The Transcriptionist Read online

  The woman’s hands were lined; ropy veins ended at large knuckles. Elongated fingers moved with fluidity over the raised letters. Lena thought she would make it home if she focused on the fingers. She swallowed, realized she was quietly repeating a phrase to herself as had become her habit. “Truth beareth away the victory,” from the library’s facade. The blind woman’s fingers stopped; she turned and seemed to see Lena, who blushed and looked down at her hands in confusion. When she glanced up again the woman was still turned toward her with a rueful half smile.

  “What are you reading?” Lena asked.

  “The Veldt.”

  “Ray Bradbury?”

  “You know it?”

  “It affected me greatly as a teenager.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, smiling, as if she were considering a secret, and Lena realized how mysterious smiles are when the eyes are dead. “Yes. But it’s different now.”

  “How?”

  “It’s quite blunt, but still chilling. When the man finds his wallet that the lions have been chewing—”

  “And when he and his wife recognize their own screams.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “That’s the part that affects me most, the couple recognizing their own voices.”

  Lena tried to imagine the blind woman screaming and then silently chastised herself for wondering if blind people scream. Of course they could, physically, but for some reason she couldn’t imagine it.

  “Would you recognize your own?” the woman said quietly.

  Lena’s head was pulsing with pain. She told herself that the woman was probably not being as cryptic as she seemed, that it was the distorted dreaminess of a migraine. “I’m not much of a screamer.”

  “It’s like murder. We all have the capacity, but we don’t all have the desire.”

  Lena was too surprised to respond, and she flinched as the bus bounced over a bump. She didn’t think she had made any sound, but the woman asked, “Are you OK?”

  “I have a migraine, it makes me unsteady.”

  The woman nodded. “I used to have them, but then I went blind and was cured.”

  “Hmm,” Lena said, because it felt impolite to laugh.

  “Here, may I try something? Give me your hand.”

  “You’re not going to read my palm, are you?” Lena asked, trying to hide her discomfort.

  The woman smiled and reached out, grasping Lena’s hand as if she had perfect vision. “Oh, I know,” the woman said. “You hate mysticism.”

  “Well, then, maybe you are a mind reader.”

  The woman lightly stroked her hand, and Lena was too stunned to move. But I’m not the hand-holding type, she almost said, but didn’t. She tried to remember the last time she had held hands with anyone. It wasn’t with her last lover, Richard. They were neither of them hand-holders and they had understood that about each other. She had been out with exactly one man since then. On the third date, he not only held her hand while walking down the street but swung it back and forth. She had broken things off with him the same night.

  “The world goes by my cage but no one sees me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m looking inside your cage,” the woman said. “I see words.”

  “I’m a transcriptionist for the Record.”

  She glanced around to see if anyone had noticed that she was holding a woman’s hand, but all the passengers were absorbed with palm-size screens or lost in a tired-eyed commuter’s coma.

  The woman tapped her hand gently, in a reassuring, comforting way.

  “I’m a court reporter,” she said. “Voices coursing through our veins. You can’t live that way forever, not people like us.”

  “What kind of people are we?”

  The woman lightly pressed the web of skin between Lena’s thumb and index finger. The two of them sat silently for a full minute or more, and Lena realized that although she still had a headache, she didn’t feel as dizzy.

  “Be careful what you listen to,” the woman said. “Be careful what you hear.”

  “But that’s my job. I have to listen to everything. That’s what I do.”

  “We can’t keep up with the suffering of others. We have to close ourselves off. How else can we survive?”

  The bus was close to Twenty-Third Street and Lena stood abruptly. “I have to go. This is my stop.”

  “Be careful,” the woman said. “You live a dangerous life.” Then she began to read again. Lena watched her fingers flit across the white page, the words concealed to all but the blind. She wanted to say something more but she didn’t know with what words, so she said thank you and got in line to exit.

  “. . . that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

  Lena wasn’t sure she had heard right and looked back, but the woman had turned her head toward the window and her expression was inscrutable. All went still and static again; there was no movement, no sound. She thought of Lot’s wife, turning back, turning to salt stone, but in Lena’s version, stranger still, it was New York that was turning to stone as she watched, helpless.

  Someone behind her said, “Hey,” and gave her a slight push. “Go if you’re going. I got to get off.”

  The pain came roaring back, behind her eyes, pushing to exit through her ears, a stormy sea was in her head, and she stumbled down the bus steps to the street.

  She stepped on someone’s foot, and vomit rose along with apology in her throat. She swallowed them both and for a terrible moment she could not see. She made it to a metal trash can on the corner and heaved with a violence that shocked her. No one seemed to notice, and she eventually shuffled to a bench in Madison Square Park near the statue of Chester Arthur. The man who became president only after the assassination of another stood before his throne-like bronze chair and she wanted to tell him that he could be seated.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hearing Is the Last Sense to Abandon the Dying

  Tonight, she is still thinking of the blind woman as she approaches the Salvation Army residence on Gramercy Park. The Parkside Evangeline, where “many advantages of home are provided for young women of moderate income.” Some of the residents have not been young in quite a long time, but Lena tries not to think about this because she is terrified of becoming one of them, a woman who never leaves.

  She enters Parkside, passes the reception desk, where the old widow, Mrs. Pelletier (don’t call her “Ms.”), sits guarding her imagined treasures, the residents’ chastity. If a man steps foot past her Plexiglas lookout post, she flings her hand up like a stop sign and cries out, “Stop! Go no further!” Lena sometimes silently adds, “Stop! I am a temple of the Holy Ghost!” like the girl in Flannery O’Connor’s story.

  Two meals a day are paid for, whether one eats them or not. It’s not as depressing as it looks, Lena tells herself, standing in the dining room’s entrance and looking at the faded green-and-rose-print carpet. Lots of young women smile and pair off and eat with gusto. But she feels most out of place when peering into the dining room, where plastic carnations in milk-colored vases line long tables under ceiling fans that whir like ancient coffee percolators. It is in the dining room that the two groups of residents are most distinct. There are the elderly ladies, as they are called, the ones who remain permanently in this place of limbo. And there are the women in their twenties, many of them visiting from other countries, who use Parkside as a kind of youth hostel. Lena fits into neither category, though she comforts herself that at thirty-three she is still closer in age to the younger group.

  She looks at tonight’s menu posted by the door: glazed meat, always the glaze, apricot glaze, sweet glaze, cloying glaze. She cannot. The elevator delivers her to the “solarium” on the seventeenth floor, a rectangular green room with a fuzzy-screen TV, two rickety exercise bikes, and folding tables and chairs designed for reunions and church revivals. Glass doors lead to the sun deck, a bare, concrete area surrounded by an eye-level wall.

  Restless, she decides to take the stairs down to her room. Two girls are in the stairwell, hanging out the window. The one with a Mickey Mouse T-shirt turns with anticipation.

  “Come here,” she says, motioning with her hands. “See that rooftop over there, the one with the trees and the glass door to the penthouse? That’s Julia Roberts’s place. We saw her come out on the terrace! She was talking on the phone!”

  “Then she went back inside!” cries the second girl.

  “But we’re waiting for her to come back out!” the first girl says. “She might!”

  “Wait till I tell my mom I can watch Julia Roberts’s apartment. She’ll just die!”

  “Isn’t this city just neat?”

  “Yeah,” Lena says. She turns to descend the stairs. “Don’t fall out the window.”

  They both laugh. “Of course not!”

  “I wonder if she’ll see us!” the girl’s voice echoes down the stairwell.

  LENA’S ROOM IS small but furnished; it has a private bathroom, with handrails in the shower. The desk with attached bookshelves tips over when she stands on a chair and pulls a book down too quickly. There is a radio and a squat beige telephone but no television.

  Lying on the bed, she pushes against the wall with her feet and stares at the ceiling. The Middlemarch passage that the blind woman quoted floats before her eyes, as if she is transcribing for the author and watching the words appear above. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” She closes her eyes tight, then opens them, but the words remain, creeping across the white ceiling. She cannot escape them. They unwind slowly like a parasitic worm, taking up more and more of her brain. It reminds her
of African river blindness—which she had transcribed an article on last summer—when the nematode worm finds a host in the unsuspecting victim’s body and grows and grows until it needs more space and comes out through the eyes. “No,” she says, and she hurries from the room.

  At the front desk, Mrs. Pelletier guards something even rarer than chastity—four keys to Gramercy Park. Surprisingly, there is usually at least one key available. Lena signs her name on the xeroxed form in the black Book of Keys. After being reminded to return within an hour, she crosses the street and unlocks the park gate.

  New Yorkers, who famously pride themselves on not looking at people no matter how famous or outrageous they are, always turn their heads at the sound of the gate opening into Gramercy Park. Someone has the key, the key! to the exclusive oasis, the small patch of gated grass and gravel.

  Lena opens the iron gate and slips inside, heading toward the statue of John Wilkes Booth’s brother, the actor Edwin Booth, as Hamlet. “Alas, poor ghost!” she says, giving him a pat. He is surrounded by a gravel oval running the length of the park, where key holders can stroll partly hidden by the trees. The trees, like the lovely London plane with its mottled trunk, wear name tags, as if they were corporate professionals at a convention: “Hi! My name is Ohio buckeye.” Lena loops the park twice and settles on a south-facing bench.

  Two gray-haired women in floral dresses gather their things and leave the park arm in arm, the one with swollen ankles supported by her companion. They have been reading, sitting on separate benches. A breeze reveals the dark elastic bands at the top of their nude knee-highs.

  People are leaving the park; it is growing dark. The gray light of evening descends like a silken net under the trees. The faux gas lamps come on with an electrical twitch. It is the time of day that belongs to twilight, quick footsteps, doors and gates clanging closed, and the very young and very old disappearing inside. The changing of the guard: the old and young retreat to their buildings, the workers advance from theirs.

  Parkside residence is quiet when she returns, and she is scolded for keeping the park key twenty extra, undocumented minutes. But she is so quiet and takes the scolding so obediently that Mrs. Pelletier removes her pointed glasses, worn so long they have come back in style, unbeknownst to her, and says that she remembers losing track of time in the park a long, long time ago. Her voice is all wistfulness and longing, yet it is clear that she would no more take one of the exclusive keys in her charge and let herself into the park than she would allow a male to enter a resident’s room. Lost hours in the park belong to a place she cannot access, even though the land itself lies just across the street.

  “Mrs. Pelletier,” Lena says softly.

  Mrs. Pelletier snaps the eyeglasses from their dangling chain, pushes them forcefully across her nose, and makes a pointed, deliberate X beside Lena’s name in the Book of Keys. She prints in big capital letters, “LATE,” and closes the thick black binder. “Punctuality is paramount, Ms. Respass. Tardiness is unacceptable in the real world.”

  AS SHE LIES in bed, unable to sleep, Lena thinks of the blind woman and the city’s potter’s fields, the one on Hart Island, which can only be visited by special permission, and the one that used to lie under the Forty-Second Street library, under the grand facade and the words “Truth beareth away the victory.”

  Sleepily, she tries to remember the origin of the quote; it was from the book of Esdras, Ezra. She remembers because of the unusual sentence. “Women are strongest: but above all things, truth beareth away the victory.” Memorization had been her companion in her lonely southern childhood. Her father was a farmer and a minister, and when he discovered that she had a skill for remembering, he had her memorize verses to open his sermon on Sundays. It began as her companion and became her curse. Language was a game, that was how it started, a game between her and her father, the only one they ever played. She was a teenager before she comprehended what her father and his congregation believed.

  That was the first betrayal. They took her into church before she had the power of speech, when she was still drooling and had bows velcroed to her nearly naked head, and passed her up and down the pew, letting the ruffles on her underpants show. All the while they were talking, telling her things, how things were, how things are, how things will be. And even though they could conjugate all the tenses, they understood only the past. When she found herself on the far side of a lonely chasm, she still believed in language. She thought that she could throw away God and keep language, that words would save her.

  When she left for college, thanks to a teaching scholarship that she ended up not honoring, life opened up for a while, and she built a student life that felt almost normal. Since that was the only normalcy she knew, she went on to graduate school in New York and settled on a thesis exploring power and domination in the novels of George Eliot.

  She had not spoken to her father in two years when he died, and for a few months she almost forgot he was dead as she continued with her research and withdrew from the small social circle she had acquired with doggedness. Then she began to miss seminars and would find herself sitting for hours in Riverside Park staring into the Hudson. The end of her academic career came at exactly two o’clock on a Tuesday in a diner on Broadway. A Salvadoran waiter had approached her table and asked, “Are you reading the Bible?” She looked up from the red leather-bound copy of Middlemarch she had bought for five dollars at Strand. “No, why?” The waiter looked forlorn. “You looked like you might be,” he said, “but girls here never are.”

  For the first time, she looked around the room at the diners eating scrambled eggs and cheeseburgers, at a busboy flirting with a waitress, at a pudgy toddler putting a french fry up his nostril, and she looked down at the book that she now studied instead of enjoyed, the book that she was trying to put between herself and the world as she retreated into the academic tower.

  She had relinquished religion, but just like the others in her father’s flock, she led a life of submission.

  A week later she left the program and took a job in classified advertising at the Record. She was very good at helping customers squeeze their copy into the five-line minimum, which made her popular with advertisers but not with her advertising managers, who hastily recommended her for the Recording Room opening, lauding her “excellent listening and typing skills.” And so she locked herself up in another tower, one she has not even tried to escape.

  That is how she came to spend her days alone in a room transcribing the words of others. She still relies on quotes she has memorized to converse with people, especially when she feels awkward or shy, though she talks with fewer and fewer people as time passes.

  THE BLIND WOMAN announces herself in the dark, like the projected image from old filmstrips they used to show in grade school. She is frozen except for her fingers, which move across the empty expanse, stroking the invisible letters to bring them to life. She is a transcriptionist, too, Lena thinks, except the words enter her fingertips where they exit mine.

  She closes her eyes, and the blind woman’s face merges with the immovable faces of the library lions, then the faces of the lions at their terrible task, ripping away the woman’s limbs, her fingers.

  And then he appears. Her own devourer, the one who has followed her everywhere for years, elusive and yet ever close, he always comes.

  When she was thirteen, the summer her mother died, a mountain lion came to the farming town where she lived. Or at least he was rumored to be in the area.

  Ernest Cutler had been driving back from Jamesville when he saw the cat crouching by the ditch along Highway 32. He said the cat was so still he thought it might be dead and he kept driving, but then he decided to circle back. When he got to the ditch, the cat was gone.

  Then Ernestine Baker swore that he—everyone called him “he” from the beginning—had been rooting through her trash barrel. She had shot at him from the bathroom window with her pearl-handled Beretta, but he was too far away and it was too dark.

  Lena had learned in school that the eastern cougar was extinct and had not been recorded in the Southeast since the 1930s, but reports of sightings persisted, because like so many things there, a good story solidified the existence of things unseen.