Lexicon (23 page)

“You can go.” He began to disassemble screens.

“What was all that about?” But she wasn’t really expecting an answer. Outside, she found the others huddled on the street. It was dusk, the tail end of rush hour.

“A drill,” said Sashona. “But for what?”

“No point wondering,” said Raine. “We’ll never know.”

“True, that,” said Sashona. She was wondering why Emily hadn’t come downstairs with them. And, by extension, what Emily knew that she didn’t.

Emily couldn’t hang around any longer. She started walking and by the time she reached the subway, she was shaking. She would not do anything rash. She would come to work in the morning, go to her desk, and do her job, like always. But this had been a lesson. A reminder. The next time something like this happened, she told herself, she would have a way out.

•   •   •

She kept a notepad and wrote down syllables she noticed were used more frequently by one psychographic than another. On the train, she listened for deviations from the average. She picked apart the words she knew, looking for patterns. She was surprised at how obvious they were. Liberals overused -
ay
and
-ee
, the front vowel sounds. Authoritarians were thick with fricatives. She developed hunches from newspapers and TV and websites, tracked down a suitable representative, at a bar or church meeting or the grocery store, and tried trotting them out. Like a safecracker listening for tumblers.
Sut. Stut. Stuh.
She slid guesses into sentences and usually people didn’t even seem to register them. They didn’t make it past the perceptual filter, ignored as verbal static. At worst, they thought she was stuttering. Her hunches were usually wrong. But sometimes she saw a flinch. A tiny flare across the muscles of the face. And that was a tumbler.

It was a hard way to learn words. She could do this for a year and still know less than Sashona. But it was very thorough. It forced her to understand the underlying principles. She deduced a preference for alliteration in a segment from what she knew of the segments around it, leaping from there to
lallito
, a command word, and this thrilled her more than anything she had been taught. Because she had found it herself.

Once, sharing drinks at the corner bar, Sashona confided that she had trouble with segment 191. “I get
kavakifa
,” said Sashona, leaning forward, holding her wineglass at an angle that Emily was tempted to correct. “I can get to
fedoriant
. But then I’m lost!” She gestured expansively. “I can
never remember
.” This was part of a tale concerning a high-speed joyride down the I-48, a police officer on a motorbike, and a speeding ticket Sashona had hilariously failed to talk her way out of. But Emily was astounded. Apparently Sashona couldn’t see that the words of segment 191 were bound together. She could understand if Sashona had forgotten the entire tree. But if you knew one, you had half of the others. Sashona did not seem to get this. She had memorized them one at a time, as if they were unconnected. Like a tray of random objects in a child’s puzzle game.

•   •   •

One thing Emily never got over was the feeling of being watched. She wasn’t sure how, but it was happening. She tried varying her route to work, checking reflections, doubling back unexpectedly, but never saw anyone. At home, she double-bolted, but felt no safer. Her feeling was that Yeats was in the apartment. That was her impression. One night, she dreamed he came into her bedroom like a black wind and leaned over her, watching her without emotion, as if she were a thing beneath glass.

•   •   •

On the first Tuesday of her sixth month in Washington, she left her apartment and walked to the local train station. She rode escalators down to the platform and waited for the red line. It was warm; she was thinking about getting to her desk and taking off her shoes. A man at the end of the platform had a guitar and was banging out a song she loathed, for personal reasons: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The train began to pull in. In its passing windows she glimpsed Eliot.

For a moment she wasn’t sure whether she had seen him inside the train or reflected behind her. Then the train ground to a halt and the doors opened and he said from behind her: “Let it go.”

She watched the train pull out. She was sixteen years old again. Just like that. But then she turned and he wasn’t so frightening. He had aged around the eyes. He was just a man, after all.

“Are you in love?” Eliot said.

She didn’t answer.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Yes.”

He looked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll stop.”

“Your next mistake will end you. This is as far as I can go to protect you. You need to appreciate this.”

“I do. I promise.”

His eyes searched her. “No more calls. Not one.”

“I’m done. I’m done, Eliot.” In this moment, she really meant it.

He walked away. She stood on the empty platform.

•   •   •

She did not call Harry that night. The following day, she did not call him. She had gone longer than this without hearing his voice but now it was different, because it was the end. She felt sick. She couldn’t taste anything. It was crazy but she could no longer taste food. At work, she clicked through tickets and wrote reports but couldn’t tell if they made any sense. When it got too much, she went to the bathroom and put her head between her knees. She made herself repeat:
Do not call him.
She felt possessed, by a cruel, heartless Emily who did not love.

She surrendered on the third day. It was a terrible betrayal of Eliot; she realized that. He had stuck his neck out for her in ways she couldn’t quite comprehend and she had promised to stop. But the fact was she couldn’t. She had tried but she couldn’t. It had been six months and home was still on the other side of the world.

She couldn’t call Harry again. Eliot would know, or, worse, others would. There was no stay-but-keep-calling-him option. She could only leave.

Years before, in San Francisco, Emily and a girlfriend had been crossing a McDonald’s parking lot and found themselves boxed in by a group of barely pubescent boys with low pants and twitchy smiles. One of the boys had a gun, which he kept putting away and getting out again, swapping from hand to hand, and the others began to ask Emily and her friend if they knew what hot bitches they were and how badly they were about to get fucked up. This was a bad situation even without the gun, but Emily had been young and stupid, so she walked up to the boy with the gun and pulled it right out of his hands. She had good fingers, even then, because of the card tricks. She didn’t know a thing about guns, except which end to hold, but that was enough, so the boys stood around looking scared while Emily and her friend made a lot of silly threats and walked out backward.

The lesson here was probably that she should not cross parking lots in bad neighborhoods. But also, when you were outmuscled, if there was a gun around, you could get control of the situation by getting the gun.

Emily was outmuscled. She did not have a gun. But she suspected there was one in the basement.

HELP!

I am trying to get in touch with everyone from the church group for our big Christmas get-together! We really want to invite EVERYONE who spent any time with us over the year.

I like to think I’m quite adept at sleuthing people down, but there’s one person I simply can’t locate: Virginia Woolf! One might think that with a name like that she’d be easy to find. Unfortunately, the opposite seems true—it’s IMPOSSIBLE to use the Internet because of all those pages about the famous writer! Very frustrating!! Anyway I was hoping someone might know SOME way to reach her, because she seemed quite attentive and interested in what we had to say!

Much love,

Belinda F.

[TWO]

Beneath her desk was a gym bag. The top layer was clothes Emily actually wore while working out, and under those was a second set she’d stashed there against this day. She logged out of the ticket system and slung the bag over her shoulder. On her way out, she passed Sashona, who was on the phone, and Emily mouthed, “Gym,” and Sashona nodded. She felt a small pang, because although they’d never been friends, for this place they were pretty close, and Emily was never going to see her again.

She walked two blocks to a small café, a place she came sometimes for lunch. In the restroom, she changed into the clothes from her gym bag: a T-shirt, a pair of frayed jeans, and an old denim jacket. She scrubbed the makeup from her face, collected a nice film of grime from the floor tiles, and dabbed this under her eyes and across her hairline. Her work clothes and the gym bag she stashed behind a toilet. She didn’t expect to see those again, either.

She circled the block and approached the office from the lane on the other side. Here was a nondescript door with a sign that said
THE ROBERT LOWELL INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH
. It looked like just another doomed business renting space on the wrong side of the building. But it wasn’t. It was the public face of Labs. She pressed the intercom and waited.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” she said. “My name is Jessica Hendry, I did one of your, like, tests a couple weeks ago, and you said I should come back if I wanted?”

The door buzzed. She pushed it open and went up the narrow steps. At the top was a small waiting room, with empty chairs and an energetic television. A woman with high hair sat behind sliding glass. “Take a seat,” she said.

Emily sat and flipped through
People
. She had been here before. The first time, the day after she’d determined to start planning, she’d found the entrance but not gone inside. She looked up “Robert Lowell Institute” in the phone book and called them—from a pay phone, for what that was worth—and determined that yes, they were interested in volunteers for testing, and walk-ins were accepted between eleven and one o’clock. They had wanted her to come in the next day, but she demurred, because she hadn’t acquired a false identity yet. It took her a week to find Jessica Hendry, a girl Emily’s age who had no fixed address and little interest in the world beyond where she might score her next hit. Jessica took to Emily straightaway, maybe sensing a shared history in addition to the potential to scam some money, and gushed more personal information to Emily than she really needed. In exchange, Emily pressed a hundred-dollar bill into Jessica’s hand and squeezed her and said, “Keep this safe,” then stole it back when Jessica wasn’t looking, because, honestly, that wasn’t going to help anyone.

The institute had asked her to fill out a questionnaire. She went through this carefully, answering the psychographic questions honestly, which exposed her completely, of course, to anyone who divined that Jessica Hendry was her. She was segment 220, she already knew. Which should be good, because Labs could never get enough 220s.

After the questionnaire, they’d taken her to a small, bright room with a forest of video cameras. They attached electrodes to her skull and showed her TV ads. These were kind of funny, because they were not ads at all, or at least not for real products. They were excuses to broadcast words. After forty or fifty, she blacked out, and when she woke up everyone pretended she had just fallen asleep. She didn’t know what they had done to her until the report bubbled through the ticketing system. When she’d seen SUBJECT SEGMENT: 220, she’d scanned it anxiously, but there was no mention of permanent damage. She’d been pretty sure that Labs wouldn’t do destructive testing on a walk-in, but it would have been a bad thing to get wrong.

A few days later, the prepaid cell phone she kept to answer as Jessica Hendry rang, and a man chatted with her about whether she would be interested in coming in again. She said yes if there was money in it and he asked why she hadn’t put down a home address and she explained about it being a tough time and just needing to catch a break and would she get paid or not, what did it matter where she lived. Once she’d established that no one would notice one way or the other what happened to Jessica Hendry, the man said to come in anytime, they would love to see her. And here she was.

“Jessica,” the receptionist said. Emily looked up from her magazine. “You’re up.” The door buzzed.

•   •   •

She followed a white-coated man with no chin through corridors lined with steel-caged lamps. “So I get a hundred dollars for this,” she said. “Right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Last time I fell asleep.” She was trying to engage him, to figure out if he was anyone she knew through the ticket system. “I hope the ads are more interesting this time.”

They reached a double set of elevators. “We won’t be showing you ads today.”

“No? What, then?”

An elevator arrived. The man gestured for her to enter. “It’s a product.”

The doors closed and despite herself, her chest tightened. It was a small elevator. It felt like a very small elevator. “What kind of product?”

He scanned his clipboard. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that without potentially polluting your reaction.”

“‘Polluting your reaction.’ You guys are weird.” The elevator numbers ticked down. “Is it, like, a bottle of shampoo, or a car, or what?”

“It’s strongly important for our tests that you don’t have any preformed expectations.”

“Oh, okay. No problem.”
Strongly important.
That was an odd phrase. She had seen that one in the ticketing system.

The doors parted. The corridor walls were pale blue. A calming color. The tech started walking and she followed him to a set of plastic doors, where he had to swipe his ID tag and tap a code into a keypad. Fifty yards later, the same thing happened again. During this process, she eyed ceiling-mounted video cameras. There was a second elevator and when this one stopped the walls were bare concrete, no more psychological blue. She didn’t like this much. The corridor ended at a perfectly round steel door that was twice as tall as she was. It looked like a bank vault. The door stood open and beyond it she could see a small concrete room with a single orange plastic chair. By the vault door stood another white-coated man and a gray-uniformed guy who looked like maybe security.

Her chinless tech said, “Verifying, I have prototype nine double-zero double-one eight six.”

The other man said, “Confirming prototype nine zero zero one one eight six.”

“Verifying subject, Hendry, Jessica, identifying number three one one seven zero.”

“Confirming subject, time is eight-fifty-eight, time lock has released and chamber is open.”

“What is all this?” she said. She tried to grin.

“Security,” said her tech, not looking at her. “The product is very valuable.” He entered the concrete room, which required stepping over a thick metal rim. “Follow me, please.”

She did so. The air was freezing. The walls were featureless concrete but for six bulbous yellow lights in wire cages. Four tripod-mounted video cameras were aimed at the plastic chair. In the middle of the room was a box. A huge, steel, coffin-shaped box.

“Please sit.”

“Mmm,” she said. “Mmm, mmm.”

“It’s all right, Jessica. It’ll be just like last time. Only this time we’re showing you a product instead of ads. I’m going to fit you with the helmet so we can measure your brain activity, okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, although she was thinking
no, no, no
. She sat. Even the plastic was icy. The steel box had no lid. Not that she could see. Around its sides were thick vertical rods. Pistons? She stared because she could not imagine what the deal was with this box.

The tech touched her hair. She flinched. “Just relax.” He began to fit the helmet.

“Hey, what is this again? What kind of—”

“Just a product.”

“Yeah, but it, you know, seems pretty weird for a product. So what kind of product is it?” He didn’t answer.
Turn him
, she thought
.
“Strongly important”: she had read a hundred tickets from this guy and he was segment fifty-five, no question, and she had figured out words for that. She could compromise him in two seconds flat and make him walk her out of here. She didn’t know what next. There was no next in that scenario. Not one she wanted. But why was there a box? Why the fuck was there a box?

“Almost done, Jessica.”

She had not anticipated a box. She’d thought maybe an envelope. A man sitting opposite, preparing to read a word. And before he could, she would take it from him, because he wouldn’t be prepared for a poet. These guys, these isolated techs, she didn’t think they even knew what poets were. They just did what they were told. But that plan was clearly fucked, because whatever was in this box, this thing that turned a person’s p-graph into a flat line, caused
synapsis
, was too important for an envelope. She had been foolish to imagine that.

“There’s a small needle in this one.”

She felt a sliver of cold enter her skull.

“All done.” The tech moved to the video cameras and began turning them on. Red lights gleamed at her. “Just clear your mind and look at the product.”

“What product?”

“The product that will come out of the box after I’ve left.”

“What do you mean, it will come out of the box?”

“I can’t tell you without—”

“Without polluting my reaction, I know, but why is there a box? What’s inside it?”

“Don’t worry about the box.”

“Just tell me why there has to—”

“I don’t know what’s in the box,” he said. “Okay?”

She saw it was true. And now that she looked, did she notice how the video cameras were covering only her? Not the box. It was so that later, after it was done and the box had closed again, people could study the tapes without being exposed. Did she notice the tech had been avoiding eye contact? She knew what that meant, right?

He placed a black device on the floor. “This is a speaker. I won’t be able to hear you, but I’ll keep talking to you throughout the process.”

“I changed my mind,” she said. “I don’t want to do this.”

He glanced over his shoulder. The man in the gray uniform hovered outside the vault door.
Volteen
, she thought.
Carlott sissiden nox, save me from that guard
. It might work. The two weren’t far apart; the tech might reach him before he drew his gun.

The guard said, “We have a problem?”

“No,” she said. “No, I’m okay.”

“Time,” the guard said. “Thirty seconds.”

“Just relax,” the tech told her. He stepped out. Shortly afterward, the vault door began to move. She expected it to clang but it closed as gently as a shadow. Then bolts fired like gunshots and she jumped. The echoes lasted forever and then all she could hear was her own breathing.
Harry
, she thought.
Harry, I may have fucked this up.

The black speaker the tech had left on the floor emitted a burst of static. It took her a moment to realize it was talking. “
Jessshhhica
.” It sounded like he was broadcasting from the moon. “We’re going to give you a few minutes to relax.” Drenched in static, it sounded like:
relaxssschh
. “Please breathe normally and remain in a calm, natural state.”

She began to peel the helmet from her head. Part of it resisted. When she finally got it off, she saw that it was the needle, which was four inches long and wet with clear fluid. She put that on the floor and tried not to think about it. There were thin wires coming out of the helmet in a bunch of places and she followed these to a tiny gray container strapped to the underside of her chair with nothing inside but a chip and a battery. Everything in this room was self-powered, she realized. The cage lights, the video cameras, the radio speaker. They were so careful to let nothing in or out, the room wasn’t even wired. If that door didn’t open in the next few hours, she would suffocate.

“I have some good news, Jessshhica. We can actually pay you a little more. One thousand dollarsshh for your time. How does that sssound?”

So the box would be on a timer. And these techs probably didn’t have any control over it; they probably just knew when it was scheduled to open. Which meant there would be safety margins. A little time for everyone to get settled, which she could use.

“Think about what you might do with that thousand dollars, Jessshhica. Ssssomething pretty great, I bet.”

She went to the video cameras but found nothing unusual. She carried them to a corner one by one and left them in a pile with their red eyes pointing at the concrete. Whatever happened here, she wasn’t going to be in a show. She wasn’t going to be watched and analyzed and used to improve procedures. She went back to the chair and circled it. But it was just a chair.

“Jussshht another minute, Jessica. Almossst there.”

She knelt in front of the box. She touched it. Nothing terrible happened, so she ran her hands around it. It was warmer than she expected. She found a tiny seam in the steel but couldn’t get so much as a fingernail into it and wasn’t sure she wanted to. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Options. But there weren’t any.

She stood and paced. The only other thing was the speaker, so she went to that. To her surprise, it had a little compartment. Inside were red pills. She looked at these for a while. She did not think they were helpful.

“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”

“Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.