You once said you would grant me anything, and now I ask that you grant your forgiveness for my long silence. In turn, I grant you my forgiveness, for yours. The answers you crave await you in Prague, as does the Lumen Dei itself. It is your birthright, and I wish it to poison my life no longer.
This is a lie. I wish it a part of me forever. But I must be done with it, if I am to survive. Johannes talks of children, although, dry and empty, I have no more to give. But I cannot deprive him, even if he allowed me to do so. And if there are to be children, I must let this die before they can live.
Three by three is where you’ll find me.
I double-checked my translation of the last line, but I hadn’t made a mistake—it just made no sense. Neither did the strange stanzas of poetry that followed. Elizabeth had sent her brother examples of her work before, but her poems were rigorous in rhyme and meter, and coherent in content, evoking the poetry of classical Rome, not open-mike night at the local coffeehouse slam. This was different.
Winters know the shadows in that word.
Unless the dark law too should seek the thief
And the good law obtain your city
For those outside the word.
Throughout our epoch, He that is below
Ignorantly deserves an abject prayer
O my guardian spirit
O when the unmixed nectar of the faithless lives with you.
My law is a tepid standard
Thus I surrendered the hound to the dark
Revive your soul at my house
The sun will foretell all things in this way.
Remember the lessons our Father taught us beneath the linden tree, and you will know where to begin.
Then the words broke off, leaving several inches of empty space. When she began again, it was in a darker ink, with a shakier hand.
My dearest brother. My most loving brother. My brother. I was set to post my letter when yours arrived. Your letter, unfinished, with the postscript appended by your schoolmaster.
I see now that I lied before, as I cannot forgive your silence, not when I know its cause.
I write as if you can still hear me, because writing to you has become my sustenance, and my hand continues along the page though my soul knows there is no use. You are the only one who penetrated beyond my words and saw what was real. Having lost you, I wonder, have I lost what little is left of myself?
Your health, always so fragile, nonetheless seemed as if it would hold forever, because it must. We have been connected all our lives, and now, that connection severed, I float free. I should float away, and yet I am sinking.
You loved Prague this time of year, the ice on the Vltava, children stumbling and dancing through the snow, as we once did. You promised you would return and we would walk the Stone Bridge together. You have never before broken your promise.
You are with the Lord now, and He will give you your reward, our Mother says. That faith protects her. But I have no reserves of faith to see me through, and no confidence that God will reward you better in death than He has in life.
I think often of our first journey together, when, barely old enough to understand, we were torn from our native land and carried to Bohemia, our new father terrifying with his dark cloak and forbidding black eyes. You would not remember, as I will not forget, the night we set camp outside Erfurt, and there by the fire, you spilled your blood and mine, and swore an oath to protect me always. Blood hot and sticky between our palms, you swore you would never leave me.
I can forgive you almost anything, my brother. But I cannot forgive this.
23 December 1600 Prague.
After what happened to Andy, there’d been a therapist. At the third appointment, after I’d spent an hour on her patchwork-quilted couch, box of tissues in my lap, refusing or unable to speak, she’d given me a homework assignment: Write a letter to my dead brother. She wanted me to tell Andy I loved him, or hated him, or that I blamed him for dying, or, for all I know, that I’d borrowed his Patriots sweatshirt without telling him and accidentally left it on the bus. I didn’t write the letter; I didn’t go back.
But sometimes, I talked to him. Lying in bed in the dark, on his birthday or the anniversary of his death, or sometimes just a day like any other, while our mother, now just my mother, slept at her office and my father slept in his and I moved through the house like a ghost. I talked to him, one ghost to another, and it made me feel … not better, exactly. It made me feel whole. But not because I thought he could actually hear me. I never fooled myself into believing that. There was no Andy anymore.
Gone is gone.
Those conversations in the dark were a secret. And if I’d written the letter, that would have been secret, too. Not meant for my therapist, nor for my parents—not even for him. It would have been for me. As this letter was for Elizabeth.
Death meant the end of privacy. I knew that. Had understood when my parents tore apart Andy’s room, scavenging through drawers and closets he’d locked away from them, reading emails, picking and choosing the pieces of him they wanted to claim, throwing out the rest. They left him with nothing, and maybe he deserved it, because he was nothing, too. But that didn’t make it right. And it didn’t make Elizabeth’s letter public property, no matter how many centuries had passed. I remembered what the Hoff had said about publication, and how Elizabeth’s letters were part of a precious historical legacy, an invaluable public record.
You are the only one who penetrated beyond my words and saw what was real.
Maybe those were good reasons to do what I did next, but I came up with them after the fact. When it happened, I didn’t rationalize, I didn’t justify, and I didn’t worry about how much this precious historical legacy was worth or what would happen if anyone realized it was gone.
I just folded it up and slipped it into my notebook. Then I zipped the notebook into my backpack, turned out the lights, and went home.
24
I am a thief.
The drumbeat thudded in my head all night long, and the next day and the one after that. I didn’t know how much the letter was worth, but it was four hundred years old, so presumably … a lot. If anyone found out I’d taken it, how would I explain myself? What college would let me in with grand larceny on my permanent record? Forget college: Chapman Prep would kick me out, and I’d end up back at the public high school, dodging stink bombs, skirting blood spatter, enjoying the periodic schoolwide drug tests (and concomitant black market for untainted “samples”).
But I didn’t regret taking it.
And I didn’t want to give it back.
I stayed away from the church, from the Hoff, and most of all, from Max, because I was sure he’d take one look and see exactly what I’d done.
He wouldn’t understand.
Three days had passed when the phone rang Saturday morning. I almost screened it, like I’d screened his other calls, offering in response only a feeble text that I was getting the flu and had lost my voice. But I couldn’t avoid him forever, so I picked up the phone, remembering to cough.
“Where are you?” He sounded frantic.
“Home.” I coughed again. “I’m not—”
“You have to get down to the office,” he said. There was a high, quavering note in his voice that I’d never heard before.
“What’s wrong?”
“I found—I saw—I don’t know—” He was hyperventilating.
“Max!”
“Just come,” he said. “Please. They’re making me hang up, I have to go.… I was the one who found him.”
Dial tone.
25
Flashing lights.
I spotted them from a block away, lighting the stone church with a rhythmic red, red, red. I pedaled faster, dumped my bike in the grass—and that’s when I saw the stretcher.
There were cops. There were EMTs. There was the obligatory crowd of gawking students, though only the handful who weren’t still in bed sleeping off a hangover. And there was M
ax, one arm around Adriane’s shoulder, the other gesticulating wildly as he explained something to a cop. Max and Adriane, but no Chris.
I could get back on the bike and ride away, I thought. Escape before it—whatever it was—became real.
Instead: “What happened?”
Max dropped his arm and Adriane flinched away from him. They were both pale.
“Someone broke in,” Max said. He took my hand, squeezed it. “I came in this morning and found him on the floor.…”
The stretcher had disappeared into the ambulance. Sirens blaring, it tore down the street. Sirens were good, I thought. Corpses were never in a hurry.
“Found who?”
Max opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“The Hoff,” Adriane said.
After, I hated myself for it, but in that first moment, all I felt was relief.
Adriane shuddered. “He was just … lying there. We thought he was dead, but then he was, like, twitching.”
The cop cleared his throat. With his thick glasses and the deep worry lines engraved in his forehead, he looked a little like my father, except for the shock of red hair threaded with gray. “You were explaining to me what you were doing here, Mr. Lewis?”
“I’m Professor Hoffpauer’s research assistant,” Max said. He nodded to me. “We both are.”
The cop turned to Adriane. “And you …?”
“I was looking for my boyfriend,” she said.
My chest tightened again. “You don’t know where he is?”
“He’s in our room, asleep,” Max said, a note of suspicion entering his voice. “Why would you come looking for him here? You don’t belong here.”
“Excuse me,” Adriane snapped. “He wasn’t answering his phone, and I needed to talk to him.”
Max glared at her. “About what?”
“It’s private.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. He stiffened, but didn’t shrug me off. “It doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “As long as he’s safe.” As long as we all were. “Is the Hoff—Professor Hoffpauer—going to be okay?”
The cop’s frown deepened. “Looks like he had a stroke. That can go either way.”
“So he wasn’t … attacked?”
“Do you have some reason for thinking he would be?”
“I told you,” Max said, with a flash of anger, “it’s missing, all of it.”
“What?” I asked.
“The letters. The translations of the Book. The whole archive—everything. Gone.”
Now I squeezed his hand.
The cop shook his head. “We’ll bring you down to the station to give a statement, and put together a list of everything that’s missing, but I don’t think you need to worry, not about this, at least. There was no sign of violence at the scene, no sign of a break-in.” He flipped his notebook shut and slipped it into his pocket. “My guess? Your prof got a little confused, stuck your papers somewhere, then passed out. I can see why you got spooked, but this is a case for the doctors, not the cops.”
“So what do you really think happened?” I asked Max when the cop was gone.
He swallowed hard. “I thought he was dead. When I walked in and saw him like that …”
I grabbed him and kissed him, hard. If someone had broken into the office and attacked the Hoff, if Max had gotten there a little earlier—I stopped myself. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“The letters are gone,” he said, still holding on to me. “Someone got into the safe. It’s all gone.”
“You’re not.” I kissed him again, then buried my face in his shoulder.
“I should go,” Adriane said. “I don’t belong here, right?”
“Adriane—” I started, but she cut me off.
“It’s fine.”
It clearly wasn’t.
“Well, when you find Chris, will you tell him I say—” I paused, because how to phrase the message For five seconds I thought those sirens were for you, and now I need to hear your voice. I need proof that you’re real? “Just tell him to call me.” But when I looked up, she was already gone.
26
I don’t do hospitals. It’s not the smell, that suffocating stench of cleaning fluid with a hint of the decay it was intended to disguise. It’s not the waiting rooms, with their faded, broken furniture and huddled groups of weeping or wailing families alongside dead-eyed survivors with no need to stay and no will to go home. It’s not Andy, who never made it that far.
It’s the doors. Open doors along dingy white corridors that reveal everything you’re not supposed to see. Patients crying, patients moaning, patients vomiting; patients awkwardly mounting bedpans or shuffling barefoot, IV in tow, toward an industrial toilet; bloated patients lying still with tubes running in and out, monitors beeping, machines wheezing and pumping and performing all the functions their bodies have given up.
I didn’t have to go alone, but bringing someone with me would have meant admitting I couldn’t do it myself.
Also, the Hoff had only asked for me.
The nursing station in the intensive care unit was empty, but eventually a heavy woman in an orderly’s uniform noticed me. She was carrying a vial of something that looked suspiciously like urine. “I’m looking for Professor—I mean, Anton Hoffpauer?” I said.
“You Nora?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, he’s been asking for you.”
“They told me. But … are you sure?”
“Took us a while to figure out exactly what he wanted, and how to find you, but yeah, I’m sure.”
“I just don’t see why he would want—”
“Room seven, honey,” she said. “You can go right in.”
“How is he?” I asked, stalling.
“In and out. You never know with a stroke. People come back from the damnedest things.”
“So he’ll be okay?”
She pursed her lips. “Go see him, honey. He’ll like that. If you stick around for a while, the doc might come by, and he’ll have more answers for you.”
But the non-answer was answer enough.
The narrow patient rooms were encased behind thick glass walls, with white curtains draped across for privacy. The door of number seven was open. I desperately didn’t want to go inside.
The door creaked when I shut it behind me. Deep breath, I thought, forcing myself to turn around and face him. In and out.
He was pale, with yellowed encrustations around his watery eyes, like a kid who’d cried himself to sleep. The liver spots at his thinning hairline stood out like splotches of ink on a too-white canvas. IV needles threaded into bulging veins. One side of his face drooped noticeably, and when he opened his eyes, only one of them focused on me. It widened.
Why me? I wanted to ask. Why not Max, or Chris, or better yet, a son or granddaughter, someone to take his gnarled hand or stroke his sweaty forehead, to sit beside him and force a smile and not recoil when a rivulet of drool trickled from the corner of his blistered lips.
I lowered myself into the narrow metal chair beside the bed. He was muttering. Nonsense syllables, mostly, the right side of his mouth lagging behind the left.
“Lay da chee,” he said, then repeated it, louder. “Lay da chee!”
He curled his left hand into a fist and pounded the bed.
“Shh.” I patted the blanket, awkwardly, a few inches from the lump that was his right leg. “It’s okay.”
His mouth twisted, and he forced out a slurred but understandable word. “Safe!” he shouted. “Not safe!”
“You are,” I assured him. And then I took his hand. I had to. “Don’t worry.”
He pulled away with surprising strength, and jabbed a finger at me. “You.”
“Me what?”
“Yortheeun.”
I leaned closer, hating myself for noticing the smell, cloyingly sweet and ripe. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“You’re. The. One.” He punctuated each word with a fist against the blanket.
“Your blood.” And then those nonsense words again that seemed to mean so much. “Lay da chee!”
“Yes,” I said, because what else was there? “I know.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He closed his eyes. I sat there, listening to his breath rattle in his chest and the monitors play their discordant song, wondering how long I was supposed to stay—and how I could leave him there alone.
The door creaked open. “So how are we doing today, Mr. Hoffpauer?” A young doctor stood in the doorway, his black hair gelled into tiny spikes and a minuscule silver stud in his right ear. The look would have gained a thumbs-up—and likely some gratuitous yoga stretches—from Adriane, but it didn’t exactly scream professional competence.
“I think he’s sleeping,” I said when the Hoff didn’t react to his arrival.
“You a relative?”
I shook my head. “I’m his student, I guess. They said he was asking for me.”
The doctor brightened. “Oh, you must be Nora? Yes, he was pretty adamant.”
“He didn’t really seem … I mean, he was kind of babbling, like he didn’t really know what he was saying.”
“That’s normal with a neurological event of this severity.” The doctor lifted a clipboard from the edge of the bed and began flipping through it, nodding at whatever he saw. “Did he know who you were?”
I nodded. Then, since he was still buried in his clipboard, said yes.
“He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand it. I think I upset him.”
“He got angry, right?” the doctor said. “Don’t worry, that’s normal, too. You can expect some irrational emotional outbursts.”
I wanted to point out there was nothing irrational about getting angry when you were stuck in a hospital bed with a ruined body and defective brain. But I also wanted answers. And I suspected I wouldn’t get many if I treated him to an irrational emotional outburst of my own.
“So it was definitely a stroke?” I asked.
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 8