Codex

by Lev Grossman

  By the time he was twelve a Bowdoin professor was coaching him every day after school, and he was traveling to Boston and New York and once, thrillingly, to London for chess tournaments. He had a national ranking and a shelf of chess trophies in his bedroom. The very sight of him—already tall, pale as a white bishop, with starch-stiff posture at the board—struck fear into the tiny hearts of his underaged adversaries.

  By the time he was thirteen it was all over. Edward’s gift evaporated like dew in the harsh dawn of puberty, painlessly and almost overnight, and though afterwards he could clearly remember what it was like to wander through those gleaming mental corridors, the doors to that secret edifice were now firmly closed, the silver key lost, the path overgrown, never to be found again. His ranking plummeted, and his matches became a series of tearful early concessions. He sometimes caught his parents looking at him as if they wondered what had happened to their brilliant changeling of a son.

  But despite the tears, and the puzzled looks from his parents, deep down Edward wasn’t devastated by the loss of his gift. It left as mysteriously as it had arrived. He missed it, but it had never seemed entirely his in the first place—he’d always felt like its host, a temporary custodian, nothing more. He wasn’t bitter. He only wished it well wherever its invisible wings had taken it.

  Nevertheless, there were times when he looked back on his years as a wunderkind with nostalgia. In the years that followed he caught himself again and again trying to recapture the feeling of effortless mastery and easy serenity that he’d known on the chessboard, the sense that he was special and meant for better things. He looked for it in his schoolwork, in sports, in sex, in books, and even, much later, in his job at Esslin & Hart.

  He never found it.

  WHEN EDWARD WOKE up he was still lying on the couch. It was dark out. He sat up and slid off his tie, which was creased and wrinkled from having been trapped underneath him.

  A weak, pinkish glow from the streetlights outside lit up the two front windows. Edward’s apartment was long and narrow, the shape of the skinny Upper East Side apartment building the top floor of which it occupied. It was all one big room, more or less: Up front was the living room, which gradually became the study, which gave way onto a crawlway-thin galley kitchen, and behind it an ill-lit bedroom and a disproportionately sumptuous bathroom. He could have afforded a place twice the size, but he’d never had the time to look for one, and what was the point? He was hardly ever here. The air-conditioning blew out last summer and he hadn’t even bothered to get it fixed.

  His clock radio spelled out 9:04 in skinny red trapezoids. Edward stood up and went over to his desk in the darkness, undoing his white shirt with one hand. It was too early to go to bed, but he wasn’t sure he really wanted to be awake either. Yawning mightily, he picked up his jacket where he’d dropped it on the floor, and he felt the stiff shape of the manila envelope in the inside pocket—Zeph’s present. He took it out and looked at it.

  Zeph had written on the envelope, in block letters,

  FOR EDWARD, WHO HAS PLENTY OF TIME

  He slipped the CD out into his hand. It was completely unmarked, and he had to guess which way up it went. As he tilted it in the light, two rainbow spokes chased each other around the center hole.

  Edward sighed. He had a colleague named Stewart, a couple of years younger than he was but still a grown man, who kept a GameBoy in his office. He was addicted to it—he played with it constantly, during meetings, on the phone, by the water-cooler, in the back of a limo. It was one of the jokes around the office, Stewart and his purple GameBoy, but Edward just found it embarrassing. He loathed the slack expression on Stewart’s face while he played it—the fixed gaze, the loose, parted lips, like a moron trying to solve a calculus problem. If he ever saw that GameBoy come out in front of a client, Edward swore he would throw it out a window.

  But he had no choice: He would at least have to take a look at the game. Zeph would ask. Edward walked over to his desk and felt around under it for the power button on his computer. He yawned and stretched while it booted up, then slipped the disc into the CD-ROM drive. A program calling itself “imthegame.exe” asked permission to install itself. He consented. The program spent a few long minutes unpacking and copying a series of colossal files to his hard drive, setting itself up, looking around, making itself at home. When it was done there was a new shortcut on his desktop. He double-clicked on it.

  The screen blacked out abruptly, and the speakers gave a vicious staticky snap. The hard drive chooked and whirred to itself like a hen laying an egg. For a minute nothing else happened. Edward looked at the clock again. It was half past nine. He could still change his mind about that party at Joe Fabrikant’s office if he really wanted to. His desk lamp made an island of light in the darkened apartment. He leaned his head on his hand.

  Then his computer was awake again. Tiny white letters appeared on the screen, against a black background.

  ONE PLAYER, OR MANY?

  Edward clicked on ONE. The words disappeared.

  CHOOSE ONE:

  MALE

  FEMALE

  He blinked. That seemed a little personal. He toyed with the idea of lying, then went ahead and clicked on MALE.

  CHOOSE ONE:

  LAND

  SEA

  RIVER

  RIVER.

  CHOOSE ONE:

  EASY

  MEDIUM

  HARD

  IMPOSSIBLE

  He was on vacation. EASY.

  CHOOSE ONE:

  SHORT

  MEDIUM

  LONG

  SHORT.

  The CD-ROM drive whined and clicked some more, then went silent. The screen went black again for so long that Edward started to wonder if the program had hung. He was about to try aborting it when the hard drive started thrashing again. He hesitated, his hands poised over the keyboard. The screen cleared.

  At first Edward thought he was looking at a photograph, frozen and digitized. The scene was strikingly realistic. It was like looking through a window onto another world. The light was green, and there were trees around him, a grove of slender birches and aspens with sunlight falling between them. A light breeze ruffled their tiny leaves. Beyond the delicate scrim of trees was open air and green grass.

  Edward moved the mouse experimentally. His point of view swung to one side like a movie camera. He carefully tilted it down and saw a leaf-strewn path. He tilted it back, toward the sky. It was blue, with a single white puff of cloud dissolving in it like a drop of milk in a pool of water.

  It occurred to Edward that Zeph had never called him about that party he was going to. Now he couldn’t remember what the address was anyway. They were probably there by now, mingling and chatting and half drunk already. He went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of cold red wine from a half-full, recorked bottle in the fridge, and brought it back to his desk. The cold wine felt good in the heat.

  There was something weird about the game. The images moved perfectly smoothly, with no cartoonish jumping or stuttering. The colors were drawn from an intense, hyperreal palette, like a green landscape seconds before a thunderstorm, and the level of detail was impossibly fine. Focusing in on a nearby branch, he saw that one leaf on it had a tiny, irregular half circle nibbled out of one of its edges. It was less like a movie than an old master painting come to life.

  Condensation beaded on the surface of his wine glass. He looked at the clock: It was almost ten.

  Edward had just about resolved to stay in for the evening when he noticed a square white shape lying on the floor near his couch. It was an envelope. Somebody must have shoved it in under the door by hand, forcefully enough that it slid a few feet into the room. It was a thick, square envelope with his name and street address on the front in calligraphic handwriting. He thought it looked vaguely familiar, and it was: Inside was an invitation to Fabrikant’s party.

  “Well,” he said aloud. “God damn.”

  How did they
even get into the building? He looked at the invitation for another second, then set it aside on the table and turned back to the computer screen.

  Trees and branches crackled around him as he pushed his way through them. When he was in the clear he saw that he was on top of a bluff that dropped off steeply down to a wide river far below. The water was the uniform gray of brushed steel and wrinkled with wavelets. The sun hung above it, a bright gold disk in a blue sky across which more white cotton clouds rushed with unnatural speed.

  Further off, gentle golf-course-green hills rolled away from the river on both sides, broken in places by patches of dark forest. Downstream a huge stone bridge stretched across the valley. He looked down and caught a glimpse of his own feet: black leather shoes and brown twill pants. Nearby, on the very edge of the cliff, was a solitary, weather-beaten wooden post with a mailbox nailed to it. Inside the mailbox was a plain white envelope, a pistol, and a silver hourglass, lying on its side. He knew instinctively that they had been left there for him and nobody else.

  He started toward them, but something caught his eye from the edge of the screen, and without thinking he turned toward it and stepped off the edge of the cliff.

  The screen reeled around him: blue skies, silver river, red cliff walls, blue skies again. He was falling. He’d been so involved with the game that his body started up a panic response: His neck prickled, and his inner ear spun. There was a last flash of bright sun before he hit the water, then the light changed, becoming weak and murky, brown and green and gray. His body settled slowly down toward the river bottom, swaying from side to side like a falling leaf, and came to rest on his back, facing up toward the shining, wobbling surface.

  He pressed a few keys. Nothing happened. His point of view was tilted slightly; he could see a bit of the sandy bottom, some slimy green plant life, the shimmery surface above him. A drab freshwater fish—a trout?—swam by far above him, momentarily eclipsing the watery sun. He realized he was dead.

  The apartment was silent. Tentatively, he pressed another key. The screen cleared.

  He was back in the forest, back at the beginning again. A gentle breeze was blowing. The sky was blue. He was alive.

  4

  THE NEXT DAY Edward woke up late. His head hurt. The last thing he remembered was wandering around the green landscape in the game, through hills and meadows and thickets, playing with the controls, looking for clues. At some point he’d finished the wine and begun pouring himself nips from a bottle of grappa—Zeph and Caroline had brought it back from a conference in Florence last year—on the principle that sticking to liquids based on grapes would minimize his hangover. He was now reevaluating that principle in light of new evidence.

  When did he finally go to bed? God, he was no better than Stewart and his GameBoy. The apartment was stifling. The windows were all closed, and sunlight was pouring in. He could feel the sheen of sweat on his bare back as he swung his legs down. Edward staggered out of bed, threw open all the windows he could find, and staggered back again.

  He looked at the clock: It was two in the afternoon. He shook his head. All that stress and lack of sleep must have finally caught up with him. He rested his head in his hands. Today was Friday—he was pretty sure it was, anyway. Usually he would have been at work for six hours already. Standing in the kitchen, he ran himself a tall glass of water and drank it in one long, unbroken series of swallows. A sweet, oversized green apple sat on the counter, and he sliced off a thin segment with a steel carving knife. He ate it off the blade. The crispness of it hurt his teeth.

  There was a message on his answering machine. It must have been left last night after he went to bed.

  “Edward. Zeph here.” Loud party noise in the background. “Everybody else here is talking on their cell phones so Caroline and me—Caroline and I—we thought we should call somebody on ours.” Caroline said something in the background. “I’m not yelling. This is how I talk. Listen, I’m talking in my normal voice.” Zeph was drunk.

  “We’re all pissed off at you,” he went on. “Fabrikant’s pissed that you’re not here, and we’re pissed that you’re not here, and that’s pretty much everybody—well, there’s some other people here, they’re probably pissed at you too, I can’t say for sure. I don’t really feel like asking them. We should go now. All this small talk isn’t going to make itself. Oh, the Artiste is here, isn’t that a scream? I told him about it. I can’t believe he came. He’s walking around freaking people out. Wow, what a gloriously slutty-looking woman,” Zeph added.

  “Look at those heels,” Caroline said in the background. “Why doesn’t she just wear stilts?”

  “I’m gonna...”

  The call cut off there.

  Edward walked back through his apartment to the bathroom, where he splashed some cold water on his face. It had been a couple of days since he’d shaved. You’re letting yourself go, he thought. You wasted last night, and you’ve already wasted half of today. Pull yourself together, asshole. He should call the office and clear up the mess about the Wents’ library, he thought, staring at himself in the mirror. No, it was already too late for that today. He should just go over there. By now they’d be waiting for him. He pictured the cool, dark quiet of the Wents’ library.

  A fresh bloom of sweat was already breaking out on his forehead. He went to the bathroom to take a shower, then he got dressed and threw a notebook and an old sweater into his leather bag. He wasn’t going to hang around here all day. At least the Wents had air-conditioning. On his way out he stopped in front of his computer. The monitor screen looked weak and dusty in the direct sunlight. It was still on—the screensaver was obsessively drawing randomly generated fractal mountain ranges over and over and immediately erasing them again. He hadn’t even bothered to quit out of the game. He’d left it on all night while he slept.

  Edward tapped the space bar and the screen cleared. He was still alive. Edward frowned. He would have thought some roving space invader or something would have come along and killed him by now. Or maybe it already had—maybe he’d been killed a thousand times since last night and then brought back to life a thousand times. Did it even matter? How would he even know?

  Even though it was early afternoon outside, in the game it was seven in the evening according to a tiny digital clock near the bottom of the screen. Through the trees a thin band of glowing, fading sunset stretched halfway around the horizon, red and gold and green. He moved forward to the edge of the cliff. The scattering of sunlight across the roughened river water was rendered in exquisite detail, veins of fire rippling and shivering. For a while he just stood and watched it.

  Not everything was the same as it had been the night before. The letter that had been in the mailbox was gone, and so was the pistol. He thought of the lyrics from that Beatles song about leaves whirling inside a letter box. And there actually were leaves on the ground now—the scene had altered subtly, becoming more autumnal. The silver hourglass he’d seen was there, but it lay broken on the ground, the pale sand inside scattered in the grass, which was looking a little patchy and threadbare. Time had passed here. He looked around nervously.

  Downstream, the bridge was in ruins. The span had disappeared, and one of the two stone towers that had supported it was completely gone. The other was scarred and blasted. He ran upstream along the top of the cliff to get a better look. He found that he moved swiftly and smoothly in the game, skimming along over the ground in an even, legless glide, faster than he or anybody else could possibly run in real life. It looked like the bridge had aged, eroded, sagged, and finally collapsed under the sheer weight of years. How could so much time have passed? A long, creamy swath of foam swept downstream from the base of the one surviving tower. As he got closer he could hear the faint rushing sound the turbulence made. Part of a carved stone lion still crouched at the tower’s base.

  How could the bridge have aged so much in one night? And what was he supposed to do? Fix it? Was that the point of the game? He glided down a st
eep embankment, then out to the end of the road, as close as he dared to where the ragged edge of the road sagged precipitately downward. The current piled up against the base of the tower like ripples of thick, heavy glass. There was no sound except rushing water, and a looped sample of crickets chirping. A little cartoon sailboat was creeping up the river, looking absurdly peaceful, leaving a white, perfectly V-shaped wake behind it on the dark blue water. From it came the sound of a clear, silvery bell.

  He hit Esc to see if the game would let him out, but nothing happened. He tried Ctrl Q, then Alt F4, then Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Nothing, though it did let him save a copy of the game-in-progress.

  “Fuck it,” he said out loud.

  Maybe killing himself again would help. He walked down to the edge of the road. It was unpaved, a white gravel track with a crest of green grass running along the center. It felt a little weird, deliberately murdering himself, but after a moment’s hesitation he backed away to get up some momentum and ran straight over the edge. He didn’t tumble this time, just fell—a moment of stillness, floating peacefully in the dusky air, then a plunge down into the dark water.

  Instead of sinking he popped back up to the surface. His point of view bobbed up and down, and the current started to take him. He wasn’t sinking. He tried to make himself dive down, but he couldn’t figure out how. He was as stubbornly buoyant as a cork.