by Lev Grossman
Edward shifted from foot to foot. There was something satisfying about the ending, but also something sad about it.
“So that’s it? He never gets to go home?”
She shook her head slowly. “He doesn’t get to go home.”
He felt like he should have something intelligent to say about it, but he was drawing a blank.
“What do you think it means?”
Margaret shrugged.
“I know what my colleagues will think,” she said guardedly. “On a dialectical level the Rose Chapel is the inverse of the black page in the second fragment: light where the black page is dark, sheltering where the blind canyon is destroying, legible where the blackness is unreadable...”
“Okay, okay. I get it. But what do you think?”
She turned away to her desk and discreetly swept some book dust off it into the palm of her hand.
“It’s strange. It feels almost more existential than Christian. I don’t know. I like it.”
“Well,” he said uncomfortably, “but don’t you think he should have gotten to go home? In the end?”
She rounded on him without warning.
“Is that what you think? You think he should get to go home?” She threw the fistful of dust at him. He flinched. “Look around you! Is that what the world is like? Everybody gets what they want, everything works out fine, everybody gets to go home. Is that what you think?”
“Well, no,” Edward said, brushing himself off, hurt and baffled. “I mean, I don’t know—”
“You don’t know? Well, you’ll find out!” she retorted bitterly. “Or why don’t you ask the Duchess? Maybe she can tell you.”
Her anger came almost as a relief. He wanted her to be angry. He was angry at himself.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I’m sorry, Margaret. I have no choice about this. You know that. I’ll do everything I can for you.”
She nodded. She dusted off her hands over the trash.
“I know,” she said. “I know that.”
A stillness fell over the room. The constant background wash of street noise, always audible in Margaret’s apartment, mysteriously ceased for a second, leaving them alone in a conspicuous silence. He shifted the bag on his shoulder.
“I should go,” he said. “My flight is in a couple of hours.”
“All right.”
“We’ll talk soon. I’ll call you when I get there.”
“All right.”
She took a graceless half step forward and kissed him with unexpected tenderness. He held her for a moment, then turned and unlatched the door. There was nothing else to say. Anyway, she knew it wasn’t his fault. There was no real reason for him to feel guilty.
22
TWO HOURS LATER Edward was sitting in a Chili’s on the concourse at J.F.K. wearing his most expensive suit—a black four-button Hugo Boss—and his best black leather shoes, with an impeccable pink silk tie rolled up in his pocket. He had two bags with him: his laptop case, into which he’d also managed to stuff his toothbrush and an extra change of socks and underwear, and the tote bag with the codex in it. He stowed them safely under the table, clamped between his knees, and ordered a huge frosted mug of pale Mexican beer with a chunk of lime floating in it. He felt like he should have something quintessentially American before he left.
He glanced surreptitiously at his reflection in a mirrored beer ad. The pain of leaving Margaret behind was still with him, but it was starting to pale next to the thrill of what was happening next. It was all coming together. Now that he was actually on his way the whole past month seemed like one long, dreamlike ordeal that was finally ending, and thank God. Even the past four years that he’d spent working at Esslin & Hart seemed unreal, like a jail sentence he served for a crime he never even committed. Forget about it. That time was gone. He was facing forward, ready to start over. God, he was so tired. He felt like an astronaut waiting on the gantry, his rocket sweating liquid nitrogen on the launch pad, waiting to boost him up and out and into the next world.
A voice called his flight over the PA. A flight attendant was waiting for Edward beyond the security checkpoint, and she accompanied Edward personally to his seat, squiring him past the long line of passengers who shuffled obediently down the telescoping corridor to the airplane. Nice touch. Once he was on board Edward didn’t want to stow the codex in an overhead compartment—in an ideal world, he thought, he would have had it handcuffed to his wrist, secret agent style—but he was determined to keep his laptop with him, so he reluctantly consigned the case with the codex in it to the luggage rack. A nozzle over his head blasted him with dry, frozen air. The seat next to him was empty, presumably having been bought up by the Duchess for his traveling comfort. He thought about trying to call Esslin & Hart on his cell phone to tell them he was en route, but at that same moment the announcement came to turn off all electronic devices, and he put it away. The day had gone dark, and a couple of raindrops left fine stitches of water down the thick plastic window. Through it he watched the runway crew driving around in their weirdly shaped baggage-handling vehicles, like alien golf carts.
When they finally took off the acceleration pressed him gently back into his seat. His long night was finally catching up with him, and he closed his eyes. They seemed to be rising up, up, up into nothingness, and he felt as if at any moment he might just vanish, just blissfully cease to be, draw the curtains, bring up the houselights. The story was over, and it wasn’t perfect, but well, things were never perfect, were they, except maybe in books. By the time they were above the clouds he was asleep.
He woke up again in the middle of the in-flight movie. He watched it lazily, not even bothering to put on the free headset. It was a big-budget martial arts movie, easy enough to follow even minus the dialogue. The young hero was being trained by an ancient fighting master who set him a series of torturous exercises. He played the flute while balancing on the point of a sword. He shattered a giant ruby by smashing it with his forehead in slow motion. He kicked tropical fruits off the heads of the masters’ servants without ruffling their bowl haircuts.
The time came for the disciple to compete in a big tournament. Not only did he fail miserably, he was publicly humiliated by the star pupil of the ancient fighting master’s archrival, a shadowy figure possessed of sinister mustachios. The old master shook his head sadly. All that time and training—wasted. But just when all hope seemed to be lost, when the master’s pretty daughter was struggling to hold back tears, the disciple reappeared. The purpose of his training had become clear to him. His dormant abilities manifested themselves. He reentered the ring. Victory in the big tournament. Defeat of the archrival’s student. Joy with the pretty daughter. Knowing smile of the master. The movie ended.
It was dark inside the plane. The window shades were drawn—glowing red with the high-altitude sunset behind them—and all the reading lights were off except for one single one, far up toward the front of the plane. The dry, sterile air was cold, and each passenger snuggled up underneath his or her individual gray fleece blanket. On the monitors the arc of their trajectory was approaching the Arctic Circle, and the sound of the engines had become a dull, soporific, reassuringly steady roar. The stewardesses clustered together silently at the ends of the aisles, slipping off their shoes to massage their shapely, aching feet through their stockings.
But Edward wasn’t sleepy—he could already feel his circadian rhythms drifting out of whack—and he fished out his laptop from under the seat in front of him and booted it up. He slipped in the disc that he’d remembered, with the addict’s presence of mind, to bring with him in his lapel pocket. The cool gray light from the liquid crystal screen flooded over him in the darkness like a bath of milk. MOMUS was waiting for him, as it always was, just where the Artiste had left it. Now that he had the means and the know-how and the free time to finish it off, he might as well do it.
To his surprise, Edward found that he remembered everything the Artiste had told him about h
ow to win the game with absolute clarity: how to reactivate the subway, where to find the diamonds, how to get to the airport, how to fly to Florida, how to take a rocket into orbit. He still had four hours left till London, and now that he was free of the Artiste’s Easter Egg it was all ridiculously easy. He felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He won every fight, found every clue, dodged every trap without even half trying.
Before he knew it he was up in outer space. The swirly blue-green marble of earth rolled beneath his feet. Missiles flew, lasers flashed. He had mustered a crack army of warriors and engineers, and now he bent them to his will: Using a superpowerful magnetic field they lassoed a passing asteroid—it was conveniently rich in ferrous metals—hauled it out of its trajectory and sent it hurtling into the center of the orbiting lens that the aliens had used to deprive the earth of sunlight. It was like the rose window of a cathedral shattering: A lattice of fine cracks spread out from the center—a jewel with a blinding bright flaw, or a great eye bloodshot with capillaries of molten gold—then it broke apart, letting through the pure intolerable burning brilliance of the sun.
Satisfaction. It was over. The earth was frozen and dead, but at least the aliens were gone, and soon the sun would be back. Life would reemerge. He guessed. Anyway, he’d done his part, he’d won the game. He yawned and stretched.
Except that the game wasn’t over. It was still going on. Edward frowned. Logically—at least according to Zeph’s logic—there must still be something left to take care of. But what?
He studied the situation. It was nighttime, the night before the first new dawn of the old, unfiltered sun. Edward watched his little figure struggle along on the screen, tireless as ever, crunching robotically through the light, powdery snow that covered the ground. He guided it up the frozen river that led north out of the city, walking for miles along the ice, leaving a dotted line of miniature footprints behind him.
It took a long time, and he lost track of the minutes and hours in the monotony of the moonlit landscape, drift after drift, like waves or sand dunes, interrupted only by the occasional stand of evergreens or a collapsed farmhouse half covered by a blanket of snow like a restless sleeper. And maybe time was the problem. He’d destroyed the giant floating lens and routed the invading aliens, but the aliens had speeded up time, too, and he hadn’t fixed that, had he? For that matter, even if he did manage to stop time, hadn’t the damage already been done? He tried to think like a science fiction geek for a minute. The earth was cold and dead. Nothing was going to change that. Maybe it was too late after all. A creeping fear stole through him. Had he won the game, or had he lost it?
He rounded the last bend in the river valley. He was almost there. The ruins of the old bridge were long gone, but he recognized the shape of the bluff: This was where the game had started. The summit was still covered with grass that had somehow survived the cold—coarse, green, thick-bladed tufts, hoary with frost. It really was like Cimmeria. He wondered if the Artiste had stuck in a model of the Rose Chapel somewhere for him to find. Edward watched as a flat pink sunrise tinted the frozen field a delicate rose-gray. As he walked through it the frost crystals began to melt into dewdrops. When he stooped down to examine one, he saw in each gleaming droplet—and he’d long since stopped wondering how this degree of detail could even be possible—the reflection of the entire world around it, and in every other droplet appeared the reflection of that reflection, and on and on into infinity.
The old mailbox was still there, still empty. The thin birches and aspens he’d walked through at the very beginning of the game were bent almost double with the weight of ice and snow, so that they formed an arched colonnade roofed over with heavy drooping branches. Beside them was a great old tree, now overthrown and on its side, lying next to the pit its hideous roots dug as the weight of the trunk ripped them out of the earth. Edward settled deeper into the comforting embrace of his business class seat and closed his eyes.
But still the game went on. He ducked and dipped his way deeper into the grove, spilling branchloads of snow on himself. Isn’t this where he came in? he thought. Maybe he could get out the same way. He’d messed up this world, now he’d just quietly slip out the back exit and try again in a new one. Better luck next time. But no, it was just trees and more trees. He put his hands on his hips and gazed up at the blank gray dome of the sky. Well, it was a puzzle, but you know what? He was tired of solving other people’s problems, jumping through their hoops, prying into their secrets. He was tired of his own secrets, too. He took a deep breath: good, dry, crisp cold air.
Dawn came on, and snow began to fall. It fell and fell, light dry flakes, not the big mushy stuff that never sticks, that melts into slush before it has a chance to mount up into the big, solid drifts you really need. This was the good stuff, and it showed no sign of stopping. He leaned on the familiar white porch railing, brushing off the skim of snow that had already collected there, and looked out over the frozen river. It was all so pleasantly familiar, and why not? This was where he grew up. Apparently time had raced so far forward that it had looped back on itself, because here he was back in Maine again, and his father was alive, and his parents were still together. Maybe I won the game after all, he reflected, his dream-self formulating hazy dream-thoughts, and this is my reward.
He needed only one more thing before he was completely happy, and it was on its way. He watched the snow fall and listened to the special hush it brought with it. It was almost a sure thing now. There was no possible way there could be school tomorrow.
A BELL RANG. Edward opened his eyes. The FASTEN SEATBELTS sign was on. The plane was beginning its descent into Heathrow.
Something wonderful was happening inside him. He took a deep breath to try to calm himself down, but he couldn’t stop grinning. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t remember the last time he genuinely couldn’t wait for something to happen. He wished he could stop time, prolong this gentle, stomach-lifting descent forever, the better to savor the anticipation. He stood up and hefted the bag with the codex in it down from the luggage rack and held it in his lap, feeling its reassuring solidity. The plane banked over the London suburbs. His window flooded full of sleeping gray roofs and scurrying white headlights.
Five minutes later they were on the ground. The plane taxied to the gate, and a line of disembarking passengers formed. Edward shouldered his bags and joined them. It was a relief just to stand up. His knees ached deliciously. By New York time it was only nine in the evening, but it was two in the morning in London. Outside in the waiting area everything looked subtly different and European. The payphones were red and white, and there were complicated, high-tech cigarette machines all along the walls. The snack bar had a fully alcoholic wet bar behind it. Beards were plentiful, and everybody seemed to have a cell phone and sunglasses.
Edward was in no hurry. He stood by the gate and waited while the crowd streamed out of the plane around him. Like all airports, Heathrow was rich in arrows and signs, branching trails, forking paths, into which his anonymous fellow travelers busily sorted themselves. They passed him by as if he were just one of them, just part of the crowd, instead of somebody with a critical and highly secret mission to carry out. He was ready to join the general flood, to allow himself to be swept along and sorted, but he paused for just a minute. He was in no hurry. He could afford to take his time. He watched silent news on a TV suspended from the ceiling. Across the room a figure in the exiting crowd caught his eye.
A tall, willowy young woman was struggling determinedly across the floor of the waiting area with a heavy bag. Her nose was long and interestingly curved, and her straight dark brown hair swung at chin-length as she walked. She had no particular expression on her face, but the naturally downturned corners of her mouth gave her a melancholy look.
He watched her cross the carpet to where a man was waiting for her at the far end of the gate area. Edward had seen him before. He was tall and handsome, an older man with a stiff
brush of white hair. He was very thin, almost haggard, as if he’d recently recovered from a serious illness, but his posture was ramrod-straight. When Margaret reached him he took her bag and hefted it easily up onto his shoulder with a single muscular gesture. His pink cheeks glowed with rude health. A silvery bell rang, and a rapid-fire voice spoke dispassionately over the loudspeaker. After a cursory exchange Margaret and the Duke of Bowmry left the gate together through the exit marked CUSTOMS.
Edward watched them go from where he stood. It was strange, but he couldn’t move. It was as if a colorless, tasteless toxin had entered his body, the silent sting of an invisible jellyfish, and left him completely paralyzed. He stood where he was, observing them from a distance. He couldn’t take it in yet. It was just colors and shapes, which his mind couldn’t translate into anything that made sense.
Then they were gone, headed toward customs, and his paralysis vanished, replaced by fear, fear of what he knew was already happening, had already happened. Only then did his body jump into action. As he walked a part of his brain kept up a neutral commentary on what was going on. He wanted his brain to grapple with this new mystery, to wrestle it into the shape of something bearable, but it refused to leave its corner, was in fact desperately trying to climb out of the ring. Everything around him was very clear and sharp, like a mosaic of broken glass. There was no time. He should really say something. He needed inspiration, a tactical masterstroke that would reverse the situation—not just reverse it but make it so it never happened, explain it and neutralize it and make everything all right again in one fell swoop. She must have thought I was getting a later flight, he thought. She wouldn’t have wanted me to see this. He felt like a camera with its shutter stuck open—he couldn’t shut it off, couldn’t turn away, couldn’t stop taking it all in.