The Transcriptionist, page 16
“I never said I would take you,” she says, even as she reaches for him. The pigeon is startled and struggles quietly, the only sound his flapping wings. She realizes for the first time that she does not know whether pigeons have a song or whether they are able to sound a single note.
“Come on, come on.” She tries to think of the proper way to hold a bird, but she has no idea. She must have held one before at least once in her life, but if so, she cannot remember. The bird puts up a valiant struggle, for something that weighs less than a pound. Finally, she wraps a gloved hand around his back and rests her fingers on his breast. “Shh,” she says, twisting awkwardly to stroke his feathered head with her right hand.
Across the street, a man sticks his head out his hotel room window. He has burnt-blond hair and a sagging face that might have been handsome once. The window is dirty, its dingy curtains yellowing, and she sees it with the same remove with which she saw the Recording Room earlier. She feels light and detached and almost asks him, How do we stand such unwelcoming rooms? How did I?
He leans out farther and she sees he is shirtless and paunchy, flabby but not fat. He holds out his hands in the universal sign for “slow down.” “You’re not going to jump, are you, lady? It can’t be that bad. You need help? You want me to call somebody?”
Their voices carry surprisingly easily above the street, like voices over water.
“No,” she answers. “It’s the pigeon.”
“He’s a bird. It’s all right if he jumps. They can fly.”
She nods and smiles, grips the pigeon tighter. He has paused in his furious flapping, as if listening to their conversation.
“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t mess with him if I was you,” he calls. “Flying rats, they carry disease and shit.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve got to say. I’ve seen some weird shit in my day, but I’ve never seen nobody trying to save a damn pigeon, much less go out on a window ledge to do it. You sure you don’t need something?”
“No, but thanks. I appreciate it.”
Suddenly, red-nailed fingers creep around the man’s waist from behind. A woman’s head emerges under his arm. Her hair has dark roots and she has a hard face made harder with the mask of makeup visible even from across the street.
“That’s nasty,” she says, looking at the pigeon.
“You don’t want me to call nobody?” the man says. “You don’t need any help?”
“No. It’s fine, really.”
“You be careful up there, now.”
“I will. Thank you.”
He gives her one last look and shakes his head, and the red-tipped fingers draw him back into the dark room.
Lena grips the pigeon tighter as they resume their silent struggle. With a jerk, she tries to lift him, and then she sees. His left foot is caught in a tiny crack in the concrete. She is so stunned by his tattered, bloody leg that she releases him and cries out.
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
The Recording Room window slams shut behind them and they both start. She is fully on the ledge now, shut out in every way.
“Come on, let me see.” She tries to look at the pigeon’s mangled leg without touching him. “How long have you been like that? You stoic little beast.”
She reaches over and gently lifts him an inch. His eyes seem redder than usual and she releases him suddenly, thinking for one terrible moment that he is going to cry. Impossible, she tells herself. Pigeons can’t sing, they can’t cry, they may even be deaf.
“Impossible,” she says aloud. “I can’t save you. There’s nothing I can do.”
Everything below is muffled, and there seems to be a pattern to it all as she peers down from above: pedestrians, traffic, the entire scene. It is here on the ledge that she feels her body begin to empty out. All the passages she’s memorized to fill the space inside, all the thousands of feet of tape she’s transcribed. It is as if all the words are leaving her, the incessant tape is spooling out of her, through her open mouth, through her pores. She feels the letters streaming out through her fingertips, and she can finally be empty.
“Pigeon,” she repeats, “there’s really nothing more I can do for you.”
There is a tap behind her, and Tommy raises the window and cries, “Don’t jump, Lena! For the love of Mary, don’t jump.”
She holds her hands in the air. “It’s OK, Tommy.”
“It’s not worth it,” he pleads. “It’s not even a fun place to work anymore.”
“I’m not going to jump.”
He motions for her to come inside and backs away from the open window to give her room. She looks at her hands and begins to remove the gloves, pulling at the green shadow fingers one by one to loosen them, then tugging the gloves off by the fingertips.
“If I leave you, you’ll die, and if I take you, you’ll die,” she says to the pigeon.
Tommy doesn’t hear but looks at the gloves, seeming to notice them only now, only after she has removed them and holds them, the limp and empty fingers dangling from her grip. He crouches in front of the window, holding his stiff back and squinting behind his glasses.
“It’s the pigeon,” she says, gesturing with the empty gloves. “He’s caught. It’s his leg.”
“You came out on this window ledge for a pigeon?”
“It’s his leg,” she repeats, feeling foolish. “He’s stuck.”
Tommy leans his big red-haired head out the window. “Well, don’t touch him,” he says gently. “He might have germs.”
“He’s hurt, Tommy. And he’s trapped. I can’t get his leg loose without amputating it.”
“Well, leave him there for now,” Tommy says. “We’ll call pest control or somebody.”
“Pest control?”
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” he says, backing into the room. “Lena, we don’t have much time.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
He shakes his head. “Tell you what. We need to get you out of here. Why don’t we focus on that?”
“Thank you, Tommy,” she says. He gently holds her elbow as she steps through the window and back into the room. “I’m ready.”
“I can help you carry your things downstairs.”
“I’m not taking anything.”
“Oh, come on, you must want something. Here’s a stylebook”—he holds up the familiar white-jacketed guide—“a stapler”—he lifts it up in the air. She shakes her head. “Scissors!” he says. “These are good ones, they’re heavy. You can trim rosebushes with these.”
“Just one thing,” she says, grabbing the orange box from the trash. “I want my escape hood.”
A voice comes over Tommy’s walkie-talkie and he lifts it with his rough, freckled hand. “Come in, Tommy. This is the command chief at the command center. Have you located the transcriptionist? Over.”
“This is Tommy reporting to the command center,” he says, winking at Lena. “I have located the transcriptionist and will personally escort her out of the building. All is calm and under control, over.”
“OK. Howard ordered us all to drop everything, but we’ve got the secretary of state in the executive dining room and one of the bomb-sniffing dogs just puked on the carpet, so we’re kinda busy. But let us know if you need reinforcements. Over.”
She shakes his hand.
“Good luck, Lena.”
“Tommy, one last thing. I know I’m not in a position to be asking favors, but if you could just leave the pigeon on the ledge. I know someone in the building I can call to take care of it.”
“I don’t see any harm in that.”
“Thank you.”
She pulls the escape hood over her head and fastens it snugly. People in the hall turn to look at her as she passes; they laugh, then go silent when she doesn’t respond. In the lobby, she puts her ID on the security desk as the guards watch in astonishment. Outside, it is a humid summer day, and she breathes heavily inside the hood.
A man wearing several layers of clothes slumps beside the building. “Yesterday was a new day,” he says. “But today is old already.” Lena is too preoccupied to turn away, and they make eye contact. His face is pallid, sweat-sheened. She nods and tries to smile. Just then a dog walks by, unusual for this neighborhood, and lunges toward the man. The dog strains at its leash but does not bark, sniffs instead, curious about the smell. If a pack of wild dogs were released on the streets of Manhattan, Lena thinks, the homeless would be the ones spared.
A few feet farther and the hand emerges from behind the column. She takes the tape with Katheryn’s dictation and presses it into Lydia’s hand, which she covers with her own. Lydia nods with solemnity and leans forward in a gesture somewhere between a nod and a bow.
Lena turns onto Broadway, ignoring the shouts and laughter the escape hood elicits as she joins the masses walking under blinking billboards and tickertapes, numbed by neon, walking north, just walking.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Arlene Lebow Dies at Fifty-Four
In her stuffy Parkside room, she lies down and immediately falls asleep. In the dark, when she wakens, tangled in the sweat-dampened sheets, she jumps up and reaches for the phone. She dials the familiar voice and listens to the new instructions, her own.
“Arlene, I’m calling to say good-bye. You didn’t really disappear, after all. Your sister knows where to find you. And I didn’t vanish either, though I was afraid I would. For the longest time I thought the tapes were spooling within me, invading, spreading. I thought soon I would not possess a single thought of my own, would not possess even my own dreams. But I was wrong. Listening doesn’t make us disappear. It just helps us recognize our absurdity, our humanity. It’s what binds us together, as the newspaper binds us and before that Chaucer’s tales and before that the Scriptures.”
IN THE MORNING, as she emerges from the dining room with a contraband coffee mug, Mrs. Pelletier calls to her.
“I’m sorry,” she says, looking at the mug. “I know we’re not supposed to take things out of the dining—”
“Lena,” Mrs. Pelletier says, “your uncle is waiting for you in the front parlor.”
“My uncle? I don’t—”
Mrs. Pelletier leans over the counter. “I can see the family resemblance,” she says, lifting her hands and framing the upper half of her face. “It’s in the eyes.”
In the parlor, Kov is sitting on the plastic-covered settee. His lips are pressed together; his straight gray hair is slicked back from his forehead.
“Hello, Uncle.”
He lifts the lid from the box at his side and she sees the pigeon, who glares at her with the glazed eyes of a newborn.
“He should survive. We’re just back from the clinic. They had to amputate,” he says, pointing to the tiny tourniquet around the string-size leg.
“The two of you are staying together?”
“Just until the wound heals. They’re quite speedy healers—have to be, I suppose.”
“Kov, why don’t we take a walk in Gramercy Park? I can get the key.”
He stands and straightens, gracefully offers her his arm. She links her arm through his and they walk to the front desk.
“Mrs. Pelletier, may I check out a key to the park?”
“Is your uncle going with you? How nice.”
Mrs. Pelletier heaves the black Book of Keys onto the desk and Lena signs her name. She replaces the pen chained to the counter, then immediately picks it back up and beside her signature writes, “and Kov.”
She glances up and catches Kov and Mrs. Pelletier exchanging a look that she would swear could be erotic if she didn’t know better. She looks again and decides she doesn’t know better.
“What should we do with pigeon?”
“He’s groggy from the anesthetic, isn’t he?”
Mrs. Pelletier peers into the box. “I had a . . .” She stops. “I could keep him here behind the desk,” she whispers. Kov nods and gently slides the shoe box across the counter. Lena watches dumbfounded at this bending of the rules.
Outside, they pause at the park gate, and Kov bows slightly when Lena unlocks the iron door and pushes it open. As they stroll the length of the park arm in arm, Kov pauses before the statue of Edwin Booth and says, “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”
Lena opens her mouth to match Kov’s quote. Remarkably, the words do not come.
“Kov,” she says, laughing and clutching his arm, “I can’t remember a word of it. I don’t have a single quote in my head.” She pauses and looks up at the trees, afraid her freedom is fleeting. She can almost feel the voices sweep across the valleys of her brain and recede.
It is morning in Gramercy Park, the time of day for nannies and their charges. The footsteps of others can be heard just beyond the iron gates. But the morning park belongs to the very old, the very young, and, of course, the people they employ.
Two toddlers zigzag along the grass and gravel, watched by two young nannies who sip Snapples and call to the boys, then shake their heads and continue talking. One boy runs behind a boxwood hedge, causing the baby birds to scatter. The bolder boy, built like a small blond tank, runs faster, his crew cut buzzing above the boxwood. A blue ball ejects from the bushes and rolls across the grass.
The little tank picks up a rock and hurls it at the bird, unseen by the nannies on the other side of the hedge. He throws another rock, harder this time.
“Stop!” Lena calls.
The children do not hear, or perhaps already understand their privilege enough to know they don’t have to listen. The smaller boy steps back and giggles, chubby fingers in his mouth.
“Stop!”
Kov selects two small rocks from the ground near the bench and approaches the boys without a word. The rock thrower is unaware of anything except his prey, calculating now as he watches the birds and carefully tracks their movements. He jiggles the rock in his grubby little hands and suddenly throws it at a bird that stands apart from the others. At the same time, a rock lands softly against the child’s butt, and he whirls around, clutching his pants. Kov says nothing but reveals the second rock waiting in his palm. Lena selects a rock, too, and holds it up for the boy to see. The boy takes a step toward them, then reconsiders and swipes his arm angrily in the air. He stomps off to his nanny. Instead of telling her, though, and incriminating himself, he yanks on her hands. The nanny resists and offers a bottle of juice. The boy shakes his head no and pouts, then snatches her hand and bites it.
“Kyle!” the nanny says, grabbing him by the shoulders, but he shrugs her off. She walks toward the gate, pulling him by the arm. The second nanny gathers their things from the bench and follows with the other boy. Kyle turns at the gate and sticks out his bright pink tongue at them.
“Spoiled brat,” Lena says with great satisfaction, since there are so few times one can say such things out loud.
Kov lowers himself onto the bench, one knobby hand gripping the black iron armrest. A starling pecks the abandoned ball.
“To the victors the spoils.”
“Speaking of victors, what happened to Katheryn?”
“We’ll see. I expect there will be a lot of scrutiny of her work, once people find out about her sources and methods.”
“How would people find out?”
He puts his hand over hers and smiles.
“Kov, you wouldn’t leak it. The Record will take a beating.”
“As you told me once, truth beareth away the victory.”
A woman approaches the gate, unlocks the door, and opens it, but before she can enter and lock herself inside, a disheveled man approaches. At first he appears to be begging and lifts his open hands, beseeching. She shakes her head no. She steps inside, holding the door very close. The man says in a loud voice that carries across the park, “I just want to come inside. That’s all. Nothing else. I just want to come inside and lay down on a bench.”
The woman says something that does not carry, and then closes the door. The man puts his hands through the iron railings; he looks like a prisoner asking to be let back inside.
Kov reaches over and pats Lena’s hand, without turning his head to look at her. She looks at his profile, serene, bony, the strong cheekbones and the thin flesh, his eyes watchful.
“I thought I was being erased, that’s what I imagined was happening with the transcription. That the recorded words were leaking in through my ears, erasing everything inside me. I know, it’s silly, and yet . . .”
He pats her hand again. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know, but it will be better. I’m tired of the secondhand life.”
“What about Arlene?” he asks.
“You know how you told me once that obits represent democracy?”
“Where the famous and the unknown meet.”
“Right. Well, I’ve written a brief obit for her. Do you think the Record would publish it? Not as a paid death notice; as a regular obit. I know the Record obits are reported, are supposed to be newsworthy.”
“I’ll see that it’s published.”
“You can do that, Kov?”
He looks slightly affronted. “It will be in tomorrow’s paper.”
And the next day, it was, exactly as she had written it.
ARLENE LEBOW DIES AT 54
Arlene Lebow, a court reporter, died on July 8, after being mauled by lions at the Bronx Zoo. The police allege that she was in the zoo when it closed and that she swam the moat surrounding the lions’ den and entered the animals’ area, where she was found dead by zookeepers the next morning.
Ms. Lebow, who was blinded from meningitis at the age of 19, used a dictatype machine for the visually impaired in her work as a court reporter for the New York State Criminal and Family Courts, where she was employed for 20 years.
Ms. Lebow was born in 1949 in Manhattan to Charles and Dorothy Lebow. She is survived by her sister, Ellen Lebow, an English professor and Chaucer scholar. “Arlene did not speak more than necessary,” Ellen Lebow said, paraphrasing Chaucer, “and what she did say was said in fullest reverence. She was as patient as Griselda, and like her, she understood the subversive power of silence.”
