Lexicon (8 page)

Tom looked at him. “What?”

“That woman.”

“No,” Tom said.

“Oh.”

“If that was Woolf, I would be weeping hot tears of joy.”

“Oh.”

“Your hometown, Broken Hill? Woolf did that. Not a chemical spill. Woolf. I would be dancing a jig if that was Woolf.”

“Got it,” Wil said.

“Not Woolf,” Tom said. “Not Woolf.”

They sat in silence. Nothing moved but the wind. “Did you know that woman in the transport?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she try to kill us?”

Tom didn’t answer.

Wil shivered. He was wearing a T-shirt. “I’m cold.”

Tom dropped the shotgun and lunged at him. Wil yelped, falling backward, and Tom grabbed his shirt, pulled him up, thrust him back to the snow, pulled him up again, and shoved him down. “What,” Wil gasped. Tom grabbed a handful of snow and mashed it into Wil’s mouth.

“You’re cold?” Tom said. “You’re cold?”

He released Wil. By the time Wil sat up, Tom had resumed his position and was facing the distant truck. Wil brushed snow from his face. “I’m sorry.”

“You need to be better than this,” Tom said. “You need to be worth it.”

Wil folded his hands beneath his armpits and looked at the sky.

“So far, you’re not worth shit.”

“Okay, look, I didn’t ask to be kidnapped.”

“
Saved
, is another way of putting it.”

“I didn’t ask to be saved.”

“Go, then.”

“I’m not saying I want to
go
.”

“Leave. See how long you last.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“You useless fuck,” said Tom.

“I did shoot a guy. I mean, not to overstate my contribution, but I did just fucking shoot a guy.”

Tom exhaled.

“And I pulled you out of the pickup.” A deep, numbing cold sunk into his body. He opened his mouth to give his jaw muscles something to do. “You didn’t run over those people.”

Tom looked at him.

“We could have gotten away. You just had to run over them.”

“Yeah,” Tom said.

“Why didn’t you?” Tom didn’t answer. “You shot that woman.”

“Brontë.”

“What?”

“Her name was Brontë.”

“As in . . . Charlotte Brontë? A poet? I thought
they
were poets.”

Tom didn’t reply.

“Okay,” Wil said. “I get it. That guy called you Eliot. You’re Tom Eliot. Right? T. S. Eliot. You’re a poet.”

Tom sighed. “Was.”

“You
were
a poet? What are you now?”

“I’m not sure,” Tom said. “Ex-poet, I guess.”

“Why did your friends turn bad?”

“They were compromised.”

“What does that mean?”

“Woolf got to them.”

“What does—”

“It means she’s very persuasive.”

“Persuasive? She’s persuasive?”

“I told you, poets are good with words.” Tom stood. Snow fell from his coat. “Time to go.”

“You’re telling me Woolf persuaded them to try to murder us? As in, she said, ‘Hey, how about you trap your buddy Tom Eliot in a cattle yard and try to run him down with a truck,’ and they
did
? Because she’s
persuasive?
”

“I said very persuasive. Get up.”

There was nothing but snow in every direction. “Where are we going?”

“I had a thought,” said Tom. “Maybe the plane really is here.”

•   •   •

They trudged through blackness and snow until Wil could no longer feel anything. His nerves retreated somewhere deep inside, where there was still warmth. His nose was a memory. He had not only never been this cold, he had not understood this degree of cold was possible. He began to hope poets found them, because whatever happened at least it would be warm.

He stumbled. “Aha!” said Tom. “Runway.” Wil couldn’t see him. “Let’s try . . . this way.”

After a few minutes, the stars began to vanish. There were noises. Tom took his arm and he found steps. At the top of those, the air was different. Warmer. Dear God, warmer.

“Sit,” said Tom. “Don’t do anything.”

He sank to the floor, wrapped his arms around his legs, and pressed his face into his arms. Tom was banging around somewhere up front, flicking switches. After a while, Wil began to feel alive. He raised his head. A yellow glow emanated from what he assumed was the cockpit. He massaged his feet. Could you get frostbite that quickly? Because he felt like he had frostbite. He decided to walk around, to save his feet.

The cockpit was a cramped nest of instruments, a single seat surrounded by dark panels. Tom was buckled in. “You can fly this?” Wil said.

“It’s not brain surgery.”

“You can’t even see where you’re going. It’s pitch-black out there.”

“I will assume we’re currently pointed in the right direction,” Tom said. “And drive straight.”

“Uh,” Wil said.

Tom ran his thumb across a dial and finished up on a worn black button. “I think we’re good to go.”

“You think?”

“It’s been a while since I did this.”

“You said it wasn’t brain surgery.”

“It isn’t. But the penalty for errors is high.”

“Maybe we should think about this.”

Tom waited. Wil thought he was reconsidering. Then he realized Tom was watching something. He followed his gaze but saw nothing but night sky. One of the stars was moving.

“What is that?” he said, and realized. “A helicopter.”

“Yes. Go sit down.” He depressed the button. Something went
click
. “Hmm.”

“Was that supposed to happen?” Tom didn’t answer, but clearly no. “Did they sabotage the plane? Do you think they—”

“Will you shut the fuck up?” Tom murmured to himself, poring over the controls. Ahead, the star grew. The ground beneath it began to twinkle. A searchlight swept snow.

“It’s getting closer.”

“Get out!”

“I’m just letting you—”

“Get out of the cockpit!”

He groped through darkness until he reached seats. He dropped into one and felt for the belt. Nothing happened for a while. He glanced behind him. He could make out shapes back there. Something in the seats. He couldn’t sit still, so he got up and made his way toward them. He found a metal suitcase on one seat, gleaming faintly in the gloom. He slid his hands around it and found clasps.

He couldn’t see, so he explored with his fingers. Something clinked. He felt fabric. He discovered something tubular and tried to pull it but it wouldn’t come. He pulled the case out of the seat and took it toward the front of the plane. When he was close enough to see, he peered into the case. Some of the equipment he didn’t recognize. Some he did. Syringes. Drill bits. In the center, its blade sheathed in plastic, lay a scalpel.

When he entered the cockpit, Tom was lying on his back, buried up to his elbows in the underside of the instrument panel. Wil held out the scalpel. “What is this?”

“Not now, Wil.”

“Look at this.”

Tom’s head appeared. His expression did not change. He disappeared beneath the panel again.

“What were you going to do to me?” He had to raise his voice over the rising thrumming of the chopper. “That guy said you were going to pull my head open. That’s what he said. Pull my head open. And I’m starting to wonder, Tom, whether that was an expression.”

“Will you fuck off?”

“
Were you going to kill me?
”

“I’ll kill you now if you don’t get out of here.”

Wil moved forward with the scalpel. He wasn’t going to stab Tom. He just wanted to be taken seriously. But Tom’s hand flashed out and grabbed Wil’s wrist and twisted the scalpel from it. He tossed the scalpel into the back of plane, looked at Wil condescendingly, and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

Wil said, “You owe me an answer.”

“We were going to do whatever was necessary.” Tom flicked a row of switches. “If we could get the word that destroyed Broken Hill from you without requiring us to crack open your head, terrific. We’d go that way. If not, the other. It’s better than what the other side wants for you.”

“It doesn’t fucking sound better.”

“I know Woolf,” Tom said. “I’ve known her since she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Trust me, this is better. Sit the fuck down.”

Light burst in the windshield. Wil raised his arm. The searchlight had found the plane. Beneath its gaze, the runway looked like black glass. The thrumming overhead was like thunder.

“Well, now I can see.” Tom thumbed the black button. The engines thumped. A low whine of power began to build. Something above Wil’s head went
thwack thwack thwack
. The plane began to trundle forward.

“They’re shooting at us. Are they shooting at us?”

“Yes.”

They bumped forward, gaining speed. “You know there’s a chopper up there.”

“I know.”

“So even if we get off the ground, how are we going to get away from the chopper?” The plane’s momentum pressed at him. He seized the back of Tom’s chair. He was going to regret not sitting down. But he wasn’t leaving. “
How do we get away from the chopper, Tom?
”

“Planes are faster than choppers.” Tom pulled on the yoke. They lifted off.

SUICIDE CULT CLAIMS SIX

MONTANA:
Police discovered the bodies of six people on an isolated ranch outside of Missoula on Tuesday, victims of an apparent suicide pact.

The dead included the owner of the ranch, well-known local herder Colm McCormack, 46, and his wife, Maureen McCormack, 44. Colm McCormack ran unsuccessfully for local office last November.

No further details were available.

[SIX]

Word filtered around that Kerry had won New Hampshire. He was going to be the Democrat nominee for president. “There it is,” said Sashona. She played with the end of her beaded dreadlocks. “Four more years of Bush.”

Emily sat in the back row. She didn’t join in these discussions. She was kind of a loner.

“Why would we back Bush?” argued a boy. “Kerry’s pro-media; he’ll be better for us.”

Because Bush is polarizing
, thought Emily. “Because Bush is polarizing,” Sashona said.

•   •   •

She had sixteen classes per week. In between, she was expected to study and practice. Not on other students. That was a rule. Her first day, wearing a uniform that still smelled of the plastic wrapping, she’d stood in Charlotte’s office and taken a lecture. There were many rules, and Charlotte took her through each of them, patiently and in detail, like Emily was retarded. At first Emily thought this was because Charlotte was carrying a grudge, but as the lecture wore on, she realized no. Charlotte just thought she was that stupid.

“This is a nonnegotiable rule of the school,” Charlotte said. “Indeed, of the organization as a whole. Should you break it, there will be no excuses. No second chances. Am I making myself clear?”

“You’re making yourself clear,” Emily said.

At this point, she didn’t know what
practicing
meant. It took her months to find out. She thought they were going to teach her persuasion; instead, she got philosophy, psychology, sociology, and the history of language. Back in San Francisco, Lee had given her a little speech about how this school would be different because it taught interesting, useful things, and that was a joke, in Emily’s opinion. Grammar was not interesting. It was not useful to know where words came from. And no one explained it. There was no overview. No road map. Classes were eight to twelve students of wildly different ages, all of them ahead of Emily and no one asking the obvious questions. She had to stay up at night, staring at textbooks, trying to figure out why any of this mattered.

She learned Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was the order in which people optimally satisfied different types of desires (food-safety-love-status-enlightenment). She learned that leverage over people’s desire for knowledge was called
informational social influence
, while leverage over people’s desire to be liked was
normative social influence
. She learned that you could classify a person’s personality into one of 228 psychographic categories with a small number of well-directed questions plus observation, and this was called
segmentation
.

“I thought this was going to be cooler,” she complained to Eliot. He was a part-time lecturer, teaching a few advanced classes, which did not include her. Whenever she saw his car parked out front, she headed for his office, because he was the only one she could talk to. “I thought it would be like magic.”

Eliot was busy with papers. But she figured he had an obligation to deal with her, since it was basically his fault she was here. “Sorry,” he said. “At your level, it’s just books.”

“When is it like magic?”

“When you finish the books,” Eliot said.

•   •   •

By the end of the year, she could see where it was going. She wasn’t learning persuasion, was still deep in Plato and neurolinguistics and the political roots of the Russian Revolution, but she was starting to sense the connections between them. One day she got to dissect a human brain, and as she peered through goggles at a frontal lobe, sliding the scalpel through the meat, separating decision making from motor function, memory from reward centers, she thought,
Hello
. Because she knew what the meat did.

•   •   •

She played soccer. You had to do a sport, soccer or basketball or water polo, and she was short and hated the swimsuits, so, soccer. On Wednesday afternoons she lined up with the other girls, shin guards stuffed into knee-high purple socks, her hair dragged back, a yellow shirt billowing, and she chased a ball around a field. The girls were all ages, so it was mostly an exercise in kicking the ball to the oldest and shouting encouragement. The exception was Sashona, who was only Emily’s age but strong and graceful and had shoulders like battering rams. Soccer was supposed to be noncontact but Sashona’s shoulders would put you on your ass anyway. After a goal, she would pump her fist, unsmiling, like she was satisfied but not surprised, and although Emily didn’t enjoy soccer much, she found this terribly impressive. She wanted to be as good at something as Sashona was at soccer.

At night, she sat by the window of her cloister room, books piled on her desk. She studied with her hair pinned up and her school tie slung. She didn’t really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn’t fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.

One day, exploring a corridor she’d always assumed went nowhere, she discovered a secret library. She didn’t know if it was actually secret. But it wasn’t marked, and she never saw anyone else. It was very small, with shelves that stretched up so high she needed a wooden ladder to reach them. Up there, the books were old. The first time she cracked open a volume, its pages came apart in her hands. After that, she was more careful. It occurred to her that maybe she was not allowed here, but that had not been included in Charlotte’s comprehensive list of rules, and the old books turned out to be interesting, so she stayed.

One shelf was for disaster stories. There was probably a classification scheme she hadn’t figured out. But the common thread seemed to be that a lot of people died. After a few books, she realized they were all the same story. They were set in different places, in Sumeria and Mexico and countries she’d never heard of, and the details differed, but the basics were the same. A group of people—sometimes they were called sorcerers, and sometimes demons, and sometimes they were just ordinary people—ruled over a kingdom or nation or whatever. In four of the books, they began building something impressive, like a crystal palace or the world’s largest pyramid. Then something bad happened and people died and everyone started speaking different languages. This story felt vaguely familiar to Emily, but she didn’t place it until she came to a book in which the impressive thing was a tower named Babel.

She thought she heard a noise and froze. But it was far away. She suddenly saw herself: sitting on the floor of a library in a blazer and pleated skirt, navy ribbons in her hair, reading old books. Before she had come here, Emily had seen girls like this—girls who wore ribbons, and enjoyed books—and thought they were a different species. She had thought they were separated by walls. Yet here she was, on the other side, and she didn’t know how she had done it. She didn’t feel like a different person. She was just in a different place.

•   •   •

The junior dining hall made excellent chocolate milk shakes. Emily got into the habit of swinging by after Macroeconomics and carrying one out to a sunny spot on the grass at the side of the building, where she could read. The cup was comically big. She always felt a little sick at the end of it. But she kept going back.

One day she passed a boy with a laptop at one of the outdoor tables. She had seen this boy in the halls, but they didn’t share any classes because he was older. He was more advanced. She snuck a glance at him, and another, because he was pretty cute.

The next day he was there again, and this time he looked up as she passed. His eyes took in her enormous milk shake. She kept walking to her sunny spot but couldn’t concentrate on her book.

The day after that, he saw her coming, stretched, and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Thirsty, huh?” She smiled, because she had been thinking of saying something, and the something was
Boy am I thirsty!

“Yeah,” she said. “I am thirsty.” She walked on.

On Wednesday, she bought an extra milk shake and deposited it on his table. His eyes, gray and soft as pillows, registered surprise. “I thought you looked thirsty, too.” She walked away, pleased with herself.

On Thursday she brought him no drink. She had thought about this. She simply walked by. There was a terrible moment when she thought he wouldn’t say anything—maybe he was too engrossed in his computer and hadn’t even noticed her. Should she circle around again, or was that too humiliating?

“Hey, wait,” he said.

She stopped.

“Thanks for the shake yesterday.”

“No problem.”

She stayed, smiling, hoping it wasn’t over.

“I’ve never been a milk shake guy. But they’re good.”

“They’re better than good,” she said. “I’m addicted.” She sucked at her straw.

He leaned back. “Do you want to sit?”

“I have a bunch of reading to do. Thanks, though. Maybe another time.” She walked away. He didn’t try to stop her, which was a little disappointing, and he didn’t seek her out later, either. But that was okay. She was playing a long game. It was naughty. What she was doing was
practicing
. Trying to persuade another student. But only a little, nothing she’d get in trouble for. The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.

The next day, she headed for her sunny spot with no milk shake. Her heart thumped, because if he saw this and didn’t respond, she would look pitiful. But she rounded the corner and his computer was closed and on the table were two milk shakes. He smiled, and gestured for her to sit, and she did.

•   •   •

His name was Jeremy Lattern. He had wanted to be a zookeeper. His family had a tiny house in Brooklyn but his mother rescued animals: rabbits and mice and ducks and dogs and two chickens. One of the chickens was insane. It ran in circles, making noises like it was drowning. His parents had wanted to get rid of it, but Jeremy pleaded for mercy. He thought he could cure it. He imagined this chicken becoming his friend, and people saying, “Jeremy’s the only one who can go near that chicken.” But this never happened. One day the chicken attacked him, pecking his face, and his father wrung its neck. That was how he got the small scar near his left eye, and decided against zoology.

Emily told him that her family were Canadian and she was raised on hockey. She described how when she was six, her father took her to a game and she was terrified because the crowd was so angry. There was an incident, a splash of players on the ice, and she turned to her father for protection but his face was monstrous. On the way home, he asked if she’d had fun, and she said yes, but whenever she even saw hockey on TV, she felt sick.

These were all lies, of course. You couldn’t tell a student anything true about yourself. This wasn’t a rule, exactly; it was obvious. She was in her second year and learning how people could be categorized into distinct psychographic groups based on how their brain worked. Segment 107, for example, was an intuition- and fear-motivated introvert personality: Those people made decisions based on avoiding the worst outcomes, found primary colors reassuring, and, when asked to pick a random number, would choose something small, which felt less vulnerable. If you knew someone was a 107, you knew how to persuade them—or, at least, which persuasion techniques were more likely to work. This was not very different from what Emily had always done, without thinking about it too much: You developed a sense of what a mark desired or feared and used that to compel them. It was the same, only with more theory. So that was why you shouldn’t talk about yourself, and why the older students were so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you had to hide who you were. But she suspected she was not very good at this. She guessed there were a whole bunch of clues she was inadvertently dropping to someone like Jeremy Lattern every time she opened her mouth, or cut her hair, or chose a sweater. She figured the reason the school had a
no practicing
rule was that sometimes people did it.

•   •   •

“Tell me what they teach you,” she said. “Give me a sneak preview.”

They were making slushies. They had progressed beyond milk shakes. The advantage of the slushie was you had to leave school grounds. Tuesdays and Fridays, if the weather was clear, they walked the three-quarters of a mile to the nearest 7-Eleven. She liked walking beside Jeremy Lattern, because cars would zoom by and the drivers would probably assume she was his girlfriend.

“You use very direct language,” he said. “You don’t ask. You command. That’s a useful instinct.”

“So tell me why I’m learning Latin.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you always follow the rules?”

“Yes.”

“Bah,” she said, defeated.

“The rules are important. What they teach us is dangerous.”

“What they teach
you
is dangerous. What they teach
me
is Latin. Dude, I’m not asking for state secrets. Just give me something. One thing.”

He attached the slushie lid and poked the straw through the plastic.

“Bah,” she said again. They walked to the front of the store and stood in line behind a kid paying for gas. The man behind the counter was balding, in his fifties, Pakistani or something like it. She nudged Jeremy. “Which segment is this guy?” He didn’t answer. “I’m thinking one eighteen. Am I right? Come on, I’m doing segmentation; you can answer the question.”

“Maybe one seventy.”

She hadn’t considered that one, but saw instantly how it made sense. “See, that wasn’t so bad. Now what? What do we do once we know he’s a one seventy?”

“We pay for our slushies,” Jeremy said.

•   •   •

She hung with Jeremy in his room sometimes. Once she stuck chewing gum into the lock before she left and came back when she knew he had a class. She went to his bookshelf and pulled down three titles she had been eyeing for a while. She was sitting on his bed, deep in
Sociographic Methods
, when the door opened. Jeremy stood there, one hand on the knob. She had never seen him mad before. “Give me that.”

“No.” She sat on it.