Verify

by Joelle Charbonneau

  “I’ll see that your bike is taken care of,” he shouts back, never losing a step. “This way.”

  He zigzags through a brightly lit area filled with silver tables and chairs and heads down another set of steps that are less well lit. The river slaps against the black iron footings below. The sound accompanies our footsteps and the faint rattling of a jackhammer somewhere in the distance. The water. The rattling. The darkness. The path we take through shadows and around iron barriers. Together they create a symphony of sound that, combined with the lack of people anywhere in sight, makes my throat go dry and my shallow breath come faster.

  Instinct screams for me to turn around and bail, but I ignore it and keep going.

  Another iron bridge rises out of the darkness. I know there are many bridges that cross the Chicago River, but I’ve never seen them from this vantage point and I am not sure which one we are facing. The lack of orientation only adds to my bubbling anxiety as Geeze heads to another set of stairs and begins to climb.

  My legs are tired, and I’m breathing hard by the time we reach the street above.

  “Wait up,” I gasp.

  Geeze doesn’t say anything, but he does stop next to the first building as I grip my side and wipe the sweat off my forehead.

  He seems to be watching the darkened shadows of the staircase where we just emerged. Then, slowly, he scans the street. There is a jogger running across the bridge. A group of people are standing in a huddle outside a doorway at the start of the next block.

  Whatever Geeze sees must be fine to him because he takes my hand and says, “This way.”

  He doesn’t comment on my sweaty palm as we walk down the sidewalk beside the empty street at a normal gait. I pick up my pace when I spot a man with a scruffy beard, tattered clothes, and a hat pulled low standing in a darkened doorway to our left. Geeze, however, stops walking, and the viselike grip he has on my hand means I have no choice but to stop, too.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Geeze asks the guy in the doorway, who clearly couldn’t care less about the time.

  I pull out my phone as the man in the doorway says, “It’s one twenty-one.”

  “Are you sure?” Geeze asks. I go still as he continues with words like those he spoke to me not long ago. “Maybe I should ask someone else?”

  The guy in the doorway doesn’t get annoyed at the question like I did. Under the scruffy dark beard, the guy’s mouth spreads into a wide grin. He pushes away from the wall, shoves his hand into his pocket, and with a flourish holds out a dull gold key. “I always verify things that are important.”

  The bearded guy turns and unlocks the door behind him. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming tonight.” He steps to the side so Geeze can lead me into the darkened doorway.

  “My passenger is new to the train,” Geeze says, nodding to me. “Did the other passengers arrive?”

  Hat Guy jams his hands into his pockets. “Two passed this way. They should be in the station now. You should get going.” Then the guy looks at me. “Getting on the train isn’t easy. I’m glad you’re here to take the trip.”

  Geeze ushers me through the doorway, so I don’t have to figure out how to respond. The minute we step across the threshold, the door behind us shuts. I hold my breath as my heart pounds hard against my chest. The click of the lock sliding into place echoes loud in the darkness.

  No way out.

  I swallow hard and fight to keep the building fear out of my voice. “What train are we getting on?”

  “It’s not a real train.” He takes off his hat and moves deeper into the shadows while beckoning me to follow. “At least not the way you mean. We go through here.”

  “I have a flashlight on my phone,” I say. “We don’t have to stumble around in the dark.”

  “It won’t be dark in here.” He leads me through another doorway, and the illumination he promised flares to life.

  The light is soft, but I still have to squint as my eyes adjust. There are two worn, mismatched armchairs in the middle of the room. I am about to ask Geeze to explain the train again when the walls of the room catch my attention and my heart squeezes. Hard.

  The walls are filled with old-fashioned books.

  Not real ones. Paintings of them. Stacked together. Strewn across the ground. Red. Blue. Yellow. Black. All with pages of white. Open. Closed. And flying out of the open books as if being set free into swirling air are carefully printed words that shimmer at the edges as if by magic.

  The truth is found when men are free to pursue it. —FDR

  The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is. —WC

  Trust, but verify. —RR

  Verify.

  That word jumps out at me first among the words and sentences painted throughout the room—all of them drawn by a hand that I know as well as my own. Maybe better.

  My mother was here. She was a part of this.

  Whatever this is.

  I ball my fingers into fists. My nails bite deep into my palms as I turn in a circle. “My mother painted this.”

  She must have been in this room for hours. It would have taken days, if not weeks, to create this entire scene.

  Geeze nods. “Your mother had some help, but, yeah, the design for this train station was hers.”

  “This is a train station?” It wasn’t like any train station I’d ever seen. For starters, there were no trains.

  Geeze smirks. “The term was chosen by my grandfather and his friends to honor the Underground Railroad.”

  “The what?” I ask.

  Geeze shakes his head. “Sorry. I forgot that was edited out of your history. We’ll get to that another time. All you need to know for now is that this is what we call a station, and what happens next is what we refer to as ‘getting on the train.’” He takes a seat in a faded red chair and nods to the one across from him. “For this little adventure, I will be your Conductor.”

  “My Conductor?” I step cautiously toward the raggedy yellow chair. Next to Geeze is a round end table with a box sitting in the center. There is no table next to the chair designated for me. “You’re going to tell me why my mother painted these walls and what she was doing before she died.”

  “I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  The truth.

  I glace at the words snaking along the wall next to me.

  He who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. —TJ

  “I promise I will answer all the questions about your mother I can, but I have to admit that I only met her once and just for a few minutes. My father was your mother’s Conductor. This was her train station. It was her experience almost two years ago that inspired her to create the design on the walls. Since then a number of our stations have undergone transformations to help make the transition onto the train a bit more . . . pleasant.”

  “You make it sound as if we are going to do something dangerous.”

  “Sometimes the most frightening leap is the one we make in our minds,” he says sternly. Then he shakes his head and laughs. “Sorry. It’s something my grandfather liked to say and my father repeats—a lot. Dad’s really good at this Conductor thing. I’m new to it, so I’m still working out the kinks. Developing my own style, you could say.”

  “Maybe I should wait and talk to your father. Is he one of the other people the guy outside the door said is here?” I look back at the walls and the dozens of books pictured. Each one has a title on the spine. Most I’ve never heard of.

  “My dad isn’t . . . available right now. If you want to do this, you’re stuck with me.” The tension in his voice is less than reassuring. “Once you sit down we can get started.”

  I place a hand on my stomach and take the seat across from Geeze, who still hasn’t told me his name. If he thinks I’m going to call him Conductor, he’s dead wrong.

  Geeze flips his hat onto the table next to him. Then h
e places his hands on the chair’s armrests and says, “I thought you already knew a bunch of this because of your mom. However, since she followed the rules, I’m going to have to start at the beginning—the paper you were given and the word written on it.”

  “Verify.” Clearly, by the quotes on the wall, the word has a meaning.

  “Have you ever heard it before this week?”

  I want to say yes, since my mother clearly knew the word, but I am honest and shake my head.

  “Don’t feel bad,” he says, which irrationally makes me feel worse. “There’s a reason for that.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  He takes a deep breath and then carefully says words he has clearly taken the time to memorize. As if they are part of the Conductor instruction manual or something. “The word ‘verify’ means to establish the truth, accuracy, or reality of something. As far as my grandfather could tell, it was first used in the fourteenth century. It was one of the first words banned from use by certain government agencies back when they started ‘cleaning up’ the streets and making the country ‘safer.’ Little by little, they removed crime and poverty, but they also removed words. Ones that would encourage people to question what they were told. And by doing so, they changed this from a country that believed in facts to one built on lies.”

  Seven

  Removed words? “Words don’t just disappear,” I snap.

  “That’s a reasonable assumption.” He leans forward. “But if you don’t know the words they removed, how would you know if they’ve vanished or not?” He lifts the lid of the wooden box next to him and pulls a tablet out. “What did you do when you were handed the word ‘VERIFY’?”

  “I looked it up.”

  “Did you find out what it meant?”

  “No,” I huff. “I set off some kind of alarm on the school computer. The police think you and your friends are part of a dangerous gang threatening the city.”

  “And what do you think would happen if you searched for another word—one that was removed and not flagged as dangerous?” He turns on the tablet, opens a browser to the dictionary website, and hands the screen to me. “Try searching for the word ‘corroborate.’”

  He spells the word, and I punch in the letters, then turn the screen to show the message that appears.

  NO SEARCH RESULTS FOUND.

  “Try ‘vulnerable.’”

  We go through the same process with him spelling out the strange word and me typing it into the tablet.

  NO SEARCH RESULTS FOUND.

  “‘Entitlement.’”

  Still no results.

  “‘Diversity.’”

  Nothing.

  “This is stupid, and just because I’m not finding these words doesn’t tell me what you’re claiming it does,” I say, holding out the device for him to take back. “They could all be gibberish. I mean, how do I know you aren’t just making up these so-called words?”

  “I’m glad you asked.” Geeze doesn’t take the device. Instead, he grins in a way that transforms the sharp lines of his face into one that is softer. More approachable. His eyes fill with excitement as he once again lifts the lid of the wooden box. This time he pulls out a book. A paper one that looks like the ones painted on the walls of this room and not the virtual ones I read on my tablet or on the computers at school.

  “Here,” he says, passing the book to me. “Try this.”

  The faded red and white with blue book feels heavy and thick and awkward in my hand. I run my thumb along the rough edge of the pages as I read the title.

  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

  “It’s the hard-copy version of the website you just used,” he says. “Why don’t you start by looking for ‘verify.’ The words are listed in alphabetical order, so it’ll be near the back.”

  “I know how a dictionary works,” I snap, even though I don’t. Not really. On the tablet you just have to search for the word and it comes up automatically. If you don’t spell it correctly, the program will give you various options about what you might have been trying to look for. This is going to require me finding the right spelling of the word on my own.

  Slowly, I flip open the cover and turn the thin, almost brittle pages until I reach the section for V words. I run my finger down the page until I land on the one I’m looking for.

  ver•i•fy ˈver-ə-ˌfī vt

  -fied; -fy•ing

  to prove to be true; to confirm; to establish the truth, correctness, or authenticity of.

  I skim through the rest of the entry for the variations of the word, then flip to the front of the book to check the date. According to what I see written there, the book in my hands was printed in 2003. Decades before my parents were born.

  “Try ‘diversity’ next.”

  I find the D’s as he once again spells the word for me.

  di•ver•si•ty də-ˈvər-sə-tē, dī- n, pl -ties

  state of being diverse; contrariety, variety.

  “You can look them all up if you like,” he says, leaning forward. “Every word you tried on the tablet is in that book, and a whole lot more.”

  Pressure builds as I methodically search the book for each of the words I typed earlier. I find them all surrounded by words I have known for years. As if they belong there. As if they have always belonged there.

  “How do I know you didn’t do something to your tablet to make the words not appear in the online search?”

  “Do you have your own screen in that bag?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Then go ahead and use it.” Geeze flops back against the padding of his armchair, sending a small cloud of dust into the air. “It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

  The smirk on his face tells me what I’m going to find before I type the first word.

  NO SEARCH RESULTS FOUND.

  Every single time.

  I stare at the tablet, then at the heavy book on my lap. When I glance back at Geeze, the superior expression is gone. Instead, the only emotion I can describe in his eyes is sorrow.

  “They took those words away, Merriel.”

  I shake my head and scoot so I am sitting on the edge of my slightly sunken seat—my knees so close to his that they are almost touching. “Okay, so maybe a few words were removed from the dictionary. There’s a news story every year about what words are added to the online dictionary and which ones are too old and unused to be in it anymore. But a word not being in the dictionary doesn’t pluck it from people’s minds or from their speech or from books or articles or whatever. Just because the word isn’t written down in one particular place doesn’t mean people wouldn’t know about it.”

  Yet I can’t shake the doubt that’s creeping through me, because I didn’t know these words. And the book in my hands says they are—or were—real. “And it’s Meri,” I correct. “People call me Meri.”

  Geeze leans forward so his elbows are resting on his knees. His eyes—clear and unwavering—are even with mine. “You’re right, Meri, people don’t immediately forget words and ideas. But this started almost seventy years ago. The government created lists of words and banned them from use by anyone who worked in the government. Just a few at a time, but enough to change how people dealt with their work and eventually how they thought about their lives.

  “Once that transition was made, the government quietly took those words away from everyone else in the country. No announcement was made. Just one day a bunch of words were suddenly unavailable for searching on tablets and computers. Green taxes were placed on paper goods. Suddenly paper books became far more expensive than electronic ones. A few people complained, but most barely noticed. Bulky school textbooks fell out of use first. That change alone affected the future in hugely important ways. Once the textbooks were gone, print books of every kind were abandoned in favor of electronic ones. Can you guess what happened next?”

  His eyes lock on mine and I can’t look away.

  “The words vani
shed from the screen versions of books.” He picks up his tablet and turns the screen around for me to see. The word “VERIFY” is written in block white letters against a background of blue. “Words on paper are forever. But the ones on screens can be altered or removed with just a push of a button.” The word on the screen shimmers as if it is alive. Then, suddenly it blinks away. “And no one even remembers they were ever there.”

  He pauses as I stare at the blank screen. When I finally look back up at him, he says, “People who weren’t part of the government still used the words at first, but when they weren’t used on television or in the news or in anything they read, fewer people came across them. One by one the people who knew the words best died and those who were left started to forget they existed. With no one using the words, kids never had a chance to learn them. And now, seventy years later, it’s as if those words never were used at all.”

  I swallow hard. My mind fights to keep up—to see the picture he is painting.

  He leans in. “Bit by bit the world changed—like ants moving grains of a mountain from one place to another. The difference is so gradual that no one notices the landscape has changed. Not until it’s too late. They changed everything about our world—they took the words and the ideas that those words define and with it the freedom to make our own choices—and they did it without anyone noticing.”

  I shake my head, trying to clear the gray fog of fear. Do I believe Geeze when he says the government eliminated words? The searches I performed and the book I hold say he’s telling the truth. Do I hate that possibility? Of course. Censorship isn’t what our country is supposed to be about.

  But I also know that the paper tax was instrumental in spreading the use of renewable energy sources and reducing the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. It was an important step toward battling changing climate patterns as well as reducing our reliance on other countries. Our history teachers have all said it was possibly the most important step our country had taken in decades. It was necessary. All the history books said so.