Lexicon

by Max Barry

  “We know Parke,” said Plath. “He’s indecisive. Untrained with weapons. He’s a carpenter.”

  “Emily, you appear anxious,” said Yeats. “Is there something I should know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I thought Harry died. But he didn’t. I just made myself believe that.”

  Plath said, “Who’s Harry?”

  “Her lover,” said Yeats, “of some time ago. He’s the outlier?”

  She nodded.

  Yeats drummed his fingers on the table. “This changes nothing.”

  They watched the soldiers fan out. Harry began to slow. She could see his face.

  “Wait,” said Yeats. “I’m missing something. Aren’t I?”

  She had to answer. “Yes.”

  “What am I missing?” He clicked his fingers at someone behind her. “You, too.” A poet, Rosenberg, a young guy with longish hair, stepped onto the road, heading after the soldiers. “Emily?”

  “Two things.”

  “Name them. I am instructing you to name them.”

  “I don’t think you’ve been in love. Not recently, anyway. I’m not sure you remember what it’s like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword. That’s the first thing.” Yeats didn’t react. If anything, he seemed baffled. “The second thing is I wouldn’t characterize Harry as indecisive and untrained with weapons.”

  Plath said, “Perhaps we should move inside.”

  “Yes,” Yeats said. “Quite.” He smoothed his pants and began to rise from the table. Then he stopped, because Emily had seized him by the tie.

  “Also,” she said, “you are a jerk.”

  • • •

  He walked toward the burger place until soldiers moved onto the road to intercept him. Then he changed course for the real estate office. He clambered through a space that had once held a plate glass window, collected the rifle from where he’d left it on the counter, and jogged toward the back offices. He’d been here a few times when dating Melissa, the real estate agent. Enough to know the layout, anyway. He took position in Melissa’s office and waited.

  A few minutes later, a soldier shuffled in. Harry waited until the second appeared, then put a bullet into his faceplate. Both men vanished like smoke. He pulled the bolt, reloading as he jogged out into the corridor. He went right instead of left, eased open the rear door, and then was in sunshine. He trotted around the side of the building to the air-con vents and peered through. The second soldier was moving away from him in a crouch. He raised the rifle and shot him in the back of the head.

  When he reentered the building, he was surprised to find both guys still alive. He wouldn’t have credited a helmet with being able to stop a high-powered .28. But he guessed that momentum had to go somewhere. One of the soldiers had pulled off his helmet and was vomiting down his chest. The other was crawling weakly toward the front door.

  He raised the rifle. The helmet-less solder raised a hand. Harry shot him. He walked around to the other one, reloading the rifle. A man unexpectedly appeared outside the window, a young guy in a cheap suit and tie, stringing together nonsense words, and Harry shot him through the window. He looked back. The crawling soldier had stopped crawling.

  He reloaded the rifle. He could hear a chopper approaching. Soldiers would be coming from both sides, he guessed. They would be jogging slowly, like these two guys, since they were encased in forty-pound armored ovens. They had been lumbering around in the noonday sun for about an hour. He couldn’t really imagine what that was like. He had seen people drop dead out here, trying to do too much. They had the idea that the worst the sun could do was make them uncomfortable. They applied their sunscreen and their hats and headed out and just fell over.

  He went into the bathroom and slid open the window. There was a low fence offering cover to the adjoining building, and from there he thought he could make his way unseen to pretty much anywhere he wanted. He climbed out the window and began to crawl.

  • • •

  Yeats’s eyes widened across the table. She had never seen him look shocked before. She had never really seen him look anything.

  “Release me,” he said.

  “You release me,” she said, although that was just to fill time; there was only one way she could ever be free of Yeats, and she was going to have to make that happen herself. He pulled back, reaching inside his jacket for the thing that would take away her mind again. Which showed Emily that Yeats really did not get it. He thought the word had worn off, somehow; that she no longer felt compelled to obey him.

  She went after him but found herself gripped from behind by Plath, of all people. Plath was thin and wiry, not the kind of person who could hold Emily for long, but she hadn’t expected to be held at all, and it gave Yeats time to get out the word.

  “Sit down and stop moving,” he said.

  “No.” Disbelief spread across his face. Plath’s arms were already slackening, anticipating Emily’s compliance. But Yeats’s hand was coming out of his jacket, and she didn’t want to face what was in there, so she threw her head backward. There was a satisfying connection. She stepped forward, swiped a glass from the table, and tossed the water over Yeats’s shoes.

  Yeats made a frightened, high-pitched sound. This was very beautiful in Emily’s ears, but the point was Yeats was not making other sounds, sounds that commanded people to kill her, so in the moment he was occupied with the horror of his softening leather, she broke the glass against the edge of the table and sliced it across his throat.

  He tried to speak. Little red bubbles popped along his lips. She took the bareword from his fingers as gently as could be. He dropped to his knees, and she should have been turning to face Plath and Masters and whoever else was back there, but instead she just stood and watched him die.

  • • •

  Harry jogged toward the burger place. He thought there must be soldiers about, but couldn’t see them. The choppers had retreated; he didn’t know why. He circled around the block but saw no one so he came at it from the front. Emily was there. A few bodies lay on the ground. There was a black-suited soldier but his helmet was off and he was standing with his feet loosely apart, not holding a weapon, looking around the town like he was vacationing here.

  He kept the rifle ready and began to cross the street. Emily turned to him. She had something in her hand. Her expression was strange.

  “Hey,” he said. “Em, it’s me.”

  • • •

  He came toward her and for a moment she didn’t know who it was. She had just killed a bunch of people and compromised Masters and her head was full of bees.

  But she recognized his expression. It was like the last time she’d been surrounded by death and he’d come for her. He was going to save her again, she saw. Of course he was. He was going to forgive her everything, again.

  “Oh, Harry,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

  He smiled. She’d thought she would never see that again, his smile, and it killed her, because she knew it couldn’t last. None of this could last.

  “I love you,” she said, “but I’m sorry, I need you to do something.”

  “Sure.” He slung the rifle and came toward her, his hands reaching for hers. “Name it.”

  “Kikkhf fkattkx hfkixu zttkcu,” she said. “Shoot me.”

  BROKEN HILL TO REMAIN SEALED

  The Sydney Morning Herald, Vol. 183 Issue 217 Page 14

  A government body charged with reviewing the toxicity of Broken Hill—site of the 2019 disaster that killed more than three thousand people—has recommended that the town remain fenced off for an indeterminate time.

  The review was triggered by photographs last summer of what appear to be two large helicopters hovering over the town. This fueled long-running local speculation that the town was not uninhabitable, with conspiracy theories proclaiming the town as home to everything from a secret mafia treasure trove to government militar
y programs.

  The review, which published a 300-page report today, should hose down such talk, with scientists finding critically high levels of methyl isocarbonate still present in the soil.

  “As much as I enjoy a good story, it would be highly dangerous to start thinking it’s okay to go have a look at Broken Hill,” said spokesperson Henry Lawson. “The town is, unfortunately, a grim reminder of what can happen when people and businesses operate without proper oversight.”

  Broken Hill remains the site of one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

  MEMO

  Subject: Re: revisions to models post-BH

  Update as per request—report not finalized, don’t quote me on this, etc. etc.

  Our chief finding is that what we saw in BH was a multilingual effect. Which I realize makes no sense on the face of it, since no relevant parties are/were multilingual to any known degree. But whenever we’ve seen rejection of this magnitude before, it’s been because the recipient is fluent in more than one language. (Can be reliably reproduced in testing: e.g., while counting in Dutch, bilingual subject exhibits increased resistance to compromise in English.) We’ve theorized that when the brain is keyed into one language, words from another are more likely to be first-stage filtered as nonsense syllables—not actually processed as words, i.e., carriers of meaning.

  So the question is, what second language? And—again, don’t quote me, data to be crunched—our answer is the language of the bareword. Whatever that is. We haven’t dealt with a bareword before, so our knowledge here is sketchy. But we believe a bareword belongs to a fundamental language of the human mind—the tongue in which the human animal speaks to itself at the basest level. The machine language, in essence.

  We’re still not clear on exactly what relationship existed between V. Woolf and the outlier Harry Wilson—some kind of love affair? But we accept that upon discovering he was alive. She shifted to a primitive, animalistic state. Mentally, she was operating in that underlying language, feeling desire as a bareword.

  As we know, when a subject experiences conflict from instructions of roughly equal compulsive power, results are situationally dependent, i.e., unpredictable. That scenario, we’re basically talking about free will.

  (Note that when instructions conflict, they do not cancel out. Subject experiences desire to do both. Just worth bearing in mind.)

  Bottom line, we see no reason to discard established models. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This may sound like we’re trying to cover our asses, i.e., avoid admitting flaws in past research, but it’s our honest opinion.

  I realize this may create something of a political issue, given the current organization restructure/bloodbath. Sorry about that. Although the bigger issue, for me, are the questions raised by this underlying lexicon. What are its words? How many are there? Can they be revealed through lab research, i.e., direct excavation from the brain? Can we learn to speak them? What does it sound like when who we are is expressed in its most fundamental form?

  Something to think about.

  R. Lowell

  [FIVE]

  He rose at four and pulled on his pants and boots and jacket. The house was cold as glass and he tried to coax life out of the remnants of the fireplace but there was nothing there. He tucked his hands into his armpits and went outside. The air was frigid, the sky an open box with no real hint of sunlight yet, and he traipsed through the near paddock to the barn. The cow, Hong, heard his approach and mooed hopefully. He led her inside, positioned the bucket, and took his place on the stool. He massaged milk from her teats, resting his forehead against her side for the warmth. He fell asleep like this sometimes, slipping into dreams of death and words. Then Hong would take a step or two away, jerking him awake.

  Filling the bucket took eight minutes. It had seemed ridiculously slow at first. He’d craved greater efficiency. But it was a good lesson in reconnecting. He now enjoyed it as a chance to exist in the moment. There was no past or future when you milked a cow. You were just milking.

  He carried the bucket back to the house and transferred its contents to six bottles. The cat curled around his boots, purring like a tractor, and he gave her a little, too. He built a little tepee of sticks and newspaper and lit the fire. By then the first rays were creeping along the tree line, and he paused to watch. The best thing about this house was the view. He could walk around it and see forty miles in every direction. If a car was approaching, he would know thirty minutes before it arrived. The sky was wide and empty. It was a good house.

  He heard bare feet on floorboards and Emily emerged, her eyes full of sleep, her cotton nightdress running down from her shoulders.

  “You should be sleeping,” he said.

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “No,” he said. “You have that backward.”

  She came to him. They kissed. The fire crackled. She tucked herself against him.

  “Want to watch the sun come up?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  He grabbed two blankets from the pile and threw one over the bench seat he’d built on the veranda. He put an arm around her and threw the other blanket over them. She rested her head on his shoulder. The sun freed itself from the tree line and he felt its warmth on his face.

  “I love you,” she said. She nestled closer, her hand moving up the back of his neck. The wind lifted.

  “Don’t kill me,” he said.

  “I’m not going to,” she said.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgments used to be rare glimpses inside the author’s mind when he/she wasn’t trying to lie to you. Stephen King had some of the best. They were long and rambling, like you’d caught him after dinner and a few glasses of wine. I grew up in rural Australia, the nearest bookstore a town away, and Stephen King never toured there, not even on a motorcycle*. I didn’t even realize authors did tours. Acknowledgments were all I had. They were blogs, before blogs were a thing.

  Now blogs are a thing, and tweets, and you never need to wonder what any author thinks about anything. Which is a little sad, I feel, for Acknowledgments. They’ve been reduced to a parade of names. Important names, if you are the author, or one of the names. The names are the reason we have Acknowledgments. But still. I liked the rambles.

  My important names begin with the usual suspects: those people who read my first drafts and then, six months later, my second drafts (“Try to pretend like you don’t know what’s going to happen”), and so on, for far too long. You might think this doesn’t sound too bad, getting a sneak peek at a book, but that’s because you don’t realize how terribly broken my drafts are. Imagine your favorite story, only every so often the characters do stupid things for no reason and then nothing ends like it should. It’s horrible, right? It’s not merely less good; it ruins the whole thing. I am very grateful to those people who let me ruin stories for them, especially Todd Keithley, Charles Thiesen, Kassy Humphries, Jason Laker, Jo Keron, and John Schoenfelder.

  Thank you to everyone who keeps publishing me. Many people put a great deal of work into each and every book, and if they do a good job, the author gets all the credit. There are editors and marketing people, assistants and copy editors, translators and salespeople, buyers and bookstore employees, designers and techs, and plenty more. Thank you for all the times you did a little more than you had to. In particular, thanks to my U.S. and UK editors, Colin Dickerman and Ruth Tross, who steered me thr
ough the final draft with insight and precision, which is like a gift to an author.

  Luke Janklow is my go-to guy, literary agent by name, guardian angel by nature. I don’t know what I’d do without him, but I bet it would suck. Claire Dippel, the wind beneath Luke’s wings, can do just about anything, apparently, while remaining bright and good-natured. Almost suspiciously so. Thank you, both.

  Most of all, thank you, Jen, for making this possible. There isn’t a single piece of this that works without you. Not the book, not the writing, not me. Definitely not me.

  And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That’s a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn’t read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that’s as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.

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  * In 1997, Stephen King rode across Australia on a Harley-Davidson.“Until you get here you don’t realize how different it is,” he told the Kalgoorlie Miner. “[America’s West] is empty but you always see a power line or a house twinkling off in the distance. Out here there’s fucking nothing.”