There was no mistaking the Mercantile Library: its name was chiseled right into the stone, below the bank of third-floor windows. Two carts of marked-down books were on sale outside, and an urn carved above the door seemed hopeful to me then, a symbol not of death but immortality. The timelessness of words.
As I stepped into the warm, dim anteroom, any mantle of worry lifted. Unbuttoning my coat, I walked past a pair of leather couches, a wall of books. At the reference desk my eye caught a sign announcing meetings of societies for Proust, Trollope, Musil. Johnson. I thought of Doug, and in that moment the thought made me smile.
But the librarian didn’t seem amused. “May I help you?” she asked coolly, tapping her seal-slick hair. Pretty pale hands extruded from dark cardigan sleeves. I’d forgotten the Merc was a private library.
I tried to keep smiling; when she asked if I was a member, I thought my lie sounded almost sincere. And at least she didn’t ask me to repeat it. (My fingers still reflexively felt in my pocket for my tube of pills.) But she wanted to see my card. When I patted artlessly at my coat, she asked, unbending, for ID, indicating their registry—a large wooden cabinet with tiny drawers: a card catalog, I later learned. “I don’t have that either,” I said. Her mouth scalloped in a scowl. But when I explained that I’d just given up my Meme and hadn’t gotten around to procuring a new form of identity, she sighed and slid a clipboard toward me. “Don’t forget next time,” she said.
I wavered just a moment before signing Alice Tate. Blushing, I realized I’d taken Bart’s last name. It gave me a flashback to lower school, in the days before the Meme—before most lower schoolers even had cell phones—and to scribbling pages of Anana Ringwald and Tobey Johnson, my name and my crush’s conjoined. Did my subconscious think I wanted to be Anana Tate? I shook my head. Those weren’t the feelings I had. Bart either.
I climbed the first stairs I saw, an open metal flight that took me to a mezzanine reading room. It resembled my grandparents’ parlor in their Connecticut country house. Same high ceilings and table sheen. Herringbone floors. Baubled chandeliers. Musky smell of old leather. I sloughed off my coat on a chair by the Johnson collection, near the baby grand. Imagined Doug beneath it, snoring a sweet, humble music, and my eyes pricked.6
I thought I was alone. But soon, as I looked around the room, I heard an unusual sound coming from a hidden corner. The jangly melody of metal on metal. As if a janitor were walking by with a bouquet of keys.
Curious, I strode to the other end of the room, pretending to need an atlas beached on a table, and found that the odd sound was coming from a woman’s gold bangles, which lightly bubbled together each time she turned a page. She looked like she was taking a break from Fifth Avenue: large sunglasses perched on shoeshine-black hair; white turtle-neck; tweed skirt; spike-heeled knee-high boots. She looked not unlike my mother, actually. And she was studying me with a judgment-fringed intensity worthy of Vera.
Marking her page with a slender finger, she watched me hoist the atlas—which was smudged and greasy, as if it had last been used by a mechanic—and carry it back across the room. I dropped it with a smack onto a leather ottoman. When I opened it, a skinny paperback—some sort of index—fell out. I didn’t take much note at the time. Just jammed it back in and flipped desultorily through the dirty atlas. Turned to the map of Iceland, which was the pale beige of a cornflake. Scratched Reykjavík with a ragged nail.
Dad, where are you? I thought, my throat burning with grief. I missed him very much. And for a moment, a sinker of sadness dropping in my stomach, I started to worry that I might not find anything at the Merc either. But then I heard the distant chime of the woman’s bracelets. Felt the itch of her invisible, critical gaze. And my anodyne resignation slipped away. In its place my resolve expanded again. I went back downstairs.
I managed not to react too strangely when the librarian referred to me as Ms. Tate, or when she noted, a little sternly, that she’d checked the rolls and found no record of me.
“What about Douglas Johnson?” I asked, emboldened.
“What about him?” she said. I thought I saw her eyelids tighten.
“What if I said I’m his daughter?” I asked. Thought, Wood and glue.
She tipped her head slightly to one side. “Are you?”
I dropped my chin. I also mentioned Vera’s name, which was evidently familiar to her. After a last scrutinous stare, she said, “All right. I think Douglas has a family membership. If you’re his daughter, I’ll write you a card.”
Relieved and appreciative, I smiled. But when I asked her, as casually as I could, if she could remind me what time the Diachronic Society meeting would start, she looked very doubtful again. She had no idea what I was talking about, she said. She said it very credibly. I repeated myself. But she firmly shook her head.
For a moment I lingered at the desk in doubt. Wondered if I should wait at the Merc until nighttime to see if any Society members I recognized arrived. Yet I wondered, too, if I’d made the whole thing up. It was a thought I almost couldn’t abide—the meeting had come to represent something absolute to me. A last threshold. I didn’t want to cross it.
But as I stood there hesitating, head swimming a little, I knew it was very possible, and even likely, that it had been a final, wishful invention. Steadying myself on the edge of the desk, trying to think what to do next, I thanked the librarian. Started to turn toward the exit. Then I heard footsteps clatter above, a light clanging at the top of the stairs, and a woman’s voice called down, “Anana?”
When I climbed back up to the mezzanine, the dark-haired woman was waiting.
“So you’re Douglas’s daughter,” she said, with a faint, hard-to-place lilt. “I thought you might be.” She held out her elegant hand. “Victoria Mark,” she said. And with a start, I realized I knew her—at least her name. She’d been an editor for Vaber, Ingmar, & Breuer before they’d closed their dictionary, and she’d become one of Doug’s most trusted contributors at the NADEL.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” I said.
“You, too,” she replied, face furrowing kindly. Lowering her voice, she explained that the meeting wouldn’t start until seven, up on the fourth floor. Then she gathered her things, donned and belted her coat. “See you tonight,” she said softly, and clacked away.
I decided to stay there, cocooned in safe, quiet calm. The occasional click emanating from the librarian’s desk below. In the afternoon an older man appeared, an ancient yellow newspaper blooming from under his arm, and silently read in a nearby chair. The soothing rustle of pages reminded me of Doug. Eventually, stomach hissing, I went in search of food.
I returned in plenty of time and took the stairs up to four. My heart lurched as I opened the door. But it was deserted. Lights out. Stacks empty. No recent litter in the trash. The woman, it seemed, had lied. I was wondering why—was she a friend of Dr. Thwaite’s? Did she just not like the look of me, or something I’d said?—as I stepped back into the hall. And nearly collided with Phineas.
As he braced himself, his hand went to his head. Which was covered by a red hat. “Alice,” he said, startled. “What are you doing here?”
But I didn’t even have time to remind him that he’d been the one to tell me about the meetings; more people were coming up the stairs—including Victoria Mark, who squeezed my arm and smiled. “I thought you told us Douglas wanted her here,” she said, winking. Dr. Thwaite’s mouth fell open slightly. To me she said, “I was just on my way to find you—there are so many of us tonight, we’re meeting up on six.” As she continued past us, Dr. Thwaite watched her disappear. Then, still silent, he plucked off his red cap, hair a white firebrand of static, and with the other hand gestured at the stairs. “After you,” he murmured.
* * *
1. Very new, in fact—I’d had to get yet another one after Thanksgiving night, when mine started acting strange.
2. I soon got an invitation to it from Chandra in marketing, and a forward from Vera;
I deleted both unread.
3. I still had Doug’s Aleph, but I’d locked it away in a large, plaid, rolling suitcase that I’d shoved under the bed. I’d taken the Aleph out a few times and flicked through, but without finding anything new.
4. That’s how I’d found the window note explaining that it was closed.
5. After I read that brochure, I started seeing this phrase pervasively, especially sprayed on Nautilus billboards.
6. Once when I was young he made a fort with me beneath the Steinway in that Connecticut house. We used the cushions of my grandparents’ couch and blankets from one of the guest beds, and had tea and cookies underneath. Then I rested my head on his bouncing stomach while he read Wind in the Willows aloud. We fell asleep, and woke to my grandmother screeching, “What deranged person would put my cushions on the floor?”
K
king ′kiŋ n 1 : a high card < ~ of hearts> 2 : the one holding the cards
The meeting room we shuffled into was bright, overheated, and crowded. A card table crammed with samovar, coffee urn, and dusty cookies governed the sole corner not lined with books. A curtained window rattled, letting in a draft. A hive of fluorescents buzzed above. More than twenty mismatched chairs were pinched into a circle, and several people stood.
Dr. Thwaite hurried for a plush brocade, leaving me stranded at the door. But Victoria Mark tapped the metal chair beside her, rings clacking with the archaic sound of chalk on a blackboard. Being affirmed by her seemed to grant instant credibility; several strangers turned to look at me with friendly curiosity.
But as I sat, shrugging off my coat and glancing around the room, I discovered that Victoria and Dr. Thwaite weren’t the only people I knew. A few chairs to my left I saw the crooked smile and frizzy amber curls of Clara Strange, from Bart’s department at the Dictionary. She waved. To her right was elegant, white-blond Tommy Keach, one of the pamphleteers I’d met on the street; there were several others. And on Clara’s left was the older man I’d seen reading the paper on the mezzanine. “Franz,” he said gruffly, leaning across the circle to extend a warm, onionskin hand. “Garfinkel?” I asked, amazed. Franz Garfinkel was a god of lexicography. He nodded, more astonished than I was at being recognized, grim face crumpling into a smile.
I also saw a stranger I’d been noticing around lately. The woman with red glasses and chin-length silver hair was seated right across from me—and staring me down with bleak, smoky intensity. I shifted uneasily in my seat, turning to see if there was someone behind me. There was not.
And yet another person’s presence threw me off even more. A person I wasn’t very glad to see. Across the circle, long legs stretched out in front of him and working to prop up a silver-handled cane, was Max’s business partner and friend Vernon Peach. It had taken me a few moments to notice him; his signature glasses were peeking from his shirt pocket instead of perched on his face. Despite the room’s heat, he also had a black watch cap tugged tightly down and a gray scarf looped around his neck. As if trying to go incognito. When I did finally see him, I felt a flurry in my chest. I’d always liked Vernon. But I’d seen none of Max’s friends since he’d moved out, and it made me anxious. Not least because he was a Synchronic employee.
But he quickly caught my eye and smiled. “Hi, Anana,” he mouthed. “So good to see you.” Pressed a hand to his heart. And a lump surprised me by rising in my throat. “You, too,” I mouthed back, swallowing hard.
By then the meeting had been called to order, and Victoria was introducing me. The people I didn’t know gave their names. Except the woman in red glasses, who was still glowering. It was Victoria who explained that she was Susan Janowitz, also once of VIB.
Then Susan confused me by sharply saying, “I expected her much sooner.”
Someone mumbled, “Renovations,” and I saw Victoria’s eyes dart to Dr. Thwaite, but she just said, “It doesn’t matter. We’re glad you’re here now, Anana. Susan is just …”
“Susan is just what?” Susan said. Crossed her thin arms.
Victoria placed a gentle hand on Susan’s knee. Then said that as I’d already guessed, this was a meeting of the Diachronic Society. “Most of us are colleagues,” she offered. Then amended, “Former colleagues.” Adjusted her gold bracelets. “We’ve been holding these meetings for a long time now. First as the Samuel Johnson Society—”
“Or the Douglas Johnson Society,” a dark-haired man I didn’t recognize said, and laughed. It struck me as oddly tone-deaf and unkind, especially after I’d just been introduced. But when he saw he was the only one laughing, he quickly quieted, and Victoria carried on.
“During the years when we were the Samuel Johnson Society,” she said, “our meetings were largely attended by lexicographers and Johnson enthusiasts. We discussed his Dictionary and letters and essays. Occasionally a biography. But mostly the meetings gave us a chance to talk about the pleasures—and the difficulties—of still working in publishing.”
Difficulties that quickly proliferated as time went on, Clara Strange chimed in, especially with the rise of Synchronic—buying up terms for the Exchange, precipitating the closure of many dictionaries, and maybe even publishers. Synchronic’s monolithic online limn store put a lot of pressure on the price of books.
Victoria nodded gravely. “Over the past few years, all of our lives have changed quite dramatically.” Many had lost jobs, she said. Several had been forced to leave New York. “They couldn’t afford it anymore,” she explained, hand rising to her throat. “They had to go back to their home countries, where it’s still possible to make something of a living working with words.”
“Pavel,” Franz angrily muttered. “And Yuki.”
Victoria inhaled sharply, closing her eyes. The dark glasses balanced on her hair reflected the crosshatchings of the overheads and made her look like a stately, lethal insect.
“So as all that began to happen,” Vernon said, picking up the thread, “the focus of the meetings shifted.” He leaned back in his chair. Crossed his extensive legs at the ankle. “We talked about Synchronic nearly every week—that became our new focus, making sure the public knows what they’re up to.” He seemed impartial, and I wondered how. As a founding partner of Hermes, why didn’t he sound defensive?
He clearly noticed my confusion. “Anana, you don’t know what a fierce apologist I used to be for Synchronic,” he said, shaking his head.
He’d come to his first meeting a couple years earlier on a lark, he explained, as a Johnson scholar, when it was still mainly a literary group. Enchanted by the characters he’d found—“He means Luddites,” Dr. Thwaite interjected; “Weirdos,” Franz expounded, quivering his hands—he kept coming back. Slowly, as complaints about Synchronic’s tactics took up more and more of each meeting’s agenda, Vernon initially felt duty-bound to defend the company’s “new vision” for language: making it “accessible,” “easy,” and “fun.” That aim overlapped with what he and Max and the others had been doing at Hermes.
“In the beginning I kept saying that there was every reason to believe the Exchange would only expand people’s vocabularies—any word they might need was always right at their fingertips.”
“But not,” Franz noted, “in their brains.”
Vern had argued that to insist on old lexicographic methods was naive—reactionary, even. “People want their words now,” he’d said at the time. “They don’t want to have to work so hard for them. They want entertainment and learning integrated. What’s so wrong with that?” What’s wrong, the Society’s members had replied, is that it wasn’t how it’s done. Vernon had rolled his eyes. “See, this is why you guys are getting left behind,” he’d said.
It had been Doug who’d convinced him, over months, that there was more to it than Vernon thought. Not just dragged feet and a few lost jobs. “You’re restructuring supply lines,” he’d said. “Understand? Once you go down that road, you can’t go back again. The road’s gone.” “Like that invisible bridge in The Last Crusade,”
Vernon had teased. But Doug wouldn’t joke with him, which was sobering.
Moving all our words onto one consolidated exchange, changing the way we use and access language, through Memes—it wasn’t just affecting our economy or culture, Doug had explained. The technology was actually rewiring people’s brains. Changing neuronal pathways and reward systems. They were forgetting things, or not learning them in the first place. And if we didn’t really have a shared, communal language—if we had nothing but a provisional relationship with words, a leaseholder’s agreement—what would happen, Doug had asked Vernon, if something went wrong? If, God forbid, there was a cyberattack on Exchange servers and language “went down”? How would we communicate then? A point he’d underscored by reminding all of them about the computer virus that had more or less shut down the whole island of Taiwan for close to six months a couple of years earlier. Annoyed, Vernon had argued that Synchronic had the best firewalls money could buy. “Better than yours,” he’d shot back at Doug. “Probably,” Doug had responded grimly.
“Eventually I just … couldn’t really defend them anymore,” Vernon said, absently tapping his cane. “Especially when more and more friends”—he nodded at the room—“started being negatively affected by their policies. And then I started seeing things—at Hermes, and later Synchronic—that I found pretty alarming.” Things like negligible oversight, shady contracts, breaches in security, changes to the game of Meaning Master that didn’t seem quite ethical or legal, deals with foreign partners whom Vernon had his doubts about.
“But when we decided on our name, the Diachronic Society,” he went on, “it wasn’t meant only as a sort of jab at Synchronic. It was really more of an homage to diachronism.”
“Taking the long view,” Clara Strange offered.
“Connecting with the labor,” added Franz, making a hoop in the air with his hands.
The Word Exchange Page 23
