The Word Exchange (3 page)

The sensation faded but left a residue of sweat. I stepped back from the window with a shiver. Blood rushed through my ears in a kind of nautical orchestra, and I thought I heard a door slam shut somewhere. My heart surged. I grew still, listening for sounds in the hall, and felt the powerful urge to run. But I stayed where I was. Looked again at Doug’s satchel. Reassured myself that he’d
be right back
.

Then four things happened more or less at once.

First I heard a familiar sound: the soft
shrr-tunk
of a metal delivery cylinder whirring through Doug’s pneumatic tube and the melodic metal ting it made as it struck another one already in the bin. Out of habit, I collected both cylinders and slid open the lids. The messages looked normal. But then I read what they said. The first had been typed on a typewriter.
⁵
It was a definition. I still remember exactly how it read: “di•a•chron•ic \dī-
Ə
-′krä-nik\
adj
: a method of looking at language that’s becoming extinct.” That made no sense to me. It didn’t even seem correct grammatically. Was the method fading or the language? It also wasn’t clear who’d sent it; there were no initials. Strangest of all, it was smudged with a fingerling smear of dirt.

Hoping to get a clue from the other note, I unrolled it, too. It said, “Received your SOS. Standing by.” It was handwritten and blind-stamped
Phineas Thwaite, Ph.D
. I knew the name; he was an outside contributor to the Dictionary. Nonplussed, I prepared to leave both missives on Doug’s desk, and I lifted the Aleph to make room. That’s when I noticed it had finally loaded. And it was open, curiously, to a page of the Dictionary. It was open, in fact, to a specific page: the one in the
J
’s on which Doug’s entry appeared.
⁶
Self-involved as he could sometimes be, that surprised me: that he’d leave the limn open there.

Although it surprised me more that he’d used the Aleph at all—I thought it had been years. He’d told me that after his last assistant, Sam, had optimistically programmed it for him, he’d tried it for just a few months before abandoning it. But it occurred to me that it wouldn’t even have turned on if it hadn’t been at least a little charged. I wondered why Doug had bothered—and of course why he’d been looking at his own entry. Thinking I’d rib him for it when he turned up, I scanned the screen, planning to quote from it. But it wasn’t there.

I clicked forward and back through the pages. Scanned again. The entries skipped from Andrew Johnson to Earvin (Magic) Johnson. No Douglas Johnson. No toothy thumbnail photo of my father. No pithy biographical facts. He had vanished.

Feeling the uncomfortable prickling of a premonition, I opened his satchel—and except for one natty brown shirt, it was empty. No pens or papers. No books. No wallet. The thought I had, unbidden, was that the bag was a decoy. He wasn’t coming back for it.

The room began to shrink, and the red lights of tiny cars on the ground below seemed to rise up to blink in tandem with the red light on Doug’s desk phone.

Which began, at roughly that moment, to ring.

Panicked, but thinking that it must be Doug calling with an explanation, I leaned in to look at the ID screen. There was no photo, but the caller’s name appeared: Phineas Thwaite. Before I could decide whether
to answer, the phone stopped ringing. The screen quickly blinked fifteen, the number of missed calls. It also said something else. Something that helped me decide—if an impulse can be called a decision—to flee.

All office phones were set up with speed dials between bosses and assistants. That night the display on my dad’s phone looked strange to me. When I peered at it more closely, I saw it had changed. It said, “Hotline to Alice.” And I knew something was wrong. Because my name isn’t Alice. Alice is a fiction. One I never thought I’d hear or see again.

Not long before Doug disappeared, he began behaving in a way some might say was strange. But my antennae, tuned to my own sorrows, hadn’t picked up the signals. In retrospect I could see that he seemed more secretive than usual, edgier, and withdrawn. On a few days, for instance, he’d wanted to talk only on the train. That presented logistical problems.

One night the week before, as we were waiting for the downtown 1, he began explaining in a whisper that he’d recently received a spate of odd emails. They had different senders and subjects, but all were composed of incomprehensible strings of words.

“Oh, Doug,” I said. “You’re not supposed to open those. Did they include ads for things?”

“Things?” he whispered, looking guilty.

“You know, for … enhancement? Or, like, pain pills?”

“No,” he said, discomfited. “Nothing like that. But I wonder why no one told me. I had to stop using my computer. It started going berserk.”

“Dad, yeah,” I said. “You can’t open those. They’re not real.”

“So you’ve gotten them, too?” he said. He seemed concerned.

“Of course. Those scams have been around for years. They’re as old as me, I think.”

“Oh,” he continued, shaking his head. “No. Not that.”

“No?” I said, unconvinced.

“No,” he said. Then, changing the subject, he added, “But that’s not the only thing that worries me.” That was when the train had pulled into the station. As we boarded, he lowered his voice even more. I could barely hear him when he said, “I looked up our advance sales earlier, and they’re hard to believe. At one point before noon we were up to number 213 on Synchronic’s sales list. The second edition, too—up to 448.”

“Dad!” I said, clapping his shoulder. “That’s incredible! Congratulations!”

“No—but it isn’t!” he hissed, glancing at our fellow passengers. They mostly seemed indifferent. “It’s actually very suspicious,” he said more gently.

“Doug,”
I said, struggling not to sound annoyed. “Can’t you just be happy? This is
good
news. We should be celebrating.”

He glanced cagily again around the train car. “If only that were true,” he said.

I was expecting him to add more, but just then we’d arrived at Fiftieth Street—my regular stop, where I would have gotten off if I’d been headed home and not to an event with my father—and he nodded emphatically at the platform. I looked up. But all I saw was a motley stream of people on their evening commute. He strained his neck toward the graffiti-scratched window and whispered,
“Tiles.”

“Dad, what are you talking about?” I said in a normal voice. Vera and I had long since learned that the best method for managing Doug’s eccentricities was benign neglect.

The train started gliding from the station, and he murmured, “The mosaic—look!” I peered out at the pattern, which I’d seen so many times I couldn’t see it anymore.
⁷
In blue, black, red, and white lacquer chips, the Queen of Hearts accuses the White Rabbit, whose top hat hovers in alarm.

“Okay,” I said, twiddling my jacket zipper. “And?”

Doug waited until we’d rumbled back into the tunnel. “Did you notice?” he whispered.

“Notice?” I said. “No—what?”

He sloped in close to me, and I could smell the apothecary scent of licorice on his breath.
“Alice,”
he said. “In Wonderland?”

“Doug,” I said, “could you please just spell it out?”

“Alice,” he insisted. “If anything should happen to me—which it won’t—but if it does, I want us to use the name Alice. To communicate.”

“Uh,” I said.

“Got it?”

“Roger.”

“This is serious,” Doug said, sounding impatient.

“Okay. And what do I call you?” I teased, feeling a tick of disquiet. I wondered if I should worry—if Doug had slid into a manic state while I’d been cocooned in heartbreak. When under stress, he was sometimes prone to swerves in mood. Frenzied activity. Paranoia.

He looked a little startled, as if he hadn’t gotten that far. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just indulge me, please.”

I nodded absently, trying not to betray my vague trepidation. And then something else happened. Something that laid the track for a certain fate. Though at the time my meter reading of our exchange hardly registered any spike in strangeness.

Doug, likely sensing my concern, changed the subject, tossing off some light remark about the talk we were on our way to attend. I don’t remember what he said. I wish I did. But the way it faded so quickly from my mind, like a text wisping from a screen, is in fact one of the primary reasons I’m recording this history.

Whatever comment he made, buried inside it was a word I couldn’t quite place—a little reservoir of meaning I’d once known that had at some point cracked and drained. And in my brief moment of confusion, I made a stupid, careless mistake: I slid my Meme from my coat pocket and quickly peeked at the screen. (I knew that the Meme, having sensed my small mnemonic lapse, would have logged me into the Word Exchange to retrieve the forgotten term, displaying it in a brief, discreet definition that would quickly melt away.)

I’m sure I thought I was being surreptitious; I knew that if Doug saw what I was doing, he’d give a dire jeremiad. But I’d become so habituated to this routine—one whose frequency had gradually increased without my noticing—that in fact I probably barely bothered to hide it.

When I looked up again, Doug was grimacing. “Not you, too,” he said quietly, face blazoned with dark alarm. “The Word Exchange?”

I felt my face spackle with heat, ashamed he’d finally learned my “secret.” “Dad, yeah,” I said brusquely, looking away. “So? Like most mortals—not you, I realize—I forget the meanings of obscure words sometimes, and I look them up—”

“Obscure?”
he repeated, nearly bristling. I could tell he was gearing up to elaborate—I was bracing for it—but then he didn’t. We’d roused the interest of a few fellow passengers (Doug’s wary glances alerted me), and as we slid into our station, he stopped talking.

But I didn’t find his silence very comforting; a mild reprimand would
have unsettled me less. It meant he was truly worried, which worried me. Did he really believe I was forgetting things—losing my mental acuity? It wasn’t a good thought. And it spurred me to remember the way I’d once made fun of friends who were dependent on the Exchange.
⁸
I half hoped Doug’s lecture would come later that night, or at work the next week. But we were madly preparing for launch, and it didn’t. Then it never did.

That wasn’t entirely the end of our conversation, however. “Just one last thing,” he said, frowning. “You’re not going to like this.” Quickly, furtively, he took two small bottles of what I soon realized were pills from his satchel. They were mottled with characters I couldn’t read, and he pressed them on me in such a way that I all but had to take them.

“You’ll never need these,” he said. “But they’re good to have. A few years expired, but it shouldn’t matter.”

“What will I not need them
for
?” I asked, disturbed. “Do they make me bigger or smaller?”

“Neither, I hope,” Doug said wearily. “But knowing you have them will make
me
feel better. And in the
extremely
unlikely event that you start to feel sick, and like something’s just very … wrong—you’re tired or confused, you have muscle aches or fever, even mild hallucinations, and especially if you’re having trouble speaking clearly, or if you have a very, very bad headache—just start taking these within forty-eight hours—the sooner, the better—and you should be fine. I’m giving you two courses just in case.”

“In case of
what
?” I asked, getting very worried. Doug’s behavior was officially off the charts. (Although in my defense, not entirely without precedent: every few years he’d press boxes of old flu medicine on me. So even this, hard as it is for me now to believe, didn’t raise the red flag as high as it should have.)

But now I’m digressing. What I meant to say was this: we (he) had
settled on Alice,
⁹
and I’d stored this conversation on the shelf in my brain where I keep certain stories about Doug.
¹⁰
Then I sort of forgot it—until the following Friday, when I found myself alone in his office, staring frantically at his phone.

Barely thinking, I scrolled through Doug’s missed calls. Wrote Phineas Thwaite’s number on the back of his blind-stamped note. Then, abandoning Doug’s satchel, trying to make as little sound as possible, I unlocked the door and peered out into the dark hall. It took all my will not to make a break for it: run flat out. I forced myself to tread quietly, cursing the husky rustling of my coat. I could barely breathe.

As I neared the elevator I passed Bart’s office, and decided, almost as an afterthought, to leave a note. His door was open, and I didn’t bother with the light. I meant to hurry in and hurry out. Get to the elevator and pump the button. Descend to Rodney in the lobby. Visit Doug’s apartment and, if he wasn’t there, call the cops. But something stopped me in the doorway.

Sticking out from beneath Bart’s desk was a skinny pair of legs.