by Lev Grossman
It was the Wents, they were his ticket out. He didn’t know why, or how, or how he knew, he just knew that they were the key. He was going to find the book, the codex. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard, until the colors came. The wave began to recede. He pulled a tissue from a packet belonging to the hapless cubicle-dweller whose desk he was sitting at.
After a long time he turned back to the landscape; for the first time all night he was conscious of looking at a screen. He turned away from the ramparts to face the interior of the castle and found himself gazing down into the same sunlit courtyard he’d seen hours earlier. Nothing had changed: There was the same stone fountain, the same grass, the same neat white gravel walkways. He wished he could find a flight of stairs down to it. He hadn’t noticed before that there was a huge old tree, as big around as a tower and so massive that it actually formed a part of one of the castle walls. Its muscular roots had twined in between the stone blocks, both shifting them apart and locking them together in a crippling, crushing embrace. Its leaves were scattered on the grass beneath it.
The little figure of the Artiste was still sitting there on a marble bench, perfectly motionless, his hands in his lap, placidly watching the play of light on the water in the fountain. Edward cleared his throat.
“Hey!” he called out. “How do I get down there?”
The Artiste looked up at him inscrutably and shook his head.
“You can’t.”
10
“AND THEN, THERE HE IS, he-he-he-he comes out of Andy’s house and he’s wearing a Speedo!” Dan, Edward’s boss, couldn’t stop laughing. “I’m not kidding! I mean, Andy does have a pool, but it’s not like it was a pool party. Everybody else is standing around in their grays and their earth tones and their, and their, and their shoes that they spent ten hours picking out, because it’s Andy, and everybody wants to impress him—myself included—and then he just walks right out onto the porch, and his-his-his-his package is, like, straining against the spandex, and he dives right into the pool. And everybody’s just standing there stunned, just in awe of what an ass clown this guy is, staring at these bubbles coming up from the water where he dived in. And then—here-here-here-here’s the best part—up comes the Speedo! It fell off! It’s this bright red Speedo floating in the pool, and we’re all staring at it like it, like it just fell out of the sky!”
Having gotten that off his chest, Dan sighed a long, satisfied sigh.
“I got Amanda to change his password to ‘speedo’,” he added by way of an epilogue. “So every time he logs onto the system in the morning he has to type ‘speedo’ to get in.”
“Uh-huh.”
A lull in the conversation. Evidently Dan had been expecting a more appreciative audience for this gem, but Edward didn’t feel up to it. Can you get a hangover from a computer game? He listened in contemplative silence, lying in bed and staring up at the blank white ceiling. It was noon.
“Anyway, Ed, reason why I called, I sent you an e-mail earlier but I didn’t get a reply. So I thought I’d follow up by phone.”
“I’m sorry,” Edward lied. “I had some problems with my ISP. I’ve been offline for a few days.” He hadn’t been checking his e-mail. He imagined it piling up like a snowdrift, higher and higher and higher, in some virtual lockbox somewhere, but he felt no anxiety about it.
“Oh, yeah? My bad, I should have called before. Is everything okay?”
There was a pause. Edward covered the receiver and coughed. He felt like the voice on the other hand was reaching him from another era, over a wire strung across a void to his bedroom from an earlier period of his life, one that was inexpressibly distant and no longer really relevant to anything much that was going on here in his current dimension. He tried to picture Dan’s face—broad, square, jowls just beginning to sag. In another ten years he’d look exactly like a bulldog.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No, no, not at all,” Edward said. He cleared his throat. “Not at all. What’s up?”
“Well, the folks from E & H in London have been trying to get in touch about the housing arrangements, and they haven’t heard back from you. I guess it’s what—less than a week now, before you start? They just want to know if you needed help getting set up.”
“Yes. I do. Tell them thanks, and I’ll get in touch with them myself. Just give me their contact info, would you?”
Dan gave Edward a long transatlantic phone number. Edward pretended to write it down. He probably already had it somewhere. He lay back with his eyes closed as the conversation passed through its natural, inevitable stages: packing, then passports, then airfares, then airports, then customs, then finally, blissfully, closure. He hung up.
It was too hot to fall back asleep, so he just let himself drift, the bedclothes kicked down around his knees. One corner of the fitted sheet had sprung loose by his head. A breeze from the half-open window cooled the sweat on his forehead. An altercation was taking place on the sidewalk below his window, a man and a woman arguing about who knew what when, and when she knew it, and who told her about it, but it all seemed very, very far away. The voices floated up to him, light and shimmering, fading in and out of intelligibility.
He was going astray, he knew. The codex was leading him astray. But a part of him had never felt more on track. To his surprise, his resolution of the night before had stayed with him. At the time it had felt like a moment of drunken wisdom, the kind that vanishes the following afternoon, but the sense of conviction was still with him. He had made his decision, and that was enough for now. He turned over on his side and went back to sleep.
AT TWO ZEPH AND Caroline buzzed him from downstairs. While they were on the way up Edward hastily pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. He splashed water on his face and ran his hands through his hair.
Zeph lumbered through the door as soon as he opened it, breathing heavily, and pushed past him into the living room. His huge forehead was slick with sweat, and his purple and orange Hawaiian shirt was soaked through.
“Top o’ the marnin’ to ye,” he said in a bad Irish accent.
“We need water,” Caroline said hoarsely, heading for the kitchen. Her stripy tank top made her look rail-thin. She emerged carrying two tumblers full of musically clunking ice water, put one down on the coffee table and drained the other in one long gulp. Then she collapsed onto the brown velvet couch next to Zeph.
“Isn’t it horrible?” she said. She indicated Zeph’s shirt with one limp arm, then let it drop. “We had a fight about it on the subway on the way over. God, it’s murder outside.”
“I haven’t been out.”
“I got it free,” said Zeph without moving. “From a software company in Honolulu.”
He pointed to a spot on his stomach where the name of the company appeared in tiny letters twined in among the leaves.
“Hey, I lost track of you last night.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Edward remembered now. “Sorry about that.” At the end of the night, after he’d seen the Artiste sitting there in the courtyard, he’d gotten up from his magic vibrating chair and stumbled like a zombie to the stale corporate bathroom. He’d looked into his own weepy red eyes in the mirror, and just like that the spell was broken. He slipped outside, flagged down a cab and made it home shortly before dawn.
“It was a pretty intense scene, even for that crowd.” Zeph pressed a water glass against his temple. “We’re doing it again next Friday. Some guys I know are renting a warehouse in Queens, they’re gonna wire it up, hack the server code, try to get 128 players on the network at once.”
“Edward’s going to be gone by then,” Caroline said. “Aren’t you?”
He did the math in his head.
“I guess I will,” he said.
Her gaze flicked around the room, floor to ceiling to bookshelves, suddenly suspicious.
“Have you started packing?”
“Not really.”
“You’re being very relaxe
d about all this,” Zeph said. “It’s not like you.”
“Isn’t it great?” Edward sensed that he was in imminent danger of a well-meaning intervention. “I’m just going with the flow, grooving on a here-and-now vibe.”
Zeph and Caroline looked at each other.
“To tell you the truth,” Zeph rumbled, “I don’t know. We can’t really tell.”
“I can’t either. But it feels good.”
“Well, then,” Caroline said chirpily. “It must be okay.”
Zeph toyed with two pads of stickies that were sitting on the coffee table, trying to mate them together into one seamless stack.
“Damn, it’s hot,” he said. “It’s like that H. G. Wells novel, where the whole world is plunging into the heart of a giant flaming comet.”
“Comets are made of ice, love,” said Caroline. “They aren’t flaming.”
“Huh.” Zeph put the stickies down. “Well, I guess it must have been some other novel.”
“Did you know,” she went on, “that the tail of a comet is actually a stream of particles excited by radiation emitted by the sun? That means that when a comet is moving away from the sun, its tail actually precedes it along its trajectory, rather than streaming out behind.”
Edward and Zeph looked at her, then Zeph looked back at him.
“So Edward,” Zeph asked. “Are you going to pack or what?”
“Yes, I’m going to pack.”
Edward lolled his head over the back of his chair. He knew they were being sensible. He’d had four straight years of sensible since college, he knew what sensible sounded like. A strand of cobweb dangled from a section of molding in his field of vision. He watched it waft in the nonexistent breeze.
“I’ll do it over the weekend,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have somebody pack for me. You know you can pay people to come in and pack up your stuff for you? Anyway, I don’t have all that much anyway.”
“One thing you can do,” said Zeph. “Wrap up all your stuff in a red bandanna and then tie it on the end of a pole. I’ve seen that on TV tons of times.”
Caroline set her empty water glass aside on the floor.
“Actually, it’s not really the practicalities of moving that we’re so much concerned about,” she said. “It’s more the underlying ambivalence about this new phase of your life that your obvious reluctance to deal with those practicalities betokens.”
“Oh.”
“You could still back out if you wanted to. Just not go. Say you’re allergic to warm beer. Say you’re having a nervous breakdown. Are you, by the way? Having a nervous breakdown?”
“No,” Edward shook his head vigorously. There was no way to explain to them what he was planning, what he was thinking. Not yet. “No, that’s not it at all. I want to go, I really do. I have to.”
He thought about Weymarshe. Overnight he’d built up a vivid picture of it in his mind, almost against his will, and based on no factual evidence whatsoever. The image was both strange and at the same time familiar, like a snapshot from a long-forgotten roll of film that he’d found at the back of some disused drawer years ago, and here it was, finally developed, as fresh and vivid as the day it was taken. The image was of a grand old English country house built out of gray fieldstone. Its roof was a mass of peaks and chimneys and dormers, and it was cooled by gentle mists and nestled in a labyrinth of light green lawns and dark green hedges that looked almost like the pattern on a printed circuit.
“Anyway, my sublettor’s going to be here in another month, so I should probably be gone by then.”
“Probably,” Zeph rumbled. “Well, at least you have boxes.” There was a waist-high stack of flattened cardboard boxes in the corner. “Come on, let’s get some of this stuff packed.”
“You guys don’t have to do that,” said Edward. “Really.”
“But we want to.” Caroline braced herself on Zeph’s knee and pushed herself up.
“If you pay us,” said Zeph.
Caroline found some tape and scissors and started unfolding the boxes. Edward and Zeph took the books down off his shelves. Caroline put on a CD, and Edward set up fans by the windows. The room started to smell like dust and packing tape. A few times Zeph objected to something—a tie, a bowl, an alarm clock—and they stopped and argued over whether Edward should pack it, or leave it, or throw it away, or give it to Zeph.
“Are you taking that painting?” said Caroline. She looked critically at a huge print that Edward had had expensively framed.
It was a Northern Renaissance painting, Dutch or Belgian or Danish, one of those, he didn’t know which. He had bought it online, an impulse click, and he was disconcerted at how big it was when it actually showed up, but since then he’d gotten attached to it. He didn’t have much else in the way of decoration. The painting depicted a crowd of lumpy peasants at work in a wheat field. The wheat was a sunny golden yellow, and the artist, whose name Edward didn’t even know how to pronounce, had obviously taken great pains to draw in every stalk individually with a superfine brush. Both the men and the women had hilarious bowl haircuts. Some of them were reaping the wheat with long scythes, others gathered it into sheaves, and others lugged the sheaves away, presumably back to some nearby village. The rest sat or lay around a giant gnarled tree in the foreground, in a quadrant of the field that had already been cleared, snoozing and talking and eating lumpy porridge out of wooden bowls.
Edward didn’t think of himself as somebody who was particularly blessed with powers of aesthetic appreciation, but he was secretly proud of his painting. An air of contented resignation hung over the scene. Somehow, in the ongoing war to keep themselves alive and the world in some semblance of order, they’d managed to make a separate peace. These people were working, but they weren’t miserable. They didn’t hate themselves, and they didn’t hate each other or the sheaves of wheat. They’d struck a balance. They could stand it. Every time he looked at it he saw new details—a bird or two flapping overhead, a tiny round moon hanging in a corner of the pale blue sky—as if the painting wasn’t actually frozen in time but slowly evolving, imperceptibly, like glass flowing.
“It would be a pain in the ass to ship,” Edward said, “but I hate to give it up.”
“I don’t think I get it,” said Zeph.
“What’s to get?” Edward shrugged. “I just like watching those medieval suckers work.”
After a few hours they went across the street to a Japanese restaurant, where it was cool. It was late afternoon, and they were the only people there apart from some out-of-work hipsters and homesick Japanese tourists. Japanese covers of Western R&B hits played nonstop in the background. Edward and Zeph still felt a touch hungover, and they binged on salty miso soup, excruciatingly spicy kimchi, and steamed dumplings seared on the bottoms and dipped in soy sauce and vinegar, washed down with rounds of bitter Japanese beer.
When they were done Zeph sat back and yawned in an exaggeratedly casual way.
“So I’ve been doing a little snooping on your friends the Wents,” he said.
Edward poked at some waterlogged ginger with his chopsticks.
“What about them? And how do you even know about them?”
Zeph tapped the side of his nose with one thick finger, meaningfully.
“Who are the Wents?” said Caroline.
“That’s who Edward is working for,” said Zeph. “The ones with the library. You know they’re rich?”
“Of course they’re rich,” Edward said.
“But do you know how rich?” For once Zeph sounded almost serious. “The Wents are ‘rich’ the way Marvin Gaye was ‘attractive to women.’ Did you know they’re the third-largest private landowners in England?”
“What?”
“You don’t know the half of it. There’s all kinds of rumors about them online. Try searching the royalty newsgroups sometime. You know they pay Forbes to keep them off their annual list?”
Edward laughed.
“Zeph, that’s ridiculous. Our
firm handles a good chunk of their portfolio. I’d know if they had that kind of money. Anyway, that’s just not how money works. You can’t hide that much of it. It finds ways to get itself noticed.”
“It’s true! Edward, these people have one of the biggest private fortunes in Europe, and they’re spending half of it trying to make sure nobody knows about the other half. And there was a scandal a few years ago—apparently they had a son who was kidnapped. The Duke wouldn’t pay the ransom.”
“So what happened? Did they get him back?”
Zeph shook his head.
“He died. Apparently the kidnappers were hiding him in a meat locker and he froze to death. They kept it out of most of the papers.”
Edward glanced at Caroline. “Zeph, you know most of that Internet stuff is bogus.”
“He’s right,” Caroline said. “Honey, remember the time you posted on that blog about how Bill Gates had been a child actor who played Batman’s son on TV? You remember how many people believed that?”
“Batman didn’t even have a son,” Edward said.
“But that was different! That was—look, I made that up! Jesus, I’m like the Cassandra of the Internet here. At least run their names through Lexis-Nexis sometime and see what comes back. They’re worth billions.”
“Billions of dollars or billions of pounds?” Caroline asked.
“I don’t know! Billions of euros, or sovereigns, or pieces of eight, or whatever they use for money over there! They have a huge private estate in Bowmry. They’re recluses—there’s a famously huge hedge that runs all the way around their property. Their hedge is famous, for Christ’s sake.”
“So where does all this alleged money come from?”
“That I don’t know. Though you should be able to find out, Edward, if you tried,” Zeph said, still hurt. “They keep it all over the place. A lot of it’s pretty new—she comes from a big manufacturing family. He must have had some too, though—his family goes back forever. They probably cornered the market on blue face paint back in 1066.”