The Transcriptionist, page 14
“That must be frightening.”
“I’d be more frightened if I never felt the prick.”
“You mean because you’d remain numb?”
“Or maybe I’d forget how to fear.” Outside the bay window, a boat on the Hudson looks like a toy, moving and yet seeming almost static.
“What do you think the prick is?”
“I don’t know. God maybe. Except I’m an academic, an agnostic, and yet . . .” She shrugs. “God. The word is so strange to me. Do you have any faith?”
“No, not anymore.” She stands awkwardly, looking down at Ellen’s bent head, her part showing the white of her scalp like a chalk line.
“Ellen, that day I saw Arlene on the bus, I thought perhaps I recognized something.”
“Recognized what?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. That something had gone wrong. That she knew. That she knew where we were both going. That it was there somehow, on her face, written, as she read with her fingertips. I thought I saw my life there, my past and my future. I know it sounds stupid.”
Ellen looks up at her. “It’s not a matter of stupidity.”
“It was as if she knew and was trying to tell me that words can’t insulate. Language can’t save you. You have to live with your head in the lion’s mouth.”
“But she didn’t choose life.”
“She did, for a moment.”
“You don’t think you could have saved her.”
“No, it’s not that. When I said I recognized something, it was an expression, a look, that I have only seen once before.”
“What kind of expression?”
“An expression on my mother’s face shortly before she died. I had asked her something and her answer was that look. But I don’t know if it was grace, or resignation.”
“Which do you think it was?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll never know.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WMDs Still Missing
Lena stops by the Record to see whether her absence has been noticed, but it hasn’t. Out of the office all day and no one knows. There are no calls on the overnight machine; no tapes have been dropped in the mail slot. She leaves the office and begins to shake as she walks west, the opposite of her usual route, and as she looks at the people she passes, it seems that the street is a concrete canal that has been drained and has exposed them there, walking along the bottom. This is so disconcerting that she enters the bar on the corner, the Record hangout.
Once again, Katheryn is there, clutching Russell as she holds court. Once again, he smiles at something she says and lifts his head to glance around the room. When his eyes meet Lena’s, she nods and looks away.
She orders a scotch and tries to act the way people must mean when they say “normal.”
“How are you?” Russell asks, approaching the bar. His voice sounds different, though she couldn’t say how. She closes her eyes briefly. “Lena,” he says, and she doesn’t know whether she could identify his voice on tape, a shocking realization.
“How was DC?”
“DC is fabulous,” Katheryn says loudly, coming to stand beside Russell. “Did Russell tell you? He’s the new deputy bureau chief in Washington. One step away from bureau chief, and we all know what comes after Washington.”
“I wanted to tell you, Lena, it just happened and there was no time.”
“Congratulations.”
He looks down at the floor and then up at her with that Russell expression, boyish and endearing.
“When do you move?”
“Next week. I’m going down this weekend to look for a place.”
Katheryn rubs his back and Russell grimaces. It’s all there, so much more seen in a glance than in a gaze: it is the look of panic that leads to paralysis. He has submitted to her.
“I’ve been trying to convince him to stay at my place until he finds something,” Katheryn says, moving her hand to his arm. “You know I’ve got that big place in Georgetown, and I’m going to be spending more time there myself. It’d be nice to have some company. And Washington’s viperous; I could show Russell the ropes.”
Lena watches him try to think of what to say. She wants to kiss him, he wants to speak; they both open their mouths.
“I have to go,” she says, and in one ungraceful movement she tosses money on the bar and slides off the barstool.
She is tempted to push past people on her way to the door, to shove them, but she doesn’t because at the same time she doesn’t want to be touched. The street is surprisingly empty; the humid air smells of sweat, as if city sidewalks, which have been absorbing sweat all summer, finally reached saturation and threw the water back up in the air.
MORNING IN THE Recording Room: all is orderly and silent.
Though there are no tapes to transcribe, she puts on her headphones and presses the foot pedal.
Silence slips in her ear like a mute tongue. The door opens.
“Yo? Excuse me.”
It is Lance, a magazine writer. He has slightly long, shaggy brown hair and wears black chunky glasses and, on Fridays, his Nation T-shirt. When he’s feeling particularly subversive, he wears a long-sleeved T-shirt under the short-sleeved one. On all days, he addresses everyone under the age of sixty—which, at the Record, is fewer people than one might imagine—as “Yo.”
He hands Lena his taped interview with a diminutive pop star whose “life goals” are to design furniture and fit into the framed James Brown jacket that hangs above his ostrich-feather lamp. As she transcribes, the pop star explains that his furniture designs are based on circles “because, you know, circles are so sensual.”
“Are you a Virgo?” Lance asks.
Lena stops typing, takes off the headphones.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she says out loud. “Arlene, I can’t do it either.”
A knock at the door makes her jump. “Just push it open, the door handle’s broken.” She turns. “Oh. Russell.”
“Lena.”
He pulls a chair from under one of the unused desks and sits down.
“Ellen Lebow called. She said you visited her twice, and that the first time you said you were a reporter.”
“I did.”
Russell leans back, rubs his smooth face. “What the hell were you thinking, Lena?”
“It seems dishonest, but I didn’t feel dishonest, only that I was using the tools at hand.”
“You know you could be fired, Lena. You know this is serious.”
“Yes, it is serious.”
She knows that he feels compromised, here to assess the damage to the Record, and also annoyed that he is personally implicated, tainted by association. Russell values clarity and detests equivocation.
“I don’t know who you are, Lena. This is a betrayal of the Record, of me, of the profession of reporting. We’re out there every day, trying to be honest, trying to be objective, gathering information—”
“There is no objectivity, Russell. You observe information. I register it. I’m the one hooked to a machine, I’m the cord. You and Katheryn might be the organs, but I’m the vein.”
They are able to look at each other with frankness now, recognizing that they do not balance each other, that their passions run counter to each other’s, as do their principles.
“Nothing changes the fact that you lied.”
“It was a sin of omission.”
“The worst kind.”
“Like Eric Isaacs?”
“What?”
“I know he’s been kidnapped. When you lied to me, was that a sin of omission?”
“You understand why I didn’t tell you, right?”
“Because you want to control the information. Because you trust yourself with it, but not others.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s how you and Katheryn are similar.”
“Lena, all reporters are like that. There’s no comparison here between what you did and what I did. You’ve put me in a bad position. I’m not going to report it, but we can’t see each other anymore. I can’t be involved.”
There is nothing unfinished between them, but something from their encounter is stored inside them both, has graced them. She smiles at the thought that the Record would scorn such a word, grace.
After Russell leaves, she stands at the phone panel and fiddles absentmindedly with the recorders.
“I don’t know what to do.” She presses “record” on one of the Dictaphones. “I. don’t. know.” Stop. Rewind. Record. “Don’t know.” She takes the mudslide tape from the cardboard box. Fast forward. Play. “. . . digging the next day, and the next, and the day after that, and for as long as it would take . . . not leave anyone behind.”
They did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.
At her desk, she ejects Lance’s tape from her Dictaphone and tugs on the tape at the bottom of the cassette. So fragile, so easy to make the plastic spill its guts. She yanks harder and more tape unspools in her hand. “Ha.” She winds it around her palm, circling the flesh until it looks like a fighter’s wrap. Then she continues to pull until she holds the entire tape in her hand.
The recording phone rings, and after a slight hesitation she answers; Katheryn is at JFK and wants to dictate a story before her flight.
“Am I sending the transcript to the foreign desk?”
“No, listen to me Lena, don’t send it to the foreign desk. Send it to Ralph. He’ll know what to do. Dateline: With the Seventh Marine Regiment, near Baghdad, July nineteenth.”
Lena presses the button on the receiver that allows her to speak on the recording line. “That’s the dateline?”
“Yes. Is there a problem?”
“I thought you were in New York.”
“Look, I was in Baghdad, right? And I just got this information, so obviously I’m not going back to Baghdad to do a fucking toe touch for the dateline. I’m at the airport, at the gate, and Ralph is in the page one meeting. I want you to do your job. Just type this up and send it to Ralph. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Starting dictation now. Lead: An adviser who defected from Saddam Hussein’s regime said that he had evidence of bunkers inside Iraq that served as bioweapons labs stop. The defector comma whose identity has not been revealed for safety reasons comma showed members of the Seventh Marines a blueprint of a bunker that he said contained the materials for building chemical weapons stop. End Graph.”
Lena rewinds the lead, puts on her headset, and watches her hands hover over the keyboard. Her fingers refuse to touch the letters. She presses the foot pedal and stares down at the escape hood that is still perched on top of the trash can.
“Reusable?” she says aloud, bending down to read the box and once again reading the instructions. “In the event of emergency, simply attach the filter, pull the hood down over your head, and tighten the straps.”
She lifts the hood out of the box, pulls it over her head, sits again, and presses the foot pedal. Through the hood’s eyeholes, she watches her fingers pass over the keys.
“When asked why he chose to defect comma the adviser said comma quote The point of life is not to just go on living stop end quote.”
Lifting her foot from the pedal, she throws off the hood. She has rewound the tape and is listening to the quote again when the phone rings.
“Hi, Lena. It’s Katheryn. Look, don’t send that story to Ralph. We have to kill it.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry about why. It’s complicated. Suffice it to say that there’s some delicate material in there that the Pentagon isn’t ready to publish.”
“You showed it to the Pentagon?”
“Lena, you don’t understand how this works. I want you to erase the tape. And then I want you to delete anything you’ve typed. Do you understand? This has to do with the sensitive nature of the information. We have to hold it for a few days, that’s all. Shit, they’re calling my flight, I have to go. I just wanted to make sure you destroy the tape.”
“I’m afraid I can’t destroy the tape, Katheryn. I have to keep a record of all the calls. It’s already logged.”
“Listen to me. Do you have any idea of my position? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be embedded with the military? Do you have any idea what it’s like to search for something as dangerous as WMDs?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“How could you? You don’t know. It’s not like you were there!”
“I know about searching.”
“That’s ridiculous. Fuck. They’re calling my flight. Kill the story and I’ll come by and get the tape when I’m back in town on Tuesday.”
Lena puts the phone back in its cradle. She finishes transcribing the tape and sends the transcript to the foreign desk. In exactly fifteen minutes she calls the foreign editor. “Hi, this is Lena in the Recording Room. I sent something from Katheryn Keel a few minutes ago.”
“We got it, thanks.”
“I just wanted to make sure it was slotted. Katheryn said she’s getting on a plane and won’t land before deadline.”
“Well, isn’t that convenient? I was just in the page one meeting and Ralph was holding space for it on A one.”
“I just wanted to check. She was adamant that it not be held because she was unreachable.”
“I’m sure it will run.”
“Thanks.”
Lena raises the window and leans out on the ledge, beside the pigeon. “We’re supposed to eat the evidence,” she says, slapping the tape against her palm.
She leans farther over the ledge. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it? Up above it all,” she says softly.
The pigeon turns its puny head from the street to the sky, as if to say, All this. They look down at Times Square, where pedestrians wander under the nonstop neon.
“What am I going to do?”
Times Square is thick with tourists and the noise of traffic and people haggling over handbags and the cost of chalk portraits. She is halfway down the block when the fifty-cent lady steps out, extends her hand like a weary landlady, and says, “Fifty cents.”
“Hi, Lydia.”
She stops and Lydia looks at her, eyes cloudy with cataracts and suspicion. Lena takes a dollar from her wallet and holds it out, but Lydia regards it in silence and does not reach for it.
Again, she thinks of Electra: “Each night that dies with dawn / I bring my sad songs here.”
A veined hand with long, tapered fingers reaches out finally for the dollar. Her fingers are thin and elegant, ravaged by age and yet containing still the traces of supple youth.
“Your hands—” Lena says with surprise, “you have such nice hands.”
Lydia looks down at her hands and smiles. “He always loved my hands,” she says. “I could reach over an octave.”
“Did you play the piano?”
The mask snaps back into place. “Go away,” Lydia says sharply.
Lena is still thinking of the woman who lost her name when, at the intersection of Forty-Third and Broadway, a careering cab and a messenger bike collide with the terrible but perfect choreography of crashing that sends the cyclist through the air, over the taxi’s hood, and thudding on his back to the filthy street.
Even though Lena makes her living by listening, she could never describe the sound of impact that causes one to instinctively turn one’s head. It is the sound of two things coming together that should not, the sound that everyone recognizes, the sound of solid meeting solid and stopping.
Times Square slows and swirls and, for Lena, goes silent. Of course, it doesn’t, it couldn’t, it wouldn’t. The men who hawk handbags probably don’t turn their boom boxes down. The traffic, of tourists and taxis, can’t have stopped. People just across the street probably don’t see, don’t hear, and keep going, not knowing what is there for them to witness, just as the ship sailed smoothly on when Icarus fell from the sky.
The cyclist lies on his back, his legs extended straight, as if he were stretching after yoga. The driver steps out of the cab, stunned, and stands behind the half-open door with one foot still in the car. He doesn’t advance but leans on the door as if for protection. “Not my fault,” he says. “Not my fault,” he repeats, clutching the door.
Cars honk behind him, then pull around. Lena steps off the curb and drops to her knees beside the cyclist. He is not bleeding, but his stillness in the middle of Times Square is more disquieting than blood. Maybe his neck is broken, or his spine. She says the empty phrase that one says to reassure the dying, but mostly to reassure the witness. “It’s going to be all right.”
The cyclist does not move his head but blinks his eyes and says seven heartbreaking words. “Will you take my helmet off, please?”
The question takes her by surprise, the sweet simplicity of it, the need to be unencumbered before death. He is young and beautiful, his muscles tense, his skin tan.
“I shouldn’t move you,” she says. “You shouldn’t move.”
A heavy young guy in calf-length shorts and a Lakers jersey is talking on his cell phone as he walks down Broadway, and his eyes lock with Lena’s as she glances up in search of help.
“Yo, dog!” he says into the phone. “Mad shit.” And then, with a gesture that he has probably never used before but maybe saw in a movie once, he delicately covers the mouthpiece of his cell phone, pinkie slightly raised, and says to Lena, “Is he dead?”
She looks down at the cyclist, who says something she cannot hear. She leans down, turning her head so that her ear is so close to his mouth she can feel his warm breath, which smells faintly of the sea. He is quietly pleading now. “Please take my helmet off.”
“Oh,” she says, looking at him and trying to smile. “I better not do that. I shouldn’t move your neck.”
His golden-brown hair curls around the edges of his helmet; he reminds her of Rilke’s Apollo with his legendary head, his eyes gleaming like ripening fruit.
She looks up at the surreal scene, where most people do not seem to notice that a man is dying in the street.
“Call nine one one!” she shouts to the guy on the sidewalk, who is still talking on his phone.
