by Lev Grossman
She looked up at Edward, a little flushed. He meditated any number of brusque, sarcastic responses before he replied.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s understood. Thanks for being frank.”
It was only a few minutes later, when he was on his way down in the elevator, that he realized that at some point in the afternoon he had decided that he and nobody else was going to organize the Wents’ library.
5
ON MONDAY MORNING at eleven o’clock Edward stepped out of a cab in front of the Chenoweth Rare Book and Manuscript Repository. It was another sunny day, hot and bright, and the street looked like an overexposed photograph. The air was awash with humidity and fumes. A large metal chemical canister belonging to a construction crew stood by itself on the sidewalk, hissing quietly; in places its bright metal surface was covered over with frost. Edward had to resist an overwhelming urge to hug it.
On the outside the Chenoweth Repository was disappointingly plain, a four-story house made of sooty gray stone jammed between two apartment buildings. The first floor was occupied by a clothing boutique called Zaz! The door to the library was off to the right, marked by a polished brass plaque; above the plaque, in a glass-and-metal frame, was a card announcing an exhibit entitled “RARE RENAISSANCE MARGINALIA,” accessible “BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.”
The front door opened onto a dark, narrow hall. At the end of it a cinnamon-skinned woman stood behind a lighted lectern at the head of a flight of stairs, looking like the maitre d’ at a restaurant.
“Leave your bag up here, please,” she said, and made him sign a clipboard.
Edward reluctantly parted with his Hermès briefcase, which she added to a disorderly pile of backpacks in the corner behind her. Instead of leading up, the stairs took him down. He realized that the library’s exterior was deceptive: Most of it was underground. When he opened the glass door at the bottom of the stairs it was like passing through an airlock into an alien world, one of cold, scrubbed, triple-distilled air, white walls, plate glass, plush carpeting, and elaborately designed indirect lighting. Banks of computer terminals and blond wooden card catalog cabinets were scattered around an enormous open room populated exclusively by old men and young women, filling out forms or purposefully pushing squeaky-wheeled wooden carts this way and that. Traces of sunlight crept into the room, although Edward couldn’t quite figure out from where. The temperature was a blessed twenty degrees cooler than it had been out on the street.
A white-haired man barely five feet tall accosted him and ushered him over to the circulation desk, a massive wooden rampart that ran the entire length of one wall, and gave him a pencil and some forms to fill out. A large leather-bound guestbook lay on the desk, held open by a weighted velvet cord, and Edward was instructed to sign it. He obediently wrote out a check to the library for 180 dollars and was handed a receipt. When he was finished the white-haired gnome immediately lost interest in him, and he was left to his own devices.
He strolled over to a computer terminal with an old-fashioned black-and-green monitor. A few xeroxed instructional pamphlets lay scattered around it on the tabletop. He sat down and typed the name “Gervase,” then hit SEARCH. Nothing. It took him five minutes with the xeroxed pamphlets before he discovered that the medieval holdings were cataloged in a separate database from the rest of the library’s collection. When he’d figured out how to access the medieval database, the two other Gervases, Canterbury and Tilbury, turned up right away, but no Langford. He went back to the pamphlets, where he learned that while 80 percent of the Chenoweth’s holdings had been transferred to the electronic catalog, the only record of the other 20 percent was in the old paper card catalog.
Edward crossed the room to one of the many wooden cabinets. Its face was studded with hundreds of tiny drawers with hundreds of tiny gleaming brass handles, each one with a neat little hand-lettered paper tag on it. He walked along thirty or forty feet of drawers before he got to the G’s, and then the Ge’s, where he found—again nothing. Finally he consulted a diminutive blond library page who informed him that he was looking in the books catalog, and that Gervase’s works, which were published before the advent of movable type, were written out by hand, and thus were not considered books at all, but manuscripts. Manuscripts were cataloged in a separate system in another part of the room.
It was there that he found the card he was looking for:
Author: Gervase, of Langford, ca. 1338–ca. 1374
Title: Chronicum Anglicanum: (secondpart)/Gervasius Langfordiensis
Published: London, 1366
Description: xvi, 363 p.; maps; 34 cm.
That was all, plus a long call number. With a stunted, eraserless pencil stub he copied the number out on a slip of scrap paper, on the back of which was a fragment of what had once been a research proposal on John Donne and the English Revolution.
But where were the books? Edward could see only two or three scattered bookcases, holding no more than a couple of hundred volumes each at most. He stood there holding the scrap paper, uncertain as to what to do next. He strolled around the room glancing casually at the other patrons, trying to deduce the local protocol on the fly. Nothing obvious presented itself. He peered through various doorways, none of which looked promising. The whole operation was a model of mysterious, gleaming efficiency, like some incomprehensible ultramodern public restroom.
When he passed the front desk for the third time, one of the attendants, a dark-haired, moon-faced young woman caught his eye.
“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked brightly.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I, ah—”
Flustered, he mutely proffered the slip of paper with the call number on it. The young woman examined it expertly.
“Gotcha,” she said. “Have a seat. We’ll bring it right out to you.”
The girl, who looked like she was barely out of junior high, suggested that he wait in the Reading Room, which sounded like a reasonable enough idea. He watched her disappear through an incongruously heavy metal door back behind the desk.
The lights in the library were slightly dimmed, like a romantic restaurant. Guessing randomly, Edward half opened a door set in a white alcove and interrupted a lively graduate seminar in full swing. He backed away defensively—just looking, thanks—and closed the door. His next try was more promising: a long, roomy chamber set with fifteen or twenty identical wooden tables, regularly spaced. Behind each table was a single severe, wooden-backed chair, and each table had a laptop on it, carefully aligned with the upper right-hand corner. It was silent in the room, and the light was a little brighter, but the air was glacial, even colder than in the lobby. A row of murky oil paintings in elaborate gilt frames hung along the smooth white walls, each accessorized with its own miniature spotlight.
Five or six people sat scattered among the tables. Edward chose an empty one and sat down. He folded his hands in front of him. Ten minutes passed. The silence was broken only by the small, scholarly noises of academics at work: light coughs, the crackle of a turned page, a throat being cleared, a nose being blown. Nobody spoke. He sketched aimlessly with his pencil on the blank sheet of paper he’d brought with him for taking notes. He’d never been able to draw anything, but he did his best with platonic solids: cubes and spheres and cones lit and shadowed from various angles. The windowlessness of the room gave him a sense of being deep underground. In each corner, safely away from the books, a shaft of sunlight made its way down through a skylight from the world above. Edward walked over to one and looked up. It was a square pane of glass, inches thick and recessed a yard deep into the ceiling; beyond it, looking infinitely far away, was a square of burning blue sky.
A hand touched his shoulder. It was the girl from the front desk. She motioned to him to follow her out into the lobby.
“I’m sorry,” she said gravely, when they were outside. “The materials you requested are unavailable.”
“Unavailable?”
“They’re in use by anoth
er patron.”
“Another patron. Somebody here?”
“Well, yeah.” She popped her gum. “You can’t take it out of the building.”
“Can I—do you know how long they’ll have it for?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
Edward made a face.
“What if I come back in a couple of hours?”
“It’s up to you!” she sang.
“Okay. Thanks.”
She practically skipped away. Annoyed, Edward left the Reading Room and climbed the stairs. What were the odds? How many people in the world had even heard of Gervase of Langford? And one of them was here, today, in person, reading exactly the book he needed? When he opened the door the warm, humid air of the outside world embraced him, and he shuddered gratefully and rubbed his freezing hands together. It was like surfacing after a bone-chilling deep-sea dive. The receptionist handed him back his briefcase.
But then the memory of his conversation with Laura came back to him. With it came the memory of the Duchess. He hesitated, standing in the darkened hallway, holding his briefcase flat in his arms like a cafeteria tray. Then he handed it back to the woman and walked back downstairs into the Reading Room.
There was no telling how long he’d have to wait. Desperate to kill time, he unfolded the laptop that was sitting on the table. It opened with an ominous creaking sound, but none of the other readers even glanced up. He turned it on. The dusty liquid crystal display slowly brightened until the desktop appeared. To his surprise he saw, as if it had been put there specifically for him, a shortcut labeled MOMUS.
He looked around again. He had the momentary sensation of being caught up in an international conspiracy—but he remembered Zeph had said the game was popular among the hacker crowd. Maybe somebody from the library’s IT staff had stashed a spare copy on one of the library machines for his personal use. And public machines were always littered with software flotsam and jetsam—maybe one of the library’s patrons was such a hopeless addict that they’d installed it on a library laptop on the sly. The laptop was old, cheap, and underpowered, and Edward didn’t really expect it to be powerful enough to run the game, but he had nothing to lose. Why not? He had a copy of his saved game on a portable keychain hard drive. He plugged it into the laptop, dragged his saved game onto the desktop, and double-clicked on the icon.
Windows full of code formed and vanished on the tiny screen, faster than the sluggish liquid crystal monitor could render them. There was a powerful electric snap from the speakers. A cheap plastic pair of headphones lay on the table, and Edward jacked them into the back of the machine.
He looked around guiltily at the other readers, but they didn’t seem to have registered what he was doing. Ten seconds went by, then twenty, then almost a minute. It was starting to look like the program had crashed.
But then, slowly, like the footlights coming up on a darkened stage, the familiar scene appeared, this time painted in ghostly gray and white: the same broad sky, the same wide river, the same grass, the same white road, the same ruined bridge. In spite of himself Edward felt reality fade around him. His vision narrowed, dwindling to a single bright rectangle.
From his perch on the base of the shattered bridge tower he looked down at the surface of the river. The water level was lower than he remembered it, and it was milky now, pale with waterborne silt. It ran fast—in places it broke into standing waves and white water. He had the distinct impression that time had somehow slipped or lurched forward again, ten years or a hundred, a thousand, he didn’t know. A tree, almost whole and looking freshly torn from its bank, came lumbering along the river, turning and wallowing in the water. Its branches were still covered with wet green leaves that glistened coldly in the dawn light. For the first time since the game started Edward felt like he knew exactly what he was supposed to do. The tree bumped heavily against the base of the bridge, and he leaped nimbly down from his stone perch onto the trunk. It would have been impossible in real life—the trunk would have been too wet and slippery—but in the game it was easy.
The tree was swept on down the river, carrying him with it, the water foaming all around him. He balanced his way up the trunk toward the branches and found a dry perch. The river was wide and fast, and it carried him along at speed. It was daylight now, the cold, clear light of very early morning. The rocks and trees and sandy cliffs on both sides slid effortlessly past him. Digitized birdsong sounded from clumps of reeds by the river’s edge at regular intervals.
Minutes passed, ten, maybe fifteen. The banks of the river smoothed out and became less sheer. Soon Edward found himself approaching the outskirts of a city.
He would have expected a fantasy city, a floating castle of spun sugar or a grim Tolkien fortress, but what he got was something considerably less exotic: It was Manhattan. The river he was drifting down was in fact the Hudson. Soon he passed under the George Washington Bridge, and when he reached the Upper West Side he abandoned the tree and swam to the shore. He crossed the West Side Highway. The streets were empty. Scraps of generic litter, lovingly rendered in three dimensions, tumbled along the sidewalks.
His dreamlike gliding run, his seven-league boots, carried him effortlessly south into Midtown. The weather was as clear and sunny as ever, but the city looked gray and dead. He strode through Rockefeller Center—he half expected the marquee at Radio City to say MOMUS, but instead the letters spelled out I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS. The flags around the famous skating rink each bore a single squat tree on a plain dark background. A sense of unease filled him.
He didn’t know why, but he found himself heading across town, walking east on Fiftieth Street, instinctively homing in on —what? Moments before he arrived, he realized where he was going. He was heading for the Chenoweth library, the building he was sitting in right now, in real life. There was something at once dangerous and irresistible about closing the logical short circuit. What would he do when he got there? Go inside? Walk downstairs? Would he see himself sitting there, hunched over a laptop?
He turned the final corner. Where the Chenoweth library should have been there were only ruins: collapsed walls, broken glass, brick dust.
Then something strange happened. Thick-leaved, hairy nettles sprouted from the ruins. Time was speeding up. Across the street the clock on a church tower convulsed, its hands a gray blur, then burst into flame with an audible woof.
Edward sat back and rubbed his eyes. He looked around the room: The squares of sunlight in the corners had shifted by a foot. What time was it? He’d been losing track of time lately. A few new people had come in, a few others had left, but nobody was paying attention to him. Okay. Everything was under control.
He stretched and looked at his watch. It was after one: He’d been playing for almost an hour. He’d have to watch that. He was starting to see what people found so addictive about these games. MOMUS had none of the slapdash inefficiency of reality: Every moment was tense with hushed anticipation, foreordained meaning. It was a brighter, higher-grade, more compelling, better-engineered version of reality. He closed the laptop, and it sighed itself to sleep. He walked back out into the lobby. The same young woman who’d helped him before was still at the front desk, but when he caught her gaze she just smiled sorrowfully at him and shook her head.
Edward wasn’t used to waiting. If it was an analyst’s report or a bond price or an SEC filing he was waiting for, he would have gone ballistic by now. Or he’d have dug in and done the research for himself. He’d already wasted half a day, and he wasn’t about to waste the rest of it. He marched back into the Reading Room and stood in the doorway, hands on hips. There were only five men and women there, each hunched over his or her work. One of them must have Gervase.
Two he could rule out right away, a jowly older woman and a crazed-looking young man with wild hair; they were working on loose papers, letters or documents, not books. At another table a tall black man with pure white hair was studying a yellowed pulp magazine through a jeweler’s loup.
That left only two more: a tall, severe young woman and the old man with the hacking cough.
Edward strolled around the edge of the room, pretending to examine the reference books. The shelves were glassed in, and his reflection made him self-conscious. He tried to look casual. The young woman ignored him, leaning over her book like a gambler protecting her hand. He moved on to the old man. He looked up as Edward approached, his moist red lips parted expectantly. At the last moment Edward saw that the book he was reading was in Arabic. No dice. He turned his head and kept walking.
It had to be the young woman. He circled cautiously around the room back to where she was sitting. She was concentrating fiercely, taking notes in a worn spiral notebook that lay open on the table beside her, putting her whole body into it, her long, gawky frame bent almost double over the wooden tabletop. Her chin-length hair was brown and straight, cut off short and square above her pale neck. She wore a green wool cardigan over a plain white T-shirt.
Edward pulled over a chair and sat down opposite her. The book that lay spread open in front of her was very large; the cover alone must have been half an inch thick. The worn, brindled pages were closely covered with fine black script in neat columns. She didn’t acknowledge his presence.
“Excuse me—,” he began, in what he hoped was a discreet whisper.
She looked up at him, quickly but not startled. Her face was long and elegant—not pretty exactly, but with brown eyes and a wide, expressive mouth that turned down naturally at the corners like a cat’s. Almost as quickly she went back to scribbling on her pad.
“Excuse me—”
With the eraser end of her pencil she tapped a little printed card that was taped flat on the table. It said: