Lexicon

by Max Barry

  That’s what’s happening if you’re getting all your news from one place. If you stop listening to someone the second you hear a word or phrase you’ve been taught belongs to the enemy, like “environment” or “job creators,” that’s what you’re doing. You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyze what you’re hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you’ve got nothing. You’ve delegated the ability to make up your mind.

  [ONE]

  She tried to catch Harry at inconvenient moments. When he was stepping into the shower, or just after he closed his eyes at night, or reaching for the car door, late for work. “Do you love me?” she would ask. She would smile, so he’d know she was teasing.

  “Maybe,” he would say. Or nothing. Sometimes the look he gave her was like: Of course, why ask? and other times it was more like: Stop it, I’m running late.

  He did love her. She was sure of it. All evidence pointed to yes. So why not say it? This was the part that nagged at her. Yes, okay, in Harry’s world, you didn’t need to say something to make it real. But come on.

  She had said it. She had said it a lot, starting three weeks ago and increasing in frequency since, with the exception of a four-day drought the week before, which she had hoped might trigger something but didn’t. And it was driving her crazy because she could force him. She didn’t have a lot of words, but she did have tricks, and had figured out his segment, and there was no doubt in her mind that she could compel Harry Wilson to say whatever she wanted. But if she did that, it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be him. It would be her, speaking to herself, through him. It was very frustrating.

  • • •

  “That car has been all over town,” said the woman who was making Emily a sandwich. Emily turned. Across the street sat a dark sedan, windows tinted, engine running against the heat. A skirt of dust betrayed some serious long-haul driving. “You see it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Not from around here.”

  “No.” She looked at the sandwich that the woman, Cheryl, was making. She had visited this shop nearly every weekday lunchtime for the past four years. She had practically married Cheryl’s sandwiches.

  “It’s been to the mines.” Cheryl gestured with the knife. “Look at the tires.”

  She looked. The tires were caked in red earth.

  “Someone from the city, I suppose. Government.” Cheryl flipped the bread. “Salt and pepper, love?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I keep thinking you might change your mind,” said Cheryl, sawing bread. “I can’t imagine how you eat it so plain.”

  “I like plain,” she said. She carried the sandwich out of the shop, although she no longer felt like eating it. The car crouched in her peripheral vision but she did not look at it. When it pulled out, she crossed into the pedestrian mall, where it could not follow, and walked the roundabout route to Tangled Threads. She locked the door and sat behind the counter. She didn’t know how to feel. Two years ago, maybe even one, she would have chased that car down the road. She would have beaten her hands against its side and begged it to stop. But now things were different.

  A young man in an airy gray suit appeared at the door. He pulled the handle, pushed it, then put his hand to the glass and peered inside. When he saw her, he pointed at the handle and mouthed: Open?

  She unlocked. He was young; a boy, really. She could tell from his skin that he had come from nowhere near here. “Thanks,” he said. He came inside. He brushed aside his hair, which was a style she didn’t know and dangled in his eyes. “Whoo. Hot.”

  “What can I help you with today?” she said.

  He smiled, as if he appreciated the pretense. “It’s good news. You can come home.”

  She said nothing.

  He glanced out the window. “That was a genuinely long drive. They told me it was long, but . . . it’s really something. Or nothing, rather.” He looked at her. “Nothing and nothing, for as far as you go. Did you get used to it?” She didn’t answer. “It seems to me it would be hard to get used to.”

  “You can get used to anything.”

  “Of course,” he said. “We can leave right away.”

  “Today?”

  “Is that a problem?” His eyes were gray, like his suit.

  She shook her head. She did not want problems. “Give me your phone number. I’ll call you in a couple hours.”

  “I wouldn’t bother packing. There’s nothing here you’ll need again.”

  “If I don’t tell people I’m leaving, they’ll look for me. I’ll be reported missing. It will get messy.”

  He was silent. He was going to tell her the organization could handle a missing persons report. But then he shrugged. “As you like.” He dug in his pockets. Had this boy attended the school? He might have been one of the kids, a skinny cavorting stick boy too small to register. But she wasn’t sure. It all seemed so long ago. “You really made yourself a part of this place, huh?”

  “It’s small,” she said. “There’s no other way.”

  He smiled like he didn’t believe her and extended her a card. “I’ll be in the car.”

  • • •

  She phoned the owner of Tangled Threads, Mary, and said she needed to leave right away, her mother was dying. Mary’s voice flooded with sympathy and told Emily it was fine, take as much time as she needed. She said, “I didn’t know you were still in contact with your family.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Emily. “I just heard from them.”

  Then she drove to the hospital and waited. She could never tell where Harry would be, but the best place to wait was the emergency room. Sometimes she sat and read magazines alongside farmers with their hands wrapped in black towels and mothers with green children. The emergency room had glass double doors and when the paramedic van pulled up, the sun bouncing off its white hood, it was always thrilling, like winning a prize.

  But when she saw him, she burst into tears. It was unexpected and shocking and if that organization boy had been around to see it, who knew what would have happened. Harry came to her, alarmed, and she heard the lie fall out of her about a mother, cancer. She hugged him and inhaled him while she could.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “No,” she said, grateful for the offer. “You can’t.”

  “How long will you be?” He shook his head. “You don’t know. It’s okay. Take your time.” He kissed her head. “But come back.”

  “I will,” she said, and as the words came out, she was surprised at how true they felt. “I will, I promise.”

  Eventually she pulled away. There were people watching, and the longer this went on, the harder it became, so when he offered to drive her to the house she refused. She had to walk away while she could. “I love you,” she said, and he smiled sadly, and in retrospect, it was very obvious, wasn’t it? She should have seen it coming. But love made people stupid, and she was so very much in love. The emergency room doors parted and she walked through them and the only thing that made this bearable was the conviction that she’d be back.

  • • •

  An hour later, she was in the black sedan, watching dust swallow Broken Hill in the side mirror. The boy brought the car up to ninety miles an hour and manipulated his phone with one hand. “Sleep, if you want,” he told her. “There’s a whole lot of nothing for the next eight hours.”

  This was true. But she couldn’t do it. The boy kept glancing at her and she curled up in the seat, putting her back to him. A while later, a car passed, heading in the opposite direction, gleaming on top and pancaked with dirt on the bottom. She watched it recede in the mirror. A minute later, there was another one just like it, then another.

  “Are there more of you?”

  “Hmm?” he said.

  �
�The cars,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Probably locals.”

  She slouched back down. A truck appeared on the road ahead, following the cars, a black eighteen-wheeler with no signage, hauling a steel container unlike any she’d ever seen, but this time she didn’t say anything.

  • • •

  The journey was thirty-four hours, long enough to develop a burning hate for the organization boy and everything he stood for. She was glad the first-class seats were like capsules, which gave her space to hide her misery. She didn’t know what had triggered the arrival of the boy, whether it was simply enough time passing for the organization to consider her suitably chastened, or they had been observing her, or something had happened, or what. But whichever it was, she would be expected to be in charge of her emotions.

  She deplaned, disoriented and bruised somewhere in the core of her body, into DC winter sunshine. A limo whisked her to a grand hotel, where the boy bid her farewell, and she slept for fourteen hours. She woke to a blinking red light on the bedside phone. She pressed for voice mail, thinking it might be Eliot, which would be frightening, or Yeats, which would be more so, but it was neither. Instead, a girl she didn’t know told her she was expected at a particular fashion store in thirty minutes. The girl ended her message without saying good-bye, as if she’d been cut off, although Emily knew she hadn’t been.

  She caught a cab downtown and tried on skirts and sheer shirts. In the mirror, she looked freakishly tan. “This will take more than a jacket,” said the man, who had introduced himself as a personal style adviser. “You’re a cavewoman in a suit, dear.”

  He forwarded her to a salon, where a bald man dragged a brush through her hair with occasional exclamations of dismay. Now she was alongside other women, she started to see the problem. Her hair was the wrong kind of blond: the kind from the sun. There was a gritty quality to her skin. She had absorbed Broken Hill. She had soaked it up and become savage. “Do not worry,” said the hairdresser. “We’ve beaten worse than this.”

  Afterward, the floor a graveyard of fallen hair, she found herself with a short bob and bangs like a steel door. It seemed like they had tried to hide her face. She looked strange to herself. “Do you wear glasses?” asked the hairdresser. “You should consider that.”

  She was shuttled back to the first clothing store, where her new look was praised effusively. She actually started to feel good and then the personal style adviser said, “Well, it’s an improvement, anyway.” She had forgotten how indirectly people spoke here. She had become accustomed to taking people literally.

  Hours later, laden with shopping bags, she was driven to a tall glass office building that offered no identifying logo. She entered a simple lobby, feeling newly manufactured in her gray woolen suit and stiff black shoes, her heart pounding in case she was about to meet someone she knew. But there was no one. A red sofa, a few paintings; it could have been anywhere. She waited at the reception desk until a young man with invisible eyebrows emerged from the rear office. “I’m Emily Ruff,” she said.

  “Just a moment.” When he returned, he had a plastic card, which he placed on the counter. It was blank but for: NL-L5D4. She looked at him.

  “That means level five, desk four.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.” She hefted her bags. It took her a minute to figure out the elevators: She had to insert the card into a slot before the buttons would do anything. Then the doors closed and she rose toward whatever was up there.

  • • •

  It turned out that level five was nothing but anonymous corporate space with a dozen or so roomy cubicles. Almost all were empty. It was very quiet and as her shopping bags rustled and banged she wished she’d left them with the receptionist. She passed a young woman on the phone and a boy with long hair and glasses who looked up from his computer screen but his expression didn’t change and she didn’t stop walking.

  She spotted identifying plates on the desk corners and began to triangulate D4. It was in a corner, with a pretty amazing view over south DC. It had a chair, a phone, a computer, and that was it. She stashed her bags beneath the desk and tested the chair. She waited. The phone would ring, she guessed. Eventually.

  After a minute, the boy with glasses appeared, accompanied by a girl whose hair was the good kind of blond. She looked familiar, although Emily couldn’t place her. She seemed very young. “Wow. Welcome.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Isaac Rosenberg,” the boy said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I’m Raine,” said the girl. “Kathleen Raine.”

  “Hi,” Emily said again. There was an awkward silence. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “Typical,” said the boy, Rosenberg. “We only got word a couple days ago that you were coming. You’re in NL.”

  “Neurolinguistics?”

  He nodded. “Testing and Measurement. Have you done any NL work before?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s good for a theoretical grounding, supposedly. Anyway, we’ll get you started. Teach you the system. If that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure,” she said. The girl, Raine, was still looking at her like she was missing something, so she said, “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  Several expressions flitted across the girl’s face in quick succession, one of which said yes and another that told her she wasn’t supposed to ask. “No,” the girl said, but Emily remembered now: They had met at the school. Emily had forgotten because it was in that first week, and the girl had failed the tests and not been admitted. She had been very young. Emily had tried to make her feel better by saying she could try again the next year. Her name had been Gertie.

  “Hey, I apologize if this is inappropriate,” said Rosenberg, “but they really haven’t told us much and we don’t want to tread on any toes, so I’m wondering if . . . you know, if you actually want to do NL or if we should just leave you alone.”

  “I think I’m actually here to do NL. I’m just another graduate now, I guess.”

  Rosenberg and Raine laughed, then stopped. “I’m sorry,” said Rosenberg. “I thought you were joking.”

  “Why would that be a joke?”

  “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  “You haven’t. But please, tell me what you know about me.”

  “Well, nothing. Just your name.” He pointed to her partition. There was a gray rectangle of plastic. A nameplate she hadn’t noticed before. Her first thought was that she was at the wrong desk. Then she realized she wasn’t. Because of Yeats. Because four years ago, he had said: I have a name for you, when the time is right. The nameplate said: VIRGINIA WOOLF.

  • • •

  The woman on the phone she’d passed earlier turned out to be Sashona. The last time Emily had seen her was on the hockey field at the school. “Screw me sideways,” said Sashona. “You’re Woolf?” She looked at Emily with her hands on her hips. Sashona had grown up. She had become a woman. “We thought you’d died.”

  “Nope.”

  “Holy cripes. Where have you been?” She shook her head before Emily could answer. “Don’t answer. Stupid question. Wow. Look at you. You’re so different.” Emily smiled awkwardly. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing. “What on earth did you do to earn that name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sashona looked at her and Emily realized she did not believe this at all. “You look great.”

  “You, too.”

  “Patty Smith,” said Sashona. “That’s my name now. Smith.”

  “Oh, Smith’s good,” said Emily.

  “Ah, fuck off,” said Sashona, smiling. For a second it was like being back at school.

  • • •

  She was reminded how much she disliked neurolinguistics. She had forgotten that, since school. At first, it was fascinating; it was all Amazonian tribes using recognizably Latin words and how saying guh could make you hungry. Then came syntax and sema
ntic violations and synaptic coupling. It required enormous amounts of rote memorization—all of which she’d lost over the past four years—and the ability to juggle symbols in her head. At school, students didn’t talk much about what they thought of specific subjects, but when she had mentioned she was studying neurolinguistics to Jeremy Lattern, he had looked sympathetic. This was like those classes again, only now she was expected to know everything.

  Rosenberg and Raine taught her how to use the computer. There was a ticket system: When people wanted her to do something, they logged a ticket. And when she was finished, she plugged her work into the ticket and closed it. Mostly, the people who wanted Emily to do something were from Labs, which she gathered was located somewhere else in the building, although it was clear that other people were reading the tickets, too, because they sometimes requested clarifications. Those people, she thought, were higher-ups. Organization people like Eliot. But there were no names in the ticket system, only numbers. Sometimes she would read a ticket over and over, wondering if there was anything of Eliot’s mannerisms in it, but she could never tell for sure. After a while, she stopped expecting to see Eliot. Apparently she was to be left alone. To do what, exactly, she didn’t know. Maybe they really did want her to relearn NL. Maybe they were secretly observing her. But if this was the case, what they were observing was nothing very interesting.

  She was assigned an apartment, a bank account, and a cell phone. All this was arranged. Her apartment balcony overlooked the meatpacking district and sometimes she stood out there with a bottle of wine, wrapped in a jacket that never really kept out the cold, watching the city breathe.

  Every few days, she did something stupid. She stayed up late, or set the alarm early, and left the apartment in the freezing dark. She walked in a random direction for a random amount of time and found a pay phone and plugged coins into it. As it rang, she reminded herself to modulate her voice, avoid identifiable phrases, and end the call as soon as possible. She told herself, This is the last time for at least a week. Because if she was caught, she had no doubt that the consequences would be terrible. But then the line would connect, and Harry’s voice would fill her, and she would forget about that.