For a moment we were quiet. Listened to the rumble of the heater coming on and Canon crying in his sleep. “I’ll be fine,” Phineas promised. “They don’t quite trust me, clearly, or I wouldn’t get the pleasure of their periodic visits. But they think I’m ‘cooperating.’ ”
I inhaled. Stared at the shiny spider veins on his nose. “Don’t you think that’s what Max thought, too?”
Phineas removed his glasses and slipped them into a pocket. Rubbed the pink depressions they’d left in his skin. “I don’t know precisely what Max has done to run afoul of his partners,” he said. “But as you’ve seen for yourself, I’m being very careful. Please don’t worry about me. As for Max … who can say.”
Against my will, my throat burned a little, as if I’d swallowed wrong. I tried to clear it. Tried to ask Phineas why they were looking for Max. What they’d do if they found him.
But all Phineas would say was, “I think he’s mixed up in something very serious.”
“Like?” I said, feeling frustrated. Helpless.
“I really don’t know, my dear,” Phineas said, testing the lump on his head. “But I think you have more important things to worry about than a very foolish young man who broke your heart. I doubt very much he’s thinking about you.”
It felt like a slap. But he was right. It was a useful reminder. I bit my cheek. Nodded.
Phineas sighed. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “That wasn’t what I meant to say. We don’t really get to choose … Do we.” His eyes looked a little glossy. And my mind tumbled back to the letter I’d seen in his office. All those photographs.
I learned the story of how Nadya became Victoria only later. It encompassed, too, Phineas’s first meeting with my father, in 1971. In fact, I know far less about the love story—only the bones. That in 1965 Phineas and the young Nadya Markova met and fell in love at the École des Hautes Études in Paris when she got a special dispensation to leave Moscow for a year of philological study and he was a visiting linguistics lecturer. That he almost convinced her to come back with him to New York. That when she finally came, several years later—getting out of the USSR with difficulty—they were married within a month.
But he soon realized that something was wrong. She often spent all day in bed, lights off. She didn’t like to be around people. And for nearly a year she seemed to give up on words. Not just their study; whole days might pass when she barely spoke. He didn’t know what else to do, so he built a darkroom, hoping that images might become her new vocabulary.
When she regained her voice, she apologized for her reticence, and for not replying to many of his letters during the years they’d been apart. Never again, she said, would she let fear menace her into silence. But she also said she needed to be on her own. Soon after she moved out, she changed her name, something she hadn’t done when they were married.
They stayed close, and his obvious despondency after she left deeply troubled her. For weeks he barely slept, went out, ate. When a strange opportunity arose—she heard from a friend of a secret trip a seasoned Icelandic explorer, Magnús Jökulsson, was leading—she encouraged him to go. The “trip,” in fact, was right in NYC: three days spelunking beneath the city’s streets. “Sometimes the best way out of darkness is into it,” Victoria said, not expecting him to agree.
It was indeed very out of character. But he knew he had to do something: he was disconsolate. And he had no ideas of his own. Maybe, having seen her metamorphosis, he hoped he could change, too—or at least change how Nadya, now Victoria, saw him. So he surprised them both by getting himself into the group, which wasn’t easy; he had to buy his spot. Not everyone was glad he was allowed along: an odd, dour lexicographer, slight and nervous, prone to mild hallucinations: distant flickers and cries, the feet and wings of insects. He woke up yelling the first night about an imagined rat invasion.
But misery underground is quickly compounded, and two men in the group grimly took on the task of trying to engage him enough to calm him down. It was that or kick him out—conditions were treacherous, focus essential. On the second day they almost got in very bad trouble wading through a combined sewer when it started to rain and the sewer quickly began filling.
The two men who’d taken Phineas under their wing had of course been Doug and Fergus Hedstrom, off on one of their adventures. And in fact it was this NYC “trek” and conversations with Jökulsson that sparked Ferg’s lifelong fascination with Iceland—and later led to his fortune there, built on “cardboard and crap” (Ferg’s own pithy description of the real-estate industry). The trip also changed Doug’s life. Or rather meeting Phineas did. The second night, over a fifth of whiskey, Fergus and Doug tried drawing Phin out, and it soon emerged that Doug was a Samuel Johnson scholar. That charmed and interested Phineas—and it prompted him to say something that changed the trajectory of Doug’s career: “Did you know they’re looking for an editor at the North American Dictionary? You’d be perfect. I’ll put in a word.”
Another unexpected thing happened while they were down below one of the greatest cities on earth, shining their lights on dark, liquidy walls like the ocean at night; encountering Gordian knots of rats; pyramids of roaches; perhaps even the sparkle of a few fish near Fulton. On the third day something else caught Phineas’s eye, although it might have been just one of his hallucinations; everyone ahead of him had missed it. The group was very quickly, carefully passing through part of the extensive network of tunnels radiating out from Grand Central. Phin was near the rear of the line, and when he called out, his companions thought at first that he’d been hurt. (Jökulsson had been in a state of dreary anticipation, waiting for Phin to touch the third rail.) The shout caused a temporary but serious jam, men falling into one another’s backs, wrenching necks, shining lamps in each other’s eyes. But Phineas wasn’t hurt. He yelled because he thought he saw something give off a gloamy light, like a copper pot in a dark kitchen: part of the pipeline for pneumatic tubes once used to dispatch the mail. He pointed it out to Ferg and Jökulsson behind him, but they impatiently hurried him on.
Phin had been looking for the tube infrastructure; he knew it had once been very dense around Grand Central. But by 1971, when his errant flashlight beam may have found the moribund message system, it had been out of commission for nearly twenty years. And of course by then the newest technology was computers, already asserting their Icarian pull. Doug and Phin discussed them extensively. Both were excited and intrigued by possible uses for the behemoth calculators. But they also shared a concern—called a paranoia by some—that these amazing machines might one day replace our need for books. Dictionaries. People. And more than forty years before the first cases of word flu, Doug had imagined a contagious language virus. The erasure of whole swaths of human knowledge and culture.
By the end of their expedition, my father and Phineas had vowed to stage a contest against accelerated obsolescence. And the more Phin told Doug about the pneumatic tubes that had once run under New York—and that were still in use, he reminded Doug, in places like the New York Public Library—the more convinced Doug became that if he ever worked in publishing, he’d like to have them installed.
When he actually managed it, though, three years later, Phin was astounded. He checked to see if it was possible to run tubes from his apartment to Doug’s Dictionary—and discovered that it seemingly wasn’t. But in the process he found out he might have seen old infrastructure; some remained, including nearly two blocks’ worth between Grand Central and his building on Beekman. (It was indeed his building, I later learned; his father had been a very successful real-estate developer and had bought several on the block. When Phin started dreaming of tubes, he made modifications to a few of the buildings, then still in his family.) He also researched where the lines might be laid, who could put them in (with permits or not), and at what price (high). At the time it didn’t seem justified, and he set aside his plans for a very long while—decades. Until increasing large-scale cyberattacks convinced him
that having a way to quickly convey analog messages might be expedient.
By then the Society had been meeting for several years at the Merc, only eight blocks away. He paid a small, discreet crew of expert underground-cable installers in Queens an exorbitant sum to exploit existing tube infrastructure and carefully lay the rest through a few combined sewers and subway storm drains.4 He also ingratiated himself at the Merc by making a donation that ensured the library’s future. The director, in turn, kindly obliged his eccentric request to run tubes secretly to the library’s cramped and humid subbasement. That had required permits and renovations. And several months after the first line was laid, Phineas hired the same team to connect the Merc to the Dictionary, only eleven more blocks away.
But on the night that Floyd invaded Phineas’s apartment, the discoveries I’d made had nothing to do with pneumatic tubes or my father.
“Nadya—she’s …” I said, faltering. “You and Victoria—you were …?”
And Phineas simply said, “Don’t look so surprised.” “I’m not,” I tried to reply. But he talked over me: “It was a very long time ago.” Then he stood, stirring Canon. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, “please allow a tired old man a rest.”
As he left the room, I heard him mutter, “Love.”
The night before my flight to London, I went home to pack, and Phineas asked Clive to go with me. I demurred—it was late; Clive had worked all day—but I was glad he was there. Because it soon became clear that my place had been raided. Nearly everything I owned was on the floor. In the bedroom, some of it was dusted with a fine layer of snow blown in through the window.
I was shaken, but I hated to make Clive wait. The city was under curfew; he was anxious to get home to his family. I decided to believe that my things had just been sifted by opportunistic thieves who’d noticed my broken window from the street. But it didn’t look like a burglary: nothing was missing and the door hadn’t been forced. Still, once I saw that no one was lurking in the hall or out on the fire escape, I sent Clive home.
“You sure?” he asked, relieved.
I said yes. And what happened next wasn’t Clive’s fault. It’s true that if he’d stayed, it wouldn’t have come about. But the mistakes were mine. I let myself get distracted, sorting through my ransacked life. I should have been long gone when the door buzzer went off. Not skimming Doug’s Aleph, which I’d brought along to charge. Certainly not combing through old clothes, papers, photographs.
On the bed, in a mess of other things, was a shiny stack of black-and-whites. Self-portraits—discrete pieces of my body—from my college thesis on “the reification of temporality” (whatever that means). But looking again at those flattened tokens of my persona—glossy bits of lip, eyes, hair, feet—I saw more than I had before.
Max had always loved those photos, and I’d found that both flattering and vaguely creepy. Images were easier to “get,” I’d teased, than thoughts, words, feelings. Ciphers were simpler than people. But as I studied those prints that night, shivering—the apartment was frigid—I finally really realized that I was culpable, too: I’d come to see myself as him seeing me. It was an inherited tendency. A little sadly, with a sting of disloyalty, I thought of Doug’s secret desk-drawer stash of Vera memorabilia. Maybe that was part of their falling apart—reification. Maybe the same was true for Max and me.
But it wasn’t the photos that undid me. A moment later, as I slowly turned them over on the rumpled sheets, I unburied a crumpled piece of paper that made time compress and my heart stop, then jump like a magnet. It was a note I’d first found more than four years earlier. Folded over on a smooth hotel pillow on a different bed, in Picard, Dominica.
And it was that note that left me open to attack. Which came in the form of five piercing trills, and—when I finally pressed the intercom—the sound of Max on the windy street below, choking on something.
“Ana.” He coughed. Tried to catch his breath. “It’s me.” And that’s when I realized, with a painful throb, that he wasn’t choking. He was crying. “Zemin. Fucked—” He was sobbing so hard that I could barely understand. “Please! Just stam—”
Heart hammering, I lifted my finger off LISTEN. Imagined him still talking into the Delphic plastic box. But after a silence that wound itself, scarflike, around my throat, the buzzer rang again, in staccato bursts, like the kamikaze bombings of an agitated bee.
I tried to think. To inhale and exhale normally. Shaking, I pressed my cheek to the wall. It was cool as a sheet. In my clammy hand I was clutching that note I’d found with the photos. From another life, it seemed, when people still wrote notes. When he wrote them to me. I read the words “My love” over and over, until they had no meaning. Touched TALK. Struggled to keep my voice even as I said, “What do you want?”
For a long moment I heard just the static of wind. Stomach sinking, I wondered if he’d already given up and left. Then I heard a sound like a retch. And I heard it again. But this time it sounded more like my name. Finally, after another silence, I heard something else. In a low, scarred voice, nearly a whisper, he said, “I have to see you.”
I later wondered if it was a recording. But right then, that was it. Those five small words an awful open sesame. Five words that I’d prayed for weeks to hear. That I’d sworn wouldn’t move me. But there we were, that other life returned to me. That life before the virus; before my father went missing; when my days were filled with words and purpose, creating things; and my nights with laughter, friends, Max’s touch—something I’d taken for love. There it all was again. Intruding. I pushed the plastic nib marked DOOR and waited.
He didn’t run up the stairs, as he’d done when we were first in love. In fact, for what felt like a very long time I didn’t hear any footsteps. What was he doing? Finishing a cigarette? Trying to wipe off the victory smirk? Holding his head in pain, sick? Was he alone? Was he telling a woman he’d be right back? Or was he with someone else—like Floyd. Or Dmitri. I dead-bolted the door just as I heard the heavy tread of boots start to echo up.
But I soon discerned that it was just one pair. Until, at last, they stopped outside my door. What had been our door until just two months before. Haltingly, knowing he’d see me, I peered out through the peephole. And I was stunned. His face was battered: one eye burled shut, chin abraded, cheekbone gashed. His good eye was red, face wet with tears. And my own eyes began to burn.
I tried to stand my ground. There was no knowing what had happened. Could have been just a bad night out. But in my mind’s ear I heard Phineas say, “He’s mixed up in something very serious.” Worse, the bitter, bruising way Floyd had apprised us that he was looking for Max. And in my hand I held the note that said, “My love without end.”
Through the eyelet in the door, I saw a pale flash. Max was holding something: a piece of paper like a white flag. In collaged letters, it read: PLEASE LET ME IN.
“What do you want?” I asked again, sounding tougher than I felt. Thinking not just of Max but of neighbors who’d hear everything, and who’d worry about infection. Though I also knew—saw myself doing it before I did—that I would open the door. My heart’s long habit of love was too strong for me to leave him sick and stranded outside. While the door was still closed, though, I watched him hold up a hand: wait. Watched as he tried, wincing, to get down on one knee. A sight I’d always hoped to see. But not that way.
“Don’t,” I said, choking up. And undid the bolt.
Once he was inside, I barely noticed the shift in mood. Like a tiny, wayward pulse of energy. Max winked at me. And I realized, too late, that I’d made a mistake.
“Shang you yow sdyelatye me wait there vod night,” said Max. He no longer looked ashamed, or even repentant. In fact he looked a little smug. I could tell he was trying not to. But nearly thirty years of egotism are bad training for remorse.
I’d planned to ask what had happened—who’d done that to his face. But with the crown of power back in play, it seemed best to harden my
line. Not show any weakness. And my fears that he might be able to infect me were growing in intensity. I noticed, too, that he wasn’t asking about me—my shorn hair, my chipped front tooth. Why all my things were on the floor. How the past two terrible months had been for me. “This is the last time I’ll ask,” I said, filling my words with ice. “What do you want from me?”
He lowered himself gently into the chair by the door, shivering. I stood, arms crossed. Rigid.
“Want? Towsher see you,” he said, flashing his gap-toothed grin. It looked more gapped than ever: his own front tooth was also broken, more badly than mine. The smile made even his good eye nearly disappear. It almost looked like he was falling asleep.
But he was very much awake. “God, Ana,” he said, reaching for my hand, buried in the crook of my arm. I stepped back, but not far. “Do you know how faychung badly deleenoy you senk? Zeegid idea how seeyong vee.” Stretching forward, he tried again to take my hand. Settled for an elbow. “You’re tolko rensher me. Chvistvo like myself again.” He tried to pull me closer. His smell, of cigarettes and old deodorant and sweat, made me gag.
“Max,” I said, moving farther back, trying to be careful. I didn’t want him in a rage. “You’re not making sense,” I said softly. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
His smile vanished; his eye came out of hiding. And I braced myself. But what I saw wasn’t fury. It was a true flash of fear. “Dongran,” he mumbled, face blanching. He’d brought an old notepad and pen. A stack of pasted-up stock phrases. HOW ARE YOU? was on top. Below that. HOW MUCH? He groped at the notepad. “Wait, oden second.” Wincing, he pressed his fingers to his head, then tried clumsily to scrawl something out. It took a long, long time. A small forever. I got impatient. Anxious. Turned to look around the room at all my trampled stuff.
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