Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  The driver blared his horn. Whitley jerked the wheel, tires screeching. Everyone screamed as we barreled off the road, bouncing to a halt in a ditch, Kip hitting his head on the seat. Killing the engine, Whitley started to sob, screaming at Cannon that it was all his fault, that as always he’d needed to impress a bunch of girls just to massage his screaming insecurity for five minutes and now we’d almost died. She snatched his baseball cap off his head and threw it into the dark. Then she scrambled out, shouting that she was finding her own ride home, running into the woods. I sensed her tantrum had to do with the rain and almost ending up in a car accident—but also with me, how I’d shown up out of the blue.

  Cannon went after her. A few minutes later, he brought her back. She was crying and wearing his hoodie. He tucked her carefully, like some wild bird with a broken wing, into the front seat, whispering, “It’s gonna be all right, Shrieks.”

  It was Cannon who got us home.

  * * *

  —

  As the five of us went clambering into Wincroft, dripping wet and drunk, it felt normal for the first time. It felt like the old days. Thank goodness for the defunct top on that convertible. Our brush with death had thawed the ice. We were giddy, teeth chattering as we pulled off our wet clothes, leaving them in a soggy pile on the floor, which Gandalf kept circling while whining. Whitley disappeared upstairs. Martha was on her hands and knees in front of the fireplace, moaning, “I can’t feel my legs.” Cannon went down to the wine cellar, returning with four bottles of Chivas Regal Royal Salute, and poured shots in pink champagne glasses. Whitley dumped a giant mound of white terry-cloth bathrobes on the couch like a pile of dead bodies.

  “I’ve never been so scared in my whole life,” she said, giggling.

  That was when the doorbell rang.

  We all sat up, staring at each other, bewildered. Mentally counting. We were all here.

  “Someone call Ghostbusters?” slurred Martha.

  “I’ll go,” volunteered Cannon. A sloppy salute, and he disappeared into the foyer. None of us said a word, listening, the only sound the rain drumming on the roof.

  A minute later, he was back.

  “It’s some old geezer. He’s two hundred years old.”

  “It’s Alastair Totters,” said Martha.

  “Who?” Cannon snapped.

  “Time-traveling villain in The Bend,” mumbled Martha.

  “No, no,” whispered Kip, gleeful. “It’s the proverbial kook with Alzheimer’s who wandered away from his nursing home during Elvis Social Hour. Without his medication. They’re always without their medications.”

  “I’ll invite him in for a nightcap?” asked Cannon, sighing, a mischievous wink.

  “No,” hissed Whitley. “That’s how horror movies start.”

  “Chapter three,” Martha muttered.

  “Hey,” said Cannon, pointing at Wit. “That’s not very nice. I’m inviting him in—”

  “NO!”

  Then we were all racing, giggling, tripping over each other as we bumbled to the foyer to see for ourselves, tying up our bathrobes, taking turns to check the peephole, bumping heads. I assumed Cannon was somehow playing a trick on us, that no one would actually be there.

  But there he was. An old man.

  He was tall, with thick silver hair. Though I couldn’t make out his face in the shadows, I could see that he was dressed in a dark suit and tie. He leaned in, smiling, as if he could see me peering out.

  Cannon opened the door with a bow.

  “Good evening, sir. How may we help you?”

  The man didn’t immediately speak. Something about the way he surveyed us—methodically inspecting each of our faces—made me think he knew us from somewhere.

  “Good evening,” he said. His voice was surprisingly rich. “May I enter the premises?”

  No one answered, the question being too presumptuous and strange. I gathered he was not senile. His eyes—deep green, gleaming in the porch light—were lucid.

  “Oh, you live next door,” said Whitley, stepping beside Cannon. “Because if this is about Burt’s sailboat, the Andiamo, being marooned in front of your dock, he told me to tell you he had problems with the anchor and he’s working on getting a tow next week.”

  “I do not live next door.”

  He stared at us another beat, his face expectant.

  “It’s really best if I come inside to explain.”

  “Tell us what you want right there,” said Cannon.

  The man nodded, unsurprised. It was then that I noticed two bizarre things.

  One: he looked like Darrow’s musical director, Mr. Joshua. For a moment my drunken mind believed that it was Mr. Joshua, that something terrible had happened to him in the year since I’d last seen him. He’d suffered some tragedy and aged twenty-five years, his hair going silver, his face growing tattered. But it wasn’t Mr. Joshua. Mr. Joshua was slight and rosy, quick to laugh. This man was bony, with a hawkish face, one that would look at home on foreign currency or atop a monument in a town square. It was as if he were the identical twin brother of Mr. Joshua, as if they’d been separated at birth and had totally different life experiences, Mr. Joshua’s nurturing and this man’s harrowing, bringing him to look the way he did.

  Two: there was no car in the driveway, so the question of how he’d come here without an umbrella yet remained perfectly dry hung in the air, vaguely alarming, like a faint odor of gas.

  “You’re all dead,” he said.

  “Oh, dear. You’ll have to excuse me. That’s not accurate.”

  The old man placed a hand over his eyes, shaking his head. “I overshot it. Went for the dramatic, Masterpiece Theater effect. I apologize. Let’s try that again, shall we?”

  He cleared his throat, smiling.

  “You’re all nearly dead. Wedged between life and death. Time for you has become snagged on a splinter, forming a closed-circuited potentiality called a Neverworld Wake.”

  Quite pleased now, he nodded and took a deep breath.

  “This phenomenon is not specific to you. There are such moments occurring simultaneously in the past, present, and future all around the world and across the universe, known and unknown, crumpled and unfolded. Time does not travel in a straight line. It bends and barrels across tunnels and bridges. It speeds up. Slows down. It even derails. Well then. This hitch, as we might call it, is where each of you exists at the moment. And it is where, until further notice, you will remain.”

  He bowed like the longtime ringmaster of a down-at-heel traveling circus, with gracious ease and a hint of exhaustion.

  “I am the Keeper,” he said. “I have no other name. The way I look, act, the tone of my voice, my walk, face, everything I say and think is the sum total of your five lives as they were lived. Think of an equation. This moment equals your souls plus the circumstances of reality. Another example? Imagine if each of your minds was placed inside a blender. That blender is turned on high. The resulting smoothie is this moment. If there were someone else with you? It would be a slightly different moment. I’d be saying something else. I’d have different hair. Different hands. Different shoes. Docksiders rather than Steve Maddens.

  “I digress. The circumstances of reality. You’re doubtlessly wondering what I meant by that. Well.”

  He sniffed, smiling.

  “Each of you is, at present, lying kinda sorta dead on the side of a coastal road. This is due to a recent head-on collision with one Mr. Howard Heyward, age fifty-eight, of two hundred eighty-one Admiral Road, South Kingstown, who was driving a Chevrolet Kodiak tow truck. Time is standing still. It has become trapped inside an eighth of a second like a luna moth inside a mason jar. There is a way out, of course. There is one means by which the moth can escape and time can fly irrevocably free. Each of you must vote during the last three minutes of every wake. Yo
u must choose the single person among you who will survive. This person will return to life. The remainder of you will move on to true death, a state permanent yet wholly unknown. The decision must be unanimous, save one dissenter. There can be only one who lives. There are no exceptions. Do you have questions?”

  No one said a word.

  All I could think was that he was senile after all. He also seemed to have once been an actor, because he had intoned his speech like the baritone narrator of some old 1950s TV Western starring John Wayne, his voice lilting, old-fashioned, and grand. There was an effortlessness to his every word, as if he’d given this memorized speech dozens of times before.

  He was waiting for one of us to say something.

  Kipling started to clap. “Bravo.”

  “Hold on,” said Martha, scowling. “Is he selling Bibles?”

  “What do you want?” demanded Cannon.

  The man shrugged. “I am a simple resource. I desire no compensation, monetary or otherwise. Nonetheless, I wish for you to succeed.”

  “Succeed at what?” asked Whitley.

  “The vote.”

  “Listen,” said Cannon. “It’s been a long night. Tell us what you want.”

  “It appears my delivery was a bit rushed for your comprehension. Would you like the news a different way? Dramatic reenactment? Flash cards? A second language? Italian tends to soften the blow of even the most ominous prognosis, which was why Dante used it for the Inferno.” He cleared his throat. “Buonasera. Tra la vita e la morte, il tempo è diventato congelato—”

  “That’s enough,” snapped Cannon. “Get the hell off this porch.”

  The man was unfazed. He smiled, revealing small gray teeth.

  “Very well. Good luck to you all. Godspeed.”

  He hopped nimbly down the steps, striding out to the driveway. Within seconds he was drenched and vanishing into the yard beyond the lights. We listened to his footsteps sloshing through the grass.

  “My brain just exploded,” said Martha.

  “Worst door-to-door salesman ever,” said Kip, shaking his head. “I think he learned his sales techniques from Monty Python. What did he call us?”

  “Dead,” I whispered.

  “Right. I’ve been called many things. Deadhead. Deadbeat. Never just plain old dead. Has a sort of bleak ring to it.”

  “He’s a Jesus freak,” said Whitley, nibbling her fingernail. “Right? In some cult? Should I call the police? There may be others out there. They might be waiting to break in here and slaughter us or something.”

  “He’s harmless,” mumbled Cannon. Yet he seemed unnerved. Scowling out at the empty driveway, he suddenly seized an umbrella and barreled outside just as another monstrous clap of thunder exploded and the rain fell harder. He stomped into the yard, looking around, disappearing in the same spot as the old man.

  We waited in silence, apprehensive.

  A minute later, Cannon reappeared.

  “Must have headed back to the road. No sign of him.”

  “Let’s check the security cameras,” said Whitley.

  They headed downstairs to the surveillance room, and Kip and Martha—muttering about needing “a stiff drink before the ensuing elderly zombie apocalypse”—shuffled back into the living room.

  I remained where I was, staring outside.

  There had been something legitimately upsetting about the old man. All the eloquence, the formal speech, the accent—at once like a cable newscaster’s and someone who’d spent a year abroad in England—seemed only to conceal a deep calculation. As if what he had told us were only one small piece of a grand plan.

  I watched the woods, searching for movement, trying to steady my drunken head.

  Suddenly, music erupted from inside, overlaying the storm with a soundtrack, softening the night’s edge. With a deep breath, I shut the door and bolted it. Whitley was right. He was probably just looking to recruit people for his church.

  Still, I walked past Kip and Martha, curled up stroking Gandalf on the couch, and took out my phone, stepping into the hall. My mom answered on the first ring.

  “Bee? Is everything all right?”

  I could tell from her anxious tone that she and my dad were both still awake, doubtlessly reading in bed: Dad, one of his thirty-pound presidential biographies, Mom trying to read a thriller by James Patterson, though she’d probably been skimming the same paragraph four, five times before blurting “I don’t understand why she had to go see them. They still have some mysterious hold on her.” Then Dad, with the patient, knowing stare over his glasses: “If she wants to see them she can, Victoria. She’s an adult. She’s stronger than you give her credit for.”

  I realized I had no idea why I was calling, except to hear her voice.

  “It’s too late to drive back, so I’m spending the night,” I said.

  “Well, your father needs you at the Crow for opening. Sleepy Sam called to say he’s having a tooth pulled.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  She lowered her voice: “How’s it going with them? Can you talk? You sound upset.”

  “Everything’s fine. I love you.”

  “We love you too, Bumble. We’re here if you need us.”

  I hung up, just as Whitley and Cannon were returning from the surveillance room.

  “No sign of him on the cameras,” said Cannon.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “This night gets an A-plus in weird,” slurred Martha.

  “Wasn’t it hilarious how he asked to be called the Keeper?” said Kip, shaking his head. “The man looked like more of an Eastern European Santa Claus.”

  Whitley wrinkled her nose. “That was my Internet password for everything for years. I’m not even kidding. The keeper one-two-three.”

  In the end, the consensus was he was Just One of Those Things, one of life’s untied shoelaces. As the thunderstorm raged on, however, lightning cracking and thunder yowling, at one point a giant oak branch crashed onto the back deck, demolishing the entire railing.

  We jumped, staring at each other, doubtlessly imagining the same thing: here it was, the beginning of the horror to which that funny old man had been the creepy prelude.

  Only nothing happened.

  Another hour passed. Whitley talked about being sexually harassed by her boss at the San Francisco law firm where she’d had an internship all summer. Cannon couldn’t tell if he was in love with his girlfriend, an international fencing champion.

  “Love is this elusive bird,” he said. “You’re the lifelong bird-watcher, looking for this rare red-plumed quail people spend entire lives trying to see for three seconds in a cherry tree on a mountaintop in Japan.”

  “You’re mistaking love for perfection,” I said. “Real love when it’s there? It’s just there. It’s a metal folding chair.”

  When no one said anything, I realized, embarrassed, I’d blurted this as a clumsy way to bring up Jim. And I was about to. Then Whitley got up to get more Royal Salute, and Kipling muttered that he hadn’t been this wasted since he was nine, and the moment was gone.

  “I’ll tell you what love is,” said Martha, gazing at the ceiling. “It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Once you think it’s there and give voice to it? It’s not there anymore. It’s over here. Then way over here. Then here. You can’t trap it or contain it no matter how hard you try.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard Martha speak in such a way—the first time for the others too, if their surprised glances were any indication. Being allergic to romance was her shtick. If ever you asked her whom she had a crush on, she’d blink at you like you had three heads: “Why would I waste time—a highly precious, constantly diminishing resource—on transitory neurological fluctuations of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin?” When she saw couples holding hands in t
he halls, she gave them a cartoonishly wide berth.

  “In case they’re contagious,” she said. And she wasn’t joking.

  The conversation meandered on as rain peppered the windows.

  At one point Kip started calling me Sister Bee again, which made Cannon blurt that I was the one person at school no one, not a teacher or student, a parent, a maintenance worker, or even an ant, could ever say anything bad about.

  “And your nice isn’t even irritating,” said Cannon.

  “Remember how in biology,” said Kip, smirking, “Bee didn’t even tell Mr. Jetty that Chad Burman had just thrown up his entire lunch all over the back of her blouse? She just sat there heroically answering his question about osmosis and then excused herself.”

  “And the field trip to D.C. when Mr. Miller had to go home to his pregnant wife, and rather than summon another teacher from campus to chaperone, Ms. Guild just asked Bee.”

  They cackled with laughter.

  “It wasn’t that big a deal,” I said.

  During this conversation, Whitley remained tellingly silent, a smug expression on her face as she stared at the floor, as if she begged to differ, as if she wanted to laugh.

  When is it coming? I wondered with a shiver. The conversation about Jim?

  The absent leader. The sixth member. The killed one.

  Weren’t they dying to talk about him? Jim, whose shadow stretched behind him long and dark, as captivating dead as he was when he was alive. Jim the poet. Jim the prince.

  Of course they were thinking about him. How could they not?

  Yet it seemed he was the locked shed on the forsaken property everyone was too scared to approach, much less peer inside all the filthy windows.

  Not long after, I passed out. When I woke up, peeling my cheek from the couch cushions, Whitley and Cannon were asleep under a blanket in front of the fireplace. Kip was snoring on the love seat. Only Martha was awake. She appeared to have sobered up and was sitting across the room in a club chair, reading with her chin in her hand.