Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  “Victoria,” admonished my dad.

  “What? Look at her. She’s completely undone. We’re not going through this again. No. Those kids are rotten. Spoiled. They’ll live their entire lives without ever turning around to see the mess they’ve made, Mommy and Daddy always running after them with a maid and a checkbook.”

  “They’re just kids.”

  “Just kids left our daughter barely able to eat or sleep for two months, if you remember.”

  “That was shock. And grief.”

  I was crying, but of course they couldn’t understand the real reason, that it was relief. The day that had already happened—whatever it was—hadn’t been real.

  This was real.

  I managed to calm my parents down, and we went to dinner at the Shakedown. We talked with Artie, who gave us free apple pie. We strolled along the boardwalk and talked about the umpteenth offer from developers who told my dad he had to sell the Captain’s Crow so they could build condos. Though my parents were alarmed, not just by my abrupt appearance, but by the uncharacteristic gusto with which I was approaching spending an evening with them—something I had done with relative apathy all summer—they said nothing. They pretended they believed my excuse for abruptly leaving Wincroft: “I had to get out of there. We’ve all outgrown each other, you know?”

  They also humored my manic need to keep the night going, to walk a little farther down the boardwalk, to stare in at every sailboat painting in every window of every art gallery, to walk out to the old swings on the beach where someone had spray-painted on the wall LIFE IS BUT A DREAM, thereby postponing the inevitability of driving home and going to bed.

  I was afraid to sleep, because the glaring fact that I had already lived this day nagged like a bad pop song that wouldn’t leave my head.

  We got home just after midnight. Dad drove the Dodge RAM as I said I was too tired, though the real reason was I was scared to be alone in the car. We filed into the house, my dad yawning. My mom loaded the dishwasher.

  “Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?” I asked her.

  “Of course.” She smiled, though I could tell the question worried her. The last time I’d asked her to do that, it was just after Jim died.

  She sat on my bed as we talked about changing the menu at the Crow, the community vote to tear down a drawbridge. I knew she wanted to ask me about them, my old friends, what had happened tonight, but thought better of it.

  At one point she stood up to inspect the white daisy wallpaper of my room.

  “I can’t believe it. Your dad said he fixed this.”

  She scratched at a seam in the corner, tugging the edge. A large chunk immediately peeled from the wall.

  “Are you kidding me? There’s actually mold here.”

  “It’s a sign you and Dad should sell the Crow and retire to Florida.”

  She crossed her arms. “Do I look like someone who wears a visor?”

  I began to feel heavy sleep falling over me. She said something about my dad’s bad back, how it was hurting him more than he let on. I held her hand as I passed out.

  My mom’s hand was real. What had come before was not. So a day had decided to repeat itself. Is it really that big a deal?

  What lies the mind will tell to keep you safe.

  The mind does its best to lessen the impact of any catastrophe. It really tries its best. But then the distance between reality and woven fantasy becomes too great for even the mind to bear. All those words of calm and relief, the hope that everything will be all right in the end, can’t help stretching and tearing and fading to nothing.

  Then you wake up screaming.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up in the downpour in the backseat of the Jaguar, Martha and Kipling beside me again. When I sprinted away from them into the house, I was shaking so badly I had to sit on the couch, feet apart, hands on my knees, trying not to hyperventilate.

  I was here again. I was back at Wincroft. At least I was alive.

  But was this life?

  Gandalf was running in circles around the living room, barking.

  “No. No. No!” shouted Cannon.

  He was at the kitchen island typing on his laptop again, though—undoubtedly after seeing that the date was the same—he slammed it closed and threw it across the room.

  I realized dazedly, glancing up, that Whitley was outside, in the throes of one of her rages. Completely soaked, she was pulling the white umbrellas out of the patio tables and launching them over the railing.

  Her temper had been legendary at Darrow.

  “Psychotic fits,” the cattier girls used to hiss.

  I’d always found it enviable—that Whitley could be so beautiful and smart, and on top of that so unconcerned about causing a scene or curbing her biblical emotions. It seemed unfairly glamorous, like she was the untamable heroine of a Victorian novel. (Even the oft-gossiped-about phrase around school—Lansing’s temper—sounded gorgeously bygone, like the name of an exotic illness with no cure.) To be so wild—it was how I longed to be. Wit surged into battle. I froze. Whitley threw her head back and screamed. I was mute. Her rages were Olympian, five-star, multiplatinum. They came from some boiling place inside her not even she could explain. Face flushed, eyes flashing, she’d demolish her dorm room, rip pages from every textbook, punch walls, overturn tables, tell off a teacher with zero care for tact, mercy, or an aftermath. It always seemed to me in those moments that Whitley was witnessing some alternative world invisible to the rest of us, something ugly and so vast it couldn’t be fit into the English language.

  Her rages got her sent to the infirmary. They would have gotten her kicked out if it weren’t for her mom, the Linda, CEO of the pharmaceutical group Lansing Drugs, flying in from St. Louis in her fat mink to smooth everything over, which meant funding another wing for the library. It was the reason Whitley got special permission to leave school to go see a psychologist up in Newport. Whenever a fit happened, I’d always run to her side and hold on to her, like some astronaut trying to make sure my colleague didn’t float out into space.

  Now, as I watched her seize a deck chair and throw it over the railing screaming, I could only observe her blankly, unable to move. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t help myself.

  Kipling and Martha had wandered in and were looking around the kitchen like people visiting their property after a tornado.

  “We have to call someone,” Kipling said, his voice shaking. “The FBI. The CIA?”

  “And say what?” asked Martha, turning to him. “Time has become a broken record?”

  “There’ve got to be others going through this. It’s a national emergency.”

  “I’m sure Anderson Cooper’s all over it,” muttered Cannon. He was on the floor, hands linked around his neck like he was in a bomb shelter. “ ‘Today. A new kind of breaking news. Yesterday is today. Again. More on this story as it never develops. Tweet us your experiences with hashtag Groundhog Day is real.’ ”

  Kipling grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, flipping through channels, every one yelping something normal. Coming up, we’ll show you how to make a three-minute omelet. Keeps whites white and colors brand-new.

  The doorbell rang.

  No one moved.

  Within seconds the Keeper had strolled inside, a sympathetic, even grandfatherly look on his face. There was something insidious about him now: same suit, same tie. I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “This will be the worst of it,” he said. “It’s the second wake that feels the most catastrophic.”

  “Tell us what to do,” said Martha.

  “I did. Take the vote.”

  Take the vote. As if it were just a matter of making a left turn rather than a right.

  Whitley must have spotted the old man from outside, because sudden
ly she heaved the sliding door open and stood in the doorway, panting and scowling at him, gusts of rain blasting around her like a storm scene in an old movie. Before anyone could stop her, she was sprinting inside. She grabbed a Chinese vase off a table and slung it at the old man’s head.

  He crumpled to the floor. Cannon ran to Whitley, but she brutally elbowed him off, grabbing the Keeper by his necktie and forcing him into a chair. Then she was barreling into the kitchen, pulling open drawers, tossing pots, ladles, cooking spoons to the floor.

  “The cycle of violence is actually a pointless denial of reality,” said the Keeper, holding his head.

  Whitley was back in front of him with cooking twine, brutally tying up his wrists, brandishing a fourteen-inch carving knife inches from his jaw as she sliced the string. Crouching, teeth gritted, she moved to his ankles. The Keeper didn’t protest, only watching her, bemused, like a father when his four-year-old decides to bury him alive at the beach.

  She dragged a stool over and sat in front of him, brushing her hair out of her eyes.

  “Start talking.”

  “About what?” asked the Keeper.

  She smacked him hard across the cheek.

  “Whitley,” reproached Cannon.

  “Tell us who did this and how we get out of here.”

  The Keeper closed his eyes. “I’ve already told you. The vote. As for who? There is an infinite number of possibilities. The universe, God, the Absolute, the Supreme Being, He Who Actually Is, Adonai, Ahura Mazda—”

  She slapped him again.

  “Wit,” whispered Kipling. “You think it’s wise to go all Tarantino on this poor man?”

  “He’s not poor. He’s toying with us.”

  She slapped him again. The Keeper remained unperturbed, blood trickling from his nose. I started to cry. And yet I made no attempt to stop her. None of us did. We stood there, frozen, all doubtlessly wondering—terrible as it was to admit—if hurting the Keeper might reveal something, something that would end this. He’d confess it was an elaborate game; the curtain would fall, scenery crashing. We’d laugh. How hilarious. You really had me going there. I also couldn’t help hoping that, as with so many nightmares I’d had as a child, if things became sufficiently strange, the dream would at last puncture and I’d wake up.

  Whitley hit him again.

  “The final three minutes of every wake you will each vote for the single person among you who will survive—”

  “Why only one?” asked Martha sharply, stepping beside Whitley.

  “I can’t explain the whys and hows of the Neverworld. They were determined by you.”

  “But if time has stopped,” asked Cannon, “why can we return to our normal lives?”

  “Only for eleven point two hours. Six hundred and seventy-two minutes. The length of your wake. For Cannon and Whitley it’s six hundred and seventy-five. At the end of that time, you will all wake up in the Neverworld again, as surely as Cinderella’s stagecoach turns back into a pumpkin. Even though your accident produced a snag in the space-time fabric, a crinkle in the cloth, the present world hasn’t disappeared. It remains alive all around you, a bullet left in the gun chamber.”

  “What is the significance of our arrival time in the wake?” asked Martha.

  “The beginning and end of a wake are based on an infinite number of factors, including violent impact, strength of connection, and random chance.”

  Whitley, seemingly unable to hear another word, flung down the knife. She seized her phone off the kitchen island and had a curt, unintelligible conversation before hanging up, shoving her feet into her Converse sneakers.

  “What are you doing now?” asked Cannon.

  “Driving to T. F. Green.”

  It was the airport for private jets outside Providence.

  “I booked the jet to Hawaii. We’re leaving in an hour. Let’s go.”

  “Won’t change a thing, I’m afraid,” said the Keeper.

  She glared at him. “We will be in a plane thirty-six thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean at the end of the—what did you call it, the wake? What’s going to happen? We just vanish out of our seats like some Willy Wonka magic trick?”

  “You’ll see,” said the Keeper.

  * * *

  —

  Everyone went with Whitley except me.

  I couldn’t. I was too devastated, too scared to move so far away from my parents, to be trapped in a box in the sky with them.

  Them.

  They were them to me too now. I wasn’t one of them, not anymore. If this situation had made anything clear, it was that: that the very people I’d once loved and trusted most in the world had become total strangers.

  What had I done to deserve this? To end up in hell with them?

  I couldn’t think about it. No, I couldn’t let my mind move ahead. It had to stay on a tight leash tied to this moment. It was all I could handle.

  I watched them pile with varying degrees of conviction into Cannon’s Jeep. It was obvious that they suspected Whitley’s plan, an impetuous flight westward to a tropical island, was futile. Yet they went ahead. For a show of solidarity? Some last, vain hope that it might actually work, that the Linda’s Gulfstream V tearing through the pink cotton-candy clouds with its beige calfskin seats and trays of fanned-out mango slices would be the loophole, the wormhole, the Get Out of Jail Free card to puncture this nightmare?

  I stumbled down the steps, barely aware of the rain drenching me as I climbed into the truck. As I backed out, I saw that the Keeper had managed to free himself from Whitley’s knots. Once again he was at the entrance, his face bloody and red, Gandalf at his side, as if the dog had always belonged to him.

  This time the old man didn’t utter a word. He didn’t have to. His smile at me as I drove past him said it all.

  See you later.

  You can’t stay awake.

  We tried that. No matter how many cups of coffee or how many cans of Red Bull or Monster energy drinks you down, no matter how many caffeine pills or how much ginseng you take, your body gets pulled into the heaviest hollow of sleep you’ve ever felt in your life. The next thing you know, you’re right back where you started.

  Back at the wake.

  You can’t kill yourself either.

  Kip tried that. He hanged himself with one of E.S.S. Burt’s belts in an upstairs bedroom. I didn’t see him. Martha told me. The next wake, as usual, he was right beside me in the backseat of the Jaguar, a healthy color, no black-and-blue marks around his neck, no swollen face.

  Like nothing had happened.

  “We’re immortal,” said Cannon. “We should take over the White House.”

  “In eleven point two hours?” said Martha. “That’s not enough time to drive to Chicago, much less rule the free world.”

  Tell your parents. Call the police. Have the Keeper arrested. Call a shrink. Check into the psych ward of Butler Hospital and ask the attending physician to make tomorrow arrive, please. Confess to a priest. Tell a bus driver, a cabdriver, the tired waitress at the twenty-four-hour diner who’s seen it all, the bent-over elderly woman in the frozen foods section of Price Rite buying a shocking number of pepperoni Hot Pockets, the man in the leather jacket browsing engagement rings at Kmart. Read the two hundred and fifty-two books in the science section of the Warwick public library, and a zillion textbooks on Google Books, trying to determine if ever in the history of the world some sage like Copernicus, Aristotle, Darwin, or Hawking has ever written or even hinted about such a thing as errors in time, cosmic waiting rooms, lethal lotteries in limbo, human terrariums in hell.

  “What’s the subject you’re searching for again?” the librarian asked me.

  “It’s called a Neverworld.”

  She typed on the keyboard, shaking her head.

  “Nothing comes up in the Li
brary of Congress.”

  We tried every one of these things in the beginning.

  Every time, we woke up in the exact same place, exact same time. We were songs on repeat, flies in a mason jar, echoing screams in a canyon that could not fade.

  The ongoing experience of Recurring goes against the very heart of being human, and it is—I will tell you this without flinching—unbearable. The mind rages trying to disprove it. When it can’t, the brain breaks down with shocking ease. The psyche is fragile. It is a child’s sand castle in an incoming tide. Never before had I understood how little control we had over our world, or really anything except our own actions, and now my little life didn’t even belong to me. We were helpless passengers strapped inside a spaceship circling Mars. The sun, the sky, the stars—how long did I stare at them, lying on the deck chair by the pool in the pouring rain, wishing I could just be them, a collection of gas and fire? I’d even take a beetle, a blade of grass, anything, so long as it was outside the Neverworld.

  “Take the vote,” urged the Keeper. “Just take the vote.”

  We took the vote. Of course we did.

  We voted for the first time early in our arrival in the Neverworld. Twilight Zone. Purgatory. Doomed-Fate-Survivor-Homeroom-Freaky-Friday Bullshit. We called it all kinds of names, as if insulting the unknown forces keeping us here would make them change their minds.

  We assembled in Wincroft’s library like colorful characters in the final pages of a murder mystery waiting for the genius detective to unmask the killer. We sat in club chairs. Whitley served champagne. We wrote the name of our chosen survivor on a scrap piece of paper, the Keeper collecting them.

  “There is no consensus,” he announced.

  The second time we voted, we each gave a speech beforehand in an attempt to persuade the others why we deserved life and not the others. We were defense attorneys in a courtroom speaking to a jury of the prosecutors, a circular setup of justice that would never work. The speeches ranged from altruistic (Cannon) to woodenly scientific (Martha) to childish and tone-deaf (Whitley, revealing a charitable streak she’d never had before, announcing she’d supply the entire continent of Africa with clean water). Kipling, when he stood up to speak, fell over, he was so drunk.