Lexicon (10 page)

But after a while she returned to the mirror. Her mind revolted. It did not want to be bruised again. But she sucked it up. “
Varrrrrttt
,” she said.

•   •   •

“We got words,” she told Jeremy on the grass. She was being less cautious about being seen with him, because he was graduating soon, and what could they do? “We have to read them to ourselves.”

“How did that go?”

“Badly.”

He smiled. “Attention words are the worst.”

She leaped on this. “Attention words? There are types?” She knew he wouldn’t answer. “What are the others? What are attention words for?”

“You’ll learn soon enough.”

“I want to know now.” But the truth was, she had just figured it out.
Attention words.
A single word wasn’t enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received
attention
. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind’s last door swung open.

•   •   •

That night she went to brush her teeth and there was Sashona, wearing blue satin pajamas. “Are you still doing it?”

“Doing what?”

“The words. You know.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Sashona sighed dramatically. “It’s foul, right?”

“Most foul,” Emily said.

“There had better be a good reason for it,” Sashona said, pulling back her hair. “Otherwise I’m going to be pissed.”

Emily nodded. It seemed pretty obvious to her that the reason was to build up resistance. This term she was taking Drama, puffing herself up and shouting at people in a voice that began in her gut, which the teacher called
projecting forcefully
. It was all because people were animals, analogue rather than binary, and everything in nature happened in degrees. People could be partially persuaded. They could be shocked into letting down their guard. You practiced saying the words so that if anyone ever said them to you, you would stand a chance.

“I can’t remember mine,” Sashona said. “They keep falling out of my brain.”

Sashona left. Emily brushed. Walking back to her room, she heard the TV burbling and saw Sashona in the rec room. She hesitated, thinking about what Sashona had said. About not being able to remember her words. She went to Sashona’s door and tried the handle and it turned.

Sashona’s room was super neat. Emily went to the bookshelf and stood on tiptoe to peer at the books.
Socratic Debate
was sitting out half an inch, but they hadn’t studied that one for a while. Emily pulled it down, balanced the book on its spine, and let it go. The pages fell open. She saw three slips of paper. Three words.

She closed the book and returned it to the shelf. She was trembling. When she stepped into the corridor she was sure somebody would see her and ask what she was doing. What would she say? She didn’t know. She had no idea. She was just curious.

But there was no one. She closed Sashona’s door and returned to her room. She climbed into bed and lay there, thinking about Sashona’s words.

•   •   •

Over time she found five more sets of words. She didn’t go looking for them, exactly. But if someone left their room unlocked when they went to the bathroom, she would notice that. And she might wander down to that person’s bedroom and see if anything looked like it was hiding words. She didn’t intend to use them for anything. But they were powerful, and they were there, so she looked out for them. She was an opportunist.

It was strange how many people left their words in obvious places. She understood that you couldn’t destroy them, because they were slippery in your mind; when she tried to recall one of hers, her brain would offer benign variants, like
fairtix
, which didn’t mean anything. You needed a permanent record somewhere. But Emily had ripped hers into pieces and numbered them on the back and hidden the code to reassemble them in the margins of different textbooks. Everyone else seemed to have just stuffed them into books and drawers, or under their mattress, or, in one guy’s case, in his pants pocket. She couldn’t understand leaving something lying around that could hurt you.

•   •   •

“I know everything,” she told Jeremy. “I figured it all out. So, good news, I don’t need to pester you with questions anymore.”

He glanced at her. He was playing basketball. Or practicing basketball. The indoor court was empty but for them. Jeremy was shooting baskets from the free throw line, over and over. She was watching his shiny shorts.

“Once upon a time, there were sorcerers,” she said. “Who were really just guys who knew a little about persuasion. And some of them did all right, ruled kingdoms and founded religions, et cetera, but they also occasionally got burned to death by angry mobs, or beheaded, or drowned while being tested for witchness. So sometime in the last few centuries, maybe even just the last fifty or so, actually, they got organized. To solve the whole being-burned problem. And . . .” She gestured. “Here we are. No more beheadings.”

Jeremy released the ball. It passed through the net with a
swoosh
.

“Also, the words are getting better,” she said. “I’m thinking that five hundred years ago, the keywords were things like
bless
. Tribal identifiers. Playing on how we trust people who think like us, believe the same things. Which is a start, but obviously not what
you
do. It’s not what Eliot and Brontë do. So the organization must have been making keywords. Building them, one on top of the other. Like you do with computer code. First you gain trust from a segment with weak keywords. Not a lot of trust. Just enough to teach them to believe in a stronger keyword. Rinse and repeat.” She sat back on her elbows. “Pretty simple. I actually don’t know why you thought you couldn’t tell me.”

“Have they actually taught you this?” Jeremy said. “Or are you guessing?”

“Ha,” she said. “You just confirmed it. Right there.”

“Bah,” said Jeremy, throwing.

“They taught me some of it.”

He came back, bouncing the ball. “What’s a word?”

“Huh?”

“You’re feeling clever—tell me what a word is.”

“It’s a unit of meaning.”

“What’s meaning?”

“Uh . . . meaning is an abstraction of characteristics common to the class of objects to which it applies. The meaning of
ball
is the set of characteristics common to balls, i.e. round and bouncy and often seen around guys in shorts.”

Jeremy returned to the free throw line, saying nothing. She figured she must have that wrong, or at least not right enough.

“You mean from a neurological perspective? Okay. A word is a recipe. A recipe for a particular neurochemical reaction. When I say
ball
, your brain converts the word into meaning, and that’s a physical action. You can see it happening on an EEG. What we’re doing, or, I should say, what
you’re
doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people’s brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And you do
that
by speaking a string of words crafted for the person’s psychographic segment. Probably words that were crafted decades ago and have been strengthened ever since. And it’s a
string
of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once.”

Jeremy said, “How do you know this?”

“Do you think I’m smart?”

“I think you’re scary,” he said.

•   •   •

While he showered, she waited outside on a wooden bench. From here she had a vantage point across the soccer field to one of the parking lots, the one reserved for teachers, and she saw four black sedans roll up, one after the other. People in suits climbed out. She got off the bench and began to walk over, because this was curious, but one of the men turned to her and she felt very cold and stopped.

The people moved inside. She returned to the bench. Jeremy emerged, smelling of soap. “Are you okay?”

She shook her head. “I saw some people. Poets, I guess.”

He looked at the cars.

“One was an older guy. White hair. Tan skin.”

“Oh,” Jeremy said. “Yeah. That’s Yeats.”

“The teachers, they’re in there somewhere. You know? They’re brick walls, but you can tell there’s something behind the wall. This guy had shark eyes. Nothing in them. Just . . . eyes.” She shook her head. “Junkies get them, if they’re in a bad place. It freaked me out a little.”

“Come to my room,” he said. “Hang out.”

“Okay.” But she wasn’t ready to move yet.

“Seriously, don’t worry about Yeats. You’ll never speak to him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a million miles above us,” Jeremy said. “He’s the head of the organization.”

•   •   •

Jeremy was going to graduate. She had known it was coming. But he became a senior and she was no longer able to pretend the day belonged in some far-off future. He started begging off slushie runs. He didn’t watch her play soccer anymore. Whenever she knocked on his door he was deep in books, looking tired, making her feel stupid for bothering him.

“Just fail,” she said. “Stay another year. We’d be about the same level. We could even study together.”

“I can’t fail, Emily.”

She got off the bed, annoyed, because she had been only joking. Or maybe not, but still. She began sifting through his drawers, looking for anything interesting. But of course there was nothing, because Jeremy Lattern had no personal effects. Certainly no hidden words. She had looked, a couple of times. Just out of interest. It hadn’t always been like this: She remembered a little toy robot with red arms. He had gotten rid of it sometime since she’d met him. That was what people did here. They shrunk and shrunk until there was nothing interesting left.

She went over and put her hands on his shoulders. He tensed. “Relax. It’s a massage. Therapeutic.” She kneaded his muscles until they loosened. When she moved up his neck, he tightened again. “Stop fighting it! I’m helping.”

He relaxed. She slid her fingers into his hair. She rubbed his neck with her thumbs. After a while, he put down his pen. It had been a while since he’d turned a page. She ran her fingernails lightly down his back. “Take off your shirt, so I can do your back.”

He didn’t respond. She bit her lip. That had been kind of obvious.

“You can’t focus if you’re tense and distracted. You can’t pretend you’re not made of biology.” She pressed her thumbs into his shoulders. “You have a deficiency need, you satisfy it. That’s Maslow. You can’t move on to higher needs until you satisfy the base ones.”

He looked up at her.

She said, “I’d like to have sex with you, if you want.”

His eyes were unreadable. “Okay.”

She smiled, but he didn’t, so she stopped that. He rose from the chair. He looked like he was concentrating on a puzzle. She unbuttoned his shirt. Her fingers shook and he must have noticed. She felt his hands on her waist and she pulled open his shirt and his chest was smooth and hairless and smelled of him in a way that was powerful. She kissed his skin. She craned her neck to reach his lips but he turned his face away. So there was to be no kissing. He removed her jacket. She backed onto the bed and he climbed on top of her. His face betrayed nothing. He was breathing more quickly; that was all. She tried to be like him, not react as his hand moved up her stomach, but a sound came out of her before she could stop it. His eyes flicked at her.

“I’m okay.” She pulled him closer. She felt his erection against her and had a moment of panic. She wasn’t a virgin but it had been a long time and everything was different. He continued to press. Her body fizzed with tiny stars and she remembered how this went. She reached down and touched him through his pants and made him grunt. She liked that. She squeezed again.

His hand sought admission to her skirt. She lifted her butt, unzipped, and pushed the whole mess of fabric down. His fingers pushed against her and she gave a little gasp. He hesitated. She wanted to grab his hand and force him onto her. She tugged him out of his pants. He buried his face in her shoulder. His fingers found her. It was an awkward angle; she could only squeeze. But the pressure was amazing. Vibration began in her legs. Her teeth chattered. She almost laughed, but that would be no good; she couldn’t do that. He groaned, a low warning, but she ignored it and then he jetted through her fingers. He did it silently. She felt triumphant. The movement of his fingers intensified, and she felt herself going out with the tide of her victory. Her legs kicked once.

She lay still. He panted into her hair. She could smell their sweat. After a minute, he raised his head. She could see the endorphins in his pupils. He rolled away, onto his side. She used a corner of the sheet to clean herself and lay back beside him. He didn’t speak. She watched the ceiling until his breathing eased into a sleep rhythm, about twenty or thirty minutes, and then, when it was safe, she put her arm around him.

•   •   •

She went to class the next day and no one knew. It was a secret treasure. She sat in the back row and thought:
I had sex with Jeremy Lattern.

It was Subvisual Methods, a class she liked, but her mind wandered. At odd times, she seemed to catch his smell. Maybe some of him was still on her. She liked that idea.

A thought popped into her head:
He’s a thirteen.
She blinked. She didn’t know where that had come from. She had considered Jeremy’s segment before and decided he was probably a ninety-four. His behavior matched up almost perfectly; she’d watched him pretty carefully. But now she felt differently. Ninety-four was a cover. He was a thirteen.