The Transcriptionist, page 4
“He’s a professional man on the street.”
“They’re good quotes.”
“He’s been quoted in the Record thirty-three times this year, Jim. His name has been in the Record more than yours has. Rewrite this now or I’ll give him the byline and you can be the man on the street.”
“The ‘man on the street’ quotes are all the same anyway. Everybody knows what people are going to say. If it’s a serial killer, people say, He seemed like such a nice guy, kind of quiet, kept to himself. If it’s—”
“Jim, nine thirty deadline. Do it. Dump it. Forget it.”
“But there’s a blackout. How am I—”
The newt shrugs and responds with what has become his famous non sequitur. “Dante had epilepsy, and Molière and Dickens. Tolstoy! Dostoyevsky and Moses and”—his voice rises with triumphant finality—“Caligula.” He pads away in his socks toward the food table.
“Caligula?”
“That’s a new one,” Boris says.
Jim groans. “Why does he do that?”
Boris grins. “Hard to complain about rewriting nine hundred words when Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment with epilepsy.”
“He probably didn’t have an editor,” Jim says glumly.
Lena tries to make eye contact with Boris, but he is studying the M&M’s on his desk. So he’s the one she’s heard about. He asks clerks to line them up by color and to discard the red ones. She can’t remember whether he hates the red ones or is afraid of them, and she wonders briefly where all the red ones go.
“Excuse me.” Boris does not acknowledge her but gazes around the room and jiggles the loafer from his toes.
In the Battle of Dunkirk, she is Belgium.
Jim sits bent in his chair, head in hands. “Coleridge,” he mutters, then louder, “Kafka.” The newt pauses behind his cubicle and Jim turns to him. “Conrad!” he shouts. “Flau-Flaubert!”
The newt trembles slightly. “Epilepsy?” he whispers.
“Writer’s block!” Jim shouts. “Creative inhibition. Writer’s fucking block!”
“Now, now,” the newt says, coming to stand over his desk. “All your notes, Casaubon,” he says, slapping his cheek in mock distress. “All those rows of volumes—will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to make your vast knowledge useful to the world?”
“Stop!” Jim shouts. “Stop quoting from nineteenth-century novels. I can’t take it anymore. Why don’t you teach high school?”
“Because this is more challenging, Jim.”
Flooding the Zone
Boris hops up on the nearest desk, shoeless, and claps his hands twice. “Flood the zone, folks! We have to flood the zone! Why are you all standing around?” Clap, clap. “You all have your boroughs, now get to it. Let’s see some enthusiasm!”
Lena stands with several reporters, gazing up at him. He hops from desk to desk, as if Vesuvius is erupting and he has found the one elevated area, which he intends to keep for himself.
“Metabolism!” he cries. “Let’s see some high, high metabolism!”
“How many M&M’s has he had?” one reporter mutters.
“You’ve got your assignments, people,” Boris calls down to them. “Your chariot-carpools await downstairs.”
The reporters scatter. Lena looks up at Boris and clears her throat. “Excuse me. I’m Lena from the Recording Room.” She feels a dark blush flood her chest. “I’m here to—”
Boris looks down and cups his ear. “I can’t hear you. Here,” he says, pushing a pink message pad with his foot, which is skinny and curved like a scythe. “Write it down.”
She writes it down. It occurs to her that the doomed Vesuvians did try to bite the ankle of the elevated one. She considers the bony, silky-socked ankle.
Boris bends and reads from the pad at his feet: “My name is Lena. I am here from the Recording Room to take dictation.”
The foot pushes a headset toward her. Boris points (“over there”), claps again, and hops away. A frantic news clerk shouts for someone to take a feed. Lena raises her headset in the air, and the clerk points to an empty cubicle.
Stories pour in as reporters call in from the five boroughs, creating their articles without pens or computers and passing their cell phones for direct quotes. Nurses in Bellevue are keeping premature babies alive in the dark after the generator overheats and quits. Stranded commuters wander onto the sidewalks as bars and restaurants fling open their doors to give away beer and ice cream.
“We’re all sweaty, we’re all hot, but so what? It’s not terrorism. We’re all alive and we might as well drink them while they’re cold,” says Ryan Bryan, a trader from Hoboken.
Lena takes call after call. On the Lower East Side a guy is serving beer to people sitting in traffic. In Bushwick, the neighborhood is quiet this time, unlike during the 1977 blackout. A forty-nine-year-old postal worker remembers the summer of ’77 fondly because he acquired four couches, two or three stereos, and other “stuff.” “Even the churchgoing folks were looting in seventy-seven,” he says.
A Brooklyn-bound train is stuck on the Manhattan Bridge, and passengers can be seen “with their sweaty palms pressed against the windows.”
Record of the Times
Across the room, a group has formed around Jim, who is muttering and banging his hands on the keyboard.
“Don’t you have it yet, Jim?” Boris asks. “Just slug it, type it, dump it. We need it.”
“It won’t come,” Jim says. “I’m blocked.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” the newt asks before biting into a recently arrived barbecue sandwich from the buffet table.
“You’re blocked?” Boris says. “What do you need, Ex-Lax?”
“Is that what you want me to produce?” Jim cries, looking up from his white computer screen. “Shit?”
“Come on, Jim,” the newt says, “you’re at the Record. You have every resource at your disposal.”
“Yeah,” says Boris, “so dispose.”
“I can’t write with you hovering.”
“I know what you can write. Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, I’m a reporter who can’t write. I work for the best newspaper in the world. Everyone takes my calls. When we have to work late, they feed us. I have an expense account that is never questioned. We have union hours and union compensation that allows us all to buy nice little houses in Montclair, where we’re invited to dinner parties and tasteful social-justice demonstrations at the Unitarian church. But Miss Lonelyhearts, deadlines have got me down. Would it really be so bad if they gave my byline and a nice blank box where the words should be? Everyone knows my style anyhow.”
“Oh, come off it, Boris. Go away.”
Boris leans over and lowers his voice and hisses, “You may be one of Ralph’s favorites,” he says, “but you still have to meet deadlines.”
Jim lifts his head and smiles at something past Boris’s shoulder. “Yes, of course, I’ll have it for you, Boris.”
Boris turns, then—
The Man Who Loves Yeats
Everyone in the newsroom turns to silently acknowledge a man wearing a straw panama hat: the executive editor. Ralph passes by cubicles as if on a pulley, only his torso and head visible above the partitions. He ascends the staircase to heaven, and Lena remembers the memo he issued after the terrorist attacks, quoting Yeats: “a terrible beauty is born.”
Just like a southerner, she says to herself, to give you Yeats when you need Celan.
There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
“Lord of the Flies,” one of the reporters mutters.
“No,” another says. “Ralph was the hero. Jack was the leader, savage, self-absorbed bastard. Our Ralph is a Jack.”
Lena has known that Ralph plays favorites and has sensed that he is losing popularity in the newsroom, but she hadn’t known he is despised.
Another reporter joins the two and asks what they’re talking about.
“Ralph.”
“Did you see his article in New York magazine? Everything the man writes is a ten-thousand-word ode to himself.”
“Yeah, even when it’s two thousand.”
LENA TAKES A call about the sewage disaster at the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Harlem, which is operating on generators, but millions of gallons of raw sewage have begun to collect and overflow. A diver is preparing to swim through forty feet of black muck to find the faulty valve.
By 2 a.m., calls have dropped off and she removes her headset. She stands to go and looks around for permission to leave. Boris is nowhere to be seen, though she does spot his empty loafers on the food table. Someone has made celery-stick figures with baby carrot arms; the loafers are their boat. “Help” is spelled out in red M&M’s.
She turns to look back at the newsroom from the stairwell door. Perhaps the rectangular room with the central spiral staircase is the right layout, because the news is laid out in columns, but in the center of all the stories are echoes of the past, the spiral of history.
Russell, with a red backpack slung over one shoulder, emerges from a cubicle and walks toward her.
“Hey, I hear they’ve set up a bar in the auditorium. Come check it out with me.”
The back of the auditorium is dim, but generators are powering the lights onstage, where a long foldout table displays several liquor bottles and two Styrofoam coolers. A guy who looks too young to be an intern but is, in fact, a star business reporter is draped over one of the coolers. “It’s melting the Styrofoam,” he cries. “It’s eating it! That’s in my stomach.” Several others gather around the cooler, scoop the pink liquid into paper cups, and cheer.
Russell grabs two beers and they find seats in the back row just as a suspiciously tan man enters the auditorium and strides toward the stage.
“Frank Slape,” Russell says. “He used to be a good reporter, a very good reporter. He got his start in metro, made his name in Vietnam, became London bureau chief. And then he went all terrorism expert. Now he gabs and gabs all day, jabber, jabber, jabber, CNN, MSNBC, he’ll talk to anybody with a camera and a big mike. Look at that face. It was a decent face and now he’s just another talking head with orange makeup.” He shakes his head sadly. “That’s the walking demise of journalism right there. God, it was a sad day when the legs became the heads.”
There is a cry from the stage, where Boris and some others have again snatched the memoir from the clerk’s bag and take turns reading from it, standing on chairs and holding it up high as the clerk flails his arms uselessly in the air.
“I had crept under the covers of my parents’ bed and had lain with them for several minutes before I rubbed my eyes and saw that there were four of us, not three. Mr. Jackson from across the street, the man with muttonchops and the pretty wife whose hands often shook, was with us.”
The reporters answer with catcalls. Many expressions pass across the clerk’s face—humiliation, anger, streaks of frustration. A twitching smile also tugs at the corners of his mouth because this is the most attention his writing has ever received from the Record.
“It’s nice to see you out of the Recording Room,” Russell says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you anywhere else, except locked away with your machine. Not in the hall, not in the elevator, even—”
“Do you think I’m a ghost?”
“No, of course not. It’s just nice to see you out, that’s all. But you look sad.”
“The job is starting to wear on me. It’s hard sitting in that room all day with the tapes and the headsets. Does the news ever get to you?”
“I’m a reporter. We’re all junkies. So there’s no hope for us.”
“I sit alone all day with the voices. I’m turning into a tape recorder,” she says. “It’s frightening. I’m turning into a machine.”
He leans in and kisses her lightly along the hairline, near her ear. “No, not a machine at all.”
“Thanks,” she says, averting her face with shy pleasure. “Do you know what caused the blackout?”
“Not yet. Some are blaming Canada, some are blaming Ohio. Some are blaming birds.”
“Birds?”
“It’s the least likely theory, seems nearly impossible on this scale. But they found a pile of dead pigeons under a huge power line. So someone came up with the brilliant theory that they all perched up there together and flapped their wings in unison and committed mass suicide, causing a short in the line that caused a kind of chain reaction.”
“Pigeon mass suicide?”
“Well, you know, they make good scapegoats.”
“Like Canada?”
He smiles and she notices that he looks tired. It is the first time she has seen him unshaven. So, he grows actual stubble like other men.
“Is it possible?”
“Is what possible?”
“About the pigeons.”
“Barely. It was probably something simple—trees weren’t trimmed, power lines went out, electricity found other routes and caused power surges. From there, relays shut down parts of the grid, and then, a cascade of failures.”
“ ‘Cascade of failures,’ nice phrase.”
“Thanks. We were halfway through a case of warm Rolling Rock when the prose began to flow. I think that’s the same time the bird blackout theory developed.”
“Drinking in the newsroom?”
“A little. Are you shocked?”
“No, relieved.”
“Well, it’s not the Gray Lady.”
She sees that he has a cowlick and just below, on his forehead, the faint imprint of four print-stained fingers.
“You have a”—she motions to his face—“newsprint tattoo.”
He rubs his forehead and blushes. “The dangers and indignities of journalism.”
He leans toward her, takes off his glasses, and is more exposed than if he were naked. His eyes are weak, vulnerable, expectant. Journalists terrify her with their endless need.
“Carol, are you OK?”
“I have to go, Russell. I have to go.”
The air on the street is just as stifling and still as it was inside the building, and Times Square is a concrete cage. She walks along with others as if wading through wet black wool, following the illuminated path just beyond her flashlight. People are still out, but now they all seem sleepy drunk and disoriented from gulping warm beer and black air.
At Parkside her room is sweltering, and she opens the window wide, slumps down in a chair, and rests her head on the sill. The city has changed into a strange and silent place, as if blanketed in black snow. She can hear the distant sound of drunken voices from the unseen streets. She stares outside, remembering the brick wall opposite and the snatch of Gramercy Park that can be seen to the left. If white is the color of panic, what is blackness, this blackness? A black blanket thrown over the panic, not snuffing it out, no, not the absence of panic, not here, not now, not anymore. But still it is a soothing darkness, a hot black frost that, for once, allows New Yorkers to spill out onto the streets with a sense of wonder that they can never show in the light. And more thrilling is the notion that there is danger underneath, that they are children walking on the sleeping dragon’s back.
She reaches behind her without turning, touches the telephone. The plastic receiver feels solid in her sweaty hands. She lifts it, still not turning, and lets it drop. She repeats the movement and listens to the sound of the receiver dropping back into its cradle. The third time, she turns toward the phone, groping for it in the darkness. She lifts the receiver, hears the dial tone, punches the Recording Room number by touch. The overnight machine clicks and she hears her own voice.
“You have reached the Recording Room’s dictation mailbox. Please note that this voice mailbox has a maximum duration of twenty minutes. If your dictation is longer than twenty minutes and you are disconnected, please hang up and call back to continue dictating. Your copy will be transcribed during working hours, which start at nine a.m. Please begin with your name, location, and the desk or editor who should receive the transcript. Please include punctuation for accuracy, speak at a normal conversational pace, and spell names phonetically, the first time only. Begin dictating when you hear the tone.”
She hears the ancient tone and sits in the dark holding the receiver.
“Note to self,” she says, as she usually does when she calls to leave herself a reminder for the morning. But tonight she can’t think of anything to say. “Note to self,” she repeats. She hangs up, but after a few minutes, she dials again. “You have reached the Recording Room . . .”
“Hello,” she says, “this is Lena.” She is surprised at herself, at her own voice, and she waits in the silence.
“I guess this is crazy. Of course you can’t hear me. I mean, not like that. Right? But I saw you on the bus and I really want to talk to you. I can’t say why, exactly, but it’s true.
“How to begin? It’s dark here, too, tonight. There’s been a blackout, and the whole city is a blind spot except the small seeing-spots made by flashlights.
“They say the blind have heightened other senses to compensate. Did you feel you had to listen to everything? Didn’t you ever get tired of listening? I do.
“What did you see when you lived in darkness? We are all looking into the darkness here, longing to see what is no longer there.”
She hangs up and lays her head on the windowsill. A sudden summer rain is coming, the air smells of it, and a damp breeze comes through the window. Looking into the blacked-out night, she thinks of all the solitary places she has hidden from the mountain lion, and though she has never found him, he has always tracked her. She wonders why an imaginary beast has always come for her, and she stares into the darkness trying to face the terror of the unseen.
CHAPTER FOUR
City Loses Body of Woman Killed by Lions; Blackout Blamed on Canada
In the morning, she awakens in the chair, rubs her stiff neck, and flips the light switch. Power.
She buys the Record on her way to work and sits on a bench to scan the headlines. Katheryn’s Baghdad bombing article is on page 7. She scans it almost without reading, like a seamstress scanning a garment for a loose stitch. She scans the article a second time and a third before she realizes what she is searching for. The charred foot is gone, edited out. First, it is ripped from the body. Then even the phantom foot is amputated from the black skeleton of newspaper ink.
