Vox Mentis

If you can't compromise him, he's a liability. Spout some shit about the economy and how you're pretty used to living like this, dude shouldn't worry about you

“I’m okay,” you say. “You know.” You wave your hands around. “This economy.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m sitting close enough to smell you.” His expression looks genuine but you don’t like his eyes. There are a lot of tiny muscles there and they are not consistent with the rest of his face. “Is there any way I can help you?”

“Thanks, but no.” You stand up. “This is my stop.”

“Mine, too.”

You sit. “My mistake.”

He leans forward. He does this slowly, like he wants to get it right. “Do you need money?”

You hesitate, because you do need money. But not from this guy. You don’t even want to compromise him. You just need to get away. Your eye is starting to hurt.

“Whatever trouble you’re in, I can help. I’m a lawyer. I have money. No strings. I see an intelligent young woman who needs a helping hand. That’s all. Say no and I won’t bother you anymore.”

The train stops. The carriage is almost empty, the platform bare. You wait until you're sure the man isn’t moving, then stand and walk quickly to the doors. You get there in time, hit the button, step off, and keep walking. A night breeze stirs your hair. You want to look around but keep your head down, in case of cameras.

“Five hundred dollars,” says the man, right behind you. “Look at it.” You ignore him. “Are you stupid? Just take it. Take it.” He puts a hand on your shoulder.

You turn and shove him. He staggers backward. He really is holding a fistful of cash. Behind him, the train begins to pull out.

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Fuck off!” you shout. And you go after him, for some reason, and push him again. “Leave me alone!” He tries to catch your arm. But you're too quick for that. Whatever else he is, he isn’t prepared for someone who fights back. You shove him again. “Leave me alone!” His back hits the moving train and he rebounds a step onto the platform. Your brain is full of violence and your star is singing and another push could send him between the carriages. If you time it right. You think, Thoreau, Thoreau, save it for Thoreau.

“Jesus,” says the man. “Jesus.” He gets around you and runs away.

You stand there, breathing. You need to get out of here. You have to leave before the cops arrive. You make for the exit, your hoodie pulled tight. You can’t wait for the space bag. You'll have to call and have it mailed. You have to take yourself out of the cities, away from people, before someone gets hurt.

~

A month later, you're trudging across the desert. You have a stick. It's night, because during the day you can see for twenty miles in all directions, and you assume someone will be looking. Also snakes sleep at night. You wear a fur-lined parka and loose shorts, maybe an odd combination, but the thing is the nights are cold enough to freeze exposed sweat. A twenty-eight-pound backpack is strapped around your waist and shoulders. You're loving your boots: big, brown, comfortable shit-kickers.

You make good ground on night one and stop at the first hint of dawn. You find a depression in the dirt beside three scrubby trees, a long-dead waterhole, and spread your space bag beneath them. You sit on it awhile, cooling, watching the stars retreat and the sky lighten. Your body feels satisfyingly used. Not exhausted. You're in good shape. You eat a hard biscuit and crawl beneath the space bag and fall asleep.

You wake a few hours later in a furnace. You're swimming in sweat. You peek out, thinking maybe you've lost your shade. But no. It's just hot. You wriggle out, keeping flat to the ground to avoid presenting a profile, and unzip your backpack. You pull out four wooden stakes and use them to suspend the space bag a few feet above the ground. The idea is to remain camouflaged from above while allowing air to move around you. You strip naked, crawl under the sheet, suck water from your drinking tube, and try to sleep.

The second night is harder. Your legs feel suspiciously sore, which they hadn’t during your trials. You might be pushing yourself, walking faster than you need to. You're blowing your water budget, too. You force yourself to slow down, stop for more rests, but then worry that you're falling behind on distance, which would create new water problems. The chances are excellent that you can source fresh water in Broken Hill, in which case you have no problem. But you do not want to rely on this, since if you're wrong you will die. You keep walking, your stick ready, in case of night snakes.

You make less ground than you want and stop early, feeling dizzy. You drink a lot, even splashing some on your face. You eat more biscuits. You haven’t brought many of those, to avoid temptation, because digestion increases the body’s demand for water. That's starting to seem like a mistake. You crawl under the space bag.
Again, you're woken by the sun baking the earth and have to convert the bag to a little tent. This time, however, you realize the trees you camped beneath are basically leafless, which is a serious problem, because no shade. There is no wind and the underside of the space bag radiates heat. You lie there as long as you can, watching your skin turn mottled pink then red, and crawl out and curl against the trunk of a tree. It's better but only a little. You begin to seriously wonder if you will die. Two weeks ago, you decided against bringing the long white Bedouin robes that would have made it possible to walk in the daytime without passing out, thinking they weren’t worth the weight. This decision might kill you.

You drink your electrolytes. Every thirty minutes, you tip tiny amounts of water onto your hands and wipe them across your face and neck. The water pack grows scarily thin but it's either drink or expire. In late afternoon, a light breeze begins to shift the sand and you cry a little despite the fluid loss.

Finally the sun eases toward the earth. Sometime after that, you begin to feel human. You get to your feet and begin to pack your bag and think about which direction to go. The smart thing is to head back. It will take two nights but you have enough water and will be able to recover and rethink how you're going to do this. But it will mean starting over. And the town is only one more night away. It will probably have water. Even if the tanks have gone bad, there will be bottles. Stores and cafés with darkened refrigerators. You ignore the part of you that asks but what if and start walking.

Your feet become sore, then wet-feeling, then numb. You don’t want to blame the boots but you have the feeling they're letting you down. They're like boys who at first are cool and suave and then after a couple of weeks you realize are assholes. Around midnight you begin to hallucinate a little and forget important things like checking your compass. You come across a boulder and sit on it and wake up face-first in the sand. Your lips feel like a baked cake. You drink and drink and finish your water.

The town rises with the dawn. You walk toward it. You lose your stick somehow. You begin to pass houses, places you recognize. You see the first body and try not to look but your eyes won’t stay still. It's a woman you know. Beryl. You recognize the dress. I’m here to fix it, you tell Beryl. To say sorry. But you can’t really believe Beryl would be pleased by that, or would forgive you in any way. You suck on your water tube and remember it's empty and turn in at a gate because it's time to search for water. You walk up the path and stop because on the house’s concrete front steps lies a brown snake, sunning itself. You stare at it. “Fuck off!” you shout, and stamp your boots, and it wriggles away.

~

You pull open cupboards and pass out in a bedroom and throw up in a toilet and aren’t sure in which order that happens. You find water and sleep. When you awake the sun is throwing shadows at forty-five degrees and you have to stare at them a long time to figure out whether it's morning or afternoon. You've slept for a day and a half. You're ravenous.

You find and devour a box of fruit bars. Your brain likes this and you begin to be able to make sense of things. Empty water bottles are everywhere. You sit at the wooden kitchen table and wait for the sun to go down. Then you strap yourself into your pack.

A strong wind is blowing, tossing stinging sand at your face. You hike along the road. You've steeled yourself for the bodies, and keep your eyes up and your mind focused, but the closer you get, the more the wild, clawing terror grows inside you, wanting to turn you around and steer you out of here. Sand stings your eye and you rub at it but it makes no difference.

You pass the gas station, with its burned cars and trucks. You make yourself machinery: legs and feet and purpose. You reach the hospital. You step over a snarl of cloth and leather and gleaming bone and push open the side door. These are things you do. You walk down the corridor. You don’t recognize anything because that part of your brain is closed. You reach the double doors for the emergency room and drop your pack and close your eyes. Then you go in.

The smell is very bad. Old but wrong. Your nose begins to run. Your boots hit something and you shuffle around it. When anything blocks your path, you carefully step over it. Your fingers find the counter. You follow it along to the place where you left the bareword.

It's not there. You stand awhile, breathing. You follow the counter all the way to the wall, sweeping its surfaces. Your fingers find objects, small things you can identify like a stapler and a nameplate and larger things you drop upon ascertaining they are not what you want and do not think about. You reach the wall and begin making a low sound, equal parts moan and hum.

You circle the counter twice. You make your way back to where the bareword had been and drop to your hands and knees and begin to feel around on the floor. Almost immediately you find cloth and hair and your hum becomes a shriek and you can’t do it anymore. You can’t grope around corpses. You get to your feet. The idea creeps into your brain: I’m lost. You will never find your way out. You will spend the rest of your life crawling over the bodies of the people you let die, searching for an exit you're too afraid to open your eyes and look for. Your breaths come in hitching shrieks. You trip twice and then your hands find the doors and you crawl through them.

~

You return to the house. You could have sought out Danny’s but aren’t up to facing more memories. With four walls around you, you feel safer. You scrub your hands in a toilet cistern. You sit on the seat and stare at nothing. You feel numb. The word should have been there.

Thoreau had probably wanted to put you in exactly this position. He had probably recovered the word months ago, in secret. You had been tracked all the way in, and right now they're moving through the streets, corralling you, whispering to each other guttural words.

But this doesn't seem right. You don't understand Thoreau well, but in your experience, people with power use it. You feel the word is there. You feel that strongly.

After a while, a thought occurs to you. You rise from the seat.

~

You go back to the hospital and through the corridors to the emergency room doors. You put your pack against the wall and withdraw a digital camera, which you found at the house. You've tested its batteries already but take a photo of a fire extinguisher, just to be sure. Then you close your eyes and push through the doors.

You shuffle inside a few steps and raise the camera. Your idea is that this thing really is a word. It's on petrified wood, but the wood isn’t the important part. The important part is the mark. You press the shutter button and feel the flash on the inside of your eyelids. You shift your aim and press again. You'll accumulate photos. Most of the photos will contain unbearable things, but in one will be the word. People kept coming into this room and turning into killers, ergo the word is somewhere it can be seen. You adjust your aim, press the shutter for another photo. You'll keep taking them until the camera runs out of room. Then you'll download the photos to a computer. You'll magnify them a thousand times and inspect each picture a handful of pixels at a time. It will take forever. You'll see awful things. But you will do it. Eventually, you'll find the edges of something that looks like wood. You'll know where in the image the bareword is located. You can magnify it a hundred times, until it's too big to see all at once. And you can copy it. The word is not a thing. It's information. It can be duplicated. You can copy it one piece at a time, carve it onto wood so it will be just the same. Maybe you'll get someone to help, so you'll never hold the whole thing in your brain. Then you'll have a hundred tiny pieces, numbered on the back, which you can reassemble. You'll have to find a way to carry it safely. To keep it always close. You press the shutter again. You're thinking maybe a necklace.

~

You come out of the hospital. The air feels incredibly fresh and you gulp at it. You start walking, then running, your pack bouncing on your back. You're clutching the camera. You should stop and seal it in plastic, stash it away safely. But you can’t stop. You run through dead streets and a crow caws and you shriek back at it, an insane yodel that won’t stay quiet. You're supposed to be stealthy. They could be listening. You run, hiccupping and gibbering, desperate to put distance between you and this place, to reach somewhere you can open your lungs and scream triumph like you want.

~

You trot up the mansion steps and are set upon by butlers. You thought you had lost them at the foot of the stairs, but there are more. One attempts to steer you through the great open double doors and another begins gently inquiring if you require refreshment and a third wants to take your coat. All this is conducted in a low-register butler octave, making you feel as if you're moving through a burbling stream. You allow yourself to be de-coated. A fourth butler seizes the opportunity to step forward and brazenly adjust your bow tie. The butler who wants to infuse you with refreshments positions himself so that you need only take a step forward for a champagne flute to slide effortlessly into your left hand, but you don’t know this butler, and in no fucking universe does Henry David Thoreau allow strangers to insert fluids into his body.

“There’s Spanish,” says Eliot. He has followed you up the steps and is peering into the house. Butlers navigate around Eliot as if he is a rocky prow in a seething ocean, because he's not wearing a tuxedo. He is in a brown suit and beige coat, which apparently you will need to physically pry from his body if you ever want to see Eliot in anything else. There is a code, of course. The Organization imposes a ceiling on the quality of dress a poet is permitted to enjoy, commensurate with the poet’s level. The point is to address the situation whereby a newly graduated poet realizes there is very little in the world denied to them and begin to get about in outrageous dress and three hundred thousand dollar cars, drawing attention. And technically the code applies to you. Technically, your entire ensemble should have cost roughly half the price of your current shoes. But you do not follow the code, because you are not a twenty-year-old idiot who requires protection from temptation. You are intelligent enough to respect the intent of the code without slavishly adhering to its letter. Eliot, however. Eliot in his last-century suit, his repulsive department store shoes, his wrinkled coat. The most important thing about Eliot is that he won’t break a rule to save his life.

“Are you coming in?” you say. “I believe that some of the delegates have brought advisers.”

“No. I’m not dressed for it,” Eliot says, then realizes it isn’t a real invitation.

“Then I will see you at the office.”

“Russian’s not coming. That’s what I came to tell you.”

You hesitate. The butler with the champagne flute takes the opportunity to slide forward and you glance at him, bestowing upon the butler the terrible shame of having drawn notice. The butler falls away, mortified. “What do you mean?”

“Russian’s doing it via speakerphone.”

“You must be joking.”

Eliot shrugs. “It’s what his people have said.”

“Well,” you say. You prepare for these meetings carefully. You attempt to consider every eventuality. But a speakerphone? Is Russian that afraid of compromise? Is he not aware that employing a speakerphone will broadcast his fear, screaming his vulnerability to every delegate in this house? It is ridiculous.

Eliot is still hanging around, eyeing the swirling gowns and tuxedos inside the room. “Thank you,” you say. Eliot nods and begins to trot down the steps. You feel your mood lifting with each step Eliot takes, with each increment of distance added between you and those shoes. Butlers begin to swarm, excited by your inattention. You shrug them off and enter the house.

~

Just inside the doors is von Goethe, regaling a glittering circle that includes, if you are not mistaken, one senator and two congressmen. Goethe is German, short and sharp-nosed with dark, slicked-back hair. He is wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, which you are sure are decorative. His shoes are fine brown soles. Goethe excuses himself from the group and clasps your hands in both of his. “Guten Tag, mein Freund,” you say, which causes Goethe’s face to crumple in disgust. “Wie geht es Ihnen?”

“Rather nauseous, after that.”

“I apologize,” you say. “I do not have the opportunity to practice my German as often as I would like.”

“You are forgiven.” This exchange establishes that Goethe doesn’t wish to engage you in German, which is sensible, since it is easier to resist compromise in a learned language than a native one, but cowardly, for the same reason. You are happy to roll with it, in the spirit of the occasion. You are not here to compromise anyone. Also, you sincerely doubt Goethe is capable of troubling you in English. “A fine occasion you have arranged. So worthy.”

“Well,” you say. For the first time you take in the stage, the tables draped in white cloth, the tasteful sign by the podium that declares: A WORLD OF LITERACY. “We do what we can.”

“I was speaking with one of your politicians and he informed me that your government is investing some hundreds of millions of dollars to teach children across Asia to read.”

“We do what we can.”

“Read English,” says Goethe.

“Well,” you say. “You can hardly expect us to teach them German.” You clasp the hand of a tall, bronze-skinned woman who had met your eye across the ballroom twenty seconds ago and begun to cross it like a torpedo. “Rosalía, what a pleasure.”

“Henry,” she says. “I swear, you age backward.”

“De Castro,” says Goethe, casting an eye over her green gown, which is daring when she stands still and practically scandalous when she moves. De Castro offers her hand, which Goethe kisses. “Thoreau and I were just discussing his latest plan to seed the world with English missionaries.”

“Surely you see that a common world language would serve the Organization’s interests.”

“I suppose,” says Goethe. “But I weep at the prospect that this language would be English.”

“It won’t be,” says de Castro. “It will be Spanish. English plateaued some time ago. It will take more than Thoreau’s missionaries to reverse that.” She looks down her nose at Goethe, who stands a foot shorter. “I suppose these things are more alarming to delegates whose languages are in decline.”

“Ah, it begins,” says Goethe. “The traditional German pile-on.”

“Honestly, I admire your spirit. It cannot be easy to watch your language slip into the footnotes of history.”

“It is doing no such thing.”

“Although I suppose you must be used to humiliation,” says de Castro. “German being the second most popular Germanic language.”

“Children, please,” you say.

De Castro turns to you. “Did I hear correctly? Pushkin will be joining us via speakerphone?”

“Apparently.”

“I do hope we don’t need another Russian delegate. They’ve been dropping like flies. Alexander was doing so well.”

“It’s the language,” says Goethe. “Too many morphemes. Inherently vulnerable.”

“He can’t expect to save himself with a speakerphone. The idea is preposterous.” She uses a German word for “preposterous,” lächerlich, slightly mangling the first syllable, watching Goethe as she does. So you presume that de Castro dropped a little linguistic depth charge there. The entire meeting will be like this: delegates continually probing each other, seeking weakness. It is an inevitable by-product of the fact that the Organization is a loose coalition of independent entities; no delegate outranks any other. Technically, you are no more important than al-Zahawi of Arabic or Bharatendu Harishchandra of Hindi-Urdu. This is something you plan to change.

“Let us assume Pushkin has other motives,” you say, “and not waste our time together on speculation.”

“Agreed,” says de Castro. “Speaking of which, Henry, I was hoping you might be able to end some speculation of my own. Have you recovered your bareword?”

Your phone buzzes against your thigh, which is surprising, since everyone who knows that number should have known not to call it. “Sadly, no.”

“How disappointing,” says de Castro, “and, simultaneously, bullshit. Henry, none of us believe you would allow a bareword to lie in Broken Hill unmolested for almost a year.”

“The concept is extraordinary,” says Goethe.

“We can discuss what you are willing to believe in the meeting,” you say. “Which has not yet begun.”

De Castro glances around the room. “There is a reason the other delegates have not approached you yet. I imagine it is the same reason Pushkin is not here at all.” Her eyes settle on you. “Do you plan to compromise us?”

“How ridiculous,” you say.

De Castro watches you. Goethe says, “There is no denying you have been making efforts to retrieve it. However, the more time that passes, the more one wonders whether one is witnessing not efforts so much as charades.”

“I do not have the bareword,” you say. “For proof, please note the obvious fact that if I did, I would be using it to spare myself this conversation.” Your phone buzzes again. “Excuse me.”

You turn away, pluck the phone from your pants, glance at the screen, and repocket it. You gaze into the distance, digesting the words: SIGHTING 5+1@97.47 IN 24 POI 605066.

The message is automated, sent by a computer whenever a person of interest - a PoI - is sniffed out by one of the vast number of surveillance systems to which you have access. Because those systems are less than perfectly reliable, possible sightings become messages only when the computer has accumulated sufficiently many of sufficient quality to pass a particular confidence level. In this case, they were informing you of five sightings in the past twenty-four hours, plus one from earlier, which are ninety-seven percent likely to be Person of Interest number 605066, which, you know from memory, is Virginia Woolf.

You return to Goethe and de Castro. “Frankly,” says de Castro, as if no time has passed at all, “I see little point sitting down to discuss digital interconnectedness and social media when such an overwhelming issue remains unresolved.”

“It is resolved,” you say. “I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you.” It strikes you as remarkably suspicious that there would be a Woolf sighting at this moment, in this meeting. You wonder which delegate is responsible.

“You can tell me the current location of Virginia Woolf,” says de Castro. “That troubles me, also.”

“We looked. We didn’t find her. It seems likely she is dead.”

Goethe looks at de Castro. “He claims not to know.”

“Henry, I hear things,” says de Castro, “from people in your organization, as you no doubt hear things from people in mine. And the most disturbing tale has reached me. In it, Virginia Woolf steals the bareword and brings it to Broken Hill not out of some adolescent fit of pique, as you described, but rather at your command, as part of a test of the word’s effectiveness. Clearly, given the current population of Broken Hill is now zero, this test was a resounding success. Which is alarming in itself, Henry, for as much as we hold you in the highest regard, we are all undermined by your possession of a kind of persuasion against which there is no defense. But the part of this tale that troubles me most is the idea that Virginia Woolf, as your agent, is out there somewhere, engaged in some activity that serves your purpose. I cannot imagine what that might be. And that makes me most uncomfortable.”

Throughout this, your phone has continued to vibrate. You have developed the uncomfortable suspicion that the coincidence of Woolf’s sighting during this meeting might not be due to a delegate. It might be due to Woolf.

“Confide in us,” says Goethe. “We are your allies, William.”