Lexicon (36 page)

A shadow fell beside her. She looked up to see who was stupid enough to disturb her in this moment, and saw Yeats.

He righted a fallen chair and composed himself into it. He was wearing a beautiful dark gray suit and his hair looked fresh and bright. He was wearing sunglasses but he removed these and set them on the table, and behind them his eyes were flat.

“Oh,” she said. She felt stupid. Of course Yeats was here. She should have realized that.

“Congratulations.” He surveyed the line of dust-blown buildings across the road. “You see now why I wanted you, specifically, on Eliot.”

She didn’t reply.

“Persuasion stems from understanding. We compel others by learning who they are and turning it against them. All this, the chasing, the guns . . .” He gestured vaguely. “These are details. What Eliot could not escape was the fact that I understood him better than he understood himself.” Plath hovered at the edge of Emily’s senses. Yeats said, “A glass of water, please. Let’s make it two.”

Once Plath had gone, Yeats shrugged his jacket and passed it to Masters, who was standing like he was planted there. “I have been visiting delegates. Not all of them agree with my new direction for the organization. Some tried to move against me. Expected, of course. Futile, since I understand them. We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.” Plath arrived with two glasses, of a kind Emily recognized from years before, and set them on the table.

“I feel bad about Eliot.”

“Yes, well,” said Yeats. “Some kind of suppressed emotional overflow, I would imagine.”

“And I’m remembering things.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“I came out of the ER. Through that door.” She pointed. “I went that way. People were killing each other. Because of the word. Harry came after me. He knew what I’d done. But he saved me anyway.”

“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” said Yeats. “It’s irrelevant.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

A figure was walking toward them, coming from the direction of the hospital. In the heat haze, it could have been anyone. But she had a feeling.

“Harry,” she said.

•   •   •

Harry peered over the edge of the roof at the street below. His head throbbed. Eliot had hit him. He had frowned at something on Harry’s rifle, and Harry had looked to see what, and woken up slumped in a doorway. Now Eliot was gone and Harry was on the roof of a furniture store, trying to see what was going on.

A few minutes ago, a soldier had walked toward the burger place, then another emerged from the front door and approached with his pistol drawn. It seemed like they were going to have a confrontation, but they stopped at three feet’s separation and stood there as if communicating telepathically. Then they both ran back to the burger place and plenty more soldiers appeared and there was gunfire. Eventually a young woman emerged and sat down at a table. He stared, because the woman was Emily.

He had begun to doubt that a little, because of Eliot. Whether she was still the same. But now everything was clear. He wriggled back from the rooftop. It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn’t need to argue for the truth. You could see it. He had almost forgotten that. He gripped the rifle and went to get Emily.

•   •   •

Yeats turned to look at the figure approaching them out of the heat haze. “Who?”

“The outlier, could be,” said Plath, peering out from a raised hand. The figure’s arms were extended from his sides. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Wil Parke. Looks unarmed.”

“Well, how about we shoot him?”

“On it,” said Masters. He gestured and two soldiers stepped onto the road.

“We know Parke,” said Plath. “He’s indecisive. Untrained with weapons. He’s a carpenter.”

“Emily, you appear anxious,” said Yeats. “Is there something I should know?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I thought Harry died. But he didn’t. I just made myself believe that.”

Plath said, “Who’s Harry?”

“Her lover,” said Yeats, “of some time ago. He’s the outlier?”

She nodded.

Yeats drummed his fingers on the table. “This changes nothing.”

They watched the soldiers fan out. Harry began to slow. She could see his face.

“Wait,” said Yeats. “I’m missing something. Aren’t I?”

She had to answer. “Yes.”

“What am I missing?” He clicked his fingers at someone behind her. “You, too.” A poet, Rosenberg, a young guy with longish hair, stepped onto the road, heading after the soldiers. “Emily?”

“Two things.”

“Name them. I am instructing you to name them.”

“I don’t think you’ve been in love. Not recently, anyway. I’m not sure you remember what it’s like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword. That’s the first thing.” Yeats didn’t react. If anything, he seemed baffled. “The second thing is I wouldn’t characterize Harry as indecisive and untrained with weapons.”

Plath said, “Perhaps we should move inside.”

“Yes,” Yeats said. “Quite.” He smoothed his pants and began to rise from the table. Then he stopped, because Emily had seized him by the tie.

“Also,” she said, “you are a jerk.”

•   •   •

He walked toward the burger place until soldiers moved onto the road to intercept him. Then he changed course for the real estate office. He clambered through a space that had once held a plate glass window, collected the rifle from where he’d left it on the counter, and jogged toward the back offices. He’d been here a few times when dating Melissa, the real estate agent. Enough to know the layout, anyway. He took position in Melissa’s office and waited.

A few minutes later, a soldier shuffled in. Harry waited until the second appeared, then put a bullet into his faceplate. Both men vanished like smoke. He pulled the bolt, reloading as he jogged out into the corridor. He went right instead of left, eased open the rear door, and then was in sunshine. He trotted around the side of the building to the air-con vents and peered through. The second soldier was moving away from him in a crouch. He raised the rifle and shot him in the back of the head.

When he reentered the building, he was surprised to find both guys still alive. He wouldn’t have credited a helmet with being able to stop a high-powered .28. But he guessed that momentum had to go somewhere. One of the soldiers had pulled off his helmet and was vomiting down his chest. The other was crawling weakly toward the front door.

He raised the rifle. The helmet-less solder raised a hand. Harry shot him. He walked around to the other one, reloading the rifle. A man unexpectedly appeared outside the window, a young guy in a cheap suit and tie, stringing together nonsense words, and Harry shot him through the window. He looked back. The crawling soldier had stopped crawling.

He reloaded the rifle. He could hear a chopper approaching. Soldiers would be coming from both sides, he guessed. They would be jogging slowly, like these two guys, since they were encased in forty-pound armored ovens. They had been lumbering around in the noonday sun for about an hour. He couldn’t really imagine what that was like. He had seen people drop dead out here, trying to do too much. They had the idea that the worst the sun could do was make them uncomfortable. They applied their sunscreen and their hats and headed out and just fell over.

He went into the bathroom and slid open the window. There was a low fence offering cover to the adjoining building, and from there he thought he could make his way unseen to pretty much anywhere he wanted. He climbed out the window and began to crawl.

•   •   •

Yeats’s eyes widened across the table. She had never seen him look shocked before. She had never really seen him look anything.

“Release me,” he said.

“You release
me
,” she said, although that was just to fill time; there was only one way she could ever be free of Yeats, and she was going to have to make that happen herself. He pulled back, reaching inside his jacket for the thing that would take away her mind again. Which showed Emily that Yeats really did not get it. He thought the word had worn off, somehow; that she no longer felt compelled to obey him.

She went after him but found herself gripped from behind by Plath, of all people. Plath was thin and wiry, not the kind of person who could hold Emily for long, but she hadn’t expected to be held at all, and it gave Yeats time to get out the word.

“Sit down and stop moving,” he said.

“No.” Disbelief spread across his face. Plath’s arms were already slackening, anticipating Emily’s compliance. But Yeats’s hand was coming out of his jacket, and she didn’t want to face what was in there, so she threw her head backward. There was a satisfying connection. She stepped forward, swiped a glass from the table, and tossed the water over Yeats’s shoes.

Yeats made a frightened, high-pitched sound. This was very beautiful in Emily’s ears, but the point was Yeats was not making other sounds, sounds that commanded people to kill her, so in the moment he was occupied with the horror of his softening leather, she broke the glass against the edge of the table and sliced it across his throat.

He tried to speak. Little red bubbles popped along his lips. She took the bareword from his fingers as gently as could be. He dropped to his knees, and she should have been turning to face Plath and Masters and whoever else was back there, but instead she just stood and watched him die.

•   •   •

Harry jogged toward the burger place. He thought there must be soldiers about, but couldn’t see them. The choppers had retreated; he didn’t know why. He circled around the block but saw no one so he came at it from the front. Emily was there. A few bodies lay on the ground. There was a black-suited soldier but his helmet was off and he was standing with his feet loosely apart, not holding a weapon, looking around the town like he was vacationing here.

He kept the rifle ready and began to cross the street. Emily turned to him. She had something in her hand. Her expression was strange.

“Hey,” he said. “Em, it’s me.”

•   •   •

He came toward her and for a moment she didn’t know who it was. She had just killed a bunch of people and compromised Masters and her head was full of bees.

But she recognized his expression. It was like the last time she’d been surrounded by death and he’d come for her. He was going to save her again, she saw. Of course he was. He was going to forgive her everything, again.

“Oh, Harry,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

He smiled. She’d thought she would never see that again, his smile, and it killed her, because she knew it couldn’t last. None of this could last.

“I love you,” she said, “but I’m sorry, I need you to do something.”

“Sure.” He slung the rifle and came toward her, his hands reaching for hers. “Name it.”

“
Kikkhf fkattkx hfkixu zttkcu
,” she said. “Shoot me.”

BROKEN HILL TO REMAIN SEALED

The Sydney Morning Herald, Vol. 183 Issue 217 Page 14

A government body charged with reviewing the toxicity of Broken Hill—site of the 2019 disaster that killed more than three thousand people—has recommended that the town remain fenced off for an indeterminate time.

The review was triggered by photographs last summer of what appear to be two large helicopters hovering over the town. This fueled long-running local speculation that the town was not uninhabitable, with conspiracy theories proclaiming the town as home to everything from a secret mafia treasure trove to government military programs.

The review, which published a 300-page report today, should hose down such talk, with scientists finding critically high levels of methyl isocarbonate still present in the soil.

“As much as I enjoy a good story, it would be highly dangerous to start thinking it’s okay to go have a look at Broken Hill,” said spokesperson Henry Lawson. “The town is, unfortunately, a grim reminder of what can happen when people and businesses operate without proper oversight.”

Broken Hill remains the site of one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

MEMO

Subject: Re: revisions to models post-BH

Update as per request—report not finalized, don’t quote me on this, etc. etc.

Our chief finding is that what we saw in BH was a multilingual effect. Which I realize makes no sense on the face of it, since no relevant parties are/were multilingual to any known degree. But whenever we’ve seen rejection of this magnitude before, it’s been because the recipient is fluent in more than one language. (Can be reliably reproduced in testing: e.g., while counting in Dutch, bilingual subject exhibits increased resistance to compromise in English.) We’ve theorized that when the brain is keyed into one language, words from another are more likely to be first-stage filtered as nonsense syllables—not actually processed as words, i.e., carriers of meaning.

So the question is, what second language? And—again, don’t quote me, data to be crunched—our answer is the language of the bareword. Whatever that is. We haven’t dealt with a bareword before, so our knowledge here is sketchy. But we believe a bareword belongs to a fundamental language of the human mind—the tongue in which the human animal speaks to itself at the basest level. The machine language, in essence.

We’re still not clear on exactly what relationship existed between V. Woolf and the outlier Harry Wilson—some kind of love affair? But we accept that upon discovering he was alive. She shifted to a primitive, animalistic state. Mentally, she was operating in that underlying language, feeling desire as a bareword.

As we know, when a subject experiences conflict from instructions of roughly equal compulsive power, results are situationally dependent, i.e., unpredictable. That scenario, we’re basically talking about free will.

(Note that when instructions conflict, they do not cancel out. Subject experiences desire to do both. Just worth bearing in mind.)

Bottom line, we see no reason to discard established models. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This may sound like we’re trying to cover our asses, i.e., avoid admitting flaws in past research, but it’s our honest opinion.

I realize this may create something of a political issue, given the current organization restructure/bloodbath. Sorry about that. Although the bigger issue, for me, are the questions raised by this underlying lexicon. What are its words? How many are there? Can they be revealed through lab research, i.e., direct excavation from the brain? Can we learn to speak them? What does it sound like when who we are is expressed in its most fundamental form?

Something to think about.

R. Lowell