Aldiss looked off toward the edge of the frame. This was a common gesture: his glancing away, his biding time. Everything with the professor was deliberate, measured. They waited for him to continue.
“The Procedure was a game,” he said at last. “A game played with the novels of Paul Fallows.”
“Do you mean like a role-playing game?” asked Sally Mitchell.
“No,” Aldiss said quickly. “It was much more than that.”
“How was it played?”
Again Aldiss seemed almost cautious. He lifted a hand to his hair, swept some of it back out of his eyes. The wind screeched above them, feathering the picture and making the professor appear, in texture and shape, like a thin shadow. He sighed. There was no choice now; he had gone too far.
“The strange thing about the Procedure was that you didn’t know you were inside it until you realized something had changed,” he began. “To be part of the game you had to be chosen. I remember when I was chosen as a student at Dumant. I remember the pride I felt, to finally be one of them . . .” Aldiss’s voice fell away, and he looked again past the camera’s edge. When he continued his voice was more measured. “A message written inside a book told me the game had begun. But as far as I could tell, nothing had happened.”
Three rows away from the television, Alex sat forward. A message inside a book? She focused more deeply on the professor.
“You mean the Procedure hadn’t really begun?” asked Frank Marsden. He was again dressed as Richard III, his eyes dark and his hair colored with shoe polish.
“No, it had begun. This is the thrill of the game—you never know. You never know exactly when real life ends and the Procedure begins.”
Aldiss waited while the class digested this. When everyone was quiet, he continued.
“After the initiation, you wait. You wait until they are ready. Three weeks after I found the message in the book, odd things began to happen. My friends—they were not behaving in normal ways. They were . . . it was as if they were playing parts in some theater production. This, students, was the Procedure.”
“And these parts,” said Hayden, his gaze leveled directly at the screen. “You were supposed to respond to them accordingly. To pick up the loose threads of these scenes and become a character from Fallows.”
“That’s right. It seems silly, yes—but trust me, when the Procedure reaches the highest levels there is nothing silly about it. I will always remember: we were at a campus coffee shop one day, and someone looked at me and started speaking lines right out of The Golden Silence. For a moment I didn’t know what was happening. I was lost. I panicked. Finally this person just got up and left. Another message appeared in one of my books the next week, this time in a copy of Derrida: WE’RE DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, RICHARD.”
“You lost,” said Keller.
“That first time, yes. But I got my next chance a couple of weeks later. We were walking down a campus street, the five of us who called ourselves the Iowans, and someone started saying lines. I recognized the passage—it was from deep inside the novel, when Ann Marie has moved into the mansion with her uncle. I fell into my own role, saying the lines and using the gestures exactly from the text. It has to be exact; the player has to show a mastery of Fallows, down to the very last detail. And that second time I knew from the others’ faces—I had won.”
“And what happens if you win?” Mitchell asked quietly.
Aldiss turned his gaze up. Something had changed in his face, eclipsed the hard-set tension from before. His eyes flashed. “You are accepted,” he said. “The Procedure ends and you become one of the elite.”
“And if you lose?” asked Alex. “What then?”
Aldiss’s eyes dropped again. The faceless guards rocked.
“Then you are shunned. And as a Fallows scholar, to not be inside, to not be one of them—that is a fate worse than death.”
The professor said nothing else. Seconds later the feed was cut.
20
Later that night she met Keller at Rebecca’s. He was there when she arrived, his note cards spread out on the streaked table, a football field cut apart by grid lines and X’s and O’s. When he saw Alex across the smoke-filled room, he waved her over.
“Just a little homework,” he said as she sat down. The place was loud, jangling. Good.
“No problem.”
“Order you a beer?”
“I’ll take a Number Nine.”
“Magic Hat,” Keller said, impressed. “Excellent choice.” He called the waitress over and ordered for them.
A couple of awkward moments passed. This wasn’t like being in the night class with him, Alex thought. This was something else entirely. This was a real date. It wasn’t as if she were a homebody at Jasper; she got out as much as anyone else. But since Harvard had accepted her, and since her father had gotten worse, there just hadn’t been much time for this sort of thing. She felt foolish, out of her element.
“So, the Procedure.”
She looked up, realized Keller had spoken. It was hard to get a feel for how big he was, how solid his frame was until you were sitting close to him. There was no softness at all on his body. But he was also good-looking, with kind, quiet eyes and a mouth that always seemed to be bent into an ironic smile.
“What about it?” she asked. Their beers came.
“Stupid, isn’t it? To get caught up in books that way? It’s almost like they wanted to find a hole and slip right into the Fallows novels.”
“I don’t know,” she said, thinking, a rabbit hole . . .
Keller cocked his head. He smiled, intrigued. Alex had caught him off guard. “You thought the game sounded fun.”
“I can understand why he did it,” she said. She looked beyond him, saw Melissa Lee in a corner booth. She was talking to three or four other English majors, and Alex was surprised to see Michael Tanner among them. Lee caught Alex looking, and Alex turned back to Keller, her cheeks burning.
“I think it’s high nerd,” Keller was saying. “But I do want to hear more about his trip to Iowa with this guy . . . what was his name? Locke.”
“I thought you distrusted Aldiss.”
“I sure as hell do. But I also want to see where this thing is going, Alex. I want to find out what he knows, what he found out inside that prison. He’s hooked me, which is exactly what he intended to do with this class. But still . . .”
“Say it,” she said.
“It sounds corny.”
“Come on, Keller.”
“It’s like things just aren’t what they seem with this guy.”
She laughed, and Keller flushed.
“Maybe it’s just me.” He lowered his eyes to the table, pulled his beer into the cradle of his arms. “Maybe I’m just paranoid as hell.”
“You’re not paranoid.”
“So you feel it too?”
Tell him, she thought. Tell Keller about the book, about the message there. Tell him that Aldiss is innocent. She opened her mouth but nothing came out. She put the bottle to her lips and took a long drink.
“I did some digging,” he said.
“What kind of digging?”
“I’ve found some things. Today, in the Fisk Library.”
Alex sat forward, but Keller didn’t offer her anything. He just sat there with his arms crossed and stared at her blankly. The jukebox was playing Screaming Trees, and there were a couple of drunken sorority sisters on the dance floor. The place was getting louder.
“Well?” she said. “Spill it.”
Keller grinned. “Nope.”
“Keller! I thought we were coming to study tonight.”
“Is that what this is?” he asked, that smile hanging in place. “Studying?”
“What else could it be?”
“Unraveling mysteries,” Keller said, lowering his voice and doing a pitch-perfect imitation of Aldiss. He took a deep drag from the beer, his eyes glistening. It was at that moment that Alex realized something: she was having f
un.
“Are you going to tell me what you found in the library or not?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“If you don’t show me, Keller, then I’ll—”
He leaned across and kissed her. It was quick, silent, the table’s feet sliding gently and their bottles sloshing as if a train had blown through on the tracks outside Rebecca’s side exit. Alex was left dazed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No. No, I didn’t mean—”
“Here.”
The boy reached down and pulled something out of his backpack. It was a thick satchel, I LOVE VERMONT stitched on the side.
Keller tossed a book on the table. It slid across the slick surface and bumped against Alex’s arm. She picked it up, inspected its cover. She had seen it before, many times. It was Fallows’s The Coil.
“Not funny, Keller,” she said, thinking about how fast he’d moved toward her, about the gentle push of his breath against her lips. “I have one just like this back in my room.”
Keller ignored the quip. “At first I didn’t believe him,” he said. “Thought it was just another one of Aldiss’s tricks. But then I started reading this thing. I mean really reading it, Alex. Reading it the way the professor talks about in class. Working with it. Working into it. Deconstructing it.”
“And?”
Keller breathed in. He reached forward and touched the book—but it was a careful touch, as if the thing were charged with electricity. “Aldiss was right. There are things . . . Jesus Christ, Alex, there are things in here that tell us where to find him.”
“You mean Fallows?”
A nod. “Yeah, I think so. It’s like a—”
“Map,” she said, remembering what Stanley Fisk had said earlier.
“That’s it. The Coil is a goddamn map.”
She touched the book’s cover now, ran her fingers over the cool surface. The image was disorienting, bizarre. A woman in a city, but it was a strange city. The skyscrapers cast no shadows; the streets all ran in zigzag patterns toward the middle of the metropolis, where there lay a black, vine-choked heart. The title of the book swept upward, the words composed of tendrils and branches that grew from the smothered heart:
THE COIL
BY PAUL FALLOWS
Alex said, “Show me what you found.”
“Like I said, I went to the library this morning. Thought I would do some reading, you know, get caught up for tonight’s class. But I read a few pages and started to get tired. Sleepy. We had a game Saturday and I’m still not recovered.”
“Don’t tell me you dreamed of this thing.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” he said firmly. “I laid my head down on the table. I was there in the reading room and . . .”
“What was it, Keller?” she asked impatiently.
“Here.”
He turned the book on its side and pointed. There, right at the edge of his finger, was an imperfection on the page. The mark was barely noticeable, just a small formless dot. It was so tiny that Alex thought it was a smudge of ink, and she tried to brush it away.
“No,” Keller said. “It’s permanent. Typed onto the page. I thought it may’ve been just my book, a mistake from the printer or something. So I went into the stacks, found the library’s copy of The Coil. Same thing. The same smudge in the same exact place.”
“What the hell is it?”
Keller didn’t say anything; he simply opened the book near the smudge and pointed. She could see the tiny speck of ink floating on the outside margin, nothing more than a granule.
The fact hit her like a punch.
“It’s a placeholder,” she blurted.
“Exactly.” Excitement gleamed in Keller’s eyes now. “Like a bookmark or something. It has to be this page, because the following page doesn’t have the mark. Page 97.”
Alex read.
It was a scene from the heroine’s home in Hamlet, Iowa. She is planning for her trip to New York City, the voyage that will be her liberation. Alex read the whole page twice, but found nothing of substance there. Nothing at all.
“I don’t see it, Keller,” she said. “It’s just a scene to me. Just words.”
“Look again.”
She sighed. She hated these tests. Aldiss, Fisk, and now Keller—test after test, gauntlet after gauntlet. Nothing could be simple.
Once more she read. In the scene Ann Marie is explaining to her mother that she is going to New York City, and that that decision is final. There was an apartment for her on the East Side, an elderly uncle who would take her in. At the bottom of page 97 Ann Marie says, “This is what I want to do, Mother. I’m leaving Hamlet tomorrow.” The page ends. Nothing.
Alex was almost ready to throw up her hands, tell Keller that she hadn’t found anything there. She clearly wasn’t as smart as he was. Of course there were other things on her mind, she might tell him. Other, darker things she had found out about Aldiss and—
But then. Then she saw.
The mark. The shape of it. The tiny granule, the shadowy blur at the edge of page 97. It looked just like . . .
It was pointing.
Pointing at a line in the middle of the page. The edge of the mark extending inward like an arrow toward the text, drawing her eye there now. It was unmistakable, and Alex scolded herself for missing it the first time.
A map, she thought again. And every map has a legend.
She stared at the mark, then put her fingernail on the page and drew her eye directly to the corresponding lines. As she did this, she saw Keller smile.
The lines read,
. . . in this century a woman needs to be at the center of everything, Ann Marie thought. She needs to be the heart of the matter, the absolute center—Plato’s liquid gold.
Alex read the line a second time, then looked up at Keller. He had the beer bottle to his lips, but the smile held.
“ ‘Plato’s liquid gold’?” Alex said aloud. The phrase practically jumped off the page.
Keller shrugged. “Got me. That’s where you come in, Ms. Harvard.”
“I’ve never heard that phrase before in my life,” she said.
“Then I guess we’re stuck.”
“But the mark has to mean something, Keller. It has to.”
He shrugged. She looked at him, thinking.
“Let’s work this through,” she said softly. “Who was Plato?”
“Alex.”
“I’m serious, Keller. Who was he?”
The boy sighed. “Classical philosopher. Greek dude, had a sweet beard. Socrates was his Aldiss and he was Aristotle’s. Freed some people in a cave.”
“What else?” Alex asked.
Keller stared at her. Shook his head.
“There has to be something, Keller. There just has to be.”
She moved it through her mind, looking for those connections. Keller had found so much, had discovered the marking in the book and this strange line with its bizarre language, and she knew the tumblers were clicking into place. She knew something was happening, could feel it happening. But it would not happen by magic; the door to Paul Fallows’s identity would not simply open by itself.
Plato’s liquid gold, she thought again. Her eyes were closed and she had her fingers on her temples, massaging. It was what her father did when he was in deep thought, the way she had seen him do it when the headaches began. Come back now, Alex, she said to herself, and thought of oil. Thought of Texas. Made connections that were so definitely not Greek that she felt herself losing sight of the line and the text and the marker and everything else—and shit. Just shit.
Plato’s liquid gold, Plato’s—
“Aldiss,” she said.
Keller looked up. “What?”
“Something you said earlier. Something about Socrates being Plato’s Aldiss. What did you mean?”
“Socrates was Plato’s mentor,” Keller said. “Aldiss is our mentor now, isn’t he? Our guide?”
Guide, she thought. Teacher as
guide. There was something there, some kernel inside the realization she knew she needed to make the next connection. If she could just isolate it, squeeze it out of there, extract it.
“Where are you going, Alex?” Keller asked, snapping his fingers. “Still with me?”
“Plato was a guide.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Plato taught Aristotle in Athens. He taught his classes—where did he teach his classes, Keller?”
He made a face. She’d lost him.
“He taught his classes outside. Remember Humphries in HUM 101?”
“Ugh. Hump Fries. The Antichrist.”
“Humphries told us that Plato always taught his classes outside,” she repeated. “And what’s outside in Athens?”
“Statues?”
“Come on, I’m serious.”
“Okay, okay. What’s outside . . . the same things that are outside at Jasper College, I would imagine. Flowers, grass, trees.”
She looked at him, eyes wide now. “That’s it: trees.”
“What are you getting at, Alex?”
She leaned over and picked up her own book bag and pulled out her Norton Anthology of World Literature. Her fingers moved confidently through the pages; how many times had she searched through this very book, how many treasure hunts had she gone on as her professors waited? She had become so good at it, at finding the answers to back up her theories, that some of her professors accused her of having memorized the heavy book.
Now she was looking for a particular work. It wasn’t by Plato; it was by Homer.
When she hit the page and began to scan the lines, Keller leaned forward. She could feel his suspicion hotly on her cheek. “Wrong work, girl. That’s not the Greek we need.”
“Shhh.”
She went on, taking in line after line.
“It’s in here somewhere,” she said, frustration edging into her voice. “I remember Humphries talking about Greek nature one day when our class was reading The Odyssey. There was something about trees here, something about—”
Alex stopped. She’d found her old note.
“What?” Keller asked, suddenly interested. “What did you find?”
She read aloud: “ ‘The girls stood still, each urging the others on. Then they led Odysseus to a sheltered place where he could sit down as Nausicaa, the daughter of the great-hearted Alcinous, had ordered. On the ground beside him they laid a tunic and cloak for him to wear, and, giving him some soft olive-oil in a golden flask, they told him to wash himself in the running stream.’ ”
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