by Lev Grossman
She gave him a thin, sympathetic smile.
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ll just get my stuff from upstairs.”
He slipped back up the spiral staircase to the library, where Margaret was still writing busily in her notebook. The incunable lay open in the pool of light from the one lamp, and as she leaned over it the light shone through the curtain of her dark hair.
He cleared his throat.
“We should go,” he said.
She finished the sentence she’d been writing, dotted the period, then looked up.
“Why?”
“Change of plan. We’re off the case.”
“The case?”
“The library. They’re terminating the project.” He couldn’t quite keep the frustration out of his voice. “I’m sorry, I had no idea this was going to happen. Word came down from the top, apparently. It’s all extremely sudden. Even Laura seemed surprised.”
He felt embarrassed, but Margaret was outwardly unruffled. She simply nodded, closed the book, and dropped her notebook back into her bag. She stood up and straightened her skirt. Edward snapped off the lamp, and they made their way cautiously downstairs in the darkness. He looked around almost nostalgically. This was the last time he’d see the inside of the Wents’ apartment. It was strange how attached he’d gotten to it.
“I just have to drop off the key,” he said, “then we can go.”
“Wait.”
In the darkness of the hallway, Margaret put her hand on his arm. It was a strange gesture, awkward and sincere at the same time. He didn’t think she’d ever actually physically touched him before. At first he thought she was trying to cheer him up.
“Don’t give them the key,” she said. Margaret felt around in her bag and took out a large jingling key ring. She wrestled with it until she managed to pull off a gray metal tube key. It was indistinguishable from the Wents’ key. “Give her this instead.”
“What?” He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. “What are you talking about?”
“I need to have access to this collection.”
“What? Why?”
“I need to be able to get back in here. To examine these books.”
He just stared at her. She seemed to have no idea that what she was saying made no sense.
“Margaret,” he began, in what he hoped was a patient and reasonable tone, “these people are my clients. I narrowly escaped being in deep shit just for bringing you here. Whatever you have in mind—and I don’t want to know what it is—if anybody found out about it—”
“They won’t.”
She hadn’t brushed away the dirt from the front of her dress, and there was a smudge of brick-red leather dust on her cheekbone like war paint.
“Margaret.”
“Look,” she explained, as if she were talking to a child. “The keys look exactly the same. This one goes to a bicycle lock. This one is the Wents’. If they notice, just say it was a mistake. They got mixed up.”
He just looked at her dumbly, rubbing his jaw. Sensing her moment, she deftly plucked the real key out of his hand and dropped it into her bag. Then, taking his free hand between both of her own, she pressed the other key into his palm and closed his numb fingers over it.
“There.” She let go. “All right?”
“This is insane.” He shook his head. It felt like it was full of buzzing bees swarming around in meaningless circles, lost and disoriented, queenless. “What—so you’re going to break into their apartment every time you feel like checking out a book?”
“If necessary. If we can’t come to some other agreement.”
“What other agreement? What are you talking about? Jesus Christ, they’re probably taking the books back to England anyway. That’s why they’re kicking us out.”
“Maybe they won’t.”
“That’s beside the point.” He looked nervously over her shoulder for signs of Laura. How long was this going to go on?
“Listen, we’re not doing this,” he said in a furious whisper. “It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s idiotic.”
“What are you going to do? Tell them that I have their key and I won’t give it back?”
They stood and stared at each other.
“Edward,” she said earnestly. “It’s time you got a grip on what’s really important here. These are people who inherited their money. This collection represents a tiny fraction of their total worth, and for all we know they’re getting ready to liquidate it with little or no regard for its intellectual and cultural value. Do you know what happens to books like these once they’re sold?” Her eyes burned. In the past thirty seconds they had acquired an incandescent intensity. “They’re disbound. Dealers dismantle them, cut them up and sell them off page by page because they’re worth more money that way. Do you understand? They’ll be gone forever. Dead. They’ll never be reassembled.”
“I understand,” he hissed back, “I also understand that my career cannot end over some stupid sitcom hijinks. And I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I don’t see what’s up there that’s so important that I should risk my whole future over it. And I don’t understand why you’re getting so excited about a bunch of—”
“It doesn’t matter why!” she answered fiercely, her face flushing. If her eyes had burned before, now they were radioactive. She took a step forward toward the elevator. He moved to block her path and she grabbed his wrist, squeezing it as hard as she could—which wasn’t very hard—and staring into his eyes.
“You don’t understand anything,” she whispered, articulating crisply, spitting the consonants. “You’re an idiot and an ignorant greedhead! You don’t care about books, you don’t care about history, and you don’t care about anything that’s important. So if you’re not going to help, then get out of my way.”
She flung his arm aside as an exclamation point. Taking a deep breath, she brushed back a strand of her hair out of her eyes.
“And I’m not getting excited.”
They glared at each other. It was a standoff. Edward should have been angry, but instead he had to suppress a hysterical giggle. He didn’t know whether to slap her or kiss her or burst out laughing. It was insane, but there was something a little magnificent about her and her speechifying and her academic zealotry. He knew it was wrong, he knew he should be taking things more seriously, but he also knew he was experiencing a moment of temptation, and to make matters worse it was the most diabolical temptation of all: the temptation to do nothing, to sit back and let things happen and get completely out of control. What would happen if he let her keep the key? Maybe the Wents weren’t through with him yet after all. A giddy feeling came over him, like vertigo, as if he were an empty-headed animated character in a video game, and somebody somewhere else was playing him.
Somewhere down the hall a vacuum cleaner was turned on.
“What are you going to do about your bike?” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your bike. Without the key. How are you going to unlock your bike lock?”
“Oh.” She flushed. “I have a spare key.”
“I have no knowledge of this. Do you understand?” Edward held up both hands, palms out. “I don’t know anything. If it comes down to it, you overpowered me with a Vulcan nerve pinch and took the key away by main force.”
She looked at him blankly. The sudden intensity was gone; she was just Margaret again.
“I know you think you’re being clever,” he added. “But you’re not. This is very, very stupid.”
“All right,” she said flatly, in her old monotone. “All right.” She patted him on the shoulder as she walked past him down the hall, as an afterthought. “I’m sorry I said that. You’re not an idiot.”
That, he thought, is where you’re wrong.
9
THAT NIGHT AROUND midnight Edward found himself in a cab with Zeph heading uptown on Broadway.
“What beer did you bring?”
Edward lifted a sweating s
ix-pack of Negra Modelo out of a brown paper bag on the floor. Zeph shrugged.
“It’ll have to do.” He folded his massive forearms and looked out the window. “These guys are real snobs about beer. They microbrew.”
“Where’s this thing happening, anyway?” said Edward.
“Broadway and Fifty-first. Offices of Wade and Cullman, accountants-at-law, pillars of the financial community.”
Edward leaned back against the black upholstery and put his hands behind his head.
“What am I doing here?” he said, staring up at the cab’s ripped fabric ceiling. “I was going to start packing tonight. I have to be in London in a week. A week.”
“You haven’t started?”
“I’ve been working at the Wents.’”
“The Wents. That’s a laugh. They’re using you, man.” Zeph shook his fist in Edward’s face. “Why can’t you see that?”
Edward shrugged. “I’m kind of getting into working there. Some of those old books are really beautiful.”
“I generally judge the worth of a book by how deeply the letters on the cover are embossed. Anyway, you need a vacation.”
Edward snorted.
“I need a vacation from my vacation. Jesus, do you realize it’s been three days since I read the Journal?”
The thrill of his leap into the unknown, giving Margaret his key to the Wents’ apartment, had already palled and congealed into a thin, greasy slick of dread and regret. The Wents had kicked him out, cut him off from the library, and instead of making a clean break, of salvaging at least his professionalism from the debacle, he’d left open the door for Margaret to fuck things up further. Letting her into the Wents’ apartment was like giving an addict the keys to the pharmacy.
With the weight of that potential disaster hanging over him, he had allowed a few innocent pints with Zeph to turn into this decidedly dodgier and more compromising late-night excursion. The cab bogged down in traffic near Times Square. A brand-new skyscraper loomed over them, its lower third completely paneled with glowing video screens. The screens crawled, teemed, swarmed with restless multicolored information displayed in giant pixels, each one the size of a lightbulb. It was distracting, hypnotic, as if you could just fall into it.
“I should warn you about something,” Zeph said. “You have to watch yourself around these guys. They’ve got a very strict social code, and they don’t like outsiders. And you’re an outsider. You think they’re losers, but what you don’t understand is, they think we’re the losers. They tolerate me because I speak their language, and I understand math and computers—actually, they don’t think I’m a loser. Just you. You—well, you’ve played a little MOMUS, and that’s fine, but don’t start acting all superior just because you were properly socialized and you went to the prom and you get laid once in a while.”
“But I don’t get laid,” Edward said. “I never get laid.”
“There could be chicks there, actually,” Zeph mused. “Geek chicks can be very attractive. But forget about it, they’ll loathe you even more than the guys do. They’re like bees, man. They can smell your fear.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It took a lot of work to build multiplayer functionality into MOMUS. These are people who really understand how shit works.”
“Uh-huh.”
The cab lurched forward, then stopped short again.
“Maybe we should just walk,” Edward said.
“Suckers walk, man. Players ride.”
Five minutes later they got out at Fiftieth Street. The air was like warm bathwater. This close to Times Square the atmosphere was like a county fair, a constant, aimless celebration of nothing, with no object and no end. The sidewalks were packed with disoriented, jet-lagged tourists. Edward followed Zeph through the crowd toward the base of an enormous pink granite skyscraper. The actual entrance was quite small, a single unassuming glass door squeezed in between two stores selling off-brand gray-market electronics. Inside Zeph nodded at the young black man in livery who sat behind a marble desk in the foyer reading Cliff’s Notes for Wuthering Heights. He showed the guard a card from his wallet, then signed his notebook, and they walked back to the elevator banks.
They waited. The buzz from the beer they drank earlier was starting to wear off.
“What did you call this thing again?” Edward asked.
“A LAN party.”
“A LAN...?”
“L, A, N. Stands for Local Area Network.”
“Right.” Edward massaged his temples. “Dude, I feel like you’re leading me right into the heart of dorkness.”
They took the elevator up to thirty-seven and stepped off. Zeph held his ID up to a dark smudged spot on the wall, and it buzzed them through the glass doors to the office. The lights were off. The receptionist’s desk was empty.
“This-all constitutes a misuse of company resources,” said Zeph in a half whisper as they walked down a silent corridor. “Fortunately the IT guys are the only ones who keep track of said resources, so they can misuse them all they want. Ordinarily the sales staff would be here right now, grinding their souls away into magic gold dust, but fortunately they’re all away at an offsite in New Jersey.”
They came out into a large bullpen filled with white cubicles. The overhead lights were off, but most of the cubicles were lit up from within by desk lamps. The room had no windows. The partitions were only shoulder height, and they could see the heads of people standing and conferring with each other over them.
As they walked past the first cubicle Edward felt something poke him in the chest. A tall, unsmiling man with long, wavy dark hair was holding a bright pink Nerf gun so that the tip of the Nerf projectile rested against the front of Edward’s shirt. The man wore shorts and a sky blue Sea World T-shirt. He looked young, maybe twenty-five, but his hair already had streaks of gray in it.
“Give him the beer, dude,” Zeph said.
Edward handed over the brown paper bag. The man took it without lowering the Nerf gun and put it behind him. With his free hand he and Zeph exchanged an arcane secret handshake.
“Let’s get you set up,” the man said, when they were done.
“I’m Edward.” Edward held out his hand, but the man just brushed past him.
“I know.”
They walked down the row of cubicles together. Somehow Zeph had disappeared; Edward glimpsed him walking into one of the offices with his big arms around two short fat guys with helmet haircuts who looked like twins. It was oppressively hot, and he was already sweating. A skinny kid who could have been in high school was walking backward along the wall, paying out wire between big stacks of speakers. Here and there stood racks of strobe lights, and a big black machine like a dehumidifier that Edward didn’t recognize.
The wavy-haired man stopped at a cubicle. It had a chair and a desk with an ordinary workstation on it.
“This is yours,” he said. “You may have to adjust the mouse sensitivity a little to get it to where you’re comfortable. Whatever you do, don’t quit out of the game. If it crashes, pick up the phone and dial 2-4444. Are you right-handed?”
Edward nodded.
“Know how to use one of these?” he asked, holding up a tangle of black wires. It was a telephone headset.
“Sure.”
“Okay then.”
Edward sat down and glumly started to untangle the headset. He didn’t belong here. It wasn’t Zeph’s fault—Zeph hadn’t exactly twisted his arm to come. In fact, Edward seemed to remember insisting in an inappropriately loud voice that Zeph bring him along. But now that he was here and sobering up it all felt like a mistake. He didn’t belong here. These people didn’t like him. He wished he were home in bed.
The chair had some kind of uncomfortable orthopedic pad strapped to it. The monitor showed a plain black screen with a menu of commands on it in a familiar white font. He looked around incuriously at the clutter on the desk: pink phone slips, yellow stickies, a half-used packet of tissues, a squeezable blue rubb
er stress ball in the shape of a globe, a minitribe of Smurfs: Papa, Brainy, Smurfette. The red voice mail light on the phone was on. Tacked to the walls of the cubicle, which were made of fabric that would have been ugly as a carpet, let alone as a wall, was a series of gelatinous Polaroids showing a small black-and-white cat with staring red eyes.
“Wozny!”
He started. Zeph’s shaggy head appeared over the cubicle wall. He was talking into a megaphone.
“I want that sales report and I want it now!”
“I don’t think I get exactly how this works,” said Edward.
Zeph put down the megaphone. “You’ll be fine. Just remember: If you die, it’s because you’re weak and you deserve it. Come on, let’s see about getting you a skin.”
Zeph’s head disappeared. Edward got up and followed him, skirting the edge of the cubicles.
“So,” he said. “Do you hang out with people like this a lot? Like, when I’m not around?”
Zeph wasn’t listening to him. “To think that these puny humans live like this, day in and day out. Poor beggars.”
He stopped and knocked on the door to an office.
“What’s a skin?” said Edward.
“You know—skin. Skin flicks. Skin diving. Skin.”
There was no answer. Zeph pushed the door open.
It was a small square room with bare particleboard walls, containing a massive, squat workstation on it. To his surprise, Edward recognized the person who was hunched over in front of it: It was the gnome he’d seen at Zeph’s apartment, the Artiste. It couldn’t be anybody else; aside from his round face and thin black hair, he was so small his feet barely reached the floor. His childlike physique made it hard to guess his age, but Edward thought he might have been thirty or thirty-five. He barely glanced up when they came in.
There was a moment of silence. Even Zeph hesitated to disturb him. Then the little man looked up and calmly picked up something from beside the workstation. He held it up.
“So this is—,” Zeph started to say.
“Smile,” said the Artiste softly, and there was a blinding flash. It was a camera.