The Transcriptionist, page 3
Ghost cat. Catamount. Puma. Painter. Panther. Mountain lion. Cougar.
She had memorized all the names it had been given over the years. Her teacher said that the cat was known by different names in different areas and that it was once common across the continent and from southern Canada to the tip of South America.
SHE AWAKENS, THRASHING sweaty sheets, and lies in the dark. Sleep will not come, and she flips the pillow over, searching in vain for a cool spot. Lying on her back, she hears the unmistakable sound. First there is the click. Then the sound of tape slowly winding around its spool. Her fingers tense, as if poised above a keyboard. She listens.
“Hearing is the last sense to abandon the dying,” says the voice on the invisible tape.
“No!” She jerks up in bed, looking around the room. Perhaps it was a daydream.
CHAPTER THREE
Power Failure Causes New York Blackout; Thousands Stranded
Morning in the Recording Room. She checks the overnight machine; no one called. She takes an unfinished tape from the rack. It is a long, boring magazine interview on the millionaire’s dating club (for women, “tough love, internal makeover, hair straightener”; for men, “the penis does the picking”) that she has two days to turn around and is not eager to finish. She looks out the window at the frantically scratching pigeon, then closes the blinds and sits down at the desk, which is just large enough for the boxy computer and, on her left, the Dictaphone, a dictionary, and The Record Manual of Style.
She opens today’s paper and reads, turning the pages and trying not to get ink on her fingers. In Mexico a woman gave herself a C-section with a kitchen knife. Britain is running out of burial space. Twenty-one women died in a stampede for free saris in India, at an event sponsored by a politician.
She sits down at the Dictaphone and presses the foot pedal. There is empty time on side B of the tape before the interview with the millionaire matchmaker continues, and she listens, concentrating for the first word. The silence continues, but she hears something, a humming almost. There is a story about John Cage in a studio to record 4'33", four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. He said he heard two sounds in the silence, one high, one low; he said the high sound was his central nervous system and the low his blood circulating. She doesn’t know whether the story is true, or whether it was even about John Cage. She tells herself lots of stories when sitting alone with the headsets, but she no longer trusts which parts are true.
“Let’s wait a minute,” the reporter says on the tape. The interview is at a restaurant, and a group nearby is singing “Happy Birthday.” The reporter pauses the interview but does not turn off the recorder, and Lena looks around the Recording Room as she listens to strangers sing a song that sounds haunting in her secluded room.
Ten minutes later, she is in her transcriptionist trance and jumps when the phone rings.
“This is Katheryn Keel,” the recording line voice announces, “calling from Baghdad with a lead for the foreign desk.”
“OK, Katheryn, go ahead when you’re ready.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“You said it’s Katheryn Keel.”
“Yes, but I mean, do you know who I am? As in Katheryn Keel, the senior foreign correspondent, Katheryn Keel, the first reporter to embed with the Marines.”
“OK, Katheryn Keel. If you want to dictate something, I’ll transcribe it.”
“I just want to make sure you give it priority. And don’t send it to the foreign desk. Send it straight to Ralph. I’ll give you his e-mail. And this is just the lead. I’ll call back with the adds.”
“OK.”
“Slug it Baghdad Foot. A suicide bomber blew himself up today in the center of Baghdad’s busiest market stop. It was two in the afternoon and the market was full of women and children stop. Authorities put the death toll at thirty-seven but it is expected to rise stop. Two hours after the blast comma blood and clothes and shoes lay in a heap with vegetables and glass stop. A charred foot comma unattached to anything comma lay in the dirt stop. Graph.
“A witness said he blacked out comma came to comma tried to move comma quote and a voice in my head told me not to look down stop end quote. Then he realized he was stumbling over bodies stop.”
Lena types “bodies” and the recording line rings again. She runs around her desk to the phone panel by the door, expecting Katheryn with the first add to her story.
“Recording Room.”
“Hi, this is Maggie Bradley with the wedding column.”
“Where are you calling from, Maggie?”
“Oh, what? You mean this isn’t a recording? I thought you were a machine.”
“No.”
“Sorry.”
“Happens all the time. So where are you calling from?”
“West Palm Beach. This is a rush and the society desk needs it right away, attention Tom Richardson. Can you rush it?”
“I’ll try.”
“Well, can you or can’t you?”
“Sure, Maggie. I’ll rush the wedding column.”
“Great. And I have a note to the editor that I’ll dictate at the beginning. Please put it in bold.”
Lena puts the phone down and finishes the Baghdad lead—“quote We would go comma quote a man standing on the sidewalk said stop. Quote But where would we go and how would we get there question mark end quote”—and begins the wedding story. Maggie does not give punctuation.
Lena transcribes:
“Note to editor: Tom, this is what happens when you put a reporter on society coverage. I want a real beat, Tom. Remember that when you read this. A real beat!”
“OK. Vows column. Elizabeth, the daughter of the former finance minister of a South American country, and Drake, the son of Victor V. W. Blankoff, met at a polo match in Brazil. They plan to travel the world for a year and then make a documentary film.
“ ‘We want to take our time,’ the bride said, her eyes as blue as a Tiffany’s box, ‘and find a deserving subject. We’re going to start doing research right away, on our honeymoon safari in Africa. I can’t wait to go to Africa.’
“The groom, twenty-nine, is a retired hedge fund founder and a buyer of polo horses and conceptual art. The bride is a photographer whose work has been exhibited in the flagship stores of Hermès and Ferragamo. ‘Please note that it’s the flagship stores,’ the bride said. ‘I wouldn’t want people to think my work was being shown at a ratty-ass mall.’ ”
The recording line rings and Lena rushes to the phone. It’s the first add from Baghdad. She hurries back to her desk and pops the wedding tape out of the Dictaphone, then rushes back to the recording line and starts a second tape recording so that she can start transcribing the first tape right away.
“Authorities say the head of the suicide bomber has been recovered but he has not been identified stop. Women in black wailed in the demolished market stop. One woman stood in the middle of the road in a daze holding a shoe that she said belonged to her son stop. Graph.”
She finishes with Baghdad and then it’s back to Elizabeth and Drake.
“The bride hired Bardley Buckley, a New York designer, to create a winter scene from Doctor Zhivago inside the Ritz-Carlton with three hundred white-painted trees and forty thousand white orchids . . .”
Lena sends the transcripts, removes the headset, and rubs her eyes. She walks to the window, where the sudden opening of the blinds startles the pigeon.
“Jump,” she says. She struggles to raise the window so that the bird can hear her better. Stuck. She bangs it with her hand. Finally it opens and she leans out. “Jump! You’re a bird. Go on.”
He puts his claw down in defiance and looks at her with pigeon eyes.
“It’s not lice, is it, pigeon? A case of OCD, maybe?”
Someone coughs behind her and she turns.
“Hi, Carol.”
“Hi, Russell.”
“I wondered if you finished the interview.”
“Of course. I e-mailed it to you.”
“Oh,” he says. “Great.” He looks behind her at the window. “Were you talking to yourself just now?”
“Oh.” She shrugs and wonders whether it is better to confess to talking to herself or to a pigeon. “Yes, guess so.”
He smiles. “Interesting day?”
“I just transcribed a story about a Baghdad bombing from Katheryn Keel.”
They both smile at the name. Katheryn Keel looks good on paper and television. She is a legend, the ex-wife of Ralph, the executive editor, and a foreign reporter who by all accounts was fearless until false bravado got in the way and hardened into self-certitude. It was true, she was unafraid of corrupt territory, be it a country or a source. She has made her way through both kinds.
“So, do you have an interview for me?”
“What? Oh, no. I just . . . ” He looks down at the tapes in their plastic cases, stacked horizontally in the shabby cardboard box beside the phone panel. He runs his fingers along the plastic case spines, in a childlike movement, like a boy running his hand along a fence. He glances up at her, and the movement takes on new meaning as he seems to wink, but she tells herself he is just adjusting his glasses.
“Did you come to pick up your tape from yesterday?”
“Right, yes.”
“Here it is.”
“Thanks.” Without turning, he reaches behind him, groping for the door handle, which comes off in his hand.
“Oh. That happens sometimes.”
“Gee.” He glances from her face to the handle in his hand.
“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inward, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”
She sticks her fingers in the hole where the lever was and wiggles her fingers. “Except in this case, it’s more about being imprisoned until your hand becomes the handle.”
“What?”
“Oh, I think this door handle looks like one Wittgenstein designed. He planned a house once, for his sister, and it took him a year to design the door handle. His sister admired the house but she could not live in it.”
“You read Wittgenstein?”
“A long time ago, in grad school.”
“You went to grad school?”
“I went to grad school, but I dropped out.”
“Do you always quote philosophers to unsuspecting journalists?”
“What? No, I guess quoting people is a transcriptionist’s hazard.”
“I don’t think anyone has interviewed Wittgenstein lately.”
She can feel the red streak of embarrassment race across her cheeks and down to her chest.
“I’m sorry. Quoting, it’s a habit. I don’t get a lot of visitors here. My conversation skills are rusty.”
“It’s OK. I didn’t mean—well,” he says, putting the door handle on the transcription log, “I better go.”
“Russell, remember that story you wrote a few days ago, about the woman at the zoo?”
“Yeah, sad story. What about it?”
“I saw the woman before she died. We were on the same bus, and I can’t get her out of my mind.”
“What are the chances you would have met her?”
“That’s what I keep telling myself. Do you know anything else about her?”
“No, I had no time, the deadline was tight, and there wasn’t much information except that a blind woman had been eaten by lions. It was really a wire story but it was so strange we had to cover it.”
“Do you still think about it? Are there stories that are hard to let go?”
“There’s always a new story.”
“It never bothers you, that it’s so ephemeral?”
“What’s not? Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Amen. Bye, Carol.”
She opens her mouth to correct him but he is already gone. At the window, she says to the pigeon, “My name isn’t Carol.” She takes a package of crackers from her desk drawer and puts them out on the ledge after breaking them into small pieces.
SHE IS AT the deli on Forty-Third and Sixth buying a container of already curdled cottage cheese for lunch when the lights flicker, then go dark. She walks outside; lights are out around the block. People spill onto the sidewalk and look around dazed. Traffic slows and angry voices sound from taxis; arms and heads are thrust out open windows. The horns begin, then the chorus of voices like fire through a sun-scorched field. “Can you get a connection?” pedestrians ask as they lift their cell phones and stumble among others who are also lifting their cell phones toward the indifferent sun.
Disembodied voices utter fragments to the air, a mass of impotent humanity.
“It’s a blackout.”
“Can you get a connection?”
“It’s like a dream.”
“It’s like a movie.”
“Can you get a connection?”
“Traffic lights are out. No lights in Times Square. Looks like a blackout.”
“A blackout?”
Lena joins the hapless parade threading through Times Square. On Broadway a woman in a floral hat stops her. “How long does this last?”
“I don’t know,” Lena says.
“I told you we should have gone to Niagara Falls,” the woman says to what can only be her middle-aged son, a florid man flanked by two florid children.
Lena continues across Broadway; Times Square is eerie in the natural light, without ticker tapes or flashing billboards or traffic lights. The pedestrians seem even smaller as they cross the square, blinking in the summer sun, like disaster victims stumbling through a steamy concrete purgatory.
The Record’s elevators are out, so Lena trudges up eleven dark flights of stairs—lit only with yellow glow tape—to the Recording Room, where her boss, Ned, awaits, a pear-faced man with plastered-down hair.
“Lena. Where were you?”
“Lunch.”
She rarely sees her boss. He works on another floor and supervises a group of people who do something in shifts and speak in acronyms. It is a mystery to both of them why he is her manager.
He swipes at the sweat on his bulby forehead. “I guess you know there’s been a blackout. It’s citywide. We’re on generators and the newsroom is looking for people to take dictation over the phone.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Do you want to go?” he asks carefully. He has been through enough middle-management training to know how to talk to union employees, following the Record’s dominant management style, based on the government model of strategic ambiguity (keep them in the dark, and give them light only as absolutely necessary). There are two management styles at the Record and a constant struggle between the two: the advocates of ambiguity, and the supporters of the more aggressive “mushroom model” (keep them in the dark, and feed them shit). The managers pride themselves on knowing which model they follow, because the workers sometimes have difficulty telling the difference.
“Sure, Ned. I’ll go.”
“I don’t know about overtime, you know, if it would be the newsroom’s responsibility or the—”
“Ned, it’s fine. I’ll go.”
“Great. When you get to the newsroom, ask for Boris Hackney.”
Journey to the Center
She follows the stairwell glow tape to the fourth floor. The newsroom has two levels with a central staircase, the stairway to heaven, where newspaper gods dole out assignments and publisher’s awards. Heaven dwellers are served snacks every afternoon, and if disaster somewhere in Manhattan causes newsroom employees to work late into the night, a full dinner is catered. Record readers might find a more accurate account of New York City catastrophes by viewing the buffet table in the newsroom: political debates and local elections—pizza; tornado in Brooklyn—burritos; terrorism in Manhattan and presidential elections—Virgil’s Barbecue.
The newsroom is more updated than anywhere else in the century-old building but still looks like a benign government agency in a bad budget cycle. Lena looks around the beige, fluorescent-lit office and wishes for a touch of squalor. The room thrums with neuroses but there is no seediness; Miss Lonelyhearts replaced by the Ethicist who does not invoke God or Art or Sex but gives sanitized, secular advice.
A gleeful group is huddled, having discovered a clerk’s memoir in his backpack. Several investigative reporters slump unhappily around a radio, specialists sidelined by the trauma team.
Lena is always disappointed anew at the room, where instead of bald, bespectacled men typing with one heavy hand and reaching into the drawer for the bourbon bottle with the other, it is the usual corporate subdivision: well-medicated activity, soundless keypads, and clusters of low-partitioned cubicles in a rectangle that spans the entire floor.
“Can I ask you a quick question?” Lena asks a passing reporter. He raises his hands in the air, palms out, and keeps walking.
A harried woman passes. “Quick question—”
Lena feels like the child lost in the forest, only she can’t remember which fairy tale. A dumpy man with a pen behind each ear approaches and she steps in his path.
“Boris Hackney’s desk?”
Caligula Had It, Too
The man pivots and points toward a trio of men. Boris leans against a cubicle partition, his left leg slightly raised behind him, and dangles a narrow loafer from his foot. Another metro editor stands beside him, a man with red-rimmed eyes who seems to have no shoulders; his arms stick out from his torso, and he resembles nothing so much as a red-spotted newt. A wiry young reporter wears the look of privileged protest.
Their argument, like so many writer-editor struggles, recalls the British and the French discussing the Battle of Dunkirk: You let me down. No, you let me down.
“I don’t have time to go back,” the reporter says. “Can’t we tweak it?”
“No, we can’t tweak it,” the newt says. “This is the Record. We don’t tweak. You’ve got a story full of quotes from a Long Island construction worker who was on NPR yesterday bragging that he goes to news scenes so he can feed reporters quotes and see his name in the paper.”
“Well,” the reporter says, “he was a man on the street, technically speaking.”
