The Word Exchange (11 page)

As I descended the stairs, I once again thought I smelled something burning, which was odd—I knew the furnace must be off; it was Saturday night. There might be no one in the whole building but the woman up at lobby security and me. And it was cold in the stairwell; my breath ghosted out in front of me. My teeth clattered like cabinet china.

When I opened the subbasement door, though, the air felt a bit warmer, and the burning scent intensified. Confused and a little alarmed, I stepped into the hall. My footsteps rang loudly on the concrete. I craned my neck up to the exposed ceiling, eyes shrinking from the white honeycomb of light. The brass pneumatic tubes hung down like fat, dusty snakes. They lazed the length of the hall, then curved abruptly left, out of sight. I followed beneath them, my head trained slightly up, ears tuned to my resounding progress. Splashing once or twice into the shallow puddles, ubiquitous in the subbasement, that I’d heard were the result of groundwater seepage after renovations, requiring everything down there to be stored on pallets or shelves.

But that night I barely noticed the water. As I turned the curve, the sound of my steps was soon swallowed by another noise: an indistinct thudder. It got louder as I neared the spot where the metal snakes stopped, heads plunged hungrily in plaster. It had also gotten smokier and hotter, my breath evanescing as I walked.

I found myself outside a blank door. That surprised me. I’d expected
arrows, cues, signs in blue, as at
ID
,
REPRO
, and
SECURITY
. But the whole scuffed hall seemed unmarked. Signs may have existed once—there were a few small holes drilled in walls, squares where paint seemed slightly brighter—but someone had removed them. Then I noticed a drooping piece of paper tacked up. When I flattened it out, I saw a single word scrawled in red:
CREATORIUM
. And beneath it the door was hot. The roar and hum I’d heard from down the hall was clearly coming from inside.

I was scared, but I was still being carried by the sinuous energy I’d once depended on to compete and throw opponents bigger than me. A feeling that had largely lain dormant in my adult life, partly because when it did appear—as in especially fierce fights with Max—it had earned enmity, not match points. But it was a feeling I’d missed, and I held it, exhaled, and knocked on the door. There was no answer. After a moment I knocked harder. But still nothing happened, so I tried the knob. And to my surprise, it turned.

Almost instantly I wished it hadn’t. Because the door swung in, shifting a towel lining its bottom edge, and what I saw on the other side was very strange and unsettling. Twenty or more workers, all in identical dark blue jumpsuits, were locked in a fast, agile dance. Several sets of eyes darted toward mine, then quickly glanced off, the people they belonged to hurriedly turning back to their tasks.

I didn’t know, of course, that the man who’d been stationed outside—the one they must have expected to see when the door opened, and to whom they might have reacted differently—had gone out for a few hours. Compared to him, I doubt I seemed very frightening. And yet even though I was careful to move with purpose as I stepped inside, I was surprised that no one spoke to me, or tried to keep me back, or even stopped what they were doing. Someone hurried past me to shut the door—that was all.

Even now, more than two months later, I find it hard to believe I wasn’t turned away immediately. I can only speculate that the workers didn’t know the guard had left his post. They must have assumed he’d let me in. And maybe my feigned authority also worked; they were willing to believe I might belong. But I think there’s another, more relevant reason: that whatever threat hovered over not finishing their night’s work was far more menacing than me. (A person running from a pack of wild dogs might not worry if a bird suddenly appeared and started circling.)
There’s also a final possibility, the one I find most troubling: that many of the workers were already too sick or stunned to notice me.

Once I was inside the room, I was mesmerized. It was very large—four or five times the size of my art studio—but it felt cramped and chaotic. Thick concrete support pillars made the space feel crowded, smaller; the pneumatic tubes and exposed pipes brought the high ceiling down, and I felt again like Alice, suddenly taller—and as if I’d stepped into a dark, elaborate dream, one littered with large orange trash barrels and white-tiled walls streaked with dirt, the reverberant clang of pipes and pounding feet. And one in which the light, which jangled down from bare bulbs high on the walls, was filtered through a gray spume of smoke. Because the most vivid sign that something was very wrong, that made me wonder if anyone upstairs knew what was happening in that room, was that it was sweltering, the air thick and acrid.

I unzipped my coat and coughed into the liner, and right away I was jostled by a man hefting boxes from a massive, messy cairn of them stacked on pallets near the door I’d just walked through, and piled high above my head, almost up to the tubes. With a low grunt, the man heaved a box and carefully swung it to the worker next to him. A line of men in dark blue suits undulated along the left wall as they passed boxes hand to hand. I couldn’t see where the row of them ended; it vanished into a cove around the corner.

The man at the head of the line nodded that I should move—I nodded curtly back—and as I stepped away from him, I tugged the neck of my shirt over my nose. It was hard to breathe through the smoke and heat, almost hard to see. My eyes burned, and I blinked back tears as I tried to interpret the shadowy movements around me.

I could make things out well enough to tell that in contrast to the thronging motion along the wall nearest me, just one man was standing on the room’s opposite side, next to what must have been the message-routing station: the pneumatic tubes curving along the ceiling came together in a confluence of dull brass gills resembling a large church organ. Each tube had a small placard that I couldn’t read from where I stood—their origins and destinations, I guessed—and they all emptied into a long sorting trough. A few empty metal stools were dispersed along its length, but the lone man stationed beside it stood. He had his back to me and seemed absorbed in his Meme, which glowed with a rabid, colored pulse. From my position, half hidden behind one of the
support pillars, I watched him intently for several long moments, but I saw him glance over his shoulder just once, at a long table in the center of the room that separated him from the men moving boxes, who were nearer to me.

Of all the room’s activity, it was the unfathomable work taking place at that cluttered table that most confounded me. About a dozen laborers sat staggered around it. I couldn’t see them all—where I stood, pillars blocked some from view—but each seemed bent at the same crimped angle, tipped into the indigo glow of monitor screens, heads floating like tired ghosts over awkwardly perched bodies. Several had white masks over their noses and mouths, which made their faces hard to read. But I thought I saw something disquieting: the dead-eyed expressions of people dulled by mindless computation, or hallucinating. Or maybe that’s what I see only now, with the eyes of memory. But then I was distracted by an even more distinctive trait they all shared: affixed to each of their foreheads was what looked like a coin, a little larger and thicker than a silver dollar. (Or so I’m told—I’ve never seen one of those.) When I got closer, I saw it was emblazoned with a coil intermittently glowing different colors: red, white, blue, gold, green. I was transfixed.

Cautiously, first studying the man watching his Meme near the tubes’ terminus—from his solitude and idleness, I deduced authority—I walked over to the table. The girl sitting closest to me was tiny and silent and must have been ferociously focused; she didn’t seem to notice me standing just a few feet away. Two enormous open books were balanced on her delicate knees, one nested inside the other. She looked down at each of them in turn and at another volume open on the table. Then she peered up at her monitor.
¹
The screen was filled with populated fields laid over dishwater gray. And it looked a lot, actually, like the corpus of our Dictionary.

While I watched over her shoulder, a field on her screen turned a pale, pretty green. Then a word—I think it was “paradox,” but I couldn’t quite see—disappeared. And in its place strange characters emerged: b-a-y-ᴨ-
O
-κ-c. Then the blocks of text below—its senses and textual examples—also vanished. Replaced by the single phrase “that which is true.”

I learned only later what I’d seen: the manufacture of a term that would be used to increase traffic on the Word Exchange. For some users of the Meme—those whose devices had been infected with a new virus that had recently started circulating—terms like this one would replace “obscure” words—“cynical,” “morbid,” “integrity”—that those of us who’d grown dependent on our Memes no longer fully trusted to our memories. But I knew nothing then about these neologisms, or the virus, or why this “word” had just been fabricated.

The new, alien string of letters had no illustration. No etymology. No pronunciation guide, even. It was just a hard-hearted, ungenerous little word whose whole use was in its uselessness, cut off from human thought and history. A sad, sterile birth, prefigured by the death of paradox. It was ouroboros made manifest. The snake eating its tail. Facta non verba. My father’s worst fears come to life, in other words. But at the time I just watched, silently entranced, as the next field on the girl’s screen flooded green.

I looked at her again. Saw the silver coil on her forehead morph from blue to purple back to blue as she stooped to peer at the thick book resting more on her left knee, glance up at the screen, look at the one on her right knee, peer up again. Then she bent to mark a check with a pen next to one of the columns of text in the book open on the table, which had been annotated heavily in what I thought might be Chinese.

I leaned in to get a better look, and the girl, finally seeing me, gave a start.

I tugged my shirt from my face. “What are you doing?” I asked quietly, trying to sound curious instead of accusatory, not sure, but not unsure, that she’d understand me.

She was silent, replying only by blinking her eyes. Her coil began to glow red.

Without asking, I picked up the defaced book and flopped it closed. Hauled it over to inspect the gold letters on its spine and saw what I’d already suspected: it was volume P of the third edition of the
North American Dictionary of the English Language
. I more closely examined the girl’s screen. It
was
our corpus. “Paradox” was gone. I felt dizzy.

“Wh-what’s going on here?” I asked, shaking the heavy volume, then gesturing at her screen. My voice had gotten louder and harder than I’d
meant it to, but my pulse was surging, my face getting hot. And when she tensed but still didn’t speak, just kept blinking under the ember glow of her device, I nearly yelled, “Do you understand?”

But it was clear she didn’t. Terrified, she flinched, and one of the books fell from her lap. It hit the floor with a loud report, and we both recoiled, me partly out of guilt and shame for the way I was treating her. I was also still vibrating with confused agitation, but that was no excuse.

Shaking, I bent to recover the volume. Before I could, though, the woman next to her dove for it, and as she leaned forward, the coil on her own forehead came off, maybe loosened by sweat—my face was dripping—fell to the floor, and rolled a few inches toward me before spinning to a stop.

I reached to pick it up. And on impulse I turned my back to the women and took a few steps away. I rubbed the device on my jeans, swiped my arm across my forehead, and pressed the disk to my skin. The side not raised into a coil seemed almost adhesive, like an electrode sticker—or more like the feet of a fly, I thought later; there wasn’t any tape or glue. That’s how I came to test the latest model of the Meme, the Nautilus. Not yet released.

I don’t know what I expected. If I thought I’d experience anything—in the tiny shell of an instant I may have considered it—perhaps I half imagined I’d see a replica in miniature of what had appeared on the girl’s monitor. But I think I assumed I’d feel nothing. What I did feel, though, right away, was a tingling, almost needlelike stinging on my forehead and an incredible warmth that quickly spread through my head and face.

But that wasn’t the most remarkable effect. As I watched, it seemed that several glowing, golden columns of calligraphic characters faded from before my eyes like lovely, dispersing sun phantoms. It was as if I’d seen them projected on some sort of screen, the impression so strong that I patted my face to feel for something—lenses. But of course there was nothing there. And stranger still, as the characters faded, I felt a residue of indignation and fear, as if induced by whatever had been written there.

It’s possible, of course, that this memory is false; I now know the Nautilus has an extraordinary power to distort—to flatten and rewrite experience and thought. And although the older woman quickly snatched the
device back, scratching my face a little as she did, I later spent several hours lost in the fog of a different Nautilus, which also might have augmented my impressions of that night.

Before she removed it, I do remember being suffused with calm. An elating, almost paralytic sense of destiny and becoming—absurd (and dangerous) as that now sounds. Then I saw the angry face of the woman whose Nautilus I’d taken right in front of mine, and in an instant I felt a painful ripping and perceived noise and blinking light. She gripped the device in one hand, and in the other, a silver case, which she quickly opened. It seemed to be full of liquid. Carefully she placed the device inside, closed the lid, and violently shook it from side to side.