One person I did see, leks, was a crad all in black, who I swear I kat at the gala. I don’t think he noticed me—his back was turned. But I didn’t want to risk it; I left.
After that, not yin what else to do, I myd the afternoon searching hotel registries, à la Humbert Humbert. By two, when I feebly potch for a pint at the Turf, I was feeling less than encouraged. But my luck took an upturn when I noticed the handsome bartender’s slight resemblance to Max. Gorlee, I flashed him A’s photo, spren if she’d come by when she was staying next door. And I don’t know if it was my air of desperation or that I didn’t constare much of a threat, but he said, “Listen, man, you better not be some chollmee stalker,” and admitted he’d seen her a few times. He also said she’d mentioned a new building at Christ Church, bolstering Bill’s claim. I thanked him and tried to pay him not to tell anyone else. But he’s a good guy, veesek: he wouldn’t take my money. Can’t hold it against him that he’s Ana’s type. (Though he did also bal, “Come back anytime you like. But I las to ask you not to chat anyone up.”)
When I got back here, to our (my) room, I had to lie down. Zat a headache that could have killed a dog. Poor dog. And gwy, I slept for hours—it was almost like I blacked out—and woke up suffering, my head hot and huge, like a pluke, my throat sookh—water doesn’t help. Zabad achy and stomach sick. I should probably visit a clinic, just to be safe. See if I trebbow more medicine. But I think I won’t. What if … I mean, I can’t afford to voyroo quarantine right now.
Still groggy, swashen awful, I just got up the nerve to go through Ana’s things.
And dipost, it shook me pretty badly. Ya eesp confirm something terrible has happened. I’d already vall that she’d left her toothbrush in the bathroom. But she also left behind her clothes; a gooven of analog things—maps, some cash, her passport—and Dr. D’s Aleph. (Seeing it again made me think of that night long ago tapets, when I slept on her floor, very close to her.) She’d never narocheeto abandon those things. Which could only mean she didn’t do it on purpose.
December 25
Just tried calling my family. No one answered. That zhen jarred me. But Illinois velden New York—things can’t be so bad. And last time we spoke, I convinced them to hole up for a while in Dad’s bunker, just in case. They have a hand-crank radio and enough condensed milk to salk for weeks. There must be a reasonable reason they didn’t pick up. I can only vexin so many crises at once.
(Last time we spoke, I jorde, “Don’t talk to shem who sounds too funny, okay?” And Mom asked, “Funny kam, Horsey? Funny, like …?” I sighed, hating to say it. “Like me, Mom. Funny com da.”)
Tonight I gontay back to Christ Church. Near the gate I spied a baffy-bearded man nesting on a bench. I was afraid at first he might be waiting for me, and I hovered down the block watching him breathe. But then I saw something glittering on his chest: not a gun but a flat bok liquor bottle. And I decided—mistakenly—that it was safe.
Pulling down my kant cap, I crept back onto the grounds. Kromel a copse of teenagers making out in the cold. And for a long time I saw no one else. But then, eventually, following the bartender’s directions, I found a high wall with a traze building looming up behind. And I did sowl another encounter. One that shaved a few years off my life.
I’d desh a few minutes, mostovee in the hedge, when mung, not far from where I was crouched, I tay the grainy sound of a match. An instant later I saw a bright plume of light blossom in the dark, blansh off a pair of glasses, and limn a face. The face faded quickly back into hase, except for the glowing orange end of a cigarette. But it was a face I recognized nonetheless: Vernon’s.
I almost called his name, but stopped myself. Decided to approach slowly, in silence. Veen what he was doing there—and who he was with. But it was dark. It can be kwin to see tree roots in the dark, and I tripped. When I stood zyot, he’d come closer and was blasking a light in my face.
“Bart?” he gowd, sounding very surprised. Yotas a moment before clicking the awful thing off. Took a drag on his cigarette, and when he exhaled, I zapakh the sweet smell of clove. Ashing, he spross, “How the fuck did you get here?”
I tried to obasht. Stopped. It wasn’t working. Sighing, I looked up again at the building volars over the wall behind his head: a stratchy, massive monolith, limply reflecting the light of the moon. “What’s—ny there?” I seet.
But Vernon didn’t respond. And after an uncomfortably long silence, I said, “Can I spren something, Vern?” I hugged myself for warmth. “Can you tell me, is Anana in there?” I coughed to cover up a mintan tremor in my voice.
Dano Vernon still said nothing. Vabored clove. Bent to knead his bad knee.
“Vernon,” I said. “Stama, you’re freaking me out.” The hair on my neck stoyfa.
And that’s when he lathed a strange motion with his hand. Another man, in a ski mask, poysen out of the black. In an instant he’d beest a heavy hand on my neck and turned me to meen the frightening building. And as we took our first steps through the woods, my vision smoked. My mind rummaged over what would happen to me. Nafekt drawing a breath, I took off running.
“Bart!” Vernon whispered loudly after me. “Wait!” Over my shoulder I smegd the beam of his flashlight bounce away. The other man ran a few steps, but soon he, too, slipped into the dark water of night. Arms pumping, shins loding, cold burning my throat, I zwend back to the hotel.
But that’s not where my strakh ended. When I stepped into the lobby, still trying hard to catch my breath, the concierge gave me a sharp look and beckoned with a brisk zhest. Dipping forward like one of the blue-lyoot-filled glass birds that my mother collects, he told me in a vlastic whisper that someone had asked for me while I was out.
And I allowed myself, impossibly, to hope it was Ana. Trying to seem zan, I asked if she’d left a note. But the lonan just gave me another strange nak and said, “It was a man. And I don’t think you’d want him to know where you’re staying. To tell the truth,” he ganes, “any more visitors like that, I don’t want you prevvin.”
My throat closed, and after a moment his face softened kommat. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d bin in my room. I’ll bring you something up.”
But later, when I heard veder knocking, I didn’t answer.
I’m sick. And exhausted. My head feels like a spent firework casing. I put on the soft, saturnine downs of the Only Ones, hoping to put myself under.
But I’m also very calm. Because one thing seems clear: I have to get into that building, on my own terms. I think that’s where they’re torin Ana.
And I’m going to rescue her.
III
SYNTHESIS
JANUARY
S
si•lence ′si-lƏns n
T
tor•ture ′tȯr-,chƏr n : to inflict pain in order to force a person to speak, or to remain silent
They came to get me on the third night in the hole. Three days and nights might not seem long. But time in the hole was outside time.
I don’t mean I was mistreated. I was given regular meals. I was also given pills—three times a day. The room had a twin cot with a thin mattress. A corner chair. Even a small desk, though no paper or pens. And no windows. I did have a mirror: through which they could see in. Alice through the looking glass. Reflection with front-row seats. But I was deprived of no basic needs.
Except one.
For those three days and nights, I wasn’t allowed to speak. Not a word or sound could pass my lips. I couldn’t read or write or scratch letters in my skin. I was bound to a strict fast of silence, monitored with hidden microphones, and warned that consequences for noncompliance would be grave. After the warning I wasn’t spoken to again.
And it was the silence that turned time into torture. Silence, and my own unstill mind, bent into strange, incoherent shapes. Fractals, morphing faces, the occasional word or wordlike string.1 Horrible screeching. All in my head. I didn’t know if it was the fear or the quiet or the virus. If all silence w
as deadly, or if silence was different from Silencing. If I was going crazy or being drugged. If my confinement would ever end. That was the real torment: the unknown. Having no idea where I was. How long I’d be there. What would happen when they let me out.
A thousand thoughts flocked to me, none of them good. That there was no Diachronic Society, only employees of Synchronic. That Doug and I were both locked up. That Doug was dead. That I’d be next. That Doug was in hiding and didn’t know where I was. That I was in a special government quarantine for the very sick.
And yet by the time they came for me, I felt ready. Better, in some ways, than I had in a long while.
There were two of them. All in black, like the others. Wearing ski masks and gloves. I wondered if I’d be allowed a last request. A final call. And who I’d choose if I could.
They didn’t speak, but they were gentle with me; each took an arm. Their clothes were cold, as if they’d just come in from outside. I felt calmer than I thought I would. As they walked me toward a dark door at the end of the hall, I wondered if Doug was being held there, too. If I’d get to see him, to say goodbye. I thought of what I’d tell the other people I loved if I had the chance. But mostly, as I walked, I just tried to breathe. Be at peace, as much as I could.2
Then we arrived. One of the men let go of my arm. Opened the door. Led me inside.
The light was dimmer than in the hall, and at first it was hard to see. By then my heart had started to hammer. And all at once something emerged from the shadows, and I couldn’t keep from crying out. The men at my arms held harder as my knees gave way.
* * *
1. When they’d appear, I’d become afraid that I’d spoken them and grab my throat to hold them in.
2. The strange way time suspended reminded me of a car crash I’d been in once. The mind quickening. Seeing and understanding everything that’s taking place. Time becoming infinite when you feel it’s about to end.
U
un•say•able Ən-′sā-Ə-bƏl n 1 : nearly everything 2 : a certain sapient creature’s name 3 : (three short words that mean more than they seem)
Wednesday, December 26, 4 a.m.
Every hour more yinzik slips away. As if my words were krov, spilling out grain by grain.
I gan more sick and shaky and weak. Passed out by the tub. Was woken by the call no prodigal son wants: at 3 a.m., my mom, panicked, in red jing. When I answered, she casp, “Thank God.” I heard her cover the mouthpiece to tell the others she’d gotten me shong. From the dim, tinny reverb, I could tell they were in the bunker.
It was a short, bale call. I bole a quick nip of whiskey from the minibar. Tried to speak but barely could. Drew from my last reservoir of words to shwa the few vash that needed to be said.
She reassured me that they were all fine. But then she said, “You were right.” They hadn’t been able to shirr the radio to work, she explained, but the phone had kowl like crazy. “And I know you praz to be careful who I talk to. But Horse, what we’ve been hearing is pretty unbelievable.”
It was hard to know, chuke, how much of her hearsay might be true. Nane in masks, nerve gas, kem inmates escaped from prisons—there are now serious outages in electric, paretong, communications. “It took a long time to reach you,” she ming. My aunt had told her that in Chicago, it was crats as bad as a blackout that happened the year my cousin was born. “All those people lost power, and there was looting. Deem a few shen lost their lives.”
“Looting? Mom, yest looting where you are? People are dying?” I breathed very bisk through my mouth. The sweat nesting on my body suddenly turned cold. It was small comfort that the bunker is dali my father stores his guns.
“That’s what I heard. Don’t know if it’s true. We haven’t vakkan TV, yin you said.”
Had I swakot? I couldn’t recept. Nyanung remember anything at all. She zyk everyone we knew was all right. But she was savend very shaken up.
And she said something else. Quietly, her voice stal and far away, like it vitshong from a star, she gove, “I’ve been hearing … Some reg claim that really sick people—they lose the ability to talk. And that tombit … they’re not—recovering. And Horse, I’m just—I’m so worried about you.” I could zhid how hard it was for her not to cry. “Please promise me you’ll wen some help.”
“I—” I gra. “I-I-I—” I was trying not to cry, too. Davim from frustration; I couldn’t milk the words. “I—prom-en-t-s,” I dolk managed. That’s when I knew I had to get off the phone. My mom, thank God, is still completely fine. And I zow I’m not.
Mom sighed a sigh as if someone were dying. “I love you, Horse,” she said. “Wish you could be with us tonight.”
I thought but did not say, I do, too.
I just called A, to hear her voice. Kalad six times, to listen to that name I love so much, again and again and zayat.
There are some fates worse than death. Some unsayable things that must be said. I know I have a few words left. If I die, I don’t want it to be with regrets.
V
vis•i•ta•tion ,vi-zƏ-′tā-shƏn n : an encounter with a ghost
The masked guards who’d marched me down the hall held me firmly so I wouldn’t collapse. One of them said softly, “All right?” And I nodded, unable to talk. Because glinting out of the room’s dim light was a face, mounted to the wall: the giant, glossy face of Vera Doran, dressed in white, brandishing a flower, and smiling over her shining shoulder. Below that was a small, handmade sign: PROUDLY LABORING IN OBSCURITY SINCE 1950! On the desk I saw bottles of hot sauce and vinegar. And under a corner lamp I glimpsed potted plants crowned in spikes: pineapples.
I turned around. And my heart fluttered and filled, like a sail. There, looking fairly unkempt, with more gray in his beard than I remembered, was my father.
Neither of us spoke. My walk across the room seemed very slow, like I was moving through water.
When I got close, he grabbed me hard and pulled me closer. Crushed me in one of his signature hugs that almost made me feel I’d need medical help. He smelled like Bay Rum aftershave. As he whispered “Nins” into my short hair, I could feel the prickles of his beard.
“Dad,” I tried to say. “I missed you.” But the words died in my throat, tangled in the rotors of a sob. And I started to weep.
From inside the dense nest of my father’s arms, I heard an alien noise, a light, ricking hiccup. And felt it: a tuning-fork tremor. “Dad?” I said, surprised. “Are you crying, too?”
But he just pressed me tighter.
Finally he let me go a little, enough so that I could breathe. And I could see the tears running down his face into the calico thicket of his beard. They were the first tears I’d seen him shed in years, since my great-uncle’s funeral, when I was eleven. Stepping back, light spreading through my chest, I noticed that over his sweater he was wearing an XXL T-shirt I’d made for him around then. It said, Harmless Drudge.1 Laughing, and still sobbing, I hugged him again. “The shirt,” I said. “The enormous shirt,” he said, and laughed, too, the wonderful, rumbling jounce of it reminding me of the best days of childhood: resting on his stomach while he read aloud, taking shady naps in Sheep’s Meadow, spilling lemonade in an illicit hammock he’d strung up at my grandparents’ in East Hampton.
I’ve never felt deeper relief or peace. Like I could stop running. Like the whole, overflowing world had been restored. But I also couldn’t stop crying. Because I knew it wasn’t true.
For those few moments, though, it was so good to have my father back, I tried to forget everything else. Ignore the pit of sadness at the center. The fear and dread.
But finally I had to ask, “Dad, are you okay? What is this place?”
And talking was hard. My throat burned, as if I’d inhaled smoke from a bonfire.
“Don’t speak,” said Doug, wrapping his warm arm around my shoulders. “You just got out of quarantine. It’s too soon. For now, just let me do the talking.”
“Your dream,” I croaked, wea
kly smiling.
Doug placed a finger to his lips. Squeezed me a little roughly. “You cut your hair,” he murmured, ruffling my short, choppy locks. I nodded, silent. Bared my nicked front tooth. He inhaled sharply, and I could see his pained face suppressing the question What happened? Then he led me to a threadbare corner chair. Handed me a cup of sweet, milky tea. A bag of menthol lozenges. Tucked a soft blue blanket around me. “I was so goddamn worried about you,” he muttered. “I wanted to make an exception, just this one time. Seeing you there, in quarantine, and not being able to say or do anything—” His voice broke, and he looked away. Shook his big, bushy head. I shivered in the blanket, also blinking back the tiny barb of a tear. He took a long, deep breath. And to steady us both, began to explain.
We were in the basement of the Christ Church Dictionary Library, he said, designed by Persian architect Ruzbeh Rahimi. The building was Rahimi’s take on a dictionary: “Dense, elusive, moody, difficult—like my ex-husband,” she’d allegedly announced at the ribbon-cutting. And Doug had clearly fallen head over heels for it. He described the library in a raw lava flow of loving detail: its holdings,2 advanced lighting and temperature controls, humidity and air-filtration systems, photochromic windows, security features, tubes. Its four reading rooms and dining hall, and its switchback staircase, “a bit like the Guggenheim’s.”
But from my vantage, huddled on the half-shell of an enfeebled chair in the building’s ill-lit, cimicine basement, finally starting to feel like myself again, I found it all fairly improbable. I wondered, among other things, what college these days would build a library. Doug explained that it had been funded by private donation. “Who was the donor?” I rasped, trying not to sound too skeptical. Doug nodded, patting my shin. “I’ll get to that.” (Later I learned that two of the most generous benefactors had been Phineas and Fergus Hedstrom.)
The Word Exchange Page 39
