The Transcriptionist, page 6
“Yes.”
“Some of my best friends are dead.”
“I saw her the day she died, or the day before, a matter of days at most. We were on the same bus. We talked a little, it seemed a bit strange but not distressingly so. And now she’s dead. She killed herself in the lions’ den, or had the lions do it. And I can’t help thinking now, what if she was asking me something and I wasn’t listening? It—she haunts me.”
“We haunt ourselves.” He holds out his hand, which she shakes, surprised at his grip. “My name is Kov.”
“I’m Lena.”
“Lena,” he says, looking down at the article, “it looks like there’s enough information here to start your search.”
“But she’s dead, and her body’s been lost.”
“She has a sister.”
“Contact her sister? That would be presumptuous, an imposition.”
“Well, then, there’s only the lion.”
“I doubt he’s talking.”
“Depends on what you’re asking.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Mudslide Buries Hundreds in Pakistan; Teenagers Say Oral Sex Is Not Sex
In the hall she turns back and looks at the closed blue door, which she never knew opened onto the forgotten files of the dead. The Record records, but it doesn’t remember. Neither does she. Already she is uncertain of Arlene’s face, the sharpness of her features, the length of her fingers. She does not take the elevator to the eleventh floor; she takes the stairs, two at a time, up six flights.
In the Recording Room she picks up the phone and dials information. She cannot give herself time to look in the phonebook. She cannot give herself time to think, time to change her mind. The automated voice gives her the number for Bellevue and she dials quickly with shaking hands.
“Hello,” she says into the receiver. “I’m calling for information about Arlene Lebow.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Lena Respass,” she says. “I’m a reporter for the Record.”
“What’s your press number?”
“My press number?”
“Yes, your press number. Anybody could call and say they were a reporter for the Record. What did you say your name was again?”
“My name . . . ,” she says weakly before hanging up.
She looks out the dirty window at the cheap hotel across the street. The pigeon stares without moving when she leans out beside him.
“I’m not going to panic, pigeon. People probably lie to get information all the time. Anyway, she won’t remember my name.”
They both look at the strip of black pavement below and then west, toward the Hudson. She leans farther over the extended window ledge, which is like a small cement balcony, rectangular and thigh-deep. I don’t know what it’s called, she thinks. I don’t know the word for it. There is a slight breeze; it’s quiet and peaceful above the city. Seen from above, taxis seem to glide instead of jerk; tourists look serene and bovine in their slow-moving herds.
“New York, give me some of you! New York come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much.” She brushes off her hands and pulls her head back inside. “Pigeon,” she says, tapping the window, “those are the words of Mr. Arturo Bandini, though he was talking about LA. We probably wouldn’t do too well in LA, you and me. You have to drive. That’s right, if you won’t fly you’ll have to drive to the gym to ride the exercise bike.”
Someone coughs behind her and she turns to see Russell studying her with his head tilted to the side. For several long seconds, neither of them utters a word. She turns back to the window. This would be a good time to jump.
“Hi, Carol.”
“Hi, Russell.”
She waits for him to laugh or make a joke about her talking to pigeons, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t, but he does look behind her, at the window.
“Russell, do you ever track people down? I mean, do you ever wonder about the people you write about, what their lives are like after you write about them, about their lives off the page?”
“No, not really, it would drive a reporter mad.”
“Well, if you were tracking someone down for a story, if you were looking for someone, how would you go about it?”
“Are they lost?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you could try the Internet, or, the old-fashioned way, look in the white pages.”
“Right, it’s just that . . .”
He lets go of the door and looks at her directly, which he seldom does. Usually he is looking down at the tape in his hands or at the window blinds. “It’s just what, Carol?”
“It’s difficult to explain.”
“Well, it’s more difficult if they don’t want to be found. Do they want to be found?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, you start with a name. Everyone has a name.”
“Yes,” she says. “Some of us have more than one.”
And with timing that makes her suspect that the gods are both bored and malicious, Morris the art critic sticks his head in the door.
“Lena, how busy are you?”
Morris is the other Recordian who calls her by name.
“Her name—” Russell starts to say, but she cuts him off.
“Hi, Morris. I need to finish something for Russell first. Do you know each other?”
They shake hands, say they know of each other.
“What do you have, Morris? And when do you need it?”
“This is an interview with the artist Veronica Vax. Do you know her work?”
Lena and Russell nod politely. Veronica Vax’s exhibits involve a group of naked women with model measurements standing still for hours while wearing dominatrix stilettos and singing nursery rhymes. In Paris they wore blindfolds designed by Karl Lagerfeld. In New York, Chanel key chains dangled from their pubic hair, which was groomed into logos by the photographer Terry Richardson.
“I think it’s quite fascinating how she reifies postmodern hegemony—”
“Please stop.” Lena closes her eyes and leans against the panel of telephones.
“Are you all right?” Russell asks, putting a hand on her arm. “You look pale.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Just do the best you can with this,” Morris says.
“Sure, you’re second in line.”
She picks up the request form and sees—on the line asking the date the transcript is needed—he has written “ASAP,” just above the plea to “please be more specific than ASAP.”
“I’ll get to it as soon as possible,” she says, and Morris strolls out.
“You went white just now,” Russell says. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. It just reminded me of graduate school. Whenever I hear about reifying the hegemony, I want to run for my life.”
“What was the program?”
“Literature.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“I was cured.” She does not say what she really feels about language failing her, because it is too painful to think of the time when she believed that language could save people.
“How were you cured?”
“With time, I guess. Academic language is wretched. And after reading works like ‘Reclaiming the Clit: Lacan and the Metastasis of Masturbation,’ or ‘A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body,’ I thought—”
“All the best titles were taken?”
“Something like that.”
She almost says, but doesn’t, that it would have meant renouncing the language of her origins, the language of the rural South. That she could not do this had surprised her most of all. She had had no trouble renouncing all the rest of it—the church, the landscape, even her own family. She had not visited her father in two years when he died from a snakebite. Apparently he had poured hydrogen peroxide on the wound and went about weeding the ditch until he sat down and died, a bloodstained rag around the hand that still held the hoe when he was found the following day.
“Was it really that bad?” Russell asks.
“There was also ‘Autoerotics, Anal Erotics, and’—”
“Stop, stop! Consider my sensitive journalist’s ears.”
He covers his ears, then uncovers them when she purses her lips together. “Carol, why didn’t you correct Morris just now when he called you Lena? A little postgraduate vindictiveness, laughing at the critic behind his back?”
“Oh, it’s not that important.”
“It’s your name, Carol, of course it’s important.”
“Oh, that.”
“I was going to correct him, but I thought you would.”
“Russell, it’s just that”—she takes a deep breath and says it quickly, quietly, on the exhale—“my name is Lena.”
He winces. “You mean all this time . . . and you never . . . and I—”
“I’m sorry. At first it didn’t matter and then it was too late.”
“I can’t believe all this time you let me call you by the wrong name.”
“I’m sorry, Russell.” Maybe she has it all wrong. She hadn’t been amused by his mistake, but still she hadn’t corrected him. Maybe it is true that sins of omission are as bad as all the others.
The phone rings and she presses “record,” lifts the receiver.
“Bye, Lena.”
“I’m sorry, Russell,” she says, but he is walking away and doesn’t turn back. She steps out into the hall with the phone pressed to her ear and the long umbilical phone cord trailing behind her. She watches him step into the elevator and she backs into the Recording Room, wraps the cord around her fingers, pushes the door closed with her foot.
The call is from a foreign reporter, Eric Isaacs, who is having technical problems and is unable to send his story by e-mail. He is one of Lena’s favorite journalists; there is modesty in his voice and he always recognizes her as a human on the other end of the line. He does not give punctuation, and in this case she takes it as a show of respect. Today he dictates five paragraphs about a mudslide in Pakistan that has left many dead or missing. Then the line goes dead.
“ ‘The earth shook, then I felt mud in my mouth.’
“The mud is thirty to forty feet deep in places, and authorities fear that some bodies will not be found.”
Lena empties out and presses the foot pedal, letting the words flow through.
“But the search for four-year-old Aarya will go on, according to her uncle, who said they would continue digging until she was recovered.
“ ‘We will not leave anyone behind,’ he said. ‘That is not our way.’ ”
There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night.
While she is transcribing, an envelope slides through the door’s mail slot and falls on the floor. She ignores it and continues to type. Sometimes reporters don’t enter the Recording Room; they just put their tapes in envelopes and drop them through the slot. She can e-mail the finished transcript, drop the tapes in interoffice mail, and eliminate any need for personal contact.
She is standing by the recording phones rewinding the tape when she looks down and sees that she is standing on the envelope. She picks it up; it is too light and flat to hold a tape. Inside is a single sheet of paper, a photocopy.
The paper is light as ash in her hands. She tilts it toward the light, and her hand trembles slightly. It is beautiful. In the X-rayed image, the bird is helpless and appears to be lying on his back. All he possesses, anonymous bones, laid bare. The bones do not look brittle, but solid where they should be solid and light where they should be light. The skull, which seems impossibly small, is the perfect size to cap the bean-size brain. How can bones be so white, the white of a thousand frosts, when they have never been exposed to any elements?
Here is the homely pigeon, transformed.
There is a soft knock on the door.
“Hi, Russell.”
“Lena, I came back because I didn’t want you to think I was mad. What’s this?” he asks, putting his coffee cup down on the transcription log and picking up the X-ray.
“Someone dropped it through the mail slot.”
“What, a joke? This is creepy. Do you know who did it?”
“No, it’s not creepy. Yes, I know who.”
“Are you sure it’s a joke? It looks sinister to me.”
She takes the paper from his hand. “It’s a sort of calling card. I think it’s beautiful,” she says. “Look at how delicate, look at the wing bones.”
“Beautiful?” He walks past her to the window, separates the blinds with his fingers, and looks out. “Like your friend out here on the ledge?”
She doesn’t answer but picks up his coffee cup, which is smudged with ink fingerprints, and turns it in her hand.
“The journalist’s signature. In another century, words were written on the fingertips to help meditation,” she says. “Touching your fingers would help you remember.” She lightly presses her nails. “Repent, confess, and be content.”
Russell closes his eyes and touches his fingertips. “Rules of the road, ethics hotline, without fear or favor.”
“Are you dropping off a tape?”
“What? No. I just—some of us are going for drinks after work. Would you like to go?”
“Oh, OK.”
SHE SPENDS THE afternoon transcribing an interview for a Sunday magazine story about kids and oral sex. With her headphones on she lapses into her transcriptionist’s trance; she is invisible and has perfect hearing. The voices fill her entire head, they are protected inside her skull, she gives herself up, lets the words course through, and lays them gently but quickly on the page. “Sex is a humongous thing,” a fourteen-year-old girl says on the tape, “but oral sex isn’t the same as sex.”
As she leaves the Record, the magazine interview plays in her head. The girls had spoken without self-consciousness about giving blow jobs. She thinks how strange it is that the social code of girlhood has changed so much in a generation: reputation used to depend on the secrecy of certain acts, and now reputation depends on the publicizing of them.
The bar is a journalist hangout and she recognizes several Record reporters, but she doesn’t see Russell. She orders a scotch and studies the rows of bottles lined up behind the bar in accordance with the universal bar-stocking chart. The universal poster taped to the wall by the cash register shows how to help a tubular figure demonstrating the universal choking sign.
As she sips her drink and looks in the mirror, gazing around the room, she sees Katheryn Keel. What is it about her that marks her so clearly as a predator? Lena wonders. It seems strange that one can see it straightaway, even from the back. She’s nearly six feet, but it’s not the height; it’s something in the stance, or maybe it’s in the faces of the crowd around her. They are like pets just after the terror of being tamed has left their eyes, and now they are docile, content, eager to please.
The man Katheryn is clutching as she holds court is Russell. He smiles at something she says and lifts his head to glance around the room. When their eyes meet, he breaks from Katheryn’s grip and joins her.
“How are you?” His voice sounds different, though she couldn’t say how. “Lena, it’s nice to see you out of your cell.”
Katheryn comes toward them. She is wearing a black silk jumpsuit and, on her huge flat feet, kitten-heel mules, which cause her to sway ever so slightly; overall, she gives the impression of a highly focused, structurally sophisticated, and quite expensive effort, like a skyscraper reinforced against the wind effect.
“Katheryn is just back from Baghdad,” Russell says as he introduces them.
“Russell says you work in the transcription room. It’s so quaint, so obsolete. But I used it the other day when I was leaving Baghdad.”
“I transcribed your story, it was about the bombing in the market.”
Katheryn does not respond but looks up and makes contact with herself in the mirror above the bar, then scans the room for a new audience. Her eyes narrow and she leans against a barstool and kicks off her mules, one of which hits Zibby, a styles reporter, in the arm.
“Ow!”
“I just can’t keep them on another minute. I’ve always thought women who insist on deforming their feet are idiots.”
“That heel hurt. Glad you didn’t take my eye out, Katheryn.”
Katheryn rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet, and everyone is made conscious that she is the tallest woman in the bar. A group of reporters, sniffing a Katheryn war story, drift over.
“That’s nothing. Have you ever been shot at?”
No, they all say, they have not.
“Well,” she says, closing her eyes and inhaling through her nose, “there’s nothing like it for feeling alive. There’s something that happens in war zones, it’s life at its best as well as life at its worst.”
“Maybe it’s best because it’s—” Russell says, but she cuts him off with a wave of her hand.
“Nothing else can compare,” she says, “to being embedded with the United States Marines. The smell of war.” She does another eye-clench, nostril-flare.
Someone says, “The smell of—” but stops as Katheryn opens her eyes and stares with a hardness that stills them all.
“When I was with those men, the Seventh Marines, in the desert in our BDUs—”
“Our BDUs? You’re a journalist—”
“What are BDUs?” Zibby asks.
“Battle dress uniforms.”
“I thought journalists weren’t supposed to wear military uniforms,” Lena says.
Katheryn shrugs and winks. “I looked magnificent. Just kidding. It made sense at the time. When you’re in the desert with the boys and you’re the only journalist with access, it makes sense to wear the uniform. I was the objective observer.” She makes her voice even louder. “I was the lens, no, the organ, the organ through which the moral view of the marines was made visible.”
“But you’re—”
“I said it made sense for me to wear it, Lena. Lena here is a transcriptionist, did you all know that? She types up our work. Isn’t that wonderfully old fashioned? As I was saying, I was the first journalist to embed in Baghdad. And BDUs were a hell of a lot better than kitten heels, even in the heat of hell. But I was talking about the edge, the clarity, the exhilaration of walking in lockstep with death. After a long day in the desert, we drove through Fallujah and stopped at an open marketplace. It was a good day, blazing hot, and no one had died. Some children were playing outside the market and one of them tossed a ball to a marine.”
