The Word Exchange (54 page)

As that last, sibilant word slid from my father’s mouth, a chill stung my spine, as if I were the one laid out on a slab. “Dad?” I said. He turned to me expectantly.

But then I bit my lip and didn’t ask,
What’s going to happen to Bart?

Doug peered at me, forehead ruching darkly. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah,” I lied, the scratchiness back in my throat.

His face tightened. He held up a hand. “Give me a second,” he said, standing. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Where would I go?” I asked, but he’d already turned his back and didn’t respond. When he returned, he’d refilled his glass, and he handed me a great, glowing goblet of Scotch. One rock.

“I don’t want you to answer right away,” he said. “But I have a proposition.” Then he raised his glass. “Bottoms up.”

From experience, I knew a proposition could be a Buster Keaton marathon or a salaried job. I took a long, burning swig. Nodded for him to say what it was.

“A moment ago,” said Doug, “I mentioned comp therapy.” He rubbed his throat. “I hadn’t intended to get into it tonight. But honestly, I think it shouldn’t wait. Not because I think you’re still in danger, but because there are a lot of people who ought to know what’s been happening—to them, and to all of us.”

Then, steepling his hands, bending forward, he explained, “There’s a way you could continue to get better while helping other people.” Sipping his drink, he went on. “We’ve lost a lot—incalculable amounts. The best way forward for all of us is to recover our recent past. It’s a start, at least, as we try to figure out stops, block the viruses that are still razing so much of the Internet and harming many, many people. And then, after things begin to stabilize, we hope, as we begin an inventory of the tens of thousands, maybe millions, of texts—books, articles, emails, transcripts—that have been destroyed. Not to mention private memories, anecdotes, oral histories. By recording the events of these past weeks, you could at least help begin what will need to be a collective process of reflection on all we’ve lost and how we got to this point. But also where we might go from here. By telling the story. Breathing life back into what have become dead letters. I think it has to be done. And I think you’re the person to do it.”

This speech had all the classic hallmarks of Doug at his most Dougish: caring, brazen and dramatic, more than a little unrealistic. All my life I’ve known him to have outsize dreams that he nonetheless tries to implement. And since he always feels best when he’s “being of use” I knew he was trying to offer me a path to utility, too, no matter how unlikely.

Even so, as he spoke my face began to burn, only in part from the whiskey. I could tell he believed what he was saying—that this project really mattered to him. I also knew he was probably asking me to do it because he couldn’t: he was too busy with meetings, press releases, conferences, research, inventorying lost resources, and in his few spare hours he was trying to prepare the
NADEL
for publication. Already by then he thought Synchronic would have to file for bankruptcy, and he hoped to get back the intellectual property and publish the third edition through the Oxford University Press by the end of January. (In his Newark safe-deposit box he’d stored a complete set of the third and a digital backup.) But even if Doug didn’t have time to write the account of all that had happened, why hadn’t he asked Vernon? Vern would do an
excellent job. Or Alistair? Or someone else?
What about Bart?
a small voice said inside my heart.

Again Doug seemed to read my mind. “You,” he said. “It should be you.”

And I was so grateful for his vote of confidence. His opinion matters to me very much. Maybe more than anyone’s. But I also had my doubts. It had been years since I’d written anything longer than a few dozen sentences; I wasn’t sure I’d be able to realize his vision. (Which of course I couldn’t—only my own.)

“Dad, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a visual artist, not a writer. And I’m still recovering. I mean, I just got out of quarantine a couple hours ago. I’m not sure I feel—”

“Just think about it,” Doug said softly, sounding a little let down. “As I said, you don’t have to decide right this moment. One thing you’ll have plenty of is time. Even with reading treatments, conversation lab, all of that. And in fact, if you were to include footnotes—which would help your readers, too, especially with memory—you could probably cut your lab time by as much as half.”
¹
Doug gave me a gauging, sidelong glance.

I tried to smile, but I was exhausted. I offered a weak shrug.

“All right,” he said, rattling the ice in his glass. I couldn’t tell if he was mad. Then he took a strange device from his coat pocket. Silver, deodorant-sized. It had a small screen and a long, snaking black leash—a mic. “But if you
do
decide to consider it …” He clicked a switch, and a tiny red eye beamed on. “I thought it might help to record a few notes.”

What follows is a redacted transcript of our conversation from that night.

Max had managed to leave the country with the help of an old Harvard friend who’d gotten in touch after Johnny’s death—and who, in speaking to Max, soon became very worried about him as well. He was a pharmaceuticals scion with access to a private jet, and after the borders started to reopen, he responded to Max’s urgent pleas to leave the country, agreeing to fly him to London, where he had to go for work, if Max would promise not to speak for the duration of the flight. (Through family connections he also got Max a course of antivirals, and he encouraged Max not to stay in London but to go on to Oxford; he’d started to hear rumors about what he thought was an innovative new clinic—but which in fact was the Glass—purportedly having better-than-average success with quarantine and language therapies.) By the Saturday before Christmas, when they were scheduled to depart, the friend had also gotten Max the papers he’d need to leave New York and enter the U.K.

Max arrived in Oxford just two days after me.
¹
And that night, at one a.m., with the help of instructions from his friend, who’d made a few discreet inquiries in London, Max turned up outside the Glass. Only one guard was on duty, Chris Bennett, a sweet, hulking nineteen-year-old rower from Stoke-on-Trent who was reading English at Magdalen.
The sight of Max, still badly bruised and groveling on icy gravel, overwhelmed him. He couldn’t understand what Max was saying and tried in vain to get him to leave. He even wielded a billy club (unconvincingly). After an hour, when Max still wouldn’t budge—by then he was not only babbling but hysterically crying, and worrying Chris by constantly glancing over his shoulder—Chris finally managed to rouse an irritable Vernon on the walkie-talkie.

Vernon took one look at Max—lips cracked from cold, one swollen eye the shiny purple-green of an oyster, tears and snot quivering off his chin, wearing just Carhartts and a thin flannel—and went inside to get Doug. Doug, lumbering out into the frigid night with a parka thrown over his robe, watched Max disappear and reappear behind the white vapor of his sobs, and sighed. “All right,” he relented. “Bring him in.”

And Max hung on Doug’s neck as they hauled him to quarantine.

They had doubts, of course. Vernon openly questioned Doug’s decision. He wondered, too, how Max had even found the Glass—if Max had been tracking him. (Or was being tracked himself. There was no knowing who’d turn up next, Vern said.) But as Doug explained, letting Max in wasn’t entirely selfless; if he was ever able to talk again, his information would potentially be very useful. “Besides,” Doug chided Vernon, “he was nearly my son-in-law. And you claimed he likely saved my daughter’s life.”

When I heard that, my stomach jumped. “What do you mean?” I asked.

But Doug refused to elucidate, offering only that there was a reason Dmitri had never kidnapped me—or worse. And the truth was, I didn’t really want to know.

Doug shuddered and took a long pull of Scotch. I did, too.

When they turned the lock on Max’s door that night, Doug was optimistic that Max would be fine within the week. As badly off as he seemed, he was actually in better shape than Alistair had been in when he’d arrived from Massachusetts. And Max was carrying a bottle of the same antivirals they gave at the Glass. (Although, confusingly, he also had a doctor’s note certifying that his aphasia was benign.)

But of course Max wasn’t fine. They didn’t know why he was so sick. Maybe, they thought, he’d been affected by more than one virus. Max had a microchip, Vern said. It had apparently been implanted nearly a year before, when he’d gone away on what I’d thought had been a
snowboarding trip. He’d come back with a shaved head and a bandage he claimed was from a fall—which was also how he’d explained his post-op symptoms.

On Max’s second day in quarantine, he got worse: pale and shaky, unable to cough up even the haunted gibberish he’d brought in. By that night it was clear that his silence wasn’t by decree; he had fallen into it. And it was a silence from which he never returned. Around two a.m. he began continuously seizing, and before the doctors even arrived, clad in hazmat suits, he slipped into a coma, his pupils slightly different sizes. It was the worst case of word flu any of them had yet seen. When one of the doctors called Doug later from the hospital, he said that Max’s eyes were no longer responding to light; there was nothing more they could do.