The Transcriptionist, page 12
“It’s tiny, quiet, not so bad. Do you think it’s strange that I live here?”
“Yes, but it adds to your mystery.”
She feels a constriction in her chest; her monastic life will not hold.
“This is the metro desk calling for a goodnight.”
“Good night, metro.”
“Good night, recording. Look at the moon.”
CHAPTER TEN
Lion That Mauled Woman in Limbo
The next day she calls in sick, rents a car, and drives 120 miles north of the city to the Cullen Animal Sanctuary. It is on sixty acres abutting the Hudson River; she has to look closely for the small roadside sign at the end of the long, unpaved driveway.
A single chain blocks the winding drive, so she parks the car and walks up the path. Trees and vegetation are thick on either side, obscuring the sanctuary grounds. She goes only a little way before a pickup truck approaches from ahead and a woman with clipped, curly hair leans out of the driver’s side window.
“Are you the one who called from the Record?”
“Right. Lena Respass.”
“Hop in.”
The woman is stocky and strong and completely at ease behind the wheel of the pickup, though she is so short that she sits forward to drive. She introduces herself as Jackie Wade, and Lena is grateful that she does not say much as they turn around and speed up the driveway, which is nearly a half mile long and lined with thick-limbed trees whose leaves flash silvery undersides as they pass. At one point Lena instinctively ducks as a low-hanging oak branch swipes the truck’s windshield.
“We should cut those back,” Jackie says, “but there’s never time.”
When they round the final curve, the sanctuary is exposed. Stables and outbuildings fan out behind a two-story farmhouse, painted white with a red tin roof. A sloping lawn fronts the house, and a grazing goat pauses to lift its head and stare in the truck’s direction.
“That’s Billie. We reward his orneriness by letting him roam. He enjoys mowing the grass at least.”
“How many animals do you have?”
“We’re small, fiftysome, not counting the dogs and cats. We have three llamas, two bears, a few monkeys, horses, parrots, an ostrich, lambs, and turkeys. We had a marmoset until yesterday. Robert is our only lion. He’s in limbo right now, but he’ll go to a wild game sanctuary in California when he’s recovered enough.”
“What happened to the marmoset?”
“We think it was a heart attack. We tried to give him mouth-to-mouth, but we couldn’t revive him.”
She stops the truck in front of the farmhouse and turns to Lena. Even in repose she seems a bustling, good- natured woman, one who lives by physical labor. A solid woman.
“Do you name them all?”
“What, the animals? Yes. Some of them come with names, and others we call whatever seems to suit them.” She corrects herself. “Whatever seems to suit us. I am not silly enough to try to humanize them, but when you live with this many animals it makes sense to call them something.”
They sit for a minute, assessing each other in the enclosed cab of the truck. Lena feels like one of the lost animals seeking refuge as Jackie looks at her with appraising eyes that hold neither coldness nor sentimentality. It is the first time in years Lena has missed the plainspoken farmers she grew up with, people who would not waste time debating things neither of you were ever going to agree on, but who even so would be the first to come to your aid if you needed help. People who looked at you and knew who you were.
“Would you like to go inside and talk or do you want to see Robert first?”
“I want to see him,” Lena says, unable to call him by the ridiculous name.
Jackie leads her around the back of the farmhouse, past a wide dirt patch where hay bales are scattered. “We have a trainer who comes in to take him to the fenced-in area where he has room to run, but Robert prefers to stay in the cage. It is hard to coax him out, and we have tried just about everything. He’s suffered a shock; it will take time.”
A chestnut tree shades the cage, and sunlight and shadow dapple his blond body. He lies in complete stillness, his head erect, the stance of a sphinx, a breathing statue.
“Robert, you have a visitor. Someone came to see you.”
The lion remains utterly still in his majestic indifference. Lena sits down on a hay bale in front of the cage and looks at him through the bars.
“Is he eating?”
“Not much, but we’re working on it. He is hesitant with food, but eventually we’ll find something he has a taste for.”
A tall, paunchy man with a red face and a feed-and-seed store cap walks toward them with a stiff-legged gait.
“My husband, Bill,” Jackie says in brief introduction. With a glance, he dismisses Lena as a Manhattan media person who has no place in this rural realm.
“The vet called, Jackie. He wants you to reconsider Prozac.”
“I don’t want to do it,” she says, shaking her head and rubbing her right hand where a scratch has puckered the skin.
“I don’t either, Jackie, hell, I wouldn’t take it and I wouldn’t want you to. But they have these drugs now, I don’t know, Tom says it may help him transition to his new setting. He’s been through a lot.”
“Transition?” Jackie says. “Listen to you. Of course he’s been through a lot, but will drugging him help? How would he tell us? He’s depressed now, we can see that. And when he is content we will see that, too.”
“I told him you’d call him back. Can we discuss this inside?”
“You’ll be all right here for a while?” Jackie asks Lena, who nods, eager to be alone with the lion.
She watches them walk toward the house, him stiff and upright, her solid and flat footed, with the walk of a farmer’s wife. Turning back toward the cage, Lena bends forward, hands on knees, and stares at him. His eyes do not blink; his gaze does not stray. She thinks she sees one ear twitch but then cannot be sure. A fly explores the wide, flat nose one nostril at a time and is acquiesced to without a movement. She is transfixed by the lion’s immobility.
“I thought it would get easier. You, too? Did you think life in the cage would get easier? That’s not what happens, is it?”
She drags a hay bale closer and sits down again; he has not flinched. “Let me look at you,” she says, as if asking permission. Leaning closer, she examines the lion’s pinhead-size pupils. It is as if everything lies behind this leonine mask, the pupils a point of entry to a place she must know. But even as this occurs to her in a wordless thought, she sees that access will be denied, not by his will but simply because the gap is unbreachable. She sits back.
“You did as she asked. You escorted her to death. Not that that’s your trouble. Is it that you remembered what life could be, or your mind was confused by your muscle’s memory? Have we committed the crime of making you an in-between, no longer lion, unable to be anything else? Are we both in-betweens?”
She leans forward, her face close to the cage, and looks into his golden-green eyes. “If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand it.” The lion yawns, revealing the inside of his enormous mouth, pink and vulnerable as a shelled mollusk. “What? You’ve heard that one before?”
But he will not be moved by a human voice; it evokes nothing in him and offers nothing for him. As she stands to go, shame comes over her with a completeness that sends her to her knees in surprise. And even as she observes herself there on the ground in front of the lion, she cannot help her physical reaction to this creature of impotent power.
She has an urge to flee, but as she gets up and approaches the house, Jackie opens the door and ushers her inside. The sunny white kitchen is small but uncluttered; there are no ornaments or knickknacks or craftsy items except for a wall clock in the shape of a birdhouse.
They sit at a table covered with a plastic blue-and-white-checkered tablecloth, drinking bitter coffee. Lena has trouble listening as Jackie tells her about the workings of the sanctuary. After a brief attempt to take notes in her reporter’s notebook, snagged from the Recording Room supply closet, she says she doesn’t feel well and asks if they can continue another time.
DRIVING BACK TO the city, she has to pull over on the side of the road. It is not as if she has ever taken much interest in animal welfare. Growing up on a farm, she accepted the hierarchy of life and the randomness of death.
The tears start with a trickle, then flow faster, so that she could not wipe them away even if she tried. As she looks through the windshield at the green countryside, the memory comes to her, stark and undeniable. She is in the truck with her father; the sun is setting behind the trees, turning the pine treetops into a ring of bloody fur on the horizon. They drive toward it, not seeming to get closer, as if the trees are hiding something. A group of men stand on the shoulder of the road, looking down at the ground. Her father brakes, and one of the men, Lynzie, comes to the open driver’s window.
“We got him.”
“Who?”
“The mountain cat. William Boyd hit him with his twenty-two. You want to see him?”
“No, Dad, no.”
He looked over at her but responded only to Lynzie. “We better get back. Margaret’s home by herself.”
As Lena and her father drove past, one of the men reached out and nudged the cat with his foot, then said something that caused the group to laugh together as one. She didn’t know the shooter but she could tell which one he was because he laughed and blushed and patted his face as the other men slapped him on the shoulder. She looked, she couldn’t help it, and there he was, so much smaller than she imagined, just a big-pawed, overgrown cat with his long, now-useless tail sticking straight out behind him. His face seemed too small for his body, and his eyes were open, a look in them as if to say, What have you done to me? What have you done?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Baby Pulled from Earthquake Rubble
In the morning, the light is flashing on the overnight machine when she opens the Recording Room door. She switches on the lights, presses “play.”
“Hi. This is Russell, calling for the transcriptionist. Slug it Seduction; dateline: Eros, July fifteenth; desk: personal; editor: unnecessary.”
She laughs and raises the volume on the machine.
“Lead: A mysterious auburn-haired woman has been observed for quite some time in a drab building in Midtown stop. She is believed to be the last newspaper transcriptionist in America stop. Her habits are hard to discern but she is fond of quoting dead people and has been known to talk to pigeons stop. She has a soft spot for the disappeared and comma one hopes comma nearsighted metro reporters who carry red backpacks and still rely on cassette tapes and pencils stop. Correction: please make that Ebony 6325 pencils stop.
“Adds to follow. Note to transcriptionist: This reporter will be unavailable for a day or so while he works on a story in DC. But he will be happy to hear the transcriptionist’s reaction to his dictation upon return. Also, sensitive passages of this ongoing story have been redacted to protect the guilty and for job security purposes, but we could review them in person. Bye for now, Lena.”
She saves the message and thinks of transferring it to tape and recording a message for Russell, but the phone rings. A baby has been found after an earthquake in South Asia that has left many dead or missing.
“No one can remember who brought the baby to the hospital and it was not recorded because of the chaotic scramble to save the living stop. But baby number sixty-seven comma so named because he was the sixty-seventh patient admitted after the quake comma has so far been claimed by seven couples stop.”
She yanks on the cord from the headphones. She pumps the foot pedal but cannot get comfortable and strains against her electrical tether.
“There has been so much interest in the baby that hospital staff members have been hiding him in the operating room at night out of fear that he might be kidnapped stop.
“One woman claimed she recognized the shape of his mouth stop. When asked if she would submit to DNA tests she said comma quote They can cut out my tongue and test it if they need to stop.
“Quote I know he is mine stop. I know he is my son stop end quote.”
As she is standing by the recording phones rewinding the tape and thinking of the lost child being hidden in the operating room like Moses in the bushes, the unbearable urge to flee overwhelms her. She takes the phones off the hooks. One day this is going to catch up with me, she thinks, as she writes “Be back in 10 minutes” and the time and presses the Post-it note on the door.
The cafeteria has metal turnstiles—like courthouses and amusement parks—so that employees cannot escape without paying, which would seem to contradict the Record’s touted belief in trust and the honor system. It is a long room with big windows overlooking Forty-Third Street and, in the distance, Times Square. It is only the twelfth floor, but it seems higher, a sort of limbo where lost and empty plastic bird-bags float through the steam from the Cup Noodles billboard outside the window. Plastic plants hang in the cafeteria windows like strange seaweed monsters that chase children down the beach in a Fellini version of childhood; long plastic tendrils drape the heads of those who sit too close. There are plain tables and brownish plastic chairs, and on the walls are pictures colored by schoolchildren. It could be the cafeteria of a middle school or an insane asylum.
This is not the executive dining room, which lies at the end of the carpeted hallway lined with pictures of all of the Record’s Pulitzer Prize winners. Lena has never been inside the executive dining room, which is attended by uniformed wait staff. She has been down the hall under the pretext of studying the Pulitzer portraits, but her real purpose was to swipe one of the chocolate mints kept in a candy dish near the dining room door.
In line at the cash register, a fat pinkish manager in a buttoned polo shirt tries to speak to Joe, the cashier, in Spanish. Joe nods sympathetically, as he is Taiwanese.
“You have met my friend?” Joe asks when she pays for the coffees.
“Him?” she asks, nodding toward the manager.
“No, my friend, birdman.”
“You know Kov?”
“We watch for each other. We know everybody. You day people have the day world, but the cleaners, the cafeteria, the workers, we have the night. Other world. Birdman is good man. He tells me how to train my racing pigeons. You know who he is?”
“What do you mean?”
“Pop.”
She assumes Joe means this as a sign of respect, so she doesn’t tell him that Pop might not be a welcome nickname.
“Why do you call him that?”
“Because he comes first. He is an important man.”
“Yes, he is.”
ON THE FIFTH floor, she walks down the empty hall to the blue door. After looking both ways, then down at the coffee cups in either hand, she tilts her head toward the door. “Kov, it’s me, Lena.” No answer. “Now the day is over,” she sings softly. “Night is drawing nigh.”
Silence. But not complete silence; the lights buzz overhead, a strange kind of music. And from the other side of the door comes the unmistakable voice: “Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.”
Kov opens the door and sweeps his arm in a shallow arc of welcome. He leads her to the circular table, where a newspaper is spread open to the obituaries, a bloodless autopsy.
“I thought you might like some coffee. I mean, if you like coffee. I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“Interruptions remind us we want to return to what we were doing, that it is worthwhile. Please, sit down and join me.”
She puts the coffee cups on the table. “I don’t know how you take it.”
“However it comes.”
“Black.”
“Good.”
He pulls a chair out for her nimbly, without making a sound. She wonders whether noiselessness is something he has learned from necessity, but suspects it is something he has always known.
“Kov?” She starts to ask him about the pigeon X-ray but can’t. They sit and sip their coffee, the newspaper between them on the table.
ITALO CALVINO, ITALIAN FABULIST, DEAD AT 61 is the headline of the September 20, 1985, obituary.
“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear,” she says, quoting the dead man on the table.
They look down in silence, paying their respects to the author of Invisible Cities.
“So, I went to see her, Arlene’s sister, Ellen Lebow. She’s a Chaucer scholar.” She doesn’t say anything about her visit to the lion. It is too painful to share.
Kov does not respond; instead he reaches for a stack of papers on the table. The page on top has a series of labeled numbers—permit number, section number, plot number, grave number, age of deceased, date permit was issued, date of death, cause of death.
“What’s this?”
“I’ve been thinking. If no one is sure where Arlene is buried, but it’s most likely that she’s in the potter’s field on Hart Island, then a determined person ought to be able to find her.”
“How?”
“They keep burial records.”
“But Russell said they told him they couldn’t find Arlene’s name on the log.”
“Well, it wouldn’t hurt to go out there and have a look around.”
“But it’s closed to the public, I checked. You have to have permission from the Corrections Department.”
“I made a phone call. There’s a burial detail taking the ferry from City Island this afternoon. I’ve arranged for you to go as a sort of honorary observer, if you wish.”
“But how?”
“It’s the morgue keepers network; I called an old friend. I’ve been here a long time, Lena. I’m a part of this institution. Sometimes that can help, if you let it.”
She stares at the xeroxed stack of pages, thin as shaved bone.
“I don’t understand.”
“These are photocopies of old records. They keep entries for each body buried on Hart Island. Bellevue’s records might be incomplete, but the cemetery has its own records. This is a photocopy of an old record book—section, plot, grave.”
