The Transcriptionist, page 5
She lives in this shadow state, always reading the news she knows over the news that makes it into print, and not just reading the shadows, but also living in them, somewhere between waiting and searching. This is what chills her, the erasure, the amputation, the phantom words. Sometimes these lost words that have been edited out of existence drift through her dreams in the form of a monster dropping unmatched shoes and lifeless limbs, charred feet, so that in her nightmare she must chase after the floating creature, holding up these nameless, possessionless things, crying, “You dropped something. Don’t you need this? Don’t you?”
IN THE RECORD’S lobby, she nods to the security guards, swipes her photo ID (they’re fatter now: the new ones have microchips, making it easier to identify bodies in the rubble).
In the elevator, she stares at her shoes because it seems unfair to see fellow Recordians so close up. It is undeniable whose hair is thinning, who wears too much cologne, who should wear a little more. Sometimes she recognizes reporters whose interviews she has transcribed. There are a few of them who speak to her, but most of them don’t. Standing so close, she remembers personal things they have probably forgotten that they revealed. It used to surprise her how much the reporters talk about themselves. The business reporter on her left is on Atkins; married six months, he hunted the “big five” on his honeymoon safari in Kenya. Legrande Haze, the flak-jacket-wearing metro reporter who gets on at the third floor, once bit a member of the housekeeping staff.
The doors open and she automatically glances up. Breath is sucked in. People move quickly, bumping into one another. She is pinned against the back panel, a broad-shouldered block of a man before her: advertising manager, wears his class ring and ties with tiny golf clubs. She cannot see, but then she hears. It is the publisher. Someone speaks to him, calls him by name, Howard—that’s what everyone calls him to his face. Sometimes behind his back they use his nickname, Kernel, which he is said to hate, just as his father hated his—Popcorn. Or maybe he didn’t. She has never seen Popcorn, doesn’t know if he’s still living. He retired in the 1990s, before she came to the Record, and is spoken of with reverence, with words like “dignity,” “constancy,” “legacy.” But perhaps that is because he presided over the Record during its golden years.
Someone asks Howard about his father. The query is perfectly scripted, just like Lena learned in a mandatory development workshop. You are always to have two thirty-second dialogues prepared (one social, one professional) in case you are in the elevator with “senior management.”
The publisher wears critter suspenders and is said to be a sort of nice man.
She pushes the Recording Room door open—the handle is still waiting for the repair team—hangs the phones on their hooks, checks the overnight machine. The gray machine (the dimensions of a 1950s bread box) shows one recorded call, her own. She presses “erase.” “Are you sure you want to erase?” the screen prompts. “If yes, press ‘erase’ now.” She pauses, then presses “save.”
The pigeon jumps as usual when she raises the blinds.
“Alarmed anew,” she says, tapping on the glass. “And yet every day it’s the same.” She lifts the window. “I said, every day it’s the same. How’s life on the ledge?”
But the bird shows no interest.
“You know, pigeon, when you stand on the ledge, eventually you have to jump off. That’s kind of the point.”
The pigeon remains unmoved by this observation.
“Where did you come from?” She leans out and looks left and right. “Aren’t pigeons supposed to mate for life? Who ever heard of a bachelor pigeon? And I know you’re a male. I see it in your indifferent eyeballs. Were you a homing pigeon who got tired? Or did you just abandon your flock? Tired of the wife and kids, of being pigeon-pecked and holding the family together with string and seed and recycled straw? Well, if you came looking for anonymity, you came to the right ledge.”
She backs away from the window, leaving it partly open. Today’s Record: The Catholic Church has removed babies from limbo. A Mount Everest climber is left to die as his fellow trekkers file past him. The Colombian Nukak tribe has decided to join modern civilization. They walked naked out of the forest and are living in an encampment just inside the city. They have no concept of property, government, countries, money, or words like “future.” When asked if they are sad, they say no and “howl with laughter.”
Her hand, which has been holding the corner of the page, drops. It is not Russell’s byline; it is a wire story about the blind woman.
“Arlene Lebow, who committed suicide by entering the lions’ den at the Bronx Zoo, is missing. Ms. Lebow’s sister, Ellen Lebow, who did not learn of her sister’s death until yesterday, has been trying to locate the body.
“A spokesman for Mount Sinai, Fred Klamm, confirmed that Ms. Lebow was admitted on July 8. After death was declared, her body was sent to the hospital morgue and then to the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital Center.
“ ‘We take this very seriously,’ Mr. Klamm said. ‘We try very hard to find relatives of the deceased.’
“The morgue was not able to locate Ms. Lebow’s name in its records, but the director of public affairs said officials were continuing to check.
“Ellen Lebow said she learned of her sister’s death when she got a call from the hospital’s billing department concerning the ambulance that transported Ms. Lebow from the zoo to the hospital.
“It is possible that Ms. Lebow was buried in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island, but no burial record has been found.
“ ‘They say I owe them $595,’ Ellen Lebow said, referring to an ambulance bill from Mount Sinai. ‘But they owe me my sister.’ ”
LENA CLOSES THE paper and snaps the interview tape into the Dictaphone, but she can’t concentrate, can’t empty out to accept the words.
She can see the article on Arlene from her chair; the newspaper lies open on her desk. Arlene is a fragile skeleton of black ink on a bed of cheap pulp paper. Tomorrow she will be yesterday’s news, her body blowing along the gutter, perhaps stepped or spit on, dropped in the street, and embedded in a tire’s tread as the car continues on, its unknowing occupants cursing or singing or laughing.
She takes a scarf from her bag and spreads it over the desk, folding it slowly, carefully, and tying it over her eyes, snug, then looser, then snug again. The keyboard feels smooth and foreign under her fingers and she pulls the scarf down to see whether she has typed anything by accident. She has not. She readjusts the scarf and presses the foot pedal. The soundless time on the tape begins, and she listens, concentrating for the first word in the dark.
In the waiting, she realizes it is not a mask she has been searching for but a hood, with no opening for eyes, mouth, nose. Just darkness.
“At the end of the day,” the business reporter is saying, “this shopping mall is—”
“No, no, no,” another voice says. It’s the owner of a new skyscraper near Central Park. “Please do not call it a shopping mall. It is not a shopping mall. It is a vertical luxury experience.”
How can a body with a name disappear along with all the edited words? Lena wonders while typing. If Arlene has been buried in a potter’s field, it will be as if she never existed.
“I see,” says the reporter. “Then in this vertical experience—”
“It’s not just any skyscraper,” the skyscraper owner says. “We have worked very hard to preserve the views of Central Park with a European glass curtain wall. Each of my properties has its own intellectual soul. That’s why in Harlem we are building a residential property that evokes a giraffe.”
“You’re talking about the boutique hotel chain that is in the West Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and—”
“No, no, no,” the voice says. “We are not a chain. We are a small luxury hotel experience. We have a pillow concierge at every luxury location. We have butlers who were trained by the former butler for the Prince of Wales.”
She closes her eyes behind the scarf and types with the automatic hearing she has developed over the past four years. It is as if her hearing has two levels. On the automatic level, she hears the words that stream through the headphones, fading in and out: “the view is free . . . all are welcome . . .” And on the second level, she hears what she recites to herself while transcribing, often poetry. She blinks, pushes the scarf up on her forehead, lifts her foot off the pedal, and looks at what she has typed: “The vertical luxury experience is pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. For example, the stunning view of Central Park is free to all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered.”
“I suppose they wouldn’t want Ezra Pound in the vertical luxury experience,” she says aloud, as she backs the cursor across the screen and watches the letters disappear. This is a danger of the job. When she is in her transcriptionist’s trance, she types whatever rolls through her head. This is why she once had a film director appreciating the “signage in porn films” instead of “the signage in foreign films.”
She presses the foot pedal, lifts it again. She pulls the scarf back down around her eyes and types. For long stretches it seems that she has eliminated the need to hear and is simply the conduit, transferring the voice from tape to type. The tape turns around its spool, and the voices go on and on; the sound comes through her earbuds, as if it has to travel no distance at all, as if the voices originate in her ear and bloom there.
The interviewee asks to go off the record. It surprises Lena that when people ask to go off the record, the reporter always agrees yet very rarely turns off the tape recorder. At first she did not know whether she should transcribe off-the-record comments. She felt guilty listening to them, but nothing has ever been revealed that she found shocking. So now she transcribes the off-the-record words with all the others, and she does not even pause when she types the stage direction in brackets for the transcript: “[Interviewee requests to go off the record for the following comments.]”
The tape ends, the voices stop, and she removes her headset, unties the scarf. Standing at the window, she looks at the pigeon. “Free among us. Is that why people hate you? No smashing success, no shattering failure, nothing to prove, no fear of being sent back to Ohio or Kansas or Iowa. You’re simply adaptable, indestructible.”
Suddenly self-conscious, she turns from the window, takes the phones off the hooks to forward calls to the overnight machine, and walks out without closing the door. She takes the stairs to the vending machines on the fifth floor. The floor is shiny gray, the hallway is wider than on other floors, and large drums of what Lena has always assumed are printing chemicals line the wall. She passes a long file cabinet with drawers labeled A to Y (no Z) and a red sign that says NO LOITERING. No loitering? The floor is completely deserted.
She pauses at each of the four vending machines to study the selections of chips, candy bars, crackers, peanuts, which brings to mind the schoolyard stories of biting into peanut candy bars so old they are full of worms.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, almost covering another fainter, human sound. She looks in both directions: no one. There is a room across the hall, but the blue double doors are closed and she hears no movement behind them.
She turns back to the limited offerings and wonders how often they fill these machines. There’s Shasta cream soda, A&W root beer, Vernors ginger ale, and Mightee grape soda, cans so old they could be colored tin reliquaries.
She gives the machines a final look and turns to leave, empty handed. There it is again, the sound. She stands still and listens. A cough. Yes, definitely a cough. She crosses the hall and puts her ear to the blue door. Another cough, and then the muffled sound of a man’s voice singing: “Now the day is over—damn, now how did it go?” A sigh.
She lifts her head and looks at the closed door. Who could this be? The man who fills the vending machines got locked in a room twenty years ago and never escaped?
Automatically, her right hand rises to her shoulder, ready to rap on the door. She looks at her fist and lets it drop.
“Now the day is over,” the thin voice repeats, trailing off.
Definitely an old man. She could transcribe this voice, could identify it from a panel of voices. She knocks lightly.
No answer.
She clears her throat. “Sir? I think it’s ‘Night is drawing nigh,’ ” she half sings to the closed door.
“That’s it,” the voice says. “Of course, ‘Night is drawing nigh.’ ”
There is a pause and she takes two steps back and waits.
“Shadows of the evening—” Pause. “Shadows of the evening—”
She realizes she is being prompted, so she sing-says, “Um, steal across the sky.”
There are shuffling sounds.
“Who’s there?”
“Lena.”
The door opens a few inches and a lined face appears in the gap, as if suspended. “Who sent you?”
“No one, no one, I just—I was at the vending machines”—she turns and points—“and I heard you. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I heard your voice and was curious.”
The door opens a few more inches.
“Did anyone see you?”
“No.”
He motions her inside. The room is a large square that gets its light from a row of north-facing windows, some of which have been patched neatly with newspaper and masking tape. Tall metal shelves filled with ancient-looking volumes line one wall. One of the clothbound volumes, a bottle of clear liquid, and a cloth are on a round table in the center of the room, along with a few browning bananas. The scent of ripe fruit mixes with the smell of old paper, the sweet smell of decay.
“You can keep a secret, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
She waits for the secret to be revealed, but he seems satisfied with the silence and follows her gaze to the bananas on the table. There is one deep crease across his wide forehead, like a bird’s wingspan drawn by a child.
“Is this your work?” she asks, nodding at the open volume.
“I’m trying to mend these obituaries,” he says. “Until I patched the holes in the windows, this had become a pigeon coop. And you know the way of the living, they are not always attentive to the dead.”
“So you’re a preservationist.”
A sharp knock sounds at the window and he crosses the room silently and lifts the window by the painted-over iron handles. A pigeon peers in from the ledge.
“This is a bold one. He always wants to dine alone.” He opens a brown paper bag and sprinkles crumbs on the sill. “He always returns after the others have gone.”
While the man is busy at the window, she looks around. Hulking green file cabinets take up the middle of the room. There is a neat pallet in the corner. He can’t live here, and yet it seems that he might.
“Do you like pigeons?” he asks, closing the window and coming to sit at the table.
“I never really thought about it.” Befriending pigeons does seem frighteningly eccentric—at least it used to seem that way—but she can’t say that, especially since she’s begun talking to them herself. There is a man she sees sometimes in the park who sits very still until pigeons perch on him, his shoulders, his legs, his head. He feeds them and occasionally announces, “I’m a monument.”
“They’re tenacious, I suppose.”
He nods.
“Maybe invincible. Darwin liked pigeons, right? All pigeons descend from one pigeon? Still, they certainly do, you know—”
“Shit a lot?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the older volumes that were exposed to their droppings,” he says, pointing to the shelf along the wall. “Those”—he points to the file cabinets—“are safe in their mass industrial tomb.”
“All those are obits, too?”
He nods. “It’s bulky, but not as big as you’d think for all those bodies.”
“How many are in there?”
“Thousands. They’re full, been full for a long time. That’s why no one comes in here. There’s no space left in the morgue, and anyway, they use computers now. All that waiting upstairs, being researched, being written, being edited.” He snaps his fingers. “And then in the space of a day, printed, recycled.”
“In the space of a day,” she agrees. “So all those stories are just forgotten. All those people, the disappeared.”
“It’s important to remember,” he says, “but it’s important to make room, too. That’s what my son says anyway.”
She has heard about the Record’s morgue, the vast collection of clips with a legendary card catalog of news makers and bios of those whose obits wait to be written or, in some cases, are written and wait only to be updated and printed. Some of the obits have been written years in advance, the occasional result being a Record obituary with the byline of a deceased writer.
“Don’t people come in here sometimes to get clips?”
He shakes his head. “The morgue, this morgue anyway, has been forgotten. It’s all been digitized. It’s hard to believe, but that’s what they say. Those in the filing cabinets are just the paper copies. The digital files and the microfiche have been moved to a building on Sixth Avenue. They don’t call it the morgue anymore. They call it the archive. The morgue has ceased to exist.”
He looks at her, his hazel eyes uncomfortably observant, the curtain of his pupils parted, as if she could enter purgatory through his eyes.
She takes the newspaper clipping of Arlene from her pocket and smooths it out on the table. He does not comment but continues to look at her; his face is abraded, as if it has been painted, scraped away, repainted, scraped away, worked and worn, remnants of the past still visible.
“Who’s this?”
“She’s been lost, too, in a different kind of morgue.”
“She’s dead though.”
