The Word Exchange

by Alena Graedon

  Here’s what ended up happening when I went out to get food.

  It was unseasonably mild, and I elected to eat on my stoop. Hot coffee (from a bag, wino-like) and a pair of crispy chicken empanadas. (This might seem an unfortunate combo for a person with IBS. But owing to the inflammatory nature of both comestibles, I find it more efficient to aggregate them.)

  While sipping my coffee, I thought about work, in a sense. I.e., my mind went to A. You can imagine, then, my discomfiture when Max appeared on the sidewalk. He was suckling a toothpick and watching me with a roguish grin that made me very tense. Why had he come all the way uptown to materialize, like a warlock, before me? How had he known I’d be home? It didn’t bode well. But all I said, non-nonchalantly, was, “Hey.”

  “Come on,” he drawled. “We’re going to meet those guys for lunch.”

  I frowned, unwittingly. “But … my empanadas,” I said, gesturing lamely at the tined half-moons of food balanced on my knees. I didn’t know it yet, but the grease had worked its way through the now translucent paper and into quarter-sized spots on each trouser leg.

  “Forget it, man. You hate empanadas,” said Max. His declaration was made with such conviction that for a moment I was confused. When had I told him that? Empanadas are the linchpin of my diet, such as it is. I felt compelled to say (to myself), No. You, sir, are mistaken. But by then we were almost at the A train and Max had eaten the empanadas.

  The casualness with which he’d said we’d be having lunch with “those guys” belied the fraught nature of their four-man fraternity vis-à-vis me. In theory, we’re all friends; really, though, we’re all friends with Max. Over the years he’s collected us, like mutant moths: Johnny, at Harvard, after Deep Springs; Floyd, of London, where Max accrued a quick master’s at LSE; and Vernon, at Columbia University, the site of Max’s MBA. Before he’d even shaken the dean’s hand for that last Hedera helix degree, he’d assembled his Hermes Corp. team. (Not to belabor the point, but I’m the odd one out: he never asked me.)

  I’ve spent a lot of time with Those Guys. Mostly I don’t mind. I’d enjoy it more if they’d excise Floyd. He’s like a chalk outline of Max: flatter, more cartoon-esque, and he leaves behind a residue that’s hard to brush off. He’s a man of unexamined tastes who believes they’re charming and unique. He likes: large-chested redheads (also any drunk woman), whiskeys over ice, and, after the latter, starting fights. He cultivates giant, frazzy muttonchops—“face pets”—that he goads girls to stroke. A person could be forgiven for failing to infer that he’s also sort of a genius who’s won awards for game-theory work.

  Given the competition, Vernon’s pretense is pretty easy to stomach. He’s a standard-issue Comp Lit ABD: short fro, stylish peacoat, and an only slightly affected cane for his bum knee, the result of a Vespa wreck back in ’03 (on which I will refrain from airing judgment). He doesn’t get total immunity, but he’s a decent guy. And fun fact about Vern: his thesis, like Dr. D’s, was on Samuel Johnson.

  There’s also one diamond in the rough: the best, most inoffensive of the bunch is the calm and cynical Johnny Lee, aka Hong Kong Johnny, aka Long John Johnny, aka Jack the Jackknife (nicknames © Floyd Dobbs). Johnny was in fact born in Hong Kong, but he grew up in Bergen County. His preternatural knack for programming gained him Hermes entrée—that, and his equanimity: “eh” and “whatever” tend to dominate his vocabulary. He falls more in my camp—i.e., shy and rangy—which is why he sops up some of Floyd’s surfeit persecution. In theory, he’s as ambitious as the rest of them. But his main penchants seem to be blue Gatorade, weed, games in the Time Crisis franchise, and music by the rapper Lil’ Big. He’s had the same girlfriend, Lizzie, since he was 20.

  Anyway, as I said, I see those guys plenty. But it’s not like the five of us “lunch.” The fact that Max made a special trip up to invite me was incongruous, to say the least, and the timing seemed noteworthy. The Dictionary launch is in just two days, and it’s been getting tons of publicity. I thought Max might want me to ask him along: an epoch-making role reversal. The thought was sweet. It was also fleeting. Because I suddenly, lurchingly, worried that he’d somehow heard I spent Friday night at A’s. Maybe the lunch was actually an invitation to a beheading. Or maybe, I thought hopefully, he just wanted a report on how she’s been. Whatever his motivation, I was feeling more than a little anxious as we lumbered down the subway stairs. “So why are we going to lunch?” I asked, trying to sound laid-back.

  Max tossed the crumpled wax-paper rosette from my bygone lunch into the trash. Then he held his Meme up to the turnstile scanner and cannily replied, “We’re just having lunch, Horse. Try not to be such a pussy about it.” “Pussy” is a term I loathe, and that also often spurs me to action. Two facts of which Max is apprised.

  When I still tarried, he gave an impatient jerk of the head and uttered a salient pair of phrases. “Just come on,” he said. “We’re paying.”

  A little while later we emerged in that carefully shabbied playground, the Lower East Side. Our destination, Premium Meats, delivered mightily on its titular promise. (Sadly, we were seated near the ladies’, so the meal was sullied by Floyd. His sparkling witticism—“I’ve got some premium meat right here”—got kind of flat after the fourth time. And later, when I offered to share my lunch with Johnny, who wasn’t touching his, I made the terrible tactical error of noting that I’d ordered more than enough meat for two people. “Funny,” Floyd rejoined. “That’s the name of my penis.” And there went my appetite.)

  When we arrived, the other guys were already there, drinking and updating their Life statuses. Our booth was a vigorous red-vinyl affair, the mottled table shot through with faux gold veins. Lithographs of handsome cuts of meat lined the walls, and dusty light filtered from dangly bulbs, casting a romantic glow over the six square feet we’d snugly jack-knifed into. (I was smooshed up against the paneled wall, Vernon and Johnny beside me.) They all beamed their orders in—Max, a sporadic vegetarian, ordered snails, rabbit kidneys, and fried pork belly; Floyd got an ox heart; Vernon went for smoked eel; Johnny opted for a steak and fries—and I asked Max to get me black coffee.

  “Come on, man,” said Floyd. “Live a little. At least get it with cream.”

  “I’m lactose-intolerant,” I informed him, for maybe the fiftieth time.

  “Of course you are,” Floyd said, shaking his head and snickering, as always.

  “Keep it light, you two,” said Max. “And really, Horse, get what you want. On us. It’s been a good year for Hermes.”

  He had me there. I shrugged and ordered a steak and sweetbreads.

  Then Max removed his tattered toothpick, trailed by a strand of saliva silk. “Horse,” he drawled, “we called you here today because we want you to join our team. Hermes really needs you. So we all hope you’ll say yes.”

  I’d been waiting so long to hear those words you’d think they might’ve lost their glow. His request also wasn’t executed particularly subtly or well. And in truth, I’m not very familiar with their oeuvre. (Before tonight I’d never tried any of their games. I don’t even have a Life profile. And I obviously don’t spend much time on the Exchange.) But more importantly, I have a job. That I love. I wouldn’t trade it for pretty much anything. Despite all that, I said, “What would that entail, exactly?”

  Max explained that their new contract with Synchronic let them hire a lexicographer, and he claimed I was his top choice. (I wondered how many others he knew. Besides Doug, of course, who, as Ana’s dad, I assumed wasn’t on his list.) He said the first job would be freelance, so I could get a sense of things. Basically, they’d pay me to attend a party and write “on-demand definitions” of words—what Floyd called “money words”—that guests made up on the spot. (“What party?” I asked. Max shrugged. “Just this gala thing.”)

  Vernon, gently rubbing his glasses on his black sweater, offered, “It’s essentially Meaning Master performed live.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, as if I got the ref
erence. A tried-and-true method of mine. And one Max sees through every time. “He doesn’t know what that is. Do you, B?” he said. I did something kind of non-committally shruggy. Max took a swig of lager and said, “Didn’t think so,” sounding nonjudgmental. “Doesn’t matter.”

  I’ve since looked it up. The lamentably named Meaning Master™ is a game—Hermes®—downloadable from the Exchange. (I didn’t even know Synchronic sold games now. I guess that helps explain its interest in Hermes.) To the degree that I’ve discerned its machinations, it seems a player’s main goal is to coin new words. Each round is two minutes long. For the first minute, as letters stream by on the screen, you link matching colors by typing them in or pinching them together. In the second minute, you mint as many fresh definitions as you can, or just opt for automatic “meaning assignment.” (I have to admit, it’s kind of fun. High production values.)

  Apparently the most “inventive” neologisms are featured on the Word Exchange and made available for download—and one “Meaning Master” a week receives $1K and is featured on Synchronic’s home page. I think they even get a little PI News feature. I read that the first winner, Haley Rutherford, a 16-year-old from Cleveland, created the appalling word “now•y ’na -,ē n : when everything important is happening.” I also found an astounding Hermes press release that claims the game produced a threefold increase in Exchange traffic in the first half of this month.

  But at lunch Max didn’t bother to explain; being Max, he just started his pitch. And to explicate this party trick—of making up words, like cake, more or less from scratch—he invoked GWF. “According to Bodammer,” he began, “Hegel calls for the mind to ‘kick name and meaning away from each other, treten Name und Bedeutung auseinander,’ to create ‘names as such’—senseless words—which are blank, and ready to receive pure thought.”

  Which means, I think, that he’s using Hegel to justify creating fake words, claiming that they qualify as “names as such,” one of Hegel’s lesser-known concepts. And I don’t know if that’s what Max actually believes, if he’s being intellectually lazy, if he feels compelled to justify profiting from manipulating language, or if he really thinks he can fool me—that I won’t know the difference. But of course that’s not what Hegel meant by “names as such.” He precisely wasn’t talking about inventing nonsensical “words.” He meant words we’ve mentally stripped of all meaning so we can consider words qua words, in formal relation, as a practice of consciousness. The mind acquires language because it anticipates sharing in communal expression. There’d be no point to learning private words only it can use.

  But I decided not to go into all that. I hate getting in pissing matches with Max. I always get peed on. Besides, his soliloquy coincided with the arrival of our food. I did wonder, though, what had happened to his longstanding concern with “context”: his belief that language suggests a wobbly ecology of meanings and that words can never be divested from the who, what, where, when, and why of their use. That I’m a right-wing crank for proposing that words are molds into which we can pour thoughts. After I’d scarfed a few fries, I said as much.

  “Well, Bart,” Max said, fixing me with his freakishly lambent eyes, “I’m glad you said that. Because context is important. Very important. It’s a big part of our motivation, actually.” Then he launched into a sort of confusing treatise on how Hermes’s methods offer the historically marginalized and voiceless a “new opportunity to enter the sociocultural conversation.” By co-opting words and “creating more useful ones,” disenfranchised people could “reclaim a language that has for centuries conspired to keep them in their so-called place. Think of how powerful it would be if ‘primitive’ morphed into ‘sovereign,’ or ‘empire’ became ‘salt’—or some word that hasn’t even been invented yet.”

  Then he pulled out the big guns. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” he continued with a one-sided smile, “that Samuel Johnson compared cataloging English to taming a savage land. Johnson said”—here he wiped the rabbit-kidney juice from his fingers and picked up his Meme to read—“ ‘though I should not complete the conquest, I shall, at least, discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed further, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.’ ” Then he looked up and pierced me again with the hazel lasers of his eyes. “Imposing ourselves on other people—our language, style of governance, way of life—it just isn’t right. Even when the ends seem worth it—spreading democracy, more open lines of communication. ‘Liberty’ and ‘free expression.’ How free are people, really, when you make them say what you want?”

  I thought of pointing out some of the more gaping holes in this rhetorical set piece, and also of asking how exactly inventing fake words at a “gala thing” would help upend the hegemony. Some people, though, can justify anything, at least to themselves.

  “I wish the answer was easy,” he said. “But we can’t fix things with just skillful elisions, or by learning Urdu or Kazakh or whatever. Might not be a bad start. But if we really want to try to understand each other, we have to communicate not just better but differently. Invent a completely new kind of exchange.”

  At that moment Floyd leered at a girl on her way back from the bathroom, and (surprise) she recoiled, knocking into Vernon’s cane. It clattered to the ground, nearly taking out a sprightly busboy loaded down with heavy plates. Vernon (not Floyd) began profusely apologizing; the girl turned the color of rare steak, and Max leapt heroically into the fray, gripping the busboy’s shoulder, righting the cane, and reassuring the girl that it had been Floyd’s fault and everything was okay. Later she looped back by our table and, flushing crimson again, passed Max a napkin, on which—in a cute nostalgic gesture—she had scrawled her number and name. (Normally girls just look at him boldly and say, “Share contact”—often when he hasn’t even asked—and their information apparently then leaps right into his Meme. In fact, I think it was the Hermes boys who devised this app.) When she was gone, Max scanned her into his Meme—which told him, among other things, that she was 22, originally from Phoenix, and trying to make it on Broadway—high-fived Floyd, and unceremoniously handed him the napkin.

  The interruption disoriented me. (The girl was really very pretty.) Instead of offering my planned rebuttal, I just said, “It’s a nice idea. But how’s it supposed to work, exactly?”

  “Sounds like someone feels a little threatened,” sneered Floyd, drooling on a mouthful of ice from the bourbon he’d just drained. “An interactive dictionary might just put you out of a job, bro.” He winked at Johnny.

  “An ‘interactive dictionary,’ whatever that means, is a terrible idea,” I said, making sure to keep talking over Floyd, who was saying, “Why? They did it with the encyclopedia.” “I mean, it seems like you’re not really suggesting a new, shared language but a unilateral one that’s constantly changing. You’re emphasizing the destruction part—tearing down the old temples or whatever. But what would you erect in their place?”

  “We’d erect this,” Floyd grinned, wanking into space. Max gently stilled his fist.

  “Okay, Horse,” said Max, shifting in his seat. “Habermas would say that Hegel sees language as a means of submitting to the state. Which of course Hegel would have approved of. Language, like labor, like domesticated ‘love,’ is a means of subordinating the individual to the larger civic sphere. And what we’re advocating isn’t necessarily insubordination but freedom from subordination. We can get words to mean whatever we want.”

  I had so many objections I didn’t know where to start. And I didn’t get why Max was being willfully obtuse. Maybe that’s why, at about that point, I ran out of steam for the debate. Besides, let’s be frank: I wasn’t weighing the job on the basis of ideology. The fee Max had quoted me was obscene. I could buy my mom a car with it—and still have some left over. I shrugged and told them I’d sleep on it.

  “Great,” said Max. “I’ll send you deets in the mornin
g.”

  Then he rummaged under the table and produced a small black box glinting with the words MEME on one side and NAUTILUS on the other. But it was also printed with a picture, and it looked nothing like the Memes I’d seen. I thought a Meme was just a slim silver screen and a little pair of fern-furled Ear Beads attached to a misnomed Crown (aka headband), its one weird little silver arm that hooks forward to lightly kiss the center of the forehead always seeming as if it might fall off. But this was different. It didn’t look like much, just a small silver circle imprinted with a spiral that glowed in the photo with a bluish light.

  “Here,” Max said, holding out the box.

  “Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “But no thanks.”

  “Sorry, brother,” Max said, smiling aggressively. “It’s a condition of employment. You’re impossible to reach. Time to join the 21st century.”

  But when I still didn’t comply, Floyd reached over, slurring, “Shit, I’ll take it. I’ve been wanting one of these. Heard it works way better with the chip.”

  “You can get your own,” said Max, roughly swatting Floyd’s hand.

  “No I can’t,” Floyd said, shaking the hand Max had smacked. “You know we don’t have any of the new ones yet.” Max, ignoring him, passed the box to Vernon, miming that Vern should tuck it in my hoodie hood. “Sorry,” Vernon murmured very quietly, just to me, so close I could smell the cigarette smoke clinging to his sweater. “You don’t have to use it.”

  That was a little odd.

  But I had a question for Floyd. “Did you say ‘chip’? As in ‘microchip’?” I was incredulous. “I thought only people with, like, spine injuries got those.”

  “Naw, dumbass,” said Floyd. He sounded sullen and therefore more lucid, his cheeks flushed at the edges of his furry face pets. “We’ve all got them. Except Vern. Pussy.”

  Aghast, I stared at Floyd’s big, fatuous head. Imagined a microchip implanted under his skull. Electrodes embedded in his brain. I couldn’t tell—as was so often the case—whether he was telling the truth or fucking with me.