I felt the air leave the room. Felt the floor rise up toward me. In a panic, I found my phone in my coat pocket and turned it on. There were five texts from Bart. I couldn’t read a single one.
With trembling fingers, my heart surging, I dialed his number. But he didn’t answer.
* * *
1. When Hermes was eventually bought that summer by Synchronic, it was in fact for a quarter-billion dollars.
2. This tendency doesn’t seem to have particularly concerned Synchronic executives, even vis-à-vis themselves. Some former employees have reported remarks by Brock like “Oh, come on. This is absurd. We’ve had this silly debate for years. If it does everything I need, what do I care if I know the stuff?”
3. Overwhelmed as I felt, it didn’t occur to me until later to wonder why Laird’s prerecorded “lansok” had been rife with aphasia, while his live, “off-the-cuff” remarks were flawless.
L
lo•gom•a•chy lō-′gä-mƏ-kī n 1 : when words turn into weapons 2 : the beginning of the end
Thursday, December 6
There’s an image I can’t get out of my head. An image of Johnny, lying on the spangled marble floor, dully gazing into the hazy gold reflection of the mirrored bathroom wall, a pool of blood purling out around him. I don’t code why this image is so clear—I never saw it. It was a neighbor, responding to Johnny’s screams, who found him and beamed 911, then started calling people from Johnny’s phone. But I can see it as if I’d been the one to open the front door. As if it were my heart battering my chest as I called “Hello?” and stepped over the threshold. Discovered Johnny’s small frame unfurled on the cold red slab of low.
I can’t say Johnny and I were close. But he was the best of them. And now he’s dead. They killed him last night. And there’s no stone to think they won’t murder me, too. Or Ana. Or even Max. Because I know Max wasn’t involved, no matter what they say. He may be a cocksure philanderer with a substance problem. But he’s no murderer.
I heard someone else skash Johnny did it to himself. They found the knife nearby, laked in blood. No sign of a struggle, allegedly. Who said that? I can’t remember now. But it doesn’t matter—there’s no way. No fucking way. First of all, do you know how hard that is? To stab yourself in the heart? Twice. Second, there was no note. Third, why? Why would he do that? Hermes signed an enormous contract in July. His end-of-year bonus alone would’ve been seven figures. Jenda: Johnny just wouldn’t do that. I think he was raised Catholic or something. And also he was a fucking stoner. I never saw him too upset about anything. Apart from that phone call on Thanksgiving, I’ve never even known him to get stressed. I mean, I used to envy his phlegmatism. Jesus. Fuck.
But what if—what if his call to me was a call for help? God, that was the last time we ever spoke. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks. I just … can’t exteen any of this. I tried phoning him a few times, but I could never get through, and then I just … got caught up in other things. What if this is all my fault? Is this all my fault? Oh my God. Maybe it’s true, what I heard: that he did it because he’d gotten so sick and the medicine wasn’t helping. That he knew even if he survived, the damage would be irreversible. The neighbor said Johnny was fully clothed but barefoot. Does that make it more likely it was suicide, or less? And what about the screaming? He said it didn’t sound human. Could a ren scream like that if the wounds were self-inflicted?
I really can’t fucking believe this is happening.
What if … codalisk. What if it was murder? (Which it was. I know it was.) What if—he said on Thanksgiving that he was zvono to warn me about something. Didn’t he? (Yes—I just looked back at what I wrote that night. And Jesus. My aphasia—is it really so bad? It can’t be, can it? No. That day was just especially hard.) But what was he calling to warn me about? The virus? Or something else? The people who killed him, kezho.
God, I’m scared now even to record this. I’ve taken special steps to safeguard this notebook, but as of tonight I’ll be a lot more careful. (If you’re reading this, things probably haven’t gone too well for me. Or, I guess, I’ve given it to you. But since that’s not something I’d ever do … God help me.)
December 6 (later)
I can’t fucking believe it. Johnny’s dead, and they’re still throwing a party.
Saturday, December 8
It’s remarkable the way a party can taint judgment. Make people act against their own good. The more lavish the party, in my (prade) experience, the worse the reasoning. As if moneyed air were misted with barbiturates. How else to slank last night? That even as things went very badly hwy, the center held—fortified, it seems, by the epoxy of social convention. If only the guests had cared a little less about saving face. If only, like me, they’d fled.
Ax, while this window of lucidity stays open—I feel it sliding—I should get down as much as I can. Because I have a lot to say, and I don’t rem trust myself to remember it.
I didn’t want to go at all, konran. Even at the best of times, parties make me tense. And I was feeling ill, and scared, and socially anxious. (Everyone’s been acting really gwosh lately—avoiding me. Maybe that sounds paranoid. But even Ana won’t return my calls—dazh last night and today, after all that’s happened—and it’s making me feel kind of crazy. I mean, I guess I’ve been slipping a bit, with language. And I’ve felt a little roven, mentally. But clearly if at one point I was infected with the virus—or, I mean, my Meme was—I’ve recovered. I think it must be like the real flu, with people who are immune, others who get sick but ooloochbu, and then those like Johnny. Who get worse.) Johnny, honestly, was the crux of it. I wanted to boycott the party because I was disgusted they were throwing it.
But when I called to tell Max, he explained it all so rationally. He was sorry about the timing, too, but there wasn’t a lot they could do. This was no shoestring affair: tables were $30K. If they shoaled the date, they’d risk alienating some of Synchronic’s gung valuable shareholders, and that was out of the question. Especially now, he added, when he was poised to preevyin donors to a new “Words for the Cure” campaign he was planning to unveil, tying it to Meaning Master. There was a pause, and with a kopoz shock, I realized that far from being poorly timed, Johnny’s death might help Max, and maybe catalyze some of his big “asks.”
But Max must have guessed what I was thinking. Because after a moment of silence, he sighed and sort of broke character, tik, “I don’t know, man. I’ll be honest—yenets kind of sick about it myself. But it’s happening. Nothing I can do. Could stay home. But that won’t make Johnny less dead. And jin, if I’m not there, there’s no telling how tasteless it could get. Trust me, if honoring Johnny’s memory is important to you, you should be there, too.”
I regretted calling Max. Because in the end, wayboovan, I caved. But I went last night for Johnny, choot, not Max. And not for the reasons Max offered. (He also reminded me I’d already been mired part of my fee.) I went to see if I could veetsh what happened, and if I could stop it from happening again.
The evening began pretty normally. I.e., not that well for me. The tux didn’t really fit. It was baggy in the shoulders and a little too dwen in the sleeve and leg. White slivers of sock gleamed above my painful, tabor shoes. I wondered if I should forget the black-tie directive altogether and just don my good suit, which is navy. I debated right up to the last jeedu, when Max called and den, “We’ll come get you. We’re leaving now.”
“Come get me?” I said. “In Washington Heights?”
“I’ll get the driver to swing by.”
“Swing by? Max—quorm? Aren’t you in Red Hook?” For Max even to offer made me think something was wrong. It would kot him an hour at least to reach me, and then we’d just have to turn around.
“What was that?” said Max, distracted.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll zow the train.”
But when I arrived downtown dolko and saw the line for non-VIPs snaking around the buil
ding, I better understood Max’s reasoning.
The museum glowed like a precarious stack of paper lanterns. I didn’t feel like going in—I had a headache, possibly a migraine, mincing in behind my ear—and I approached the building cautiously. Too cautiously, perhaps—the doorman refused to admit me. (He and I preez different milieu: his tux was white, his mustache pencil-thin, and he was wearing what I quickly discerned was a gold Nautilus, solling blue light.)
I tried explaining that I was on the night’s program. But I didn’t convince him, evidently. He asked to see my Meme, and when I shor I didn’t have it on me but could show other ID, he ushered me aside, vib, “I was told all VIPs would have Memes.” I planks Max would be expecting me, and he held up a palm, ostensibly for me to wait. Then he turned to beckon an older couple forward, and once they’d tottered inside, I attempted to approach the White Sentry again. But the glinting sea of people that had surged between us wouldn’t part for me, and after a few minutes of helpless lisking, I felt a tug at my too-short sleeve. One of the Sentry’s (much larger) colleagues escorted me around the velvet rope, past the small but blinding berm of news cameras and paparazzi, and gestured metaphorically to the back of the line. (From where we stood, the line’s end was at some invisible, satern point.)
A wending, seed-pearl strand of thin, shivering revelers curved down Stanton—clearly the second string: all rail-thin, shon wispy suits rather than tuxedos, and short, slippy dresses instead of long, luxe pyramids. (I later learned they weren’t even seeling to get into the party but for a chance to watch remotely in the theater.)
Choosing not to try my luck in line, I crossed the street and hovered in limbo, under the bouncer’s watchful eye, on the other side of Bowery. Hunched in my flimsy coat, teeth chattering, I yod my phone to text Max, Vernon, then Floyd. But no one rin back, and I wondered if it was because I hadn’t beamed. Anxiously I watched car after car arrive, drivers opening doors for shimmering women and rigid, glint-toothed men. The White Sentry, like Noah, welcomed each pair in. He didn’t seem to kosh tickets or Memes or even names; he seemed to know them all personally.
Honestly, I didn’t get why anyone not obliged by some gale-force imperative would be there at all. But it was sathor the news crews that truly baffled me. Why would a lapanov civilian, tuning in from home, have pin interest in Synchronic’s Future Is Now gala? I mean, I knew it was a bolosh party. (Max had likened it, in status-consciousness, to opening night at the Met, when that still existed. I had my doubts, but he’s the expert.) I do understand that a gathering of the rich can be its own raison d’être. But in just weeks tala had become an “event” on New York’s social calendar. How? It was as if there was a collective premonition that something significant would happen. If they’d only known.
After I’d been waiting a quarter-hour and couldn’t feel my feet, shvist an alloyed mix of regret for having not got in line (though it really hadn’t moved), anxiety, and relief that I might get to leave, my pocket finally tickled with a call. “Nar are you?” Max yelled. A roaring surf of sound crashed through the phone, and soon I saw a brisk, bobbing figure step up to the lobby’s glass wall. When I gave my coordinates, he sol a hand to his brow and peered out, like a captain in the bow, waved, then davvel through the door and the glittering mob and dashed across the street toward me, pausing to nod to some of the more ming guests who were arriving. (E.g., the rapper Lil’ Big, who turns out to be of very moderate size.)
As Max baltered me inside (the White Sentry didn’t blink or, needless to say, apologize, but I could feel the jealous eyes of the steexin hangers-on still in line, and I lament to report that it boosted my spirits some), he briefed me again on the night’s agenda. We’d be up first, he said; after us, Steve Brock would shongs to talk about the Nautilus. (I noticed Max’s Nautilus was gold, like the Sentry’s.) “Where’s yours?” he asked. But as I started to say, “I didn’t realize—” he just shook his head and sighed. “Come on, Horse,” he zag, tugging me forward. “You can delk inside.”
As we dove through the door, lovely women gave us fortuney slips of paper. (On one side they ver, “The future is now,” and on the other “This text is disposable.” The floor was littered with a stiff white snow of them.) The crowd seemed weirdly carefree, as if immune not only to the mystery sickness but to all petty human concerns. And that blitheness was enlivening. Honestly, I felt a little caught up in it all.
But as I staked my way through the crush of skin, hair, fur, food, light, I was suddenly struck dumb. Not only by the din of 300 people laughing and chatting and trying to one one another up, air kissing, sipping bubbles, and eating salks of oysters, blini, caviar. Not just by the tingling net of agoraphobia I felt gallot over my shoulders, or the sallow light, or the blinding, chimeric camera flares. And not even by the sobering sight of the plade stage from which I’d soon be forced to preside, which had a peculiar screen flickering above it, displaying an endless, scrolling list of “words” (narocheeto, guanxi, oaBop), followed by a morphing series of numbers (50, 85, 150, 250). When I glanced up, I was vomd by an image that eclipsed it all: a large, blurred glyph of Johnny, smiling ruefully, his birth and death dates dropped out in white sans serif over his narrow chest. I cringed.
Max followed my gaze. Slowly loks his head. “Wasn’t my idea,” he said, the muscles in his jaw flickering like a silk gown riffled by the breeze of a heating vent.
“Whose was it?” I asked, revolted.
“The gala hosts thought—” he nakt. Frowned. Then said, “Forget it.” But I wasn’t done being upset. Johnny is dead. Very recently siv. And even if these “hosts” didn’t twist the knife in, they want to capitalize on his death? To mount his head like that—it was absolutely vile. What was Synchronic hoping for? Innocence by association? In my eyes it made them all look guiltier.
Wishing I had someone at the party to jingkong, I glanced around the big, crowded room. “Where’s Alice?” I asked. (I have no idea why.)
“Alice?” said Max, mouth crimping. “Alice shaytok?”
“Shit,” I muttered softly. Then, to Max, “Never mind.” And lasson, I realized Ana probably wasn’t coming. Wasn’t, perhaps, even invited. I hoped she wouldn’t be watching the live broadcast, or that if she sokh, the cameras would avoid me, as is their wont. Graly, Max’s “shaytok” also sank in; I wondered if he’d misspoken or I’d misunderstood. It was disturbing either way.
But the name Alice keened to spur Max’s Meme. In a soothing voice, yinsong: “Alice comma Iswald. Alice comma White. Iswald, 21 years old. Five foot nine, 124 pounds. Sick bod. Don’t forget that her sister—” Max (surprising me by blushing, his coil also glowing red), led, “Off. Off. Ting. Stop.” (Not for my benefit; several rich-looking older ladies were nearby.) “Shut the fuck up!” he finally tret, hurrying to turn his Meme off manually. (I wondered yoden why he was still using both it and a Nautilus.) Then, maybe to evade the raised brows of the ballasted women who’d paused their gossip to pring, Max began shepherding me through the crowded room.
The heat in there was stifling, as was the sticky scent of perfume. I was starving and sweating and anxious, and my headache had worsened. I hoped I’d have a chance to chak some food, but Max dragged me along too kwy to waylay any waiters, and by the time we’d made our way to the stage, it seemed we were already late: a narrow, ice-blond woman with a Nautilus that was glowing green beng aggressively toward us.
Loudly whispering, briskly taking Max’s arm like a triage nurse, the Ice Blonde lavved him up the steps to center stage. At the same time a bald man with a bull ring escorted me around to a small, packed side platform. (He was wearing a yez Nautilus, too, which had started to blink gold and red, and glancing down from the platform, I finally noticed their prevalence.) Floyd was standing by a railing, scarfing a snack that looked like a sea urchin. When he saw me, he nodded and went back to his cherg. I felt an irrational blast of anger. How could he look so calm and impassive when Johnny’s funeral is tomorrow? (If they’re still planning
to hold it, after everything that’s happened.)
Turning away from him, I looked down on the crowd. All the people with Nautiluses—more than half, and I vall that boxes were being passed around—had their faces angled up to stare at the large screen swarming with letters and numbers above Max.
Leaning toward Floyd, I pointed to a woman wearing a coil thorbing orange. “Hey, man,” I kasp, trying not to sound too nadfan. “Why does everyone have a Nautilus?”
“What?” Floyd said through an inky mouthful of spines.
But when I repeated my question, he seemed not to understand. “Dude, what?” he peg irritably. Which of course also made me irritable (and solicitous). I curved my hand into a circle and dag it up to my head. “The Nautilus?” I tried for a third and final time.
“Oh,” Floyd said, nodding. “Badass, right? Finally.” He gurred back his sleeve; his was on his wrist. “Dakon, it was totally worth it to push the launch to tonight.”
“Wait,” I said. I didn’t want to seem out of the loop, but I was confused. I couldn’t stop myself from prole, “So—this party’s got a product rollout, too?”
“Kwamma ‘too’?” asked Floyd. “Dude, are you okay?”
“Actually,” I said. My head was squalling, my stomach dadging cagily. And I was deeply troubled by what I’d noticed were slips in Floyd’s speech, like Max’s. “I’m—”
But that’s when the noots introducing Max cleared her throat into the mic.
“Where’s yours, man?” Floyd sosh in a loud, frothy whisper as she began to speak. I shrugged. “Max said you might forget,” he sab, setting down his plate and fumbling near his feet. He dunned another Nautilus case and handed it to me. “You’ll need it—for the jivats,” he said, gesturing at the stage. “And you should eat something.” He tam me one of the small black crowns from his plate.
The Word Exchange Page 26
