The Transcriptionist, page 8
Lena looks down at her hands, unable to answer.
“It’s nice to talk about her, I mean other than as a news story, to remember her. Our parents are gone, we didn’t have a large family. So, go ahead, ask what you want.”
“Did she work?”
“Yes. She was a court reporter.”
“Really?” Lena says, trying to act surprised, though of course she remembers that Arlene told her that. “So we’re both transcriptionists.”
“What do you mean? Newspaper reporters and court reporters aren’t the same thing at all.”
“Of course. I transcribe my own interviews though. It always takes longer than you think it will.”
She puts the tape recorder between them on the coffee table. It had taken a great deal of time for her to choose it, and she had tried the patience of the clerk at the electronics store, who kept telling her that tapes would soon be obsolete and she should consider the new digital recorders, which were smaller and lighter and could store a “tremendous amount of data.” She had tried to explain to him that she didn’t deal in data and couldn’t transcribe interviews on a digital recorder because she used a Dictaphone, but he didn’t know what a Dictaphone was. Even with the minicassette recorder she will have to use the one Dictaphone that plays minicassettes and for some mysterious reason never works as well as the machines that play regular-size cassettes.
“Do you mind if I turn this on?”
“That’s fine. I’m surprised you waited so long. Where were we? Arlene was not reporting, she was recording. She was transcribing exactly what other people were saying, all day, every day. It was a very difficult job—I mean, not only the work, the concentration, the, well, submission to listening to people’s tragedies all day. It was very difficult for her to get the job in the first place. No one had ever heard of a blind court reporter. She had to use a special dictatype machine. She worked extremely hard, and when she passed the exam she was still in her twenties. So she had been absorbing the trials and tribulations of others for years. But she said it wasn’t the murders that finally got to her. It was after she moved to family court, the custody battles, the hideousness of family relations. I could see that she was getting sadder, but it happened gradually. I didn’t know that she had passed from sorrow to futility.”
Lena tries to hide her disconcertment: She and Arlene, both professional listeners, recorders. The recognition between them had been real. She accepts this, though she cannot explain it and knows it is not reasonable.
“Did she ever enjoy the work?”
“At first I think she did. But eventually it began to take quite a toll, more than I knew. I remember a conversation we had some months ago about the case she was working on. It was a fraught trial, very sad; a woman was accused of having her husband murdered while they were divorcing and fighting over custody of their daughter. They played a recording in court of the child screaming—“roaring,” as Arlene called it—as she was being delivered from one parent to the other. Arlene was distraught over this tape, she said she couldn’t transcribe it, there were no words, and after, she couldn’t get away from the sound of the screams. She was also upset that the recording was made in the first place. One parent had secretly recorded the child to show that she didn’t want to go with the other parent. Something about that bothered Arlene tremendously.”
In this moment, Lena sees Ellen’s likeness to her sister, the startling sadness of the smile, a fullness, a shapeliness of the lips. And her hands, the same elegant, elongated fingers. Lena reaches out and puts her hand on Ellen’s, stops herself from stroking the back of it.
“Do you think it bothered her—and maybe this isn’t even true—do you think it bothered her that her work, transcription, is becoming obsolete, that machines will soon do all the listening, that her work was losing meaning?”
“Well, I suppose I’m fortunate that Chaucer lost his major audience ages ago,” Ellen says, gently moving her hand. “But for Arlene, I would think technology was much more an opportunity than a defeat. It’s you as a newspaper reporter who suffer the loss of meaning in the world’s eyes.”
“That’s probably true.”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Did she leave a note?”
“Not with her, not that they found. The truth is, I haven’t been to her apartment yet. I just can’t. But I don’t believe there’s anything there, I think I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t leave anything behind.”
Lena is disgusted with herself; she is picking through Arlene’s bones. People might be pathetically easy to find, but sometimes they don’t want to be found.
“I’m sorry, Ellen. I’m intruding,” she says, standing. “I should leave. But if there’s anything I can do . . .”
“I would like to do for her what Adam did for Chaucer. I know she lived a hidden life, but her death was newsworthy. I’d like to see an obit in the Record.”
“The paid death notices are handled by classified advertising. I can give you their number.”
“No, I meant an obit, a tribute, in the A section of the paper, after the news, written by a staff writer.”
“I’m sorry, Ellen. I can’t do that. The obits are decided by the editors based on news value.”
Ellen nods. “News value. That says it all, then.”
“One last question, I have to ask. Why lions?”
“We’ll never know. But she loved to sit in the zoo, listening for the lions. She said hearing them was like being punctured by sound, like being released. And she was an excellent swimmer. Everybody is so surprised about that part, but you can swim with your eyes closed. Who swims with their eyes open? We’re all blind underwater.”
THAT NIGHT IN her room, she calls the overnight machine. “Arlene, I went to see your sister today. I don’t know if I should have gone. And it didn’t make me feel any closer to you. I felt closer to you this morning, when I saw a falcon devour a pigeon. It was in Madison Square Park, that odd little pocket of space. As I approached the William Seward statue, the forgotten abolitionist, there was a quietness, a stillness, and a few isolated sounds, a gasp, a curse, a question. I paused and heard someone say, ‘It’s a falcon. He’s got a pigeon. The pigeon is—oh God, the pigeon is alive, he’s struggling. Oh.’ We all stood motionless, honoring the pigeon, the falcon, a life ending before us. I could see the falcon holding the humble bird in its talons and tearing into it as the pigeon still pulsed with life. We watched in awe and wonder; it seemed a very dignified death, though probably not to the pigeon. It was shocking to see nature assert itself in the middle of Manhattan. We stood together in excitement and I thought of Aquinas: The saved would feast on the sight of the sufferings of the damned. But who are the saved, Arlene, and who are the damned?
“The week my mother died, the church congregation came to anoint her head with oil. I suppose some of them must have thought it would help, but it was an irrevocable invasion of privacy. I was in her bedroom watching from the window as they came toward the house. I watched as they crossed the gravel drive and opened the door without knocking. My father met them in the kitchen and led them down the hall.
“I turned away from the light outside toward my mother, who was propped up in bed.
“ ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you letting them do this to you?’
“She smiled wanly and said, ‘It couldn’t hurt.’ That’s what she said, ‘It couldn’t hurt.’ She could have meant several things by that. And when she said it, she had this expression that I have never seen again, except the day I saw you on the bus.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lions Upset after Mauling Woman to Death
At the newsstand, she picks up the Record and puts it down. She looks at the front page of the Post and Daily News and stops in front of the Financial Times. The Financial Times. She might have a different life if she read the Financial Times. It’s too late. She buys the Record and goes to a neighborhood coffee shop where a group of Italian men, regulars, sit under the green awning.
“Why the hell you so dressed up?” one of the group says to a recent arrival. The speaker has thick, pearly-gray hair swept to the side. It is his pride and joy, and he pats it often, afraid it may jump up and skitter away.
“I’m not dressed up,” the man replies, pleased with this deviation from the daily routine. “I’ve just got on a polo shirt.”
They begin to discuss whether they would rather have been born rich or handsome. This debate is taken up periodically and will last all morning.
Lena sits down at the table next to them and sorts the Record by section.
“The six-pound Sunday Record,” one of the men says, “the white man’s burden.”
She scans the front page, reads about Greek sailors who have been detained as witnesses of “environmental crimes.” The men are living in a hotel near Kennedy Airport, and every afternoon, they pack their single duffel bags and sit in the parking lot waiting for the shipping company to pay that day’s hotel bill so they can check back in. This is the only time they venture outside, because their passports have been taken and they are, as one sailor says, “100 percent illegal.”
They spend their days watching television and waiting and eating food from the vending machines.
“The hard part is not knowing when we can leave,” one man says. “It is a little like living at sea. But only the bad parts. The hotel is like a ship but we are not moving. We are living at sea without the sea. We cannot leave. We must wait.” They have been in the hotel for four months.
Waiting.
She is almost at the subway before she realizes where she is going. But first, she pauses before a small shop that sells colorful cotton dresses, silver jewelry, incense, bags made from flour sacks, flat-soled espadrilles, and, by the door, what always catches her eye, a round rack of long, lightweight scarves.
She pushes the door open and a bell jangles. She smiles at the old-fashioned touch. An Indian woman in a pink-and-gold sari smiles at her from behind the register.
“Hello.”
A beautiful brown-eyed boy stares around the counter at her, clutching a fistful of sari.
“Hello there.”
“Pow!” he yells as he fires his toy pistol.
“America,” his mother says by way of explanation.
“Ah,” Lena says. She begins to look through the dresses. “China,” she adds, glancing at a dress tag. The message on the square brown tag has mistakes that make her read it twice.
“The occasional irregularity in shading and weaving are characteristic of the cloth. Each and every piece is as individual and extinct as you are. They are not to be treated as defects. MADE IN CHINA.”
She holds out a yellow sundress with three embroidered star-shaped flowers along the neckline. When she sees the flowers, she puts it back on the rack.
“It’s pretty,” the woman says, coming from behind the counter. “It would look pretty with your hair.”
Lena touches her hair; it used to be the color of fire ants, but lately it has faded to diluted gasoline. She nods, smiles, moves to the scarf rack.
“You are married?”
“No.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Maybe with the yellow dress you’ll find someone.”
She nods again and looks at the scarves. They hang from wire racks, and she touches them, running her hand down the length of them, looking for flaws in the fragile silk. Dark green and orange, black, blue, pink, purple. She picks out a brown one: it is bright like the boy’s eyes.
She pays for it and turns to go. “Thank you.” She opens the door, the bell sounds, she turns back.
“I’ll take the dress after all.”
“Good,” the woman says, quickly retrieving it from the rack. “Maybe it will bring you luck. Maybe you will find someone.”
AT THE ZOO, she takes her time, locating the lion area immediately on the map, then avoiding it, saving it for last, the way she would a treat or a chore. She watches the polar bears, shaggy and tatty furred, then the sea lions, who stare with woeful eyes and swim toward her, bumping the glass. There is something both mortal and meditative in their circular swimming, across the pool, around the rock, bump the glass, across and around again.
She wanders toward the lions and sits on the most distant bench, where she can see the entire enclosure. A class of camp kids in bright orange T-shirts crowds in front of the railing.
“I swear they’re multiplying,” one ponytailed counselor says to another as she counts heads. “Are you sure we haven’t picked up a few from Lake George?”
The lions stretch lazily in the sun and gaze indifferently at their observers. Then, looking directly at the children as if to give them their money’s worth, one of them roars. The children shriek and scamper, then are through. Someone wants to see snakes, others want ice cream.
One boy—he looks seven or eight—stands slightly apart and grips the handrail that separates the moat from the pavement. He has a long, narrow face, a large head out of proportion with his lanky frame. He watches the lions, mesmerized. The other kids jump around the camp counselors, giving ice cream orders noisily, so it is Lena who witnesses the boy begin to scream.
The lions look at him idly; one swishes his tail languorously. The boy screams again, louder, holding the iron rail with both hands. The sound contains both yawp and provocation, tones of fear and longing.
“Bobby!” a camp counselor shouts. “Bobby White!”
The boy doesn’t seem to hear but lifts a sandaled foot onto the railing, which is above his waist.
“What are you doing?” the counselor says, snatching his arm. He doesn’t move when she grabs him, and she lets go in surprise, her empty hand pausing in the air.
There is something strange in the child’s behavior, something unsettling. The counselor squats down and speaks gently.
“What’s wrong, Bobby? He can’t get you. He’s over there, see? Don’t be frightened, he can’t get you.”
Bobby covers his ears and presses his hands against his head; his long face seems to grow even longer. “He’s roaring.”
“He’s not roaring,” the counselor says, pulling Bobby’s hands away from his ears. “You’re imagining it. See, listen.”
“But I hear him,” Bobby says, almost whimpering.
“No,” the counselor says. “He’s not roaring.”
Bobby holds the railing with both hands, and the frazzled counselor must pry his fingers away one by one.
“I hear it, too,” Lena says.
But the counselor is dragging Bobby off. He goes silently, with his head turned, watching the lions.
I seem forsaken and alone,
I hear the lion roar;
She tries to remember the rest.
And every door is shut but one,
And that is Mercy’s door.
The roar comes again; the sound is a steel thread that glides straight through her, the needle’s eye threaded by an unseen hand. The lion is expressionless, as if he has been instructed by his master to sing from behind the mask. He’ll never lose that voice, she thinks, but I’m losing mine. It’s happening. Her voice is fading, being replaced by others, the ones recorded on endless tapes, and now, the lion’s roar. Like the voice imitator who imitates anyone upon request but when asked to imitate himself is unable.
She walks to the railing and stands where Bobby White stood and where Arlene must have stood. She grips it tighter, and her palms moisten the metal with sweat.
In kindergarten, she went on a class field trip to a petting zoo. It was mainly goats and chickens and it smelled awful. Most of the children got a bacterial infection. The teacher explained to Lena’s mother that she didn’t get it because she didn’t pet the animals. She observed them from behind the fence and felt sorry for them because they did not have a place to hide from onlookers like her.
She looks down at the railing, at her two ordinary hands, which type and type and type every day. She is an anonymous transcriptionist who does not know the separateness of suicide or know the separateness of the lions. Looking at them, she wonders whether they keep the memory of killing, even though they are blameless. It is their nature. Maybe that is why they kill in the first place: they carry the memory of killing from their ancestors, even after a lifetime at the zoo.
The sun feels warm, as if coffee is being poured just under her skin, and she wanders to a shady spot under some oak trees. There is a trailer office between the trees and the bathrooms, a reminder of the labor behind all this artificial nature. She walks up the plywood steps to the trailer and knocks on the door, which is opened by a young man who clearly moved here from somewhere else not long ago.
“Yes?”
“Hi. I’m from the Record,” she says, fumbling in her bag for her ID, which she holds out awkwardly. “May I ask you a few questions about the woman who was killed in the lions’ den?”
“Oh. I don’t know if I can help you. I mean, I’ve only been here two months; I’m just a guard.”
“A guard?” She tries to look kind and encouraging, benign.
“Yeah, I just sit in the trailer and watch surveillance tapes.”
“Really? You must see a lot.”
He shakes his head. “It’s boring, actually. I see a lot of kids trying to shove candy into cages, a lot of temper tantrums. That’s about it.”
“Is it air-conditioned inside? Could I come in, just for a few minutes?”
He moves aside so that she can enter. “Well, I guess so. I should be sitting in front of the monitors anyway.”
The room is dimly lit and smells of chemical carpet fiber and electronic equipment kept in a closed space. Two rows of video monitors line the shelves behind the metal desk.
“It’s the matinee,” he says.
People cross the screens as if in a black-and-white dream, doing banal things without a sound, pointing over a fence, pausing at a fork in the path. A child drops an ice cream cone and begins to cry.
“It’s so boring,” he says. “I never noticed growing up in Iowa, but now people seem so much the same. Day after day, same, same, same. Buy the ice cream, eat the ice cream or drop the ice cream. Cry over the ice cream.”
