When I approached the desk with a weary smile, I was surprised to see his arm in a blue cloth sling—why he hadn’t been in to work for a few days, he explained, lifting it. “But, matter of fact, not sure how much longer I’ve got left around here,” he said, sighing.
“What? Why?” I asked, aggrieved. “Not Synchronic?” And reluctantly, hesitating, he dipped his chin. But it didn’t make sense—he worked for the building, not the NADEL.
I asked how much longer he was on for the night, if I could maybe walk him to the train when he was done. Subtly, he cut his eyes around the empty lobby. Rubbed the back of his neck where the blue strap bit in. Wiggled his fingers, grimacing. “Yeah, okay,” he finally said with another tight nod. “Darryl takes over in half an hour.”
When I met back up with him, we bundled ourselves against the cold, stopped for coffees at a kiosk plastered with a Future Is Now ad, and ambled to Columbus Circle. But instead of heading toward the subway, Rodney led me into Central Park, glancing over his shoulder several times until we were under the dark cover of some trees, our backs to the trunk of one of them. Then he told a story that peeled me away from myself.
He’d been walking across the north end of the park, he said, on his way to Thanksgiving at his sister’s, when a man had stopped him to ask the time. “I knew there’d be trouble,” Rodney muttered. “I’d seen that man before.” But he’d been loaded down with gifts for his grandnephews, and he wasn’t prepared when the man pulled a knife. He thought at first it was a robbery, but when the man spoke, it was to tell Rodney that he’d better stop talking to the cops. That he hadn’t seen what he thought he’d seen on November 16—the night Doug had vanished. No security recordings had gone missing, the man claimed. And Rodney didn’t recognize anyone he’d seen enter the building.
As Rodney explained all this, a rolling boil filled my ears. “Who was the man?” I said.
And Rodney replied, “Real big guy.” Used his unharmed arm to mark a place well above his head. “Thick accent. Russian dude, I think.”
The edges of my vision blanched. I was having trouble hearing him. But in my mind’s ear I heard clearly enough: Dmitri Sokolov. The man I’d encountered, alone, in the Dictionary subbasement. Under no circumstances, Doug’s letter had read. If he should contact you—well, let’s hope he doesn’t. I took a jagged breath. “Do you know why he attacked you?” I asked. “The recordings—what was on them?”
Rodney asked me to repeat the question. I did, shivering, and at first he started to say he hadn’t really seen much. But then he shook his head. Rubbed the back of his neck again. Admitted, “I just had a real bad feeling that night.” Looking to his left and right, he started to tell me what had happened: “Some men came in. This was around six-thirty, six-forty-five. I think you’d left a little while earlier. And these men, they said they had a meeting with your dad. I didn’t like the look of them—one had dark glasses on inside, and this was night—and they wouldn’t sign in or give ID. I told them, ‘Sorry, gentlemen. It’s our policy.’ But the one with the glasses, short guy, he said, ‘This is crazy. I’m not doing it,’ and on like that. ‘Absurd’ was the word he used. Then he called your dad himself and gave the—the phone to me. And Mr. J said go ahead, let them in.” Here Rodney paused. Looked at me with what I thought was regret; it was hard to tell in the dark. “I didn’t like to do it,” he said. Sighed. “I did not like to do it. But I did. And then, in the elevator …” He trailed off. Massaged his arm gently.
I held my breath.
After a moment he continued. “This same man”—here Rodney lifted his sling—“he was with them. And I saw him laugh. Watched it on the monitor. One of them pointed at him. Said something. And the man did like this.” Rodney drew a finger across his throat. Cold crawled over me, and I tightened my coat. “Could have just been messing around,” Rodney went on. “But I called up to Mr. J to ask did he want me or Darryl to come to twenty. He must’ve left his desk already to meet them, though. And he was expecting them and everything. So I thought, Okay then, that’s all right. Mr. J must know what’s going on.” Rodney coughed. Again shook his head. “But I did, I had that bad feeling,” he said. “And then, after they left and you came back by looking for your dad, and you didn’t find him … I didn’t want to scare you,” he said. “But later, at the precinct, I tried to tell Mr. Tate.”
My throat had constricted. I couldn’t feel my face. But I kept my voice even. “And did you figure out who these men were?”
“Not all,” Rodney said. “Not right away. But there was one …” He stopped talking for a moment. Shifted his weight uncomfortably. “He used to visit you sometimes,” he said softly, looking at the ground.
My skin prickled with fire. I flashed back to the night Doug disappeared and to what I’d thought had been just a ghost of Max, floating down Broadway in a black suit. I felt sick.
Rodney explained that he’d looked Max up later on the Internet and had identified a few Synchronic employees. Some of whom he’d seen that very day, going in and out of the lobby.
I had just one more question. I had to repeat it, too. But even the second time I asked, it was clear that he’d never seen or heard of the Creatorium.
“The what?” he said, cupping his unhurt hand around his ear.
I shook my head. “Never mind.” Then I thanked him and gave him a gentle half-hug, trying not to hurt his arm. Cautiously we parted ways, Rodney leaving first, then me.
I was very careful, before entering my building, to make sure no one was lurking nearby. And after I locked my door, I retrieved The Canon of Judo from the collapsed box. Upset and exhausted as I was, I started quietly practicing falls, kata, falls, for over an hour. Then push-ups, sit-ups, and more falls before finally falling into bed, spent, near midnight.
If I had doubts about my new regimen when I woke up bruised and sore the next morning, they soon dissipated. After talking to Rodney, I started to feel like I was being followed. My buzzer rang at odd hours. And a few times in the street I thought I sensed someone watching me. Every man in black began to put me on edge. (In New York they were hard to avoid.) Once, after taking files from the Dictionary to Doug’s apartment on the Upper West Side, I came back down to the lobby and the doorman asked, “He get you?”
“Get me?” I said, scalp tightening. “Who?”
“The guy who was outside. Arrived right after you. Said he didn’t want me to tar up—he’d just try your phone.” When I asked the doorman to describe him, he said, “I don’t know. Just some guy. I’ve seen him around.”
Cold slid down the back of my neck. I paid a taxi to drive me around for an hour, fake a few stops while I crouched on the floor. After that I didn’t go back to Doug’s. I relayed the conversation to Officer Maroney, and he put an unmarked car on my block.
But I refused to stay inside, a fearful prisoner in a tiny apartment gummed up with the grease of bad memories. I was hamstrung by the impossible task of trying to investigate while avoiding the Internet and phone, with no Meme,3 and vetting all my calls. I was determined to find my dad. Or find out what had happened to him.
Which is how I started to encounter different members of the Diachronic Society. In fact, I’d seen a few of them already.
They’re a motley group—different backgrounds and ages. Many are older than me: former booksellers and librarians; teachers; writers, editors, and agents; publishers and publicists; lexicographers and linguists. But there are also younger members: translators and poets, critics and readers, devotees of old zines. And the reasons they’ve expressed for getting involved are equally diverse. Some have conveyed a feeling of exile from a way of life that no longer exists. Others, a sense of duty. A fondness for rule-breaking. Activist or anticorporate bents. Some say they joined for the esprit de corps, others that they’re concerned for public health. What they hold in common is a dedication to words, and the worlds these open up. They also share an enmity to anything that might threaten language.
M
any—not all—have a preference for print. None use Memes. They communicate in person, by phone or email, sometimes by letter and postcard, fax, graffiti, posters, handbills. (Some also occasionally send messages by pneumatic tube.) No one knows exactly how many there are. Maybe several hundred in New York, maybe more; the core membership is at least several dozen. And there are some in other cities, too, in the U.S. and abroad. Of course there are more and less dedicated members, and their numbers wax and wane. Some keep their affiliation secret; others present their ideas in open and direct ways. This was especially true after the virus appeared and started spreading.
One of the first I spoke to I’d already seen—a little more than a week before, I’d taken a pamphlet from him without reading it and dropped it in a Times Square trash bin, with bent cigarette butts and paper plates gone gray with grease. I lived just a few blocks from Times Square, but I tried to stay away if I could. I’d gone to see Jesmyn, though, in Jackson Heights—she was flying home to Oakland; one of her sisters had gotten very, very sick with what they were afraid was the virus—and I was walking back from the 7 train when I saw the man again. He had a thick stack of red pamphlets and was standing in almost the same spot I’d first seen him, at Forty-second and Eighth. This time he didn’t seem as tired; he was chanting as he handed papers to passersby, “Memes kill! Stop the spread of word flu!” And this time I didn’t ignore him.
His name was Rob. He was an affable retired English teacher with a runner’s build and a long gray ponytail, and he was sensitive, he said, to cold. That’s why he had on such a heavy coat. But when he mentioned his coat, it wasn’t its heaviness I took note of; I saw that odd symbol I’d been noticing: Ø. It was printed on white cloth and pinned to his lapel.
“It means not infected,” he explained. “So people will know it’s okay to talk to me.”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, puzzled. The media had only started to report on the virus that week. With growing intensity, it was true. But it still seemed strange.
“Nowhere,” he said. “I made it.” But he was squinting at me a little warily, and I didn’t know whether it was because he didn’t like the question or I’d said something aphasic. It made me very jumpy; I checked again, as I’d been doing constantly, to make sure my pills were still in my pocket. Wondered, as I had several times, if I should start a second course of treatment. Soon after that Rob shrugged me off. He had to go back to work, he said.
When I got home, I read the pamphlet word for word. It didn’t say much I hadn’t heard. But it did claim that Memes were vectors of the virus—the first time I’d seen the accusation outright. More importantly, though, its rhetoric was very familiar: I recognized it from the Times op-ed; I’d heard it from Doug for years, and also by then from Dr. Thwaite. Over the next couple days I tried texting and calling Phineas, and I left several messages. I even tried visiting, twice. Both times the doorman turned me away, claiming that he wasn’t in.
During the second week after Thanksgiving I extended the radius of my search—from Union Square to Zuccotti Park, from up near Columbia to down by NYU, under Atlantic Terminal, and over to the Merc4—and I stockpiled many more brochures. Once I started looking for the Diachronic Society, its members were less difficult to find than one might think. I ended up meeting nearly two dozen even before the Merc reopened, crisscrossing the city in my search for them when I wasn’t checking on family and friends or at the Dictionary. Watching all the time for whoever might be watching me.
I met Archie Rodriguez, a former college librarian and stay-at-home dad with two kids; Tommy Keach, who put together the zine Best out of his Chelsea recording studio; Martha Hertzberg, a Juilliard-trained pianist and poet who was about my age; Zheng Weiming, a bioethicist and translator of Chinese and French short stories; Winifred Brown, a retired executive with a penchant for old print books and magazines; Matt Falstaff and Mara Levy, NYU sophomores. They were among the volunteers who spent hours standing in the cold, putting themselves at risk. Trying to save the rest of us.
Some of those passing out leaflets called to bystanders; some didn’t. Some simply left bundles of papers in the train and other busy public places. Most wore the Ø on their clothes, along with cotton masks and earplugs or massive headphones that bulged like the eyes of insects. Their precautions seemed to work: none appeared to have the virus.
Maybe as a result, not all were very eager to talk to me, especially when I asked about Doug. Some seemed to believe I was his daughter and expressed concern that he was still gone. A few said they hadn’t heard of him. If any knew his whereabouts, none confessed. And no one had any idea what OXIDP meant. Several seemed to grow suspicious when I mentioned Doug’s name; a handful even asked if I worked for Synchronic.
Regardless, though, of how willing Society members were to talk to me, they all handed over whatever pamphlets they carried. One, printed on red paper, had the header “NAUTILUS KILLS.”5 (It was clear that the anonymous author hadn’t actually seen a Nautilus; the leaflet described something conical, “about the size of a saucer,” outfitted with at least one tiny needle.) An excerpt follows:
The device Synchronic plans to release, with much fanfare, on December 7 may seem completely new. It was actually developed years ago—even before the Meme. It might in fact predate Synchronic’s forgotten Aleph model, according to sources close to the company. When the Nautilus prototype was put together, executives apparently decided that the public wasn’t ready yet for such an invasive machine. They opted to launch the Meme instead, to groom consumers, while they continued developing and testing their prized flagship device at labs in the United States and overseas—including in Beijing, where the first cases of word flu surfaced in 2016.
Another handbill, “ARE YOU A SLAVE TO MEANING MASTER?,” was printed on stock the green of old paper money. It described a game that had exploded in prominence since its release in early November. Part of Meaning Master’s appeal, the authors speculated, was in how deceptively simple it was to “win”: players simply strung together random letters to make “words,” then gave them “meanings.” It was repetitive, bright, and aesthetically pleasing, and those who created the most popular words each week got small cash rewards and a modicum of recognition. But another reason for its surging success, the pamphlet insinuated, was that it might also be psychologically addictive for Meme users. Although even non-Meme players seemed more than usually devoted. (The average number of rounds played in a single sitting was supposedly near forty.)
Profits, the brochure explained, were derived from “ad revenues; point-of-purchase sales (downloads are $5.99); subscriptions ($2.99/ month after the first month ‘free’); add-ons (if you want a definition assigned to a new word, for instance, instead of having to invent your own, they’re 9¢ each); etc.” But the real money the game was generating for Synchronic, the authors claimed, came from increased sales on the Exchange—a correlation they didn’t explicate.
A brochure Weiming gave me was far more disturbing. It was about the NADEL and included a photo, taken a few years earlier, of Doug in his office, smiling, surrounded by piles of paper, his hair and beard a little wild. It pressed a bruise on my heart. The caption, though, elicited a very different response: “Contrary to rumor, Dr. Douglas Johnson, the NADEL’s Chief Editor, has had nothing to do with the creation or dissemination of the so-called word flu, nor with the corruption of his Dictionary,” I read. Obviously I wanted to know what all that was supposed to mean. And Weiming weathered my storm of questions with kindness and equanimity. Then he explained that he hadn’t written it and didn’t know much more than I did.
There were also blue pamphlets outlining advice on preventing and reversing the language virus. Those I found strewn everywhere: cafés, park benches, sidewalks. (Not so many being read, alas.) Many of the suggestions were the kind of commonsense advice doled out during other virus scares: to wash hands, cough into sleeves, wear masks, visit the doctor at the earliest sign of serious symptoms. But it w
as also the first mention I saw of language therapy, and one tip it included for those recovering from word flu was to read.
I’d already been following that advice inadvertently each night after I got home—taking different routes, trying to make sure no one was behind me, checking my block for the unmarked cop car before carefully locking myself in. I’d read books of Doug’s I’d taken from his office as I searched futilely for references to OXIDP, but also my own old books and magazines. Ever since the night Bart had stayed over, I’d been revisiting them. (We were speaking less and less often by then, but they’d started to be linked in my thoughts with him.) And even before I picked up that blue pamphlet, I found that reading gave me a certain relief—one form of escapism that seemed safe, and maybe more than safe. I felt saner—less fragmented—after reading for an hour.
On December 5, the day the Merc reopened—a Wednesday, the same day of the week I’d seen Dr. Thwaite skulk into his secret meeting—I ventured east with a sense of resolve and something like destiny. Feelings that derived at least in part from desperation. Nearly three weeks had passed since Doug had gone missing, and I wasn’t any closer to finding him, despite spending nearly all my time looking. I was very close to giving up.
It was the middle of the afternoon, the air so cold that my breath froze. Bright spears of light stung my eyes. I nodded to the officer in the squad car across the street, then walked the four wide avenue blocks to the library, glancing behind me as I went.
The city had changed for the holidays. As I passed the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and glyphs of Rockettes, mothers towing toddlers to cafés by their mittens, windows graffitied with spotty snow and wreaths, and shoppers strolling arm in arm down Fifth, it was possible to believe for the length of my walk that everything was fine. I stopped for a hot dog at Forty-seventh Street. “Here’s your dog, doll,” the vendor said. “Keep smiling.” Every word perfectly clear, composed, like the shop window behind him, reflecting us back.
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