The St. Louis Arch loomed into view through Jeremy Cook’s bug-spattered windshield. He crossed the Mississippi like many a pioneer before him, squinting against the sun, his stomach lurching with fear of an uncertain future.
Cook was in transition. He hated to be in transition. He liked things to stay the same. He wanted tomorrow to be like yesterday. He wanted to know that where he was going was where he had been.
WHERE HE HAD BEEN: the Wabash Institute, a linguistics think tank attached to a daycare center, where for six years he had happily crawled around on the floor and watched young children learn to talk. His specialty had been toddlers in the one-to-three range, whose world he entered as easily as if he had never left it. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, he would go home actually confused about his own age, yielding sidewalk space to the rather threatening third-graders in his neighborhood.
The Wabash Institute, stuck in the outback of southern Indiana, had suited Cook in all ways. His colleagues had thought well of him and he had bathed warmly in their appreciation. Among the staff of seven linguists he had found only one good male friend, but that was all he needed, and he had found other friends among the divorced mothers who used Wabash for daycare and the occasional female graduate students and postdocs who stopped by Wabash for a spell of linguistic fieldwork and a bit of bed and breakfast down the road at Cook’s place.
These many led, in time, to one special one: Paula, a summer intern who stuck around for eight months longer than she had planned, thanks to Cook, moving in with him while she finished writing her Ph.D. dissertation. But when she went to M.I.T. to defend it, she never came back. This made Cook feel like some branch office of a graduate fellowship program. His one great fear the whole time she had lived with him was that she would think he was not smart enough for her, despite his two books, his many articles, and his sharp comments on her dissertation chapters as she wrote them. Apparently he had somehow botched it, because the day she left she said to him, “Which would you rather be—clever or warm?” Being a man of careful language, he had objected to the question and thoroughly trounced it.
He had had a year all by himself to savor his victory. He heard from her just once in that time, by postcard, sent from the excitingly named town of Jones, Oklahoma, about six months after she had left him. He hadn’t been able to figure out much about her life from the card. All she had written was “Well?”
The Wabash Institute followed the example of his love life and went to smash. Its demise came in the common way: the money ran out. As it became clear that this was happening, most of the linguists planned for the future and found jobs on college faculties or at other outposts of linguistics. But not Cook. He refused to believe Wabash could come to an end and, much to his colleagues’ concern, took no action.
“It’s because you’re all alone, Jeremy,” Wabash’s mean secretary had told him, treating him to this summation at the final spring picnic before Wabash broke up. “You don’t have anyone to help you make decisions. When you’re sick there’s no one to take care of you. When you have a bad day there’s no one to talk it over with. There’s no one to help you plan your life. You’re all alone. You’re all by yourself.”
Cook had found this moment somewhat humbling. Uncharacteristically, he had said nothing to her. But, characteristically, he had brooded over it. At the picnic everyone was paired up except for him. Husbands and wives—they drove him nuts. They were so damned connected, with their linked fingers and blurry-edged egos. Watching them in action, he felt more than ever like a mere friend. He sensed that at the end of the picnic he could say farewell to everyone there and drop dead the next day, and no one would give him any thought at all.
WHERE HE WAS GOING: to the Pillow Agency in St. Louis for an interview, maybe even a job. One good thing had happened at the picnic—a colleague told him of an opening at this agency for a linguist. Cook had written and obtained an interview, which was scheduled for four-thirty this afternoon.
Cook knew little about the Pillow Agency. He knew it was well funded from the estate of a St. Louis businessman who had made a fortune in rat poison, or something like that. He also knew that its focus was language and society, but from odd perspectives. He remembered hearing a lecture at a Linguistic Society of America convention in San Francisco by a representative of the Pillow Agency—a wizened fellow whose grim subject was language death. The lecturer told one depressing tale after another of last speakers of languages like Cornish and Dalmatian going to the grave and selfishly dragging with them whole branches of family trees. He dwelt somewhat morbidly, Cook recalled, on their deathbed snorts and croaks—the last feeble vibrations of these choking tongues.
If this study was typical of the work that went on there, at this point in his life Cook felt that the Pillow Agency and he were made for each other.
He exited Interstate 70 into the bowels of downtown. The city seemed crazed with noise and motion. Either a parade was imminent or Indiana had completely ruralized him. He located his building and worked his way from there to a nearby parking garage. As he hurried to the garage elevator he found himself all aquiver, shivering from the cold (it was a mild day, but the garage held a chill), flinching from the screeches and honks that echoed off the concrete, and quaking from job-interview nervousness. Out on the street, a demented pigeon flew straight at his face and made him duck before it veered upward. St. Louis knew he was coming and was ambushing him with everything it had.
But he set his jaw, mustered his resolve, and discovered, upon his prompt arrival on the twelfth floor of the Hastings Building, that the Pillow Agency was closed for the day. Not a soul was in sight.
Cook wandered the halls and knocked on doors. He took the letter scheduling his appointment from his suit coat pocket and reread it. He looked at his watch (already set back for Central Time), checked it against the hall clock, examined his wallet calendar—in short, brought every paltry arithmetical fact to bear on the problem, more to dodge than to reach its obvious solution: the Pillow bastards thought so little of him that they had forgotten about the appointment.