The Transcriptionist, page 10
“That’s so I can see to clean them. I don’t have to read them anymore. I’m just washing the corpse.”
“Honoring the dead.”
“My son thinks I should be doing other things, but it’s important to keep a record.”
“Your son?”
Kov doesn’t answer but closes his eyes; she does the same. She immediately thinks of Arlene, but she is forgetting her features and instead sees a leg, possibly her own, hoisted over the white rail surrounding the moat around the lions’ den. Her legs, then her arms, come into view, the limbs of her younger self. She sees her own bedroom window, where she stands and watches as men disappear into the woods to search for the mountain lion, their flashlights bouncing in the dark like falling stars.
•••
AS SHE APPROACHES the Recording Room, she sees Russell on his knees, peering through the mail slot.
“Hi, Russell. The handle’s still broken.”
He jumps up, brushing off his knees. “Sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you if you were working.”
He follows her inside and she hands him a cassette tape. “I e-mailed the transcript to you.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
He blushes, a peculiar but not unpleasant tone against his tan skin. He takes a step toward the door and stops, places his hand on top of the overnight machine in a failed effort at nonchalance.
“I’m going to the auditorium for mandatory escape-hood training.”
“Oh, right. I’m supposed to be at that. But I have an interview. I wanted to ask you to have a drink tonight, if you don’t already have plans.”
They agree to meet at the Algonquin at seven thirty.
THE AUDITORIUM IS full and the group is grumpy. Ralph is scheduled to speak, and a group of reporters in the row behind Lena joke about his well-known addresses to the newsroom.
“How long do you think it will take for the first Bear Bryant quote?”
“I’d bet two beers it will be in the first three min—”
Everyone turns to acknowledge Ralph as he walks down the center aisle. His panama hat and gliding gait bring to mind an overseer; Lena watches as he passes her row, half expecting to see him astride a horse and flaunting a riding whip.
He leaps onto the stage, removes his hat, and looks at the crowd with an expression so rigidly serious it seems rehearsed.
“Friends, colleagues, we are gathered here today to issue escape hoods to our valued staff. It is true that our country is at war. And we, the voice of the people, the voice for the people, we are under attack as well. As I’m sure you know, one of our most esteemed colleagues, Katheryn Keel, received personal threats this week, along with an envelope containing white powder that was fortunately found to be flour.”
“All-purpose or self-rising?” one of the reporters behind Lena jokes.
“If it was KK’s, it had to be self-rising.”
“I will not lie, friends,” Ralph says, raising his voice. “These are the times that try our souls. But we have it in our power to create the world anew.”
“The world anew?” one of the reporters whispers.
“Thomas Paine, I didn’t see that one coming. What is he doing, trying to channel Ronald Reagan?”
“What about Yeats? No Yeats?”
“ ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,’ people. Yes, we have men and women giving their lives every day. But we are under attack, too.”
“There’s your Yeats. But where’s Bear?”
“We are the fourth estate my friends, and though we were not elected, we are the check on all the branches of government. We are the guardian of the guardians, and with this comes the burden of awesome responsibility. When people open their newspapers and read the same article with the same dateline and time stamp that Americans from Peoria to Palmyra are reading, we create among them a sense of imagined community.”
“What the hell? Did he get a new speechwriter?”
“And who is it, Peggy Noonan?”
“And, friends, that bond of trust with readers is our most crucial asset, and the preservation of that trust is our most important duty. Information is more than power; it is the reason this irreplaceable newspaper exists. We might be under attack but we will not cower! We will answer our higher calling, we will break with the past, we will forge a new future, and we will continue our reign as the best newspaper on earth because we will overwhelm those hiding information by sheer force! Shock and awe, folks, the Bush administration isn’t the only one who can do shock and awe!
“But we want you to be safe. So the Record has generously invested in escape hoods to be used in the event of a biological emergency. Now I turn things over to our security consultants, who will instruct you on the proper use of this lifesaving equipment.”
Three men onstage explain that they will distribute escape hoods, or SCBAs, self-contained breathing apparatuses (“Or is it apparati?” one asks, ha-ha) to every Record employee. The men look like burly flight attendants giving the instructions that will not save a single soul in the event of a real emergency. Those with beards, goatees, and claustrophobia are urged to come forward at the end and “we will help you tighten your hoods.” Those allergic to latex are advised not to take one because “we don’t know exactly what these are made of.” People practice putting them on, and the room takes on the look of a hazmat convention.
As everyone files out of the auditorium clutching their Evolution escape hood boxes, the understanding is that if by chance the hoods are effective, the chosen survivors will not be the meek or the poor, but quick-fingered workers without facial hair or latex allergies.
The reporters who were betting on Ralph’s speech are joking about the hoods, but there is anxiety beneath their banter. Lena balances the big orange box as she maneuvers through the hall and thinks of the perverse irony that the terrorist attacks were the Record’s last great story, the start of the end of many things. She has come to feel sorry for the haunted-eyed reporters who work harder and longer to chase fragments for their fragmented audience.
An editor claps one of the reporters on the back. “Where’s the story on the Islamic principal fired yesterday?”
“I’ll have it by five. I just have to—”
“This is the Record. If I want yesterday’s news tomorrow, I’ll go to the Herald Tribune.”
THE PHONE IS ringing as she pushes the door open and puts down the escape hood. It is a foreign reporter in the field calling because her computer crashed. Lena waits for the call to end, rewinds the tape, and hooks herself to her machine. For the third time in recent days, she feels her body resist.
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, blows out through her mouth, trying to empty herself. It is like the dead man’s float she learned as a child in the river where she was baptized. You float facedown, the hair fans out around your head, that’s called the jellyfish. You have to breathe out slowly so that your body will sink. The water will close over you. You can’t see anything even if you open your eyes. Slowly you start to sink. Anyone standing on the shore can’t see you. No one would know there’s someone sinking to the bottom, the bottom of the world. Once the water closes over you, no one can see.
She stares at the writing on the escape-hood box: “The emergency mask has evolved! One size fits all. And unlike other escape hoods, the Evolution is reusable.”
“Reusable?” she says aloud.
“In the event of emergency, simply attach the filter, pull the hood down over your head, and tighten the straps. That’s it!”
“That’s it!” she says as she lifts the orange hood from the box. It is a strange-smelling material with clear plastic over the eyeholes and a big circle for the filter to fit over the nose and mouth. She puts on her headphones, attaches the filter, and pulls the hood over her head. The familiar emptiness comes over her and she submits, feels herself sinking. She presses the pedal; her fingers pass over the keys.
“A man whose wife, mother, and two sons were killed said comma quote We can see the sea comma but we live in prison comma this life is a prison stop end quote.”
Lifting her foot from the pedal, she listens for silence, then the roar on the other side. It passes through her like steel thread. She throws off the hood and walks to the window, leans out toward the pigeon. She leans farther, and the black pavement rises to meet her full on—black! She remembers an article she transcribed—a week ago, a year ago, a thousand years ago?—about a young woman who had jumped from the twenty-third floor of a Midtown high-rise, her brother’s apartment. But first, and this was the one detail Lena was certain of, she had taken off her shoes and left them side by side on the balcony. Her hands come into focus; they are white where she is gripping the ledge. She backs away and sinks down against the window.
Inside the room again, she shoves the hood back in its box and tries to stuff it in the trash can, but it won’t fit, so she balances it on top. She replaces her headphones, presses the pedal.
“And what about the prospect of this country without civil war question mark this reporter asked the man stop quote It seems as far away comma quote he said comma quote as the clouds in the lofty sky stop end quote.”
She looks to her left: the newspaper blurs before her, the letters appear as if under a microscope, little parasites floating on the pulpy page. The news cycle now has no recovery time, we are bombarded with so much news that it has lost its meaning and people look for signposts that they touch like rosaries to order their world, repetition without affect. It did not take long for news of war to be added to the rosary, touched but not felt.
From time to time, she has seen faces on the street and connected them to random stories, but she has never seen the person first, like Arlene, and then recognized that very person, that stranger from the bus, and seen her transformed into print. She had met Arlene and forgotten her; she had read the story and remembered her.
She pushes the revolving doors and leaves the Record’s cold air-conditioned lobby for the humid heat of Forty-Third Street. Enclosed briefly in the glass capsule, she daydreams that maybe she will emerge on the other side not only to a different climate but to a different life.
Heat hits her on the other side. Some tourists are posing for pictures under the Record’s sign. Midblock, the unmistakable hand reaches from behind its concrete pillar, as if the building itself is demanding a toll. Lena presses a dollar into the open palm. She walks a few feet, then turns back.
“I’ve been walking by you for years. Will you tell me your name?”
“Guess,” the woman says.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Why not?”
“There are so many names in the world. It’s not very likely that I would guess the right one.”
“Guess,” the woman repeats.
“Mary.”
“Ah.” She laughs once, short and sharp. “No.”
Lena moves closer and looks in the woman’s dark eyes. They are a shade of green that reminds her of the colored glass she prized as a child when she made bottle trees.
“I had a name once,” the woman says, “but I lost it.”
“How did you lose it?”
“I lost everything.”
“I bet it’s still there, if you want to take it back.”
“No,” the woman says angrily. “I lost everything. You’d be surprised what you can lose.”
“Do you remember where you lost it?”
“No!”
“You could choose a new one.”
“No,” the woman says. “Really?”
“Why not? What name would you like?”
The woman closes her eyes and tilts her head back, exposing the pale slittable softness of her throat. “Lydia. That was my grandmother’s name.”
“Good night, Lydia.”
“Night, sad-eyed lady.”
Lena crosses Times Square, where there is no difference between night and day; the same pedestrians lose speed and equilibrium under the mechanized riptide of tickertape above. How else to explain the sudden jerks, stops, the inability to cross the street, to move out of someone’s path, to close an umbrella after the rain has stopped?
THE ALGONQUIN LOBBY is cool and dim. She likes to come here in winter, when she can make a satisfying meal of a book, the free nuts, and a glass of red wine. Russell sits erect in a low, lumpy wing chair.
They order martinis and watch the righteous Algonquin cat sashay through the lobby, eluding outstretched hands.
“I’m so glad this place exists.”
“And the cat. She must be twenty years and thirty pounds by now. What’s her name? Mathilde? Mathilde Two?”
The older waiter brings their drinks and places them carefully on cocktail napkins printed with the Dorothy Parker witticism “I love a martini—but two at the most. Three I’m under the table; four, I’m under the host.”
The table is low, and the waiter pauses for a painful moment before straightening with a tight smile, one hand on his lower back.
“Enjoy.”
“Cheers,” Russell says.
She sips the clear flame slowly, welcoming the burn in her throat. She takes the folded newspaper clipping from her pocket and places it on her knee.
“What’s that?”
She passes the warm piece of paper to him, the most intimate gesture she has made in a long time.
“Her again. You’re obsessed, aren’t you?”
“I know you said that never happens to you, but why not? Isn’t there ever a story you work on that you can’t let go?”
“Not really.”
She takes a bigger sip of the drink, the taste a little subtler now. A couple sits uncomfortably together on a nearby couch. The man looks unhappily at the woman, who shifts on the flattened cushion. He swirls his drink aggressively and looks at his wife. She has beautiful, sensible silver hair and sturdy shoes.
“Are you ready to leave?” she asks.
“No.”
The woman looks down at her chenille jumper, which has served her well in some small academic town, and seems to realize that she does not travel as well as her wrinkle-resistant fabric. Her husband seems to say with each swirl of his drink that he realized this long ago. He can take her places, but she won’t travel.
Lena balances the drink on her crossed leg, and Russell reaches out, touching her knee.
“Is this where you brought her?” the woman on the couch asks.
The husband looks at her and frowns, throwing his swizzle stick like a spear in his drink. “Margaret, it was a crime of opportunity.”
“That’s funny,” the woman says bitterly. “That’s the funniest thing you’ve said in years.”
“Crimes of opportunity,” Lena says, sliding the martini’s olive in her mouth.
They follow the cat’s indifferent gaze to watch the couple leave. The husband throws out his unfaithful arms, gesturing for his wife to proceed.
“Russell, doesn’t it seem strange that someone could just disappear?”
“People are pretty easy to find,” he says, “except when no one bothers to look. It’s almost impossible not to leave some kind of record—technology is too sophisticated. There are so many ways a person can be tracked. Also, the brutal truth is that she was an unknown woman, a dead woman. It’s hard enough to interest readers in missing unknowns, but dead unknowns, that’s a story with no future.”
Lena looks down at the clipping that Russell has put on the table between them, the colorless photo static and unrevealing.
“I read recently that the average American lives about a thousand months. How many newspapers would that be?”
“One thousand times, well, approximately thirty, so thirty thousand.”
“Thirty thousand newspapers equal a life.”
“In a sense.”
“A record.”
“Well, a record of the days, not of the life.”
“Precisely.”
“Lena, are you OK?”
“I just feel that Arlene has been abandoned. No obit, no follow-up, just perished, printed, recycled.”
“Lena, the story’s dead. Arlene’s dead. There’s nothing else to say.”
“But how do you reconcile things?”
“What things?”
“The news, life—observing, recording, living.”
“Reporters aren’t moralists. We’re guardians.”
“Guardians of what?”
“Not what we used to be. Now we’re just trying to keep up.”
“Do you ever feel that living the news, breathing it, day after day, that it harms your . . .”
“My what?”
“Soul.”
“We try to stay objective. And our souls are full of ink.”
She looks at the couch where the couple was sitting. “That couple that just left, did you hear them?”
“No, I wasn’t listening.”
“I was. What if I really am turning into a tape recorder? It’s frightening.”
Russell looks at her with a pleasantly bland and relaxed, almost dreamy, expression he acquires when he is interviewing. Lena has wondered whether he has had Botox, but now she thinks he has retained the unlined look of youth without medical help.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he says, taking her by surprise. He grips her shoulders and draws her to him and kisses her slowly, with a skill and confidence that contrasts with his slightly awkward ways.
Outside, he hails a cab and places a hand on her lower back as he opens the door for her. Their heads knock together as she leans forward to adjust her skirt and he leans toward her, closing the door behind him. They share a thirty-block kiss, pause while he pays the driver, and then pick up again as they climb the stairs to his apartment.
His shoes are lined up outside the door.
“Shoes aren’t allowed inside?”
“No.” He kicks off his loafers and bends down to unbuckle her sandals.
“I’ll do it—”
“No, let me.”
She looks down at the back of his boyish head as he kneels to gently remove her shoes.
