplussed expression, Doug digressed with an aside on Hedstrom’s heroic rescue. In college, he explained, he, Ferg, and Laird had formed a triumvirate. But it was an unstable bond, “like sodium,” Doug said, “which bursts into flame when you add water.” Ferg had never hedged his stance on Laird: “I hate that
weasel fuck,” he’d say. And Ferg’s feelings were understandable. Before Laird had ever met Vera Doran, he’d long been practiced in the art of woman-poaching: e.g., Ferg’s Radcliffe girlfriend and first true love, Sylvie Grace Mason, a petite blond deb. Ferg and Laird’s “friendship,” flimsy to begin with, fell to pieces after that. Doug was the only adhesive that remained between them. And in the past year, of course, even that glue had dissolved.)

Doug didn’t relay all the details of this story on my first night out of quarantine. He filled me in on it, and far more, over the next few weeks. Sometimes on walks we took down the Abingdon Road or up to Jericho, wearing balaclavas to keep warm (and disguised). Sometimes Doug would leave me voice memos, or typed-up notes he slid under my door while I worked on this manuscript, bent over the typewriter, pressing hard on the keys.

That very first night that I got out of the hole, the night after Christmas, he recounted only the plainest facts of his escape. And in the silence that opened up after, I said, “Can I ask … If you hadn’t gotten out … What happened to John Lee?”

Doug exhaled. Scrubbed his face with both hands. “Poor John Lee,” he said, shaking his head, taking a gulp of the Scotch he’d poured during his story. Vernon had wandered in as Doug was mentioning his Bombardier flight to Oxford, and glancing up at Vern, Doug said, “Horrible.” Took another deep pull of his drink. “He was very sick,” Doug went on. “He was one of the first to be infected with word flu from the Nautilus. But that’s not what got him killed.”

Leaning heavily on his cane, Vernon explained, “He was trying to warn the workers in the Creatorium that they could be hurt by the device and the virus. And that they were exposing other people. That’s why he was murdered.”

“Well, he also tried publicizing the symptoms,” Doug added. “He put up a warning on the Exchange, which can’t have been easy, given how aphasic he became. But it was of course immediately replaced with an apology, claiming that the site had been hacked and the warning was a fake.”

With a thud, Vernon sank into a nearby chair. “We don’t know for
sure who did it,” he said, placing his cane across his knees. “Could’ve been more than one of them. Dmitri, maybe. Or maybe this guy Koenig.” Vernon’s neck and shoulders twitched involuntarily. “Lately he’s been seen lurking around here.”

And I shuddered, too, picturing the man in black from my train. “Dad,” I said, a little light-headed, “I think someone was following me.”

Doug turned pale. “It’s possible,” he agreed bleakly. Drained his glass. “When I heard from Bill you were here and then got word about this Koenig, I got very worried.”

“Why didn’t you tell me how to find you?” I asked. “Or come get me?”

“I didn’t know where you were,” Doug said, frowning.

I studied him. “So that note,” I said. “ ‘The Jabberwock’—” But Doug’s face was blank, and the words died in my throat. I felt a twinge, as if my skin were being unzipped.

“What?” Doug said, tensing.

But I just mumbled, “Nothing.”

Doug squinted at me. Muttered, “Maybe we should stop there.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Really. I feel much better, actually.” It was true. Surprised, I realized that talking had also gotten easier.

“Really?” Doug asked, suspicious. But when I nodded, I saw him suppress a smile. “Already?” he said, mostly to himself. To me he said soberly, “That’s a very good sign.” (For all his devotion to scholarly rigor, Doug was a bit superstitious. It came out in small, almost imperceptible ways—e.g., when he was most excited, he often refused to smile and wrung all joy from his voice. I teased that he was warding off the evil eye. And I’d found it confusing as a child. But I’d gotten used to it, like his habit of knocking on wood or tossing salt over his broad shoulder. And in that moment I found his seriousness, and what it signified, extremely reassuring.)

He explained that engaging in conversation with healthy people was one facet of language therapy: it could help reverse any residual effects of S0111 following quarantine and begin to stimulate new neuronal connections. Reading, as I already knew, was another rehabilitative remedy. He handed me a stack of
International Journal of Lexicography
back issues. My heart fell. And lopsidedly grinning, he said, “Kidding.” Passed me a beautiful edition of
Through the Looking-Glass
. Added, “It also might not hurt to review a few entries in the
NADEL
.”

These guideline recommendations—language fasts, conversation labs, reading, writing, too (“We’ll discuss your own course of composition therapy soon,” Doug said)—had been developed in nascent form several years earlier, in Taiwan. After this latest word flu outbreak, Doug had conferred with labs at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and

Carnegie Mellon, the WHO, CDC, and the U.K.’s National Health Service. And he’d received a small stockpile of antivirals. But no other, better therapy ideas. In part, perhaps, because many of these organizations had lost years of digital data to the cybervirus, including information about word flu and what had been done in China and Taiwan. The best anyone could offer was prevention advice.

In the six weeks that had elapsed since the first known victim of this epidemic had succumbed, scientists had begun studying the virus’s effects. Since then, and especially in the two and a half weeks after the mass infections, they’d had an unfortunate wealth of samples to analyze—assessing CTs and MRIs, including data from those who’d suffered Silencing—and they’d also started looking at damage caused by malfunctioning microchips and Crowns in victims of benign aphasia. All while trying to protect their data from being destroyed. But researchers still didn’t know enough. They were submitting grant proposals. They wanted to run cross-sectional and cohort studies. Examine more reports from autopsies.