The Word Exchange (41 page)

“On my way home earlier,” he said, “I was reconsidering the wisdom of this. But then I encountered Mr. Dobbs in the street. It appears he was waiting for me. It doesn’t seem safe for you to stay here much longer.”

It wasn’t Floyd’s first house call, apparently. Floyd—along with Max, Phineas said pointedly—had dropped by a couple of months earlier. They’d even known to tell Clive downstairs that they were with the Diachronic Society. Phineas hadn’t recognized them on the monitor, but it was before he’d had reason to be very wary; until that visit, he’d never suspected that the Society was being surveilled. Their activities included occasional op-eds (prior to the
Times
piece, largely in periodicals that almost no one read), political letter-writing campaigns, etc. Phineas had been worried that people didn’t listen enough, not that they were listening too well. Floyd and Max, however, had assured him that they were paying attention. They had several old Society pamphlets. They’d also
somehow procured copies of emails he’d sent to state senators outlining why the Nautilus should never be sold.

Needless to say, they’d encouraged him to change his position. But while he’d found their visit unnerving, he claimed that it hadn’t seemed like a threat per se. Still, he’d reported it to other members of the Society, a few of whom had received similar visits (though not Doug; there were different plans for him, apparently). Phineas had also suggested that as a group they might want to be more prudent, pointing out that if anyone wanted to curtail the kind of open canvassing that might get them in trouble, there was no shame in it at all. Instead, though, most of them had taken the warnings as a call to arms and ramped up their efforts. “If they’re calling on y’all,” Winifred Brown had said, “that means something’s going
on
.” That seemed to summarize their sentiments.

As a result, Floyd’s second visit to Phineas hadn’t been so cordial; he’d been accompanied not by Max that time but by Dmitri.

“Sorry I opened the door tonight, but—” Phineas bent in his telling to pet the dog, who lifted his head gently to Phineas’s hand. “I knew Mr. Dobbs would just come back again, and maybe not alone.” Phineas tapped his bloody lip. I touched mine, too; it had finally healed. “It might seem surprising, I suppose, that we thought this was the best place for you. But there are still certain things they seem not to know about the building.”

I thought, of course, that he meant the secret cell.

Phineas shook his head and sighed. Then, heaving himself up, he left the room. Canon raised his head again and nervously watched him go. He was gone a long time. I wondered if he’d meant for me to follow. But he finally came back with some shabby papers and maps. “The timetable from Paddington to Oxford,” he said, pressing it on me with a thick wad of cash, in pounds. Added, “I can’t tell you where to find him, exactly. Not because I won’t. But I don’t know.”

Shyly I thanked him. I wished I could refuse the money. But what my grandparents had beamed me after Thanksgiving was running very low, if it was even still in my account. And of course there’d be no more paychecks from the Dictionary.

“What about you?” I asked Phineas.

“What about me?” he replied. When he leaned forward to pet Canon, I noticed a small spot of dried blood on the collar of his button-down.

“Aren’t you coming?”

He quickly shook his head. “Not now,” he said, sounding impatient. “Maybe later.” But I knew by the way he avoided my eyes that there was something he wasn’t saying.

“Please don’t tell me it’s because there weren’t enough tickets,” I pleaded softly.

He took a small sip of water. Marked the glass with blood. “Of course not,” he bluffed, pretending to study the rug’s threadbare pattern of crenellations.
³

“In that case,” I said, passing back the ticket, “I can’t accept this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Alice,” Phineas said sharply. “It’s in your name.”

Then, as we both checked the ticket, he hastily added, “Anana, I mean.”

Finally I realized who he was: the White Knight. Taking me to the end of his move. His early behavior had hidden his true identity, but even that had been out of a misguided protectiveness for the Society and Doug. And really not so misguided—for a long time he had a lot of questions about me. Questions I can now understand.

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.