The Transcriptionist, page 9
“Do you monitor the entire zoo or a specific section?”
“I have this section,” he says, pointing. “The top row shows the path and the bathrooms. These screens on the bottom row show the lion area, but you can’t really see the lions, just the benches and railings by the moat.”
They look at the screens; the mute people seem displaced, with no past or future, suspended in surveillance. Then they disappear.
“So, you’re a reporter for the Record.”
“Hmm.”
“That must be cool. You get to go out and do stuff and not be cooped up all day.”
“Sometimes. But there’s a lot of sitting at a desk in front of a screen, like you. Anyway, I wanted to ask you about the woman who was killed. Do you have video from that night?”
“No. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but the cameras near the lions’ den weren’t working when the woman was killed. Besides, we don’t leave them on overnight anyway.”
“You don’t?”
“No, at least we didn’t. There’s nobody here at night except the animals. And they get on fine without us. It’s the people we have to watch.”
“Did you hear anything about what happened?”
“Well, it was awful for the lions really. How can they be happy now?”
On the monitors, people pass in noiseless movement. She wonders whether they would act differently if they knew they were being watched. Or maybe most people assume they’re being watched now.
“The lions aren’t happy?”
“They’re very upset. They can’t settle down. It’s like before they forgot they were in a cage, but now they’ve remembered where they are. They’ve tasted blood and they just can’t settle down.”
“Are the ones out there today the same ones that killed her?”
“Some of them, but one, Robert, had to be taken out. He’s relaxing at a retreat upstate—Cullen Sanctuary in Hudson. Poor Robert, the woman who’s taking care of him says he acts like his heart is broken. I don’t know, maybe he feels bad for killing that woman. But what could he do? He’s a lion.”
She looks at the square screens. Maybe she should be a surveillance-screen watcher. She already knows how to be anonymously present at all kinds of places. Maybe the transcription of images would be more interesting. She knows how to listen neutrally and record words on a page, but it is something else to watch offensively, looking for suspicious gestures lurking in the everyday.
There are no answers for her here. She had allowed herself to be distracted by the familiar scene of a room recording snippets of the outside world. But there is nothing true to be found about Arlene on a surveillance screen.
She thanks the guard for his time. He spells his name twice so that she’ll be sure to get it right in the Record. It’s an investigative piece, she tells him, hard to say when it will be published. He tells her she can visit again if she wants. It is very hard to sit inside all day, he says, alone in a room watching people who don’t talk.
Outside, she feels a surge of lightness, and at the fork in the path she looks up at the surveillance eye secured to a utility pole. For a few moments she blinks slowly, then steps closer, feeling the force of her gaze. She lifts her hand to wave, but blows a kiss instead.
THE SUBWAY PLATFORM is smelly, sweaty, dank as a tomb. Across the platform, the uptown tracks are closed off and three men with helmet lights walk the tracks. “We call him feathers,” one man says to the other. “You know why? Because he’s a chicken.” They all laugh and move like miners along the rails.
The downtown train roars into the station and she breaks into a sweat. It is scalp sweat, the sweat of fear. A toddler covers her ears as her mother pulls her by the elbow through the open train doors. Lena is shaking when she steps into the train car, and she turns back; she needs to get out, she cannot breathe. As she steps toward the door she locks eyes with the child who is still covering her ears; she looks at Lena with eyes like whirlpools of light blue. The train doors close just as Lena is about to step off, and she presses her palms against the door as the train carries her away from the lions.
THAT NIGHT SHE has her recurring nightmare: Dirty streets filled with charred feet and bloated bodies. They have been banished from the world by editors, and this is where they disappear to, her dreams, which have become a decayed landscape, a landfill of edited things. She gathers them up in her arms and runs through the streets, trying to find their owners, who will know the dismembered limbs and the forgotten words. She runs with her arms full, and the streets become Manhattan streets in some terrible future that seems like now, west to the Hudson River, and there, like a ghost ship, is the ship of Crete. It comes toward her, gliding fast on dream water, and there is loud creaking and clanking as the anchor is let down and the ship is secured not with ropes but with chains. It is then that she realizes this is the only sound, and she turns back toward a silent city. Men without faces wordlessly lift the remains from her arms and load them onto the ship, then drift off into the river, which has widened behind them and turned into a black-blue sea.
Lena awakens and, unable to fall back to sleep, lies in the dark and presses the wall behind her head. Arlene’s face is starting to fade from memory. She thinks of getting up and finding the clipping with Arlene’s photo, but she wants to retrieve the memory, how she saw her that day on the bus. The only image she can conjure is a composite of lion sketches and Patience and Fortitude and the lion roaring in the zoo and the child with the narrow face.
She hears the click, then the sound of the tape worming around the spool. “Stop torturing me,” she says. Reaching out, she touches the phone with her hand, sits up, and dials the Recording Room.
“Arlene? It’s Lena. I went to the zoo. I saw the moat. How did you swim that, Arlene? Could you hear the lions waiting for you?
“I wish I had stayed with you on the bus that day. I wish I could have helped you. When I left the academic cloister, I thought the Recording Room would be insulation from the world. But it’s not. It’s too difficult to eat the news with my ears every day. It leaves a residue. I have letters in my bloodstream, nut graphs in my gut, headlines around my heart. It usurps my soul. You knew about that. But people don’t understand, do they? We have to listen. We have to accept them into our bodies. People have no regard for what their stories do.
“Arlene, my body is merging with the newspaper. I’m losing myself. First, I lost myself to Scripture when I was a child, and then to literature when I was a little older, and now the news, which is the worst of all. It has replaced everything; all the words of suffering keep flowing through my veins. But I have to separate myself. It’s just as you said. We can’t keep up with the suffering.”
She hangs up and lies back against the pillow. The shadowy furniture, the bureau, the desk, and the white sink seem to float in the darkness. The imaginary tape spools quietly in the dark, but the voice does not begin. She involuntarily pumps the invisible foot pedal as if to forward to the place where the voice starts. But it does not come.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Massacre in Mideast; Hope Turns to Despair
As Lena is walking to work in the morning, a woman suddenly grabs her arm and points up to a balcony across the street.
“She’s not going to jump, is she?”
Lena looks up at the open window, where she can see the variegated leaf of a plant draped like a weary arm over the sill.
“Oh, she’s gone away,” the woman says, and for the first time she looks Lena in the eye. She is a middle-aged woman whose face has permanent traces of anxiety and alarm. “I’m so afraid of heights now, I can’t open my windows.”
Before Lena can respond, the woman is gone, swallowed up in the pedestrian sea. She continues along the avenue, looking up, hearing snippets of conversation, and twitching her fingers to transcribe them on air.
“The super said he gave it a kiss and a prayer.”
“Why, in Russian you have to move your lips more?”
“Can you hear me? I can see you.”
Approaching Times Square, she feels a thread of sweat along the small of her back. She steps into the street to skirt the tourists who have already crowded the corner to examine tables of handbags and socks and old jazz magazines and albums. The men selling—it is nearly always men with these wares—have boom boxes and canvas butterfly chairs and coolers.
IN THE RECORD’S elevator, she remembers that today is escape-hood training. The paper has canceled all holiday parties this year and instead has invested in escape hoods, four thousand of them for seventy dollars each. Employees have received offers to buy escape hoods for family members at this same generous discount.
She glances at today’s front page. Children are working as rock crushers in Kenya. A young boy and his father have to pass the family’s one pencil off to each other—one takes it to school in the morning, one takes it to work in the evening. Soldiers killed in Iraq, civilians killed in Afghanistan, monks killed in Myanmar, lawyers killed in Pakistan. A mysterious weed is choking swamps in Louisiana. Scientists have discovered that moths in Madagascar drink the tears of sleeping birds.
The Recording Room phone is silent. She lingers with the paper, reading about people in China who are arrested and encouraged to confess. There must be a transcriptionist in China who specializes in confessions. There must be hundreds. The confessor’s cries that arise from the “encouragement” must be off the record.
She begins to pace. At these moments, when she has gorged on too many sad stories, she has such a longing to create something, to produce something, to bring forth something, or to commit some violence, that she considers ripping the articles from the paper just to destroy the paper itself. But she doesn’t. Really she is afraid of committing any violent act, even against paper, because it reminds her that she never knows where the drop-off point is, but she does know that it takes only a second to step over it.
She glances at the paper again, and a sentence catches her eye. “More graves are believed to exist, but no one is willing to reveal their locations.”
There is a knock on the door, which she opens to find a science reporter and a rabbi standing side by side.
“We’d like to make a copy of this videotape,” the reporter says.
“Of course, come in. I can copy it for you and call you when it’s done.”
“I thought we’d stay and watch it, if you don’t mind.”
“You might not want to stay,” the rabbi says to Lena. “It’s a video of a kosher slaughterhouse.”
“It’s okay. I’ll just sit back here and do my work.”
She inserts the original and a blank videotape into the side-by-side VCRs and places chairs in front of the TVs so that they can watch. At her desk, she puts on her headphones and pumps the foot pedal to make the empty tape unwind so that she can pretend to work.
On the TV screen, which she has a clear view of, a steer’s throat is slit. A worker pulls something out of its neck with a hook and the steer falls to the floor. The animal stands up shakily as pinkish-white throat muscles hang exposed.
“Is that pain?” the rabbi asks the reporter. “Who are we to say he feels something?”
Another steer is slit, hooked, and dumped on the slimy floor. Lena sits in silence, headphones on, staring. She has never seen slaughter, except in childhood on the farm, when she saw only the aftermath.
The science reporter is quiet, fidgety. The rabbi talks in a monotonous voice used to comfort witnesses to the dead.
“What causes unconsciousness?” he asks. “Blood loss. The shohet has slit the throat, and this man here”—he touches the screen with his finger, emitting the faintest buzz of static—“has removed the trachea. Blood pressure has been lost. Have you ever seen a snake with its head chopped off?”
“No.”
“Well, you get the concept.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes they continue to move, but not for long. Chickens, too. It’s involuntary movement.”
The reporter nods.
The rabbi turns to Lena as another steer falls to the floor. “I didn’t invite you to watch,” he says softly, the voice of absolution.
She blushes and pumps the foot pedal. “Qwerty,” she types, “pain and consciousness.”
She cannot look away from the screen where steers flail on the bloody floor while the rabbi speaks about humane death.
“We do not believe in drugging the animal before it is killed,” the rabbi says.
“Another shehitah expert said the first cut must cause instant unconsciousness,” the reporter says.
“What is consciousness?”
“You’re the rabbi. How can there be so much argument about it?”
“We have no pope,” the rabbi says with a smile.
ONCE THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE pair leaves, she cannot settle down at her desk. She paces the room and stacks and restacks the cassette tapes in the cardboard box. The tape with the lead from Eric Isaacs about the mudslide is still unclaimed. She rewinds it on the recording Dictaphone and plays it out loud.
“ ‘The earth shook, then I felt mud in my mouth.’
“. . . so much mud . . . fear that some bodies will not be found . . .
“. . . said they would be back digging the next day, and the next, and the day after that, and for as long as it would take to find her.
“ ‘We will not leave anyone behind,’ he said. ‘That is not our way.’ ”
She searches Eric Isaacs’s name on the Web. On the Record’s site, his bylined articles appear consistently until a week ago. There has been nothing since then, and of the three articles on the mudslide, one is by a stringer and the other two are wire stories. She reads Eric’s skeletal bio on Wikipedia: it lists his birthdate and his education and notes that he came to the Record in 1998, after winning a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Taliban for the Washington Post.
She paces the room some more, and when she sits down at her computer again and presses “refresh,” Eric’s Wikipedia page has disappeared. She refreshes again and again, but it is not there.
“KOV?” SHE CALLS softly. “Kov?”
He opens the door and ushers her inside without a word.
“The strangest thing just happened. Eric Isaacs called in a story about the mudslide in Pakistan a few days ago. But he only dictated the lead, he never called back with the rest of the story. The story ran with a stringer’s byline. Eric hasn’t had a story since then. And just now, I was looking at his Wikipedia page and it disappeared.”
“Lena, Eric has been kidnapped.”
“What?”
“He did the mudslide story because he was already in the area. He was crossing into Waziristan for an interview with a Taliban leader. The Record and the Isaacs family have asked other news organizations to cooperate, even Wikipedia, in keeping it private. They think if his kidnapping is publicized, he’ll be in more danger.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve been here a lifetime. I still hear what’s going on.”
“Do you think it’s the right response, to keep silent?”
“It’s what the Record and the family have decided, so I don’t have to approve it, only to respect it.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Wait. People are trying to help, but right now we can only wait.”
There is a peck at the window. Kov crosses the room, raises the window. A pigeon struts across the windowsill, looks toward Lena as if startled to find a visitor, then flashes its feathers and flies off.
“As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding / Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird.”
Kov turns his head to look at her.
“What’s that from?”
“Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
He fixes her with his gray-green eyes. There is something in his stare, pity perhaps.
“I’m sorry, Kov. I—I quote from things a lot. I sometimes forget how to talk to people. And quotes help me.”
He closes the window and brushes his hands together. “You don’t do it to help you talk to people. You do it to preserve your distance.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I’m sure you have your reasons.”
They move to the round table and sit side by side, looking at the splayed newspaper. She suddenly wonders whether he has that disease, the one where people eat paper or paste. But she knows as well that whatever he is doing is not a disease or an obsession but a rite.
“How’s your work?” she asks, touching the corner of the paper.
“I’m trying to repair them,” he says. “Some of the files were in binders on those old metal shelves over there.” He points. “And, well, you can imagine.”
She looks down at the table and has a sudden alarming urge to break off a piece of the paper and put it in her mouth like a communion wafer.
“How do you choose?”
He looks at her with what she supposes would be a questioning look on anyone else, but on him it is more beatific.
“I mean, there are so many,” she says. “All the names.”
“So many,” he agrees. “I do what I can as the morgue keeper.”
“Why do you care about the disappeared?”
“I suppose it’s about this institution itself.”
“The Record?”
“The Record.”
“You’re afraid it will disappear?”
“I suppose it seems old-fashioned, but this paper has been my life, and it would be dishonorable to leave it now.”
They look down at the paper, as if sitting vigil with a dead friend. Kov picks up a pair of heavy black-handled scissors. “This is how we used to make corrections, by cutting and pasting, literally, cutting with scissors. Quite satisfying.”
She leans forward and smooths the paper with her hand. “What did you do here? What was your position?”
“Oh, this and that. Administration.”
She picks up the magnifying glass and finds Kov’s eyes through the circle. She studies his skin through the glass, a mysterious map. There are roads, but it’s hard to tell where they begin, where they lead.
