“Oh, dear,” Eliza says, stopping herself just in time. “Not feeling any better, then?” She resists the urge to reach forward and touch his back as she might do if one of the kids at the after-school program were in similar straits. This is, after all, a grown man, and he’s done this to himself.
“No,” he says, after another spell.
“The hiking will help eventually,” she says. “You’ll sweat it out.”
Tom nods. He’s taken a seat, now, right in the middle of the trail. Eliza stays on her feet. Tom wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.
“What possibly possessed you to drink so much?” she asks.
“Good question,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind the answer to that question.”
“It won’t be so bad,” Eliza says, looking up the trail. “Only a few hours, really. Then you’ll have your machine, and you can take it home and sell it on eBay.”
Tom smiles. “Right,” he says. “One dollar.”
“Maybe not,” says Eliza. She does not want to look at Tom because she is guessing at his line of thinking, and she does not like where it’s headed. She always has had this talent—no idea where it came from or why she’s so good at it, but she can guess what’s in the heads of other people, sometimes frighteningly well. She almost always wins at rock-paper-scissors. It’s not quite that she can read the faces of her opponents. Usually, it’s more of a guess at the other point of view. If I were Sheila, goes the thinking…if I were Sheila, I would prefer to follow rock with rock.
Her guess about Tom Sanderson’s thinking: he is right now, as he wipes his mouth, calculating how best to extort money from her.
He does know, after all, that a condition of her receiving her inheritance is that they retrieve this machine together. No retrieval, no money for Eliza. The manner in which she is supposed to spend it will be lost on him entirely. He’ll only note the easy logic.
It’s sadly predictable, and it fits perfectly into her conception of humankind, actually. See a means of capitalization, calculate the manner and means to exploit it, and fly into action. A simple formula for being. Not hers, but most.
“This is insane,” Tom says. He’s sipping his water.
“Yes,” she says. “Very.”
Here it comes, she thinks.
He looks at her.
“And yet strangely,” he says, slowly getting to his feet, “I kinda want to find out what happens.”
They continue into the hills for another two hours, talking here and there. Tom asks her what she does for a living and even though she can’t see his face when she answers, she suspects it displays the wry smile that comes alongside the patronizing pity most people experience when they consider a lifelong career in social work.
Then Tom says the most obvious thing he could say.
“So you’re a do-gooder, eh?”
“No,” Eliza says. “Just child services.”
Tom says nothing. Perhaps he hears the hostility in her voice. For whatever reason, he decides to shut up, which leaves Eliza alone with her thoughts and ongoing images of the American moving along at a slow pace, drifting left and right on the trail. She can hear him panting.
She does not dislike him quite as much as she initially had, although she has no intention of warming up to him anytime along this brief journey. To her, Tom is a vaguely interesting addition to a cataclysmic shake-up of her life, a blink of the eye amidst a paradigm shift.
They break for lunch on a ridge that overlooks a vast lake. Finally, they seem to have finished climbing, and the trail now seems to flatten out and take them toward the base of much rockier hills—one might be tempted to call them mountains, although Eliza has seen enough pictures of the Rocky Mountains to know she would sound foolish if she called them that in front of Tom.
Tom no longer looks hungover. He looks exhausted, but not hungover. He sits atop a chair-sized rock, eating one of the energy bars Grayspool so thoughtfully packed. He’s also dug out a small GPS device from the pack, and is now tapping it as he chews.
“Hmph,” he says. “We’re halfway there.” He glances east, out toward the rocky hills in the distance. “It’s probably right in there.”
“Will we be there before dark, then?” she asks, looking out where he points. It’s beautiful. Green hills, still the blue sky above, roving and arching lines of trees and forest. To the south, they can see a small lake, a disc of cobalt.
“I guess so.”
Eliza looks back at him.
“I have to say, Tom. You’re being an awfully good sport about all of this.”
He smiles. “Why do you say that?” he asks. “Because I’m out here hiking in the first place?”
“I suppose.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “I didn’t have a whole lot going on back home. No kids. I got divorced six months ago. Lost my job.” He shrugs. “At the moment Grayspool called me, I was ready to believe just about everything. This is perfect for me.”
“Funny, that,” she says. “It’s the same for me.”
“What do you think,” Tom asks, “about all this talk of Herman watching us? Over the years, I mean. Did you ever notice anything?”
“Nothing I would have recognized at the time.”
“What does that mean?”
“Grayspool,” she says. “I’ve known him for years.”
Tom looks, cocks his head. “You’re kidding.”
“I didn’t know I knew him,” she says. “He showed up at my school when I was 24. He posed as one of my advisors and gave me…I guess you would say he gave me an assignment. I thought it was a part of the program. And so I did it. It took me an entire year. The first draft, at least.”
“What was the assignment?”
“He told me I was to design an institution whose sole purpose was to prevent the destruction of the world.”
“Huh?”
“Given no financial constraints, what would such an institution look like?”
Tom is smiling, his eyebrows up.
“That’s kinda neat,” he says.
“I thought it was annoying,” she says. “But I did it—I thought I had to do it. And I arrived at the offices a year later with this…enormous document, hundreds of pages, and told them I was there to hand in my project. They asked me which project, and I told them. They looked at me like I was mad.”
Tom laughs. “From what, though?” he asks.
“Come again?”
“Prevent the destruction of the world from what? What’s gonna destroy us? A band of aliens?”
“Yes, well,” says Eliza. “Grayspool never directly responded to that question, even though I asked the same thing at the meeting. He said I need only glance at the previous century to find plenty of candidates.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“War, technology. Pollution, destruction of the environment. Starvation, overpopulation. Unpredictable catastrophe. There are already plenty of choices. We don’t need aliens. Although there is a Department of Extraterrestrial Diplomacy.”
“Say what?”
“In case they come,” Eliza says. “We do need to have some people who know how to talk to them, don’t we?”
“I guess so?”
“We do.”
“So wait, hold on,” says Tom. “What exactly did you come up with? What’s the institution you made?”
“Well,” she says, “it’s rather complex.”
“Okay. I’d imagine, sure. How so?”
“There are quite a lot,” she says, “of departments.”
“Departments?”
“You know,” she says. “Branches. To address the different issues. It’s essentially a university. But a free university.”
“Ah.”
“We study—well, we study unusual branches of knowledges.”
“Knowledges?”
“Yes,” she says. “Knowledges.”
“I didn’t know the word was plural.”
“No,” she says. “You would
n’t know. If you don’t know.”
“I see.”
“Do you remember the feeling,” Eliza asks, “when you were back in school, when you were just a child? And you had a project to do. Or you gave it to yourself?”
“I remember a whole lot of coloring.”
“Not what I mean.”
“What, then?”
“It was really one of my first ideas, actually,” Eliza says. “You know. Here I am with my papers out, writing up this or that idea, thinking about it all. And what I found was that it’s really quite enjoyable to be working on a project. Something that’s your own project, I mean. It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense or not. You have your own rules, all of that. You must have done something like it. Didn’t you?”
“I guess I made a castle once,” Tom says. “Out of snow. And made myself the king.”
“More like that, yes,” Eliza says. “But I thought what I might do is spread schools all around. In every city. Schools that had no real name, no real purpose. No goal, no credential of any value. And all you would do, at these skills, is work on projects. Like your castle.”
“For children, you mean? Daycare.”
“No, Tom. For adults.”
“That’s incredibly stupid.”
“It’s really quite silly. You’re right.”
“I mean I’d like to be enthusiastic with you,” he says. “I’d like to embrace how cute the world is. But come on. Don’t you think you’d just be better off—I don’t know. Better off trying to find every mine that’s still in the world and disabling it? Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense?”
“It would seem to, yes,” she says.
“But you ignored that impulse.”
“To be practical? Yes. I did.”
“You ignored any sense of realism.”
“I did. It seemed important. Look at the adult world.”
“You mean our world?”
“Yes.”
“I find that to be deeply cynical,” he says. “And I’m supposed to be the cynical one.”
“You think I’m cynical?”
“Only inasmuch as a willful refusal to look the world in the eye, for what it is, is cynical.”
“It’s quite a lot to assume that we can do that in the first place, isn’t it? Where is the world’s eye? For me to look into it? I would if you could tell me.”
“You know,” he says. “Two-thirds up its face.”
“Right.”
“And what’s this thing called?”
“What? The institution?”
“Whatever this whole project of yours,” Tom says, “is called.”
“My free university? Designed to save the world from various threats?”
“Yes.”
“It’s called Pangea.”
As they hike onward—Eliza now in front, keeping a reasonable pace for Tom, who, she noticed at lunch, has begun to drink again—she does her best to outline the project for him and describe her whimsical institution, ignoring the frequent intrusions of skepticism that erupt, again and again, from his mouth. Because it is whimsical. Very. Is that not the point. It’s not as though she can’t see that, even though Tom tries to imply that she cannot. But she was 24 years old when she began to design it, focused on spending her life doing something to make the world slightly better instead of slightly worse, and thus unencumbered by anything resembling real experience in the world or a real understanding of human suffering beyond the struggles and experiences of her own young life. Was there not a certain value to deductions springing from this initial perspective? She thinks so. To how youth looked out at the world? Money, in the exercise, was not a constraint. Nor was practicality. In truth—and she remembers now, as she describes it to Tom, how she had become obsessed with the project, how exciting she found it to simply imagine on such a mass scale, to do a project, if for no other reason than to see where it might lead. Pangea (or Pangea University, as she sometimes thinks of it) is by far the most absurd thing she had ever done.1 Which had made it all the stranger when she realized the mercurial “Dr. Yellowyarn” had been taking a piss all along.
Funny thing was, she hadn’t ever really stopped working on the project, even after she realized it was a hoax. She set it aside, of course, but now and then she would have a new idea for a new department or a new wing—a new initiative so bizarre that it would never exist, not really, but perhaps so outrageous it might nevertheless produce something unexpectedly good? Pangea had always been her secret, her private joke on the world. Wouldn’t it be interesting if this existed, or if this were true? It didn’t matter what was possible. I don’t care if it cannot. And the pleasure she took in whimsy only grew as she got older; for each year she watched children slowly disappear into the bureaucratic cogs of the British government and for each moment she looked at a young person in the eyes and thought to herself: you are damaged beyond repair; we are not able to fix you; your lifetime will be a lifetime of suffering—most likely you will cause it for others, too. Or for all the times she missed her mother and father and wished with all her heart she were not essentially alone in the world, trying to steer her way through it with no help whatsoever. For all these things, whimsy. For all these things, Pangea. It truly did help to just imagine.
Tom, she is learning, is a very logical person, despite the obnoxious veneer of stupidity. And so eventually, when she feels they must be getting near their final destination, he asks the next logical question, and she is not surprised.
“Wait a minute,” he says, and she looks back and sees that he has stopped walking.
She stops, too, and looks at him.
“Jesus,” he says. “Wait. How much money did Herman actually leave you?”
Eliza says, “Four billion, three hundred and seventy-two million pounds.”
Tom continues to stare.
“I’m going to make it,” she says. “You’re right. I’m going to use the money and make Pangea real.”
They arrive at Uncle Herman’s secret cave an hour later.
It’s a pretty strange cave.
For starters, it has a door.
“Not unlike hobbits,” Eliza says.
“I’ve always hated those little fuckers.”
“Oh.”
“So,” Tom says. “Do we knock?”
They’re standing in a small clearing outside of the cave’s entrance. Small, simple signs with red arrows led them off the main path and down a small trail. The door is a deep oak brown and looks as though it belongs on a house. There is also a mailbox, a lamp, and a welcome mat. And a doorbell.
“Oh,” Tom says.
He steps forward, rings the bell.
“Easy,” he says.
“I have a feeling nobody’s home.”
“You never know,” Tom says, frowning at the door. But there is no sign of anyone, no noises to speak of. “Would you really be surprised if Grayspool opened the door? Wearing, like, a kimono and a wig and a dildo?”
“Probably.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
Eliza looks at the door a moment longer, shrugs, and reaches for the knob. When she finds she has not been electrocuted, she twists.
Not locked. She pushes. The door swings open.
In the way that it’s completely unexpected, the situation inside of Herman’s cave dwelling is somewhat predictable to Eliza. A wave of musty air washes over them and track-lighting along the rock ceiling as bolted to the sides of stalactites clicks itself on, light by light, until little darkness remains within the vast cavern. Eliza hears Tom blow out through his rounded lips in a half-whistle as he absorbs the scenery. Things here are decorated rather nicely.
“This sort of reminds me,” Tom says, “uh…” He stops, finger on his lip. “What is this?” he says.
Eliza doesn’t know. Two chiseled rock steps lead down into the main space, where two long couches form an L-shape atop a bright orange shag carpet. In front of the couches is a low glass coffee table with a f
anned display of magazines across its surface. In the back corner of the cavern is a kitchenette, and on the other side, elevated a few feet on a rocky plateau and accessible by more carved steps, a large, plush, king-sized bed. Near them, just to the left of the entrance—and with plenty of space around it—is a yellow ping-pong table.
“A pretty tastefully done bachelor pad?”
They take a few steps into the cavern.
“I can’t say I’m really into the yellow on the table there.”
Somewhere deep in the cavern, a ventilation system comes to life.
Tom looks up. There’s a vent above them.
“And here’s where we die,” he says. “Here comes the green gas.”
But Eliza only feels cold air sweeping down onto the top of her head.
“Fuck me,” Tom says. “A/C.”
For a few minutes, the two of them explore. They set their packs down near the door and fan out. Eliza finds some very nice built-in (rock) cabinetry along the western wall. Tom, who has gone to the kitchenette, alerts her of the very nice rock refrigerator.
“I gotta say,” calls Tom, his voice echoing slightly. “I’m liking Uncle Herman more and more. He has those…um…he has those poetry magnet things here on the fridge? Even though it’s made out of rock. Weird.”
Eliza, who has drifted over near the ping-pong table, is now looking down at a conspicuously soft, sandy part of the floor near the corner. It’s also conspicuous because it has a giant red X running across it.
“Maybe there’s some kind of code or puzzle we can solve with these poetry magnets,” Tom is saying. “We put them into the right order, spell out the right poem, and then a secret door opens and leads us into another chamber…And in that chamber, we find what we’re looking for. There’s gotta be a riddle…there’s a riddle and you and I are going to solve it. Right now.”
“Tom?” she says.
No answer.
She looks up from the red X and sees that he’s leaning over a boulder.
“What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” Tom says. “Found the bar. Do you want a martini, or…?”
“Tom,” she says, this time sternly, as though she’s talking to a teenager.
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