The Transcriptionist, page 11
He leads her inside the apartment, which has more charm than she would have expected, the small, slightly messy abode of someone who has a life both inside and outside the home.
“Does the fireplace work?”
“No.”
He opens a bottle of wine and she examines his bookshelves. There’s a book about the terrorist attack written by two Record reporters. She takes it down and rubs the cover without opening it. She transcribed more than 250,000 words for this book, which she has not read, though she keeps the copy the reporters gave her. She knows what’s inside, if not the particular arrangement. The acknowledgments thank her among many others, an unexpected gesture that touched her.
She replaces the book as Russell returns with red wine, which he hands to her, kissing her nose. She doesn’t know whether it is too soon to tell him she hates being kissed on the nose, so she smiles and sticks her nose in the glass.
“It’s nothing special,” he says.
“My favorite kind.”
He takes off his glasses, and his eyes are like the eyes of an animal coming out of hibernation. She has the same feeling: her whole body is like that, coming awake, shaking off the lethargy.
“You said you were leaving on assignment tomorrow. Where are you going?”
“To Washington. Soldiers’ bodies are arriving from Baghdad, from Germany really—they’re flown from Iraq to Germany to Fort Dix to Washington. We’re doing a story on how the administration won’t let their coffins be photographed.”
She remembers a photo that had sparked some conversation and then disappeared. It was of an airplane at an airport gate. In the photo, a few passengers were peering out their porthole windows. Below, in the plane’s belly, flag-draped coffins were being prepared for unloading. The passengers above could not see and still had no idea that death had been onboard.
“They don’t want people to see the war.”
“Or dead people.”
“It’s strange how they put so much effort into creating a war and convincing people to go along with it and now they want people to forget we’re in it.”
“And they’ve been effective at both.”
“Invisible bodies,” she says. “They’re all around us, aren’t they?”
He takes her glass and puts it down on the table. “You’re not invisible, even if you try to be. I’ve been wondering.” He kisses her.
She tries to concentrate on kissing him back and ignores the familiar feeling that her body is vaporizing. He takes her hand and leads her into the bedroom, and she follows him eagerly because she wants to feel hands on her skin and the heaviness of her limbs.
The sex is sweet, fumbling, better than she would have guessed. They draw back and smile at each other, surprised at their passion, or at least their enthusiasm. Sleep comes slowly for her and fast for him, but in the morning when she blinks awake, Russell is showered and stands near the bed, buttoning up his button-down. She blinks again, not quite believing that she slept while he was awake, up, moving around and preparing for the day.
He sits on the bed. “Don’t get up, it’s early. I have to catch the shuttle.”
She struggles up on her elbows. “I’ll be quick.”
“No, it’s early. I want you to stay. Take your time, there’s coffee in the kitchen. The door will lock behind you.” He kisses her forehead. “I like to think of you here.”
She looks down and leans into him as he strokes her hair, remembering the image of the zoo sea lions bumping against the glass.
“Stay.”
She nods.
When he leaves, she spreads her arms and legs in the bed. It is a midwestern bed, soft, beige, and unfairly spacious. She rolls over and stretches out her arms, which still don’t touch the edge. She had underestimated the impact of a big, comfortable bed in her life.
In the kitchen she pours a cup of coffee that Russell has left warming in the pot. The silence of the apartment is different from the silence of her room, and she wanders freely, pausing to pull the same book from the bookshelf in the living room. It’s hefty in her hand, but not as heavy as it would be if all the quarter of a million words she transcribed were included. She remembers only a few of the interviews and only one with any clarity. It was a security guard who had been at the front desk greeting people, “all my happy faces, all my people.” Looking unseeingly at the text, she hears his voice, clear and distinct. “That particular morning it struck me that the foot traffic was lighter, and it wasn’t until later I realized that it was Election Day.
“And I’m just standing there wondering where everyone is when I hear this tremendous roar. I thought, It’s probably nothing. But then it came back and started getting louder and louder. I looked to my left and that’s when I saw this tremendous fireball roaring out of the lobby of building number one. And it appeared that it was pushing hundreds of people in front of it.
“This is where my memory fades out. I remember running. Then I blacked out and came to in silence and darkness. And around the same time I caught through my left eye, in the periphery, coming toward me, two figures. And they were fully engulfed. They were running toward me. They ran past me. And it was silent.”
She closes the book and turns it over to the back cover, where two reporters look out with placid credibility. Let us sort it out for you, they seem to say. Let us cut it down and put it between the covers of a book so that it’s bite-size, ingestible, digestible. It’s not their fault, Lena says to herself, that the massive amount of information, and the continual cycle of commentary, has blunted all meaning.
She glances at the chapter headings, flips through the pages. It starts with the story of the architect. The man who built the then-tallest buildings in the world had a fear of heights. Was that prophetic? The acrophobic architect, the fine fault line between attraction and repulsion, is something she understands. She puts the book back on the shelf and stares at the row of spines. For the first time, she thinks of bookshelves as plots in a vast potter’s field, except these dead can be claimed and known each time someone selects them from the shelf.
She continues to wander, making the bed, brushing her teeth with her index finger, rinsing her coffee cup. Looking for Russell’s cup to rinse, she realizes that he didn’t drink any coffee: he made it for her.
On his clunky schoolboy desk are stacks of tan reporter’s notebooks, like sandbags against a sea of uncertainty. Looking closer, she sees that they are dated and arranged by year. The top one on the nearest stack is from this month; the pages are full of scribbles and the last entry is less than a week old. It is not hard to find the entry on Arlene. In Russell’s small but legible script there is a number for Mount Sinai, the name of the spokesman, Fred Klamm, and two phone numbers, one crossed out. “Confirmed that A. Lebow admitted on July 8,” he has written, “body sent to the hosp. morgue, then to city morgue (Bellevue).”
Klamm quote: “Take very seriously, blah, blah, blah, quotes on tape.”
At the bottom of the page, he has scrawled, “Follow-up? A. Lebow’s address, 317 Ave. C (Stuy Town), Apt. 3B.”
She writes down the address and puts the notebook back on top of the stack. As she leaves, she takes one last look around, then closes the door and turns the knob to make sure all is safely locked inside.
CHAPTER NINE
Break-in at Dead Woman’s Apartment; Scientists Date Van Gogh’s Moonrise
She does not have to wait long outside Arlene’s Stuyvesant Town building. A woman pushing a stroller struggles with the door, and Lena holds it open, then follows her inside. The woman pushes the stroller toward the elevator, so Lena enters the stairwell, which is wide and industrial. The concrete walls and iron rails make it seem more like a school than an apartment building.
On the third floor, she knocks softly on Arlene’s door. There is no answer, and almost as a reflex she tries the doorknob. It’s unlocked. She opens the door and puts her head inside.
“Hello?”
At the sound of a child’s voice from somewhere down the hall, she steps inside and closes the door as quietly as possible.
So this is the Stuy Town appeal: by Manhattan standards, it’s huge. A cleaning crew must have left the door unlocked. The harsh scent of fake pine fills the room. Empty boxes are stacked along the walls, waiting for the dead tenant’s belongings. The parquet floors are uncarpeted and she tiptoes into the central room even though she is wearing soft-soled espadrilles. Somehow it feels like the living space of a quiet person. She lifts her arms up to shoulder height and lets them fall; so much space in the middle of Manhattan is hard to comprehend. No one would stumble over anything here, she thinks, not even a blind person. Maybe Arlene liked the spaciousness, maybe she could close the door and live privately, expansively. This space of her own allowed her a private life, something not allowed for animals at the zoo.
The small, old-fashioned kitchen is tidy and bright, with a white gas stove, white cupboards, and a small green refrigerator, butter and carrots and cereal the only things inside it. Cereal in the fridge—that’s something that Lena always did when she had a kitchen. It is something she never thought much about, but roommates and friends seemed to find if very strange. She wonders whether Arlene had to explain this to people, too, and whether she told them, as Lena did, that she didn’t want to attract mice, when really she just liked to keep her cereal cold.
She carries the box of cereal into the living room, where a built-in bookshelf runs the entire length of the wall. She takes a few books from the shelves, runs her fingers over the letters, but they remain dead to her, unable to be raised.
She grabs a handful of cereal and munches as she walks down the hall, holding the box to her chest. There is no answer when she knocks on the closed bedroom door. She listens carefully, with her transcriptionist’s ears, but she cannot hear a sound except for a protest from her throat for swallowing dry cereal. With her eyes closed, she turns the knob and gently pushes the door open. A puff of air hits her face, blowing a strand of hair in her eyes, which have fluttered open and blinked against the breeze that is coming in from the open window, lifting the white curtains. The room is spare, the unadorned space of a monk or a scholar, with a double bed, a dresser, a bedside table stacked with four books in braille.
She pauses at the closed closet door. Until now the invasion of privacy has been excusable, if only in her own mind, because she will leave things exactly as she found them, as if they have not been touched. But the closet is different. She stands in front of it, trying to decide whether to open it.
A noise from the window causes her to turn around. Parting the curtains, she sees a dirt dauber fly against the glass before crashing down to the sill. He does this again and again, and at first she does not know how to respond. The windows crank open and shut; there are no screens. Guiding him with her hand does not seem to help. Finally, when she thinks he will bash his dirt dauber brains out, she grabs him between her fingers and flings him outside.
She did not know dirt daubers lived in the North; she always associated their heavy slowness with the South. She tries to remember the last time she saw one. Sinking down to kneel beside the window, she parts the white curtains and tucks them behind her ears like hair, as she used to do in her bedroom, where she would watch from the window as her father walked up and down the rows of the field, “inspecting” them, as her mother had called it. And after she died, he inspected them even more. Her father preached shared suffering but he grieved in his solitude, as did she. At home, nothing was shared, suffering least of all.
The dirt road ran beside the field; many nights it was illuminated by the moonlight’s white fire, and she would watch for him, the mountain lion, as her father’s feet thudded softly through the thick dirt, rising and falling between the rows of seedlings, from which all he asked was silence. He was too modest to ask for their obedience, or even to pray for it.
Sometimes, if she watched long enough, she would see a shadow move on the road near the ditch. And she would press her face against the screen and strain to see the body she had heard described as a supple, overgrown cat, tawny and long tailed, with binocular vision and a legendary scream.
A movement in the courtyard catches her eye; a man is walking a Labrador retriever. They shamble along with the same heavy-hipped gait. She moves away from the window, sits down on the double bed. She looks down at her legs; her linen pants are beginning to wrinkle, and she feels her body relax into the mattress that once held Arlene’s weight but never will again. As she runs her hands over the white embroidered bedspread, a weariness washes over her, and she lies down in the dimness. Laying her head against the indented pillow, she wonders whether it cradled Arlene’s head in the same perfectly contouring way. She turns her head toward the window, and her cheek brushes against the pillowcase, which gives off the scent of lavender and bananas that she has smelled in Kov’s room. Her hands relax against the spread and she closes her eyes.
In the dream it is always summer. There is only the sun, the road, and the two of them.
“Arlene?”
She does not turn back. The road runs before them and behind them, unbroken in either direction like a barren and elongated row of the field where no crops grow.
“Arlene.”
Then she begins to run.
“You. Listen!”
And she begins to run behind her, though she is terrified to see her face. They run, the air filled with the metallic smell of insects singed by the sun. You forget how big they can be until you crash into them on summer nights. She runs faster, she can hear Arlene’s breath now; they are younger, then older, then younger again as they run, burning through the days. The distance is not far and she lifts her hand—
“Arlene!”
There is no one else. She is closer and can hear Arlene’s breath and her own breath and the road—
Suddenly he passes them—first her, then Arlene. He passes them without a sound, the riven, fur-coated skin flowing from his back like Joseph’s cape. The cat’s movement is smooth, unbroken, his mutilated beauty is almost unbearable.
The hunters, she thinks, they have finally got him. But just as she thinks it, he is somehow beside her again, and he turns his masklike face to her, and as their eyes meet, the shock of recognition makes her cry out.
They continue to run. They are engulfed, running and burning, all silence now, and in the dream she understands that they will run forever and she will never reach them and the road will never end.
Her own moaning awakens her and she quickly straightens the bed and rushes from the room.
Passing again through the front room, she pauses at a round table near the bookshelves. There is a computer and, beside it, a cassette player with a set of headphones. She does not even think of privacy or violation; she is not thinking at all when she sits down before the computer and slips on the headphones. It is muscle memory that allows her to rewind the tape as she wonders if words will sound different through Arlene’s headset. Suddenly, Arlene’s voice is in her ear: “This is my last entry. I am through with this body. It is my choice. I want to inhabit the lion’s body. It is not that I think I will become the lion. I am not crazy. I don’t want to disappear, to fade. But I wish to be devoured, devoured by something that does not speak. Not in our language anyway.
“Maybe we are as we move through the world. If I cannot inhabit the lion’s body, then at least I can be a small part of him as he moves through the world. I hope that for a moment as he devours my body the lion will be satisfied, that it will remind him of his wildness of spirit, that it will remind him that he is a lion.”
ALONE IN HER room at Parkside, Lena yanks the string above the sink and the light buzzes on. There is something painful about living in a room with a sink, though it is difficult to say what it is. The gray-green carpet underneath sometimes gets damp and it feels awful underfoot. Or maybe it is that lying in bed, she can see the sink’s naked udder leading to exposed pipes. But she cannot consider a sink skirt either. That would be worse. Hardware should not wear costumes. Of that, at least, she is certain.
“The one certainty of my future,” she says to herself in the mirror. “No tea cozies, no toilet fuzzies, no toaster covers, no sink skirts, no Kleenex cases.”
She looks at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror, turns her head to the right, the left. She overheard a former boyfriend describe her once as “attractive, unaggressively so.” She examines herself, wondering what remains. Hazel eyes, faded red hair, unremarkable features, good teeth. She parts her lips and examines her inheritance, white and serviceable. As she turns her head slowly from side to side, the black spot appears in the corner of her left eye. She watches it spread, signaling the static vision that comes with migraines. But she doesn’t have a migraine; she hasn’t had one since the day she saw Arlene. She lifts her hand and waves it slowly before her eyes. It is like a dismembered hand, a ghost of her own, and she remembers an experiment from one of her college seminars where students lifted their hands quickly when the lights were flashed, and then they sat in the dark, all seeing the white ghost of their own hands float before them. Persistence of memory, the professor had called it.
She jumps when the phone rings, so seldom does it ring, and so late.
“It’s after midnight. Do you know what today is?”
“Hi, Russell. Today, July thirteenth?”
“It’s the date Van Gogh saw the moon in Saint-Rémy, the one he painted in Moonrise.”
“How do you know?”
“Scientists took elevation readings and measurements. Isn’t that amazing? They took a painting over a century old and were able to calculate that the moonrise depicted for eternity occurred on July thirteenth, 1889, at 9:08 p.m.”
“Is that what intrigues you, the destruction of mystery?”
“The solving of mystery. That’s why I’m a reporter.”
“To solve mysteries? I thought you were spreaders of information, recorders of fact.”
“Yeah, that, too. So, what’s it like in there?”
