I didn’t want to phone your Meme; I was afraid they might be able to intercept the call and listen in. I also don’t want you using it, especially now, if it’s possible that word flu is circulating. So I left a few arcane clues that I imagined, in my maddened state, you might find this week. (I don’t know why, but I didn’t think you’d go looking for me at the Dictionary that night. If I had, I would have waited near the building and steered you away. I’m sorrier than I can ever say that I put you in harm’s way. I wasn’t thinking, truly.)
Finally I threw on my coat and, leaving the light on in my office, hurried for the stairs. Not until I’d made it halfway down was I stopped by an unnerving thought. An image arrived in my mind unbidden, as if beamed in from outside: my Aleph. I probably wouldn’t have even thought of it—I really hadn’t used it in years—if not for the fact that I’d recently secreted details in it about the new safe-deposit box I’d gotten. (I thought at the time that storing them in the Aleph was so clever and discreet.) Anyone who switched it on would also be able to see my old notes, contacts, passwords, codes. Maybe other things.
Those devices are like elephants: they have very long memories. Unless scrubbed clean by specialists, they’ll retain what they’re given. I didn’t even know what it knew about me—or you, or Vera, or members of the Society. And I was also afraid that it might know how to find me. That in this brave new world of ours, there’s no such thing as escape. No quiet place to be alone, even in your own mind.
I pictured it starkly, upstairs in my desk. Bracing myself in the stairwell, trying to catch my breath, I wondered if they knew I had it. Would Brock’s assistant have checked her records before the meeting and seen that they’d sent me one years ago? If so, and if they guessed it was in my office, it wouldn’t be hard to find. The thought made my chest contract. I had to sit. Feeling jangled, vulnerable, and a little crazy, I decided to go back up for it.
And yet I couldn’t move from the stairs, where cold was leaching up through my slacks. My heart was pounding. I was soaked through with sweat. It must have been some kind of mild attack. And thank God. At least eight or nine minutes had passed since I’d seen John in the hall. I’m sure that if I’d turned back, I would have been caught.
By the time the panic had faded enough for me to stand, I’d made the decision to keep going down. Only a fool favors imagined threats over those right in front of him. (Though I’m very relieved, I must say, that you were the one to find my Aleph.)
Once I reached the subbasement, I tried visiting the routing terminal, to send messages to you and Phineas. But I couldn’t get in. The door was locked. It was also scalding hot. I had a terrible feeling. Alice, I think they’re burning books in there.
Some other day I’ll explain how I made my way out of the building. For now, I’ll just say it involved a detour that landed me near the old Mercantile Library.
I realized with a start that it was past eight o’clock and you’d probably left the diner. But I asked the car I hailed for Newark airport to stop there just the same.
When Marla saw me, she pursed her lips. “You,” she said, wagging a thick finger. “She waited a long time before she went home.”
“She went home?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what she said,” Marla reported, shaking her head and muttering something under her breath. I know how it must sound, to blame Marla, but that’s why I never guessed you’d gone to the Dictionary. And I thought home was the best place for you, until I could be in touch from Oxford. I called Phin as soon as I got here. It just took longer than I’d planned. But that’s a story for another day, too.
Maybe it was naive, but I believed the lexicographic life would be relatively calm. I know, though, that I’ve taken a great risk in writing all this down. Not just a risk for myself, but for you and Phineas and the Diachronic Society as a whole. Writing things down is always dangerous. But even now I think it’s a risk worth taking.
I don’t want to live in a world where we destroy words—where meanings have no meaning anymore. Of course linguistic devaluation started before the Meme and the Word Exchange, before “Meaning Master” and this new virus that the game is supposed to spread. For years, decades, our memories have slowly been replaced by the memories of machines. I know you’ve heard all this before, but now more than ever it bears repeating.
Some say history is a forward march—a line advancing toward a target. Maybe this view was just a mirror of its time: the 19th century saw the rise of what we came to call linear thought, a way of processing the world that was made possible only by the medium of books. By accident, the bound codex taught us sustained focus, abstract thinking, logic. Our natural tendency is to be distracted—to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved. There was no going back—only ever forward.
Others say that history isn’t straight but curved, a circle, constantly repeating; ouroboros, the eternal return. But ouroboros isn’t just a circle; it’s a serpent eating its own tail. What if, right now, as we’re immolating language, we’re doing away with ourselves? Maybe we’ve regressed. The skills we once used for survival—scattered attention, diffuse concentration—have been adapted to finding glowing dots on screens, skimming pop-ups, beams, emails, video streams. Our thinking has been flattened; our progress ceded to machines. It’s happening faster and faster. Accelerated obsolescence accelerating.
It’s very late here. I’ve spent all night writing—not just this letter but an editorial for Tuesday’s paper on the dangers of the Meme. Tomorrow I’ll be in meetings with colleagues at the OED. I’m also working to contact our warehouses, retailers, and printers, to prevent any more sales of the NADEL. (The irony, I assure you, is not lost on me.) And I’m trying to reach IT and find a new security service to fortify our firewall and implement other strategies—our corpus is filling up with holes. But I know all that can be reversed.
I’ve also tried reaching out to agents at Homeland Security, to encourage them to be on the alert for possible new cyberviruses and attacks. So far I’ve had no luck getting through, nor have I been able to communicate my concerns about Nautiluses and Memes to anyone at the FDA. But I’ve had some initial discussions with the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control. (Apparently there may already have been a few word flu cases in New York. Please keep those pills I gave you close.) One WHO official with whom I worked in Taipei has been especially helpful, and I’m feeling hopeful that we can beat this thing. I plan to stay here for at least the next several days. But I have every intention of being back by Friday—for the NADEL launch.
Until then, Alice, please be safe. Check in with Phineas. I’ll be in touch.
All my love,
Doug
Q
quea•si•ness ′kwē-zē-nƏs n 1 : nausea, physical or existential 2 : a common virus symptom
I arrived in London late. Spent hours passing through customs, health inspections, security. After I managed to make it through, shaking a little with relief, I tried to chalk up my trouble in New York to exhaustion and anxiety. I’d slept some on the plane. But I couldn’t quite erase the fear that I’d been reinfected.
The city was cold and rainy and smelled faintly sewery. I had a cab take me straight to Paddington and just barely caught the 23:20 train. I’d had a hard time getting a car. When the first driver asked if I was American, I was too slow to say no, and he sped off. I tried to complain to the man assigning taxis, but he shrugged, unsympathetic. “Just come from the U.S., in’t it? Where they’ve got that disease and all running rampant.” When the next driver asked where I’d arrived from, I used the hackneyed backpackers’ trick and said Canada. But he eyed me suspiciously and drove away, too. The taxi-stand man cut me a funny look, then; people in line behind me backed away. Finally, with the third driver, I tried a
terrible New Zealand accent. Fortunately, he’d never met a Kiwi. He spent the ride sharing his opinion of Americans and their virus. “I hope they all catch it,” he said. “Serves them right, hey?” I tried not to speak.
I was so tired that the train ride was more of a dream. I chose a seat facing backward by mistake. A boy sitting near me was flipping through a book of Borges stories. A small girl babbled sleepily on her father’s phone. “Chelsea’s mummy won’t let me come over,” she was saying, “because Chelsea’s daddy just got home from New York, and she’s worried and doesn’t want anyone to talk funny now.” Near Slough I thought I saw a man across the aisle staring. He was dressed in black. I caught his reflection in the yellow window glass. When I turned to look, though, he was focused on the screen in front of him, and I pretended to be studying a girl crimping her lashes. But my stomach wobbled like a water balloon.
It was December 20, more than a month since Doug had faxed his letter for me to Phineas. Nearly two weeks since the spike in virus infections and the cyberattacks. Five days before Christmas, which I’d spend away from home for the first time—alone, if I didn’t find Doug. Certainly without my mother or my Doran grandparents or a call to Gram and PopPop Johnson. Without the Dictionary holiday party. Without Bart. Without Max.
The letter. I’d angrily torn it to a houndstooth snow. I couldn’t believe Dr. Thwaite would lie on such a glowing, marquee scale. In the first, fake, shortened version he’d given me, he must have retyped whole swaths. Forged Doug’s signature. Sent it back through his fax. Doug had written it just two nights after he went missing; the date and time stamp read 22:12, November 18. But Dr. Thwaite’s glossed iteration hadn’t made its way to me for days, until I was out of my mind with worry and had started searching recklessly. Had such baroque scheming really been sparked by my own, much smaller lie, that Max and I were still in love? Or had Dr. Thwaite been motivated by something else? Whatever the cause, it made me doubt everything he’d said. Was he even friends with Doug? Could he be working for Synchronic? Had he bought my ticket to help the company find my father?
And yet one thought kept tugging me back from the cliff of doubt. I sensed the letter was authentic. For one thing, its idiom was pitch-perfect. Anyone who’d met Doug could fake his basic theses, all the references to ouroboros and accelerated obsolescence and the end of human memory. But it was seeded with personal details and lexical choices only Doug would make: his hackles up, the aegis of Synchronic, his purblind rage. I’d stumbled over one word, actually: “rogering” around with U.K. colleagues. It had raised my suspicions—gotten my hackles up—when I’d read the redacted version of the letter, too. (Surely Doug didn’t mean that he was sleeping with our Oxford associates.) But then it occurred to me: “roger,” I thought, might be a subtle nod to my strange conversation with him in the downtown 1 train shortly before he disappeared. I clearly remembered saying “Roger?” when he’d christened me Alice, and repurposing the word would be a very Doug thing to do. At the time, he’d admonished me to be more serious. He was right, of course, and by then I knew. It couldn’t be more serious.
That was the real reason the letter had upset me. Things had gotten so much worse than even Doug could have predicted, and so quickly: the deal with Synchronic rammed through, the Dictionary more or less closed, and dissolving. Countless other digital documents, books, websites, texts—the archives of whole lives—destroyed. All the other assaults on infrastructure and machines. And even on the plane I’d heard a few small slips. As I boarded, a woman in first class asked her husband if he’d brought any pills—she was having trouble “shway” without her Meme. Before takeoff, a Midwestern businessman passed the jittery flight attendant $60 for a can of “jee.” The whole plane had felt tense, like a school basement during a terror drill. More worrisome, I’d heard a few scattered slips since arriving in the U.K., even from Brits. And I was afraid I’d gotten some strange looks, too.
On the Oxford train, a cartoon glowed above windows glazed with grime: one monkey put paws to his ears; another battened down his mouth. A billboard scrolled with grim red-lettered warnings:
STOP THE SPREAD OF WORD FLU:
1. DON’T TAKE CALLS FROM STRANGERS
2. CARRY EARPLUGS
3. WHEN IN DOUBT, WRITE IT OUT
It was after midnight when my train got in. The station was deserted, a single taxi idling. “Late then, in’t it?” The cabbie sounded affable as I ducked inside. But I was so tired I forgot to fake an accent, and his face contracted in the mirror. “You’re American?” he asked tersely, not pulling from the curb.
Sorrow hit me. It was late and still misting rain. I didn’t know where to go. I’d been to Oxford before; it was a quiet college town, ancient and safe. But the thought of making my way alone, in the dark, loaded me with dread. Since the virus, every place seemed threatening. And there was something else: the man in black from my train. He’d gotten off just one stop before me, in Radley. And I could swear he’d mouthed “Goodnight” as he’d gone by. I couldn’t shake the cold shock that had raced up my spine.
I took a risk—I decided to tell the driver the truth. On my ticket stub I wrote, “Please. I don’t have a place to stay. I’m exhausted and alone. And I promise I won’t infect you. Will you take me to a hotel?” Prayed that what I’d written was legible. I must have looked stricken, because the driver surveyed the street, sighed, scratched his chin, and agreed to take me to a place he claimed had a vacancy. When we arrived, he watched me hard, eyes like marbles, until I’d stumbled out of the car with my bag. Then he sped off.
But the hotel was dark. I tapped the glass door, softly at first, as if on the tank of a shark. Then, peering over my shoulder into the black, empty alley, I began knocking. Banging. Clattering the glass. When the concierge appeared, he didn’t look happy. He was grinding his eyes with his knuckles and yawning. Grousing that no one knew anymore how to read. Only then did I see a tiny sign by the doorbell, exhorting, NO CHECK-IN AFTER 11 P.M. Fortunately, as I apologized, I remembered to inflect my speech.
“South African?” he asked, yawning deeply again. I shrugged, gamely smiled, and he ushered me in, saying, “My wife has family in Pretoria.” He was tall and wide, with white hair thick as a pelt. And the tired slope of his back reminded me so much of Doug that I caught my breath. Almost felt compelled to ask if he knew my father, but I stopped myself.
Taking down a set of keys, he introduced himself as Henry. Explained that I was in luck: a suite of rooms had just opened up. When I asked how much, he said, “Just two-fifty,” and I nodded grimly. I had no choice but to pay with the cash Phineas had given me. (Henry insisted on that—no credit cards “with all that’s happening.”)
By the time I locked myself in for the night, I was nearly delirious with fatigue. But I couldn’t fall asleep. I tried to numb my mind by turning on the sim I found behind a heavy curtain. That was a mistake. The scraps of news I saw only prodded me further down the plank to wakefulness. But it was hard not to watch: I’d been cut off for days and days.
From the panicked, strangely blanched coverage, it was clear the U.S. was in a state of emergency. But few facts could be confirmed. Because of border controls and contagion fears, virtually no British journalists had been able to report firsthand on “the American crisis,” i.e., the cyberattacks, the virus, and their effects: rioting and violence, curfews and food shortages, deaths. U.S. news networks were of course in shambles—many crews and anchors infected; some networks afraid to broadcast the illness to viewers. What got out was mostly hearsay. The BBC was playing part of an interview on loop, a tear-jerking clip of German parents whose two teenaged stowaways were found dead in a Bremerhaven-bound container ship held up in New York Harbor. One mother, sobbing, said through an interpreter, “She was just visiting her cousin. For two weeks only. She was coming home last night for her brother’s wedding.”
The camera cut back to the studio. A trim brunette in a fuchsia blazer soberly intoned that the WHO had recomme
nded a temporary global ban on all Meme models. Several countries, including Great Britain, had increased antiviral production; a medication specific to word flu was in initial testing. Doctors were also trying to develop a safer method of microchip extraction, but so far attempts had gone poorly. Then the anchor dipped her chin, frowned, and gravely described the terminal muteness that had afflicted some virus sufferers whose illness had reached an advanced stage. Victims of Silencing often never spoke again, she said, most passing first into comas and then to that greater silence, death. They had no chance to describe their suffering. Say goodbyes. Expiate their sins.
Over her voice, shaky footage appeared. It was soundless and color-leached: rows of pale, plaintive people wrapped in sheets. Then the camera moved to a hospital waiting room. The shifting lace of letters floated over a woman’s chest, identifying her as Angela Meekins, Member of the American Deaf Community. She looped and bunched her stocky, nimble fingers through a locutional ballet, white letters swarming to keep up. “It’s very frightening for patients and families,” the letters read. “I’ve tried to teach the few I can some ASL, to make things a little easier at the end.”
The number of casualties had continued to rise, though figures varied. Some sources claimed that six thousand were dead or terminally ill; others put the total near fifteen thousand. Those with compromised immune systems seemed more prone to serious sickness, but young, healthy people were dying, too. So far fatalities seemed to have remained isolated to the United States, the reporter said, but deaths were expected elsewhere soon. “There are many unknowns,” she continued, smooth voice belied by clear distress. She couldn’t keep from blinking, riffling papers, sipping something from a cup. “It’s still uncertain, for instance, if the naught-triple-one virus will affect only English-speakers and those with Meme devices or if others should be on alert as well.” Then, face tightening, she pressed her fingers to an ear. “And now breaking news,” she announced. “The president is about to make a statement.”
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