The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland

Author:Amy Rowland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2014-03-10T01:13:43+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Massacre in Mideast; Hope Turns to Despair

As Lena is walking to work in the morning, a woman suddenly grabs her arm and points up to a balcony across the street.

“She’s not going to jump, is she?”

Lena looks up at the open window, where she can see the variegated leaf of a plant draped like a weary arm over the sill.

“Oh, she’s gone away,” the woman says, and for the first time she looks Lena in the eye. She is a middle-aged woman whose face has permanent traces of anxiety and alarm. “I’m so afraid of heights now, I can’t open my windows.”

Before Lena can respond, the woman is gone, swallowed up in the pedestrian sea. She continues along the avenue, looking up, hearing snippets of conversation, and twitching her fingers to transcribe them on air.

“The super said he gave it a kiss and a prayer.”

“Why, in Russian you have to move your lips more?”

“Can you hear me? I can see you.”

Approaching Times Square, she feels a thread of sweat along the small of her back. She steps into the street to skirt the tourists who have already crowded the corner to examine tables of handbags and socks and old jazz magazines and albums. The men selling—it is nearly always men with these wares—have boom boxes and canvas butterfly chairs and coolers.

IN THE RECORD’S elevator, she remembers that today is escape-hood training. The paper has canceled all holiday parties this year and instead has invested in escape hoods, four thousand of them for seventy dollars each. Employees have received offers to buy escape hoods for family members at this same generous discount.

She glances at today’s front page. Children are working as rock crushers in Kenya. A young boy and his father have to pass the family’s one pencil off to each other—one takes it to school in the morning, one takes it to work in the evening. Soldiers killed in Iraq, civilians killed in Afghanistan, monks killed in Myanmar, lawyers killed in Pakistan. A mysterious weed is choking swamps in Louisiana. Scientists have discovered that moths in Madagascar drink the tears of sleeping birds.

The Recording Room phone is silent. She lingers with the paper, reading about people in China who are arrested and encouraged to confess. There must be a transcriptionist in China who specializes in confessions. There must be hundreds. The confessor’s cries that arise from the “encouragement” must be off the record.

She begins to pace. At these moments, when she has gorged on too many sad stories, she has such a longing to create something, to produce something, to bring forth something, or to commit some violence, that she considers ripping the articles from the paper just to destroy the paper itself. But she doesn’t. Really she is afraid of committing any violent act, even against paper, because it reminds her that she never knows where the drop-off point is, but she does know that it takes only a second to step over it.

She glances at the paper again, and a sentence catches her eye.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.