The Word Exchange Read Free Page A

sideways, considering something invisible to me. He, in contrast, is watching her with adoring absorption, oblivious to all other witnesses at the scene of the crime—a 1975 backyard wedding at the Doran estate in East Hampton.
    I was seized then by what my father would call “an attack of sadness.” The photos made me queasy. They seemed like more proof that devotion fades. That everyone you love will someday, in some way, disappear.
    There were a few other pictures, these of Doug—all of which would be confiscated later by police. There was one of him as a teenager,with Aunt Jean, each posing with a fat brown trout on the North Platte River. Another of Doug delivering the Graduate English Oration when he received his Ph.D. from Harvard, having also delivered the Undergraduate English Oration, “Johnson & Johnson: A Love Affair with
A Dictionary of the English Language
.” Doug punting on the River Isis in Oxford. And one of him and a twelve-year-old me posed with the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. I’d starred in the school play, and he’d made me wear my costume.
    There was also something else in the drawer, buried beneath our family history: Doug’s Aleph. I miswrote if I’ve implied that Doug didn’t have a Meme. He didn’t
use
a Meme. (He hated that I had one, but that battle had long been fought. He
had
gotten me to forgo the optional microchip; it made me a little nervous, too. But I was intrigued to see what the new Meme would do—it was supposed to be coming out soon—and I’d contemplated getting one when I upgraded.) Doug did have an Aleph, though, which I’d forgotten about. It was the first model of the Meme that Synchronic, Inc. ever manufactured. It wasn’t widely distributed, but a few had been given to key publishing people when it came out.
    From what I understand, Synchronic chose the name Aleph because it represents the number one and the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But the name tested poorly—no one could pronounce it—and the device was full of bugs. It had a very early version of Sixth Sense software, and its Crown, called a Diadem at the time, had almost no sensors; it could only roughly gauge basic mood states. Even after training it for weeks to recognize preferences, the smart technology could guess what you wanted less than 10 percent of the time. “It’s not actually very smart,” Doug had said, “but it does have a good personality.”
    It didn’t, though: lots of users complained that a Chinese weather page loaded during games of Ping, or that they were redirected to Russian gambling sites while trying to watch live poker. When the software and hardware had been fixed about a year and a half later, the device was aggressively rebranded as the Meme, and Synchronic offered a steep discount to anyone willing to trade it in. As a result, very few Alephs remained in circulation. Doug’s was one of them. But the significance of finding it was initially lost on me.
    It was massive, nearly the size of a book, with clumsy raised buttons and keys. I flicked it on, guessed the password on the third try—oneof Doug’s many pet names for my mother—and while I waited for it to load, I crossed back over toward Doug’s window. Wondered where he could be.
    The sounds of streets that blinked red and white below were blocked out completely by the nineteen floors beneath me. Sometimes high winds could send our building creaking, as if on high seas. I looked into the window glass, my reflection rising from the surface like an emerging silver gelatin print. The pane became a parallax. For whoever might look in, it made a still. For me, looking out, it was a mirror, my face floating over all the dim shapes outside. And maybe it was my distance from the ground. The sense, from that height, that human life was illusory. But I felt for a moment as if I were falling a long, long way down. As if the girl reflected on the inside of the glass were merging with the one