The Word Exchange

by Alena Graedon

  But I couldn’t make him leave. He was twice my size. And it was more than that: he still had meaning in that place. He’d made us countless meals in that kitchen. Accidentally shattered nearly every glass. Sometimes left his swim goggles in the freezer, his bike helmet on the dish rack. And said the word “love” so many times. Whether he’d meant it or not.

  I was facing the kitchen when he rasped, “Ana? Kan me, please?” He sounded agitated. When I turned, he fixed me with his relentless hazel eyes. Pressed a rumpled piece of paper to my palm. His penmanship had devolved. Letters slackened and gone soggy, like the last cereal in the bowl. I didn’t know whether it was the virus or his lack of practice, but the sloppy letters didn’t help his cause. They made his note seem disingenuous. I was angry a priori, before I even read a word.

  “I just want you to know,” he’d scribbled, “I’m so, so sorry for what I did to you and to us. I’m so, so sorry for hurting you. I’m just so profoundly sorry.”

  “This is what took so long?” I said, crumpling the paper. I was incredulous, but also a little conflicted for feeling mad when he was clearly so hurt and sick. I didn’t even know what he was sorry for. As if there were just one thing. (As if it were all his fault.) And of course I also knew he couldn’t have just written it. Fleetingly, I wondered if I was the first person he’d given it to.

  But he shook his head, brow furrowed, and tried again to talk. “N-not all,” he stammered, taking the paper floret from me and flattening it out. Turning it over and handing it back. And the note lurched on. “I’m horrified, plain and simple,” it continued, “to have ruined things with my best friend and my love. This isn’t something I’ll ever get over. And I’m just so sorry, Anana. So sorry that when things got hard, I put work first and left. I know you can probably never forgive me, but if you’d ever even consider taking me back—”

  That’s where I stopped. And not only because it was so insultingly flat. (A man who traffics in words, I thought, should come up with better ones than that.) The note felt toxic; it left a funny taste in my mouth. Metallic, like lead paint, or the prodrome of a migraine. When had he written it? And why? Maybe someone else had done it for him. While I’d had my back turned, had he just been pretending to write? Everything about it made me ill. And then there was what the note said. What did that mean, “put work first”? It’s true that before Max left, he’d had many late nights at “meetings,” with “clients,” “developing projects.” But I’d assumed those were euphemisms—the source of many fights. Had he really been working? At what? Meaning Master? What was he “mixed up” in? Did it have anything to do with Doug? The Creatorium? The language virus?

  He’d started softly crying again, maybe sensing my doubts. Maybe really crying. With Max, it was hard to know. So hard. And his tears had a paradoxical effect on me. I tersely asked what he meant by the note. “Why bring up work?” I chafed. He couldn’t explain. He was crying harder. Tried a few starts at speech. But the note had put me on guard. And other thoughts had started bubbling up in my brain. Maybe he had just written the note. Maybe he wasn’t really sick after all—the virus was a front, to lower my defenses. To scare me, or make me feel sorry for him. How had he turned up, I wondered, at just the moment I’d been home? Had he been watching me? Had someone else?

  By that point, though, he was rocking back and forth, and his whimpers sounded piercingly real. Still upset but softening, I studied his bloody, broken face. He was suffering. And whoever had beaten him might not be far away. I eyed the door. Guardedly, second-guessing myself even as I did it, I placed a hand on his broad shoulder.

  “I’m never going to take you back,” I said. “I think you know that, too.” The words felt like a benediction; I realized as I said them that they were absolutely true. And with that unexpected release came a warm, airy absolution. Gently I asked, “Why are you really here?”

  “Ana,” Max said, voice breaking like glass. He handed me another collaged sheet of paper. It read: I’M IN SO MUCH TROUBLE. Then he bent over and wept again. It was a wrenching wail, like the baying of a dog. Tears rained in tiny pearls, marking a trail through the dried blood below his swollen eye. He covered his face with his hands. And finally I believed him. My heart flooded with a sad, insoluble mix of grief, vindication, and anger, despair, detachment, compassion—like the mismatched letters glued to the papers he’d brought with him. But most of all, seeing him like that, what I felt was fear. Max, the stoic. The king. I hurried to the door and slid the chain. Peered uneasily into the bedroom, at the broken window gaping onto the fire escape, a few loose tines of glass in its casement.

  “It’s okay,” I said, stepping close to Max again. Hovering over him. Like I used to do if he’d had a fight with his father, mother, one of his brothers, a friend. Me. But without the same requiem of feelings. I softly said, “Just—try to tell me what’s going on.”

  After a moment of silence and a long, jagged sigh, Max said, “I-I-I boo code how I got here.” Looked around, bewildered. “Gebbad what I’m zolat here. Bode shem I zwah. I fucked up.” He stared at me, wretchedly wild-eyed. “I fucked up bolsh. Wem a fucking fuckup,” he wailed. “And tyx—onet pitsher blame the whole vyesh on me. Dwetto. The virus. Everything.” Then he began banging his head into the wall. I winced. And when it got louder and more violent, I put my hands on that knobby skull I knew so well, and the banging stopped. “Sedded anything,” he sobbed. “Eechye to go back. Poydeet six months ago. We hway zove Dominica.” He grabbed my arm. Started crying on my sleeve. “Please. Tor gwazee and be with you again. My shokh my fucking soul if I nung.”

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand him. I knew what he meant. And that for those few moments, he believed it.

  “Souls aren’t worth much,” I said, smoothing the stiff, dirty mass of his hair. “Especially not yours.” He tried to laugh, but it came out strangled, like the cough of a clotted vacuum cleaner. Against my better judgment, I found myself scratching his head in soothing circles. Dusting dried blood from his cheek. Letting myself get pulled back in. “But I know you,” I said. “And that’s not really why you’re here.”

  He nodded, and my hands moved with his head. Part of me wanted to believe him.

  “But there’s another reason,” I prodded. Stopped massaging his scalp. “You need something from me.”

  “What?” The word was muffled by my sleeve. But his neck tensed. And I knew, with quicksilver certainty, that it was true. I just didn’t yet know what he was looking for.

  “Don’t,” I warned softly. “Just—don’t fucking do it. Do not lie to me again.” I let go of his head. Tugged my warm, wet sleeve from his face. Took a step away and tried to regain my lost ground. Shake off the spell. But I felt like a simulation of myself, in a scene I was imagining. Had imagined, many times. Although it never went like this.

  As if trying a different approach, Max quieted. Collected himself. Gave speaking another chance. “Listen. Shur,” he said. “I was going to gid you. Didn’t your dad karatz an Aleph? Swannas, I do jen need one of those.”

  I was silent for a minute, face tingling with resentment and regret. From the corner of my eye I saw a glint on a high kitchen shelf: the Aleph’s power switch. A cold shiver twitched over me. And I was afraid I’d unwittingly look up and give it away. I made myself stare at Max. Breathe.

  “If I can kross show them brevvek happened way before mone. That I had mayneetch to do with it. None eezets lamek my fault—”

  A wave of amazement crashed over me. “Get out,” I ordered. Almost laughed in disbelief. How gifted he was, how masterly at manipulation. How willingly I contorted. And he was only doing what I’d asked: finally telling me the truth.

  “Ana, don’t,” Max said, with what was now a desperate—or angry?—edge. Even at the best of times, it was hard to keep up with the whipping sails of his moods. Standing, he said through gritted teeth, “You don’t leebon get it. They jyong dat kill me.” With one step he was next to me. “I’m dead.�
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  My throat jolted, and I felt a chill of fear. I’d never been afraid of him like that before. “Max,” I said, trying to sound in control, “get out of here.”

  And then a thought occurred to me: what if it was Max who’d upended the apartment? The door hadn’t been forced because he hadn’t broken in.

  I didn’t yet know why the letter I’d received had asked me to safeguard the Aleph. But if there was any chance it might put Doug in danger, there was no way I’d give it to Max, whom I wanted out of my apartment more than ever. The Aleph was in plain sight. How long before he noticed it, even with just one good eye?

  “Ana, ching,” Max begged. “Let me praze leeved longer. Pozh, just the night.”

  “The night?” I said. But all at once I was stung by a discomfiting thought: he’d been staying there for days. Ringing the buzzer before mounting the stairs. Sleeping in my bed. I shuddered. Looked again at Max’s bludgeoned face. Had it been here that Dmitri had found him? Anxiously I examined the shattered window again. Looked at the door. I wanted Max gone. “Get the fuck out,” I commanded with the whole force of my being. Wood and glue, I thought.

  But instead Max came closer. Took hold of both my arms. “Dalsh, please. Gantyay where it is. Whatever I’ve done to you, don’t rong them kill me. Anana. Zhal.”

  And I was scared. So, so scared for him. Persuaded that this time he was telling me the truth: that if I didn’t give him the Aleph, he’d be in trouble. But I was also frightened for myself. Because he was holding my arms so tightly it hurt.

  “Maybe,” he was saying, voice rising in desperation, eyes shining, “yode might even zwamt a better treatment. Straven reverse it—for all of us, dakazh.”

  His grip tightened. And I knew I could throw him down. He didn’t expect it. It would be easy to do. With his body already so bruised, that would probably be enough—he’d leave. But I also knew I didn’t have to. I could do it with words. Tell him what he wanted to hear: what he’d done to me—and I’d done to myself—for years. And he’d believe me.

  So I lied. To this man I’d loved so much, and still loved. To save myself, and maybe my father. “Okay,” I said. “Max, I’ll give you the Aleph.”

  “You will?” he asked, distrustful, not releasing my wrists.

  “Yes. I’ll meet you in an hour.”

  “Where?”

  “The bathroom of SoPo,” I said impulsively. And wished I hadn’t. SoPo, his favorite bar, was only nine blocks south. Why couldn’t I have picked a place in Brooklyn? Chelsea, even. And Max was so maddeningly perceptive that if I wavered, he’d get suspicious. As it was, he said “SoPo?” so skeptically that I was afraid he wouldn’t leave.

  “Yeah. And you’re just going to have to trust me,” I said, forcing myself to laugh. “Because you don’t have a choice.”

  After considering that for a moment, he let go of my arms. “Okay,” he said. “Eachas.” Then he tried to smile. A horrifying sight. “Ganvu, Ana. I’ll never forget this.”

  And I knew he never would.

  ————

  When he was gone, I packed my backpack faster than I’ve ever done anything. Outside, as I searched for a taxi in a cold, wet wind, I saw a man standing in the dark across the street, the red eye of his lit cigarette hovering beneath an awning. I thought at first it was Max, waiting there to catch me in my lie, and a chill poured down my spine. But the man was too short.

  I quickly looked away and took a step into the road. Started walking west very fast—almost running. Trembling, teeth chattering hard. I willed myself not to turn around. Waved harder for a car until one stopped for me as I reached Ninth. After I’d slammed the door, I let myself glance back into the orange-tinted blackness through the glinting droplets beaded on the window glass, and I saw the man who’d been moving after me. I realized, heart racing, that I’d seen him on my block before. Resting on the curb. Sitting in a parked car. As we drove off, he stopped. Lifted his fingers to his forehead in salute. I felt like I might black out. You have to get out of here tonight, I thought, or you won’t get out.

  Instead of going straight to Phineas’s, I had the driver take me to the train at Times Square, one of the heavily guarded stations that had recently reopened. I switched cars, then lines—the 1 to the D to the E—watching over my shoulder the whole time.

  “What happened?” Phineas asked, eyes wide, when I stumbled in the door nearly an hour later. My knees buckled so badly that I had to steady myself on the back of a chair. Canon whined, threading through my legs, licking my hand. And for a while all I could manage was, “I can’t wait until tomorrow—I have to leave tonight.”

  Phineas balked. Reminded me that I couldn’t change my flight. Tried to insist that I stay at his place until the morning, at least. But as I described my encounter with Max, his jaw set. And when I mentioned the man who’d been waiting in the darkness outside my apartment, Phineas picked up the black receiver of his rotary phone, dialed—endlessly—and finally said into the large, curved mouthpiece, “I’d like to call a car.” But instead of giving his own address, he offered one several blocks away, on Park.

  “Ready for your adventure underground, Alice?” he asked.

  He outfitted me with a headlamp, gloves, and waders. Ferried me and my backpack to the basement. Escorted me behind a boiler that clanged like a parade, pushed aside an oily curtain. Spun the combination on an ancient lock and unhasped the rusted clasp. And soon we were inside a large bunker, reverberant with cold Cold War cement, rows of naked showers and bunks, metal shelves lined with old cans. As he guided me to a sort of manhole—into which two narrow tubes disappeared—I asked how he knew about this place. And, more relevant, how he had access. And he said, with a casualness I found staggering even in my state of rabid anxiety, “I own the building.”

  That’s how I learned about his family history in real-estate speculation—and that in 1974, when he’d started looking into installing tubes, he’d had bunkers put in beneath a few adjacent buildings and connected via short subterranean tunnels. He’d bribed some of the workers to extend one passage about 100 feet and create a small, discreet aperture through which one could pass into the combined sewer there under Forty-ninth Street.

  “The most difficult stretch will start at Second Avenue,” Phineas said, twisting on my headlamp and giving me a hand-drawn map of a seven-block route. “The sewers narrow there considerably.” Then, scowling, he carefully explained the location of a very tight drainage tunnel that would lead me to the vast underground cathedral of Grand Central.

  “You’ll follow the tracks the last few blocks north and west. When you arrive,” he said, tapping my map, “you should look on the ground for a small chalked X.”

  He also presented me with a letter in a clear plastic bag that he said I should read on the plane, and he gave me two instructions: that I should destroy it as soon as I’d read it, and that if it seemed as if I were being followed, I should destroy it even if I hadn’t opened it. “Why?” I asked, suspicious. Phineas cleared his throat. “In case you’re abducted,” he said. Then he sent me down into the frowsy dankness on a rough metal ladder that burned my palms.

  Descending, shivering from the frigid air, I followed the snaking blazon of tubes as they plunged downward, too. Once belowground, I pursued them through a low, dark burrow; a small hole; and then, as Phineas had instructed, splashingly, through dirty water. Creatures skittered from my thin light and melted back into the blackness like rain into a lake. Jittering with nerves, legs going numb and mind going blank, I made slow, crouching progress after Second Avenue. Ducked below stalactites of goo. Tried to block out the stench and sounds: squeaks and scratches, distant rumbles, rasping echoes that seemed almost human. Once I’d made the terrible, claustrophobic passage through the drainage tunnel—if I hadn’t spent the past half hour in awful, fear-addled escape, I might have turned back when I found it—I hurried along the tracks. Saw an abandoned subway platform up ahead, covered in graffiti and dipped in a gh
ostly blue glow. Then, at last, I reached the door Phineas had described.

  Peering through the gloom, the white light of my lamp beaming a weak beacon onto the red X on my map, I put my shoulder to the door. Pushed with my whole scrawny weight. It didn’t move. I shoved harder, frescoing my right side in bruises, I’d discover later. But then, as frustration curled in my throat, I heard a man’s voice on the other side. I stopped to listen. Heart beating so hard I felt sick. I couldn’t hear what he said, but almost before I knew what was happening, he was slowly opening the door from the inside.

  “You must be Alice,” said a stately young man. “Welcome to the Waldorf Astoria.”5 Nearly dissolving in gratitude, I molted out of the ruined waders and gloves. Outside, a car was idling.

  Airport security had tightened since the virus, and getting through felt like being hazed: you had to be scanned, then patted down, recite five prescribed sentences, get your temperature taken, breathe into a tube. And I almost didn’t make it. After my recitation I was pulled aside by a large, stern TSA agent. “Come with me, please,” he said, officiously glancing at my passport. Despairing, I assumed that Max had reinfected me. After the agent had taken me to a small containment area near the X-rays, he dropped his voice. “I’m going to ask you to repeat those sentences, Ms. Johnson,” he said very deliberately. Only then did I notice a tiny Ø pinned to his tie. He let me go with a brisk nod.

  By the time I made it to my gate at 2:30 a.m., the shock had started to wear off, and I was dead with fatigue. I spent the next five hours in shaky vigil, hood tucked over my shorn hair; terrified; wearing dark glasses I’d bought in duty-free; and listening very softly on an old CD player to a gift from Phineas: Bach’s cello suites. A few times men skulked by and stared at me. I kept my hand closed over my cell phone. An eye on security.

  And as I hunched, corralled in my seat, scanning the periphery, I was tortured by thoughts of what would happen to Max because of me. My mind was clouded with visions of fists and arms thick with tattoos. Arced blades. Ropes and cords. Semiautomatic weaponry. Twice I walked as far as the door to baggage claim. Wondered if I’d still find him if I went back. With an ache, I thought of the photos scattered on my bed. The note he’d written to me in Dominica. Had he left it out there because he’d reread it? Or just because he wanted me to think he had?