Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  Instead, he started to beatbox, not even trying to be cool about it.

  “There was a fetching girl in my English class / Wary as a bluebird, radiating class / I’m scared to look away from her, in case she flies away / Congress needs to declare her a national holiday.”

  Everyone in class went silent, a boy behind me snickering.

  Little did I know that this was how it would always be, that being the subject of Jim’s attention would be like having a bomb go off in my face: unexpected, shocking, accompanied by a fallout of popular girls suddenly approaching me with long, swingy mermaid hair and doubtful glances.

  “How do you know Jim Mason?”

  “You’re from New York?”

  “Did you go to Spence?”

  “I’m from Watch Hill. No, I went to Watch Hill East. I—I don’t know Jim.”

  That was how I met Whitley. She was friends with Jim from some exclusive Native American camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  “Jim Mason has a crush on you.” It was the first thing she ever said to me.

  I hurried along the hallway, clutching the strap of my backpack like it was my floatation device and I was drowning.

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Yes, he does.” She peered at me, frowning. “He calls you ‘haunting.’ He said you’re old-fashioned. And innocent. Like you’re from the 1940s or something, and have been transported here by time machine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  The next day, suddenly Jim was strolling beside me down to the athletic fields. My heart flopped like a freshly caught fish.

  “Did you grow up on an Amish farm milking cows at sunrise?” he asked.

  “Um. No.”

  “You look like you did.”

  “Okay.”

  “Want to come home with me this Sunday?”

  He asked it like he was offering me a bite of his sandwich.

  I said no. Sunday was Family Sunday, which meant Darrow’s students either went home for the day or signed up for a field trip to a museum. I hadn’t seen my mom and dad in a month, and they’d planned an elaborate lasagna dinner. Of course, the truth was I said no because I was terrified by Jim’s attention, the brash, drenching spotlight of it, both blinding me and causing everyone else to stare.

  Little did I know, no to Jim was simply a yes that hadn’t happened yet.

  “Beatrice!” he shamelessly rapped at the start of English, causing our teacher Mrs. Henderson to regard me with irritation. “She’s a realist. With secrets. A conscienceless realist who leaves me sleepless. And speechless. Oh, Beatrice.”

  He left notes in my locker. Say yes (jump off a cliff with me). He recorded a theme song about me. It got passed around the entire school.

  “ ‘The Queen’s Neck’? Please,” I heard a girl hiss during chapel.

  “Say yes!” Jim blurted when he passed me in the hall. (“Yes to what? Having his babies?” the varsity volleyball captain snarked to her friends.) Jim called my parents to formally introduce himself, discuss train times to and from Penn Station, give them his word that I’d be safe with him, that he was a gentleman.

  This deluge of attention would have been too much coming from anyone who wasn’t Jim Livingston Mason, Jim of the thick, tangled black hair, the chocolate eyes, the sideways grin.

  “He sounds so adorable and kind of quirky, actually,” said my mom.

  Back then she’d been naïve about the old-moneyed jungle of Darrow and Jim’s lionlike position inside it.

  “It’s wonderful you’re already making some interesting connections,” said my dad.

  The Sunday trip to Jim’s house for the funeral—this very trip—would end in disaster.

  Fast-forward five, six hours? I’d be taking a train home from New York early, alone, the reasons for which Jim and I always argued about afterward. To this day I found it difficult to recall what had really happened. What had I been so upset about? I could never separate my shyness, my self-consciousness at being painfully underdressed and awkward, from the truth. During the post-funeral buffet, held in some relative’s Gilded Age apartment on Park Avenue, I remembered Jim disappeared for what felt like a torturous period of time. I’d grabbed my coat off the hall rack and snuck out without a word to anyone. I cried the whole ride back to school. I vowed—unreasonably, because even then my feelings for him felt as inevitable as seawater in a rowboat full of holes—that this would be the end of my friendship with Jim Mason.

  That Monday morning, however, during English, he placed a red Cartier box on the notebook I’d been drawing in.

  “Forgive me.”

  Inside the box was a diamond-encrusted bumblebee pin.

  * * *

  —

  The bumblebee pin.

  Thinking of how it had mysteriously gone missing from the sock drawer in my dorm room, then abruptly reappeared all these years later, jammed in the side of my neck as we lay in the middle of the coastal road, sent a fresh wave of shock through me. Clearly it had been meant as a means of sabotage, a surefire way to get rid of me, make me think of Jim, thereby pulling me into some compartment of the past. Whoever had done it had meant to hurt me, purposefully destroy any chance we had of voting and leaving the Neverworld.

  Which one of them had done it?

  “Cookie?”

  I jumped, startled. I realized dazedly I was in the Masons’ living room staring out the window at Central Park, which from this height looked like an architectural rendering of a park with pipe-cleaner trees. One of Jim’s adopted siblings—Niles, nine or ten years old—was offering me a stack of cookies held between his thumb and forefinger.

  I took one. “Thanks.”

  He squinted. “You’re Jim’s latest girlfriend?”

  “No. I’m a friend of his from school.”

  “Well, take care you don’t go”—the little kid crossed his eyes, making a deranged clown face—“like all the others.”

  I laughed.

  “Whoa— Did you see that?”

  The kid moved to inspect a large red Rothko, which had just fallen clean off the wall, revealing a dark square of what appeared to be mold.

  “That was totally Poltergeist!”

  I smiled stiffly, moving away as Jim led his mother over.

  “Mom. This is the girl I was telling you about. Beatrice Hartley.”

  “Hullo there.”

  Mrs. Mason was beautiful, her black suit sealing her like an envelope. She extended her hand like it was a gift. I’d forgotten how chilly she could be: the boredom in her smile, the flick of her eyes over my shoulder, as if somewhere behind me something more charming was always happening, like dolphins leaping out of the sea.

  “Darling, did you speak to Artie Grossman about the Currin?”

  Mr. Mason stepped over. He was short and tan, with spiky hair and the tense stare of all moguls. His teeth were big and artificially white, hinting they’d glow in the dark during a blackout.

  “Dad,” said Jim. “This is Beatrice.”

  Mr. Mason smiled warmly, shaking my hand.

  “Just started Darrow-Harker with Jimmy, is that it? How are you finding those old-school traditions and Kennedy smiles?”

  “Fine.”

  “Wonderful. Wonderful. Glory, did you talk to Artie?”

  “I’ll do it right now,” said Mrs. Mason.

  She was smiling again, drifting away. “Lovely to meet you,” she said unconvincingly over her shoulder.

  I couldn’t help staring after the two of them, wondering how they had reacted to Jim’s death. What had they done, all these polished, perfumed people? Had any of them screamed and lost their minds as I had, or had life simply floated on?

  Jim was dead now. He was lying in a coffin underneath a gravestone that
read Life Now Forever in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. In this sunlit apartment with the thick walls and marble floors, the idea was unfathomable.

  Jim smiled after them. He appeared to mistake my stare for admiration.

  “They met on the R train when they were twenty years old. Still madly in love after twenty-eight years. Completely unforgivable. Come.”

  He clasped my hand again. We slipped through the crowd, past mute housekeepers in gray uniforms, a waiter holding a tray of triangular sandwiches like little starched pocket squares. He whisked me out of the living room, past three siblings playing Wiffle ball in the foyer (“Totally inappropriate!” Jim shouted at them), a wood-paneled library with a ladder to retrieve the thousands of first-edition leather-bound books, a dining room with a modern steel chandelier that looked like a giant tarantula. In two years I’d eat Christmas dinner there and his mother wouldn’t say a word to me the entire meal. His father would call me Barbara.

  Jim pulled me through a door and closed it behind me. It was his bedroom, a shadowed, chaotic rock star’s lair with electric guitars mounted on the wall and sheet music covering every flat surface, handwritten quarter notes and half rests spangling the bars. Synthesizers. A McIntosh stereo. Three laptops. Piles of notebooks burping up pages where song lyrics were taking shape in terrible handwriting. Lost Little Blue. A biography of Janis Joplin. Sweeney Todd: The Complete Score. A framed copy of a Bruce Springsteen Madison Square Garden set list signed with a note: Love you, Jimmy. Keep hearing the music. Bruce. Rumpled boxers and T-shirts and rolled-up posters swamped the corners of the room.

  Jim was rifling through a bookshelf, looking for something.

  “Okay, so, I have this song I wrote about a girl I haven’t met yet,” he said, pulling out a notebook. “ ‘Immortal She.’ It’s about the love you have for someone that can’t die, no matter how far apart you are, even if you’re separated by death or time. That’s what I’m searching for.”

  The lump in my throat was there again, a pile of rubble.

  He began to read the lyrics, as he would countless times after this. I came to know that song well. It was one of the best he ever wrote. I’d sing it for him on a picnic blanket at school during finals week. He’d sing it to me some nights at Wincroft as I fell asleep.

  I remembered this exact moment. I’d related it to Whitley a dozen times, because it was the classic chorus refrain of “The Ballad of Jim and Bee,” an old standard. This was the first time we were ever alone together, our first deep conversation. Our first kiss was seconds away. Having it before me again made me feel paralyzed, out of control. As he read, stumbling over a word here and there, pausing to scratch his nose, he seemed so beautiful and so young—younger than I ever remembered. He raised his chin and strained his voice a funny way on certain words, as if they were spears he was launching blindly over a wall.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said when he finished.

  He had a funny look on his face. He carefully set the book on his desk and sat beside me.

  “I was going to wait to do this, like, weeks, and be this total gentleman and woo you like a knight in medieval times? But I’m punting that plan. I’m not a knight. I’m not even a gentleman. But I am devoted. Once I decide I’m with you, it never goes away. I swear to you that, Beatrice.”

  He kissed me. There was a whole world in that kiss. Every moment of pain, regret, loneliness I’d felt since he’d died fell away. I’d missed him so much, how much hit me only now. As his hands slid down my back, I knew I was going to tell him about the Neverworld, the Keeper, the vote, his death. Would he be able to tell me why he died if I asked him? Couldn’t we run out of here, get into a car, and go live out the wake at a highway motel where the light was gold and the carpet full of vending machine crackers?

  Tomorrow we could do it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  I didn’t have to be without him anymore. I’d tell him everything. He, of all people, would understand. It’d be like it was before, before his strange moods, his anger, his lies.

  When he pulled away, I was aware of a rapid popping noise behind us. Jim looked stunned.

  “How weird.”

  He stood, moving to the guitars mounted on the wall. He widened his eyes, mystified. “All the strings just broke. Every single one.” He grinned. “It must be your effect on me.”

  I smiled weakly.

  * * *

  —

  My decision to tell Jim everything set off some gangster-movie escape scene from the funeral, wavered, and stalled the moment he took my hand and we rejoined his family.

  There were so many uncles, cousins, women wearing black mink coats and stilettos with toothpick heels, swirls of blond hair like sugar garnishes on thirty-four-dollar desserts. We made our way outside, a glamorous black-clad procession up Madison Avenue into the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.

  “Last time I was here it was for Allegra de Fonso,” a woman told me.

  The funeral service was long, filled with sniffling people quoting Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, “Let It Be” by the Beatles. There was a speech from a red-eyed woman who couldn’t stop clearing her throat. Children snickered over an ancient man in the front row announcing too loudly, “It smells like cat piss,” before a nurse escorted him out. Jim smiled down at me and squeezed my hand. I found myself staring in wonder at a photo of the dead man: Great-Uncle Carl, memorialized in a laminated poster propped on a brass easel beside the casket. He had mottled red skin and an oblivious yellow smile. Had he ended up in some kind of Neverworld? I was closer to Great-Uncle Carl’s state than any of these people could imagine.

  I had to tell Jim.

  However, once the service ended and the crowd spilled onto the sidewalk—black Cadillac Escalades lined up eight deep, everyone shaking hands and muttering condolences and observations about Carl, how he “did it his way” and was a son of a gun—every time I was about to tell him “I need to talk to you,” some new person tapped his shoulder and gave him a bear hug, asking how he’d been, when his first musical was premiering on Broadway. Jim was amiable and kept trying to make his way back to me, but before he could, someone else would approach. When he finally rejoined me, he had two girls in tow. He knew them from grade school.

  “Beatrice, meet Delphine and Luciana.”

  I’d always recalled the girls as intimidating and otherworldly. Seeing them now, they weren’t as jaw-dropping as I’d remembered, though they had waist-length hair, which they tossed out of their eyes like ponies, and a bored manner that could be mistaken for expertise. Jim kept putting his arm around me as he talked, but after a while, as I stood listening to stories about Millicent, Castman, and Ripper—whether these were people, a law firm, or impossible-to-get-into nightclubs, I couldn’t tell—I began to feel like a giant old L-shaped couch that had been carried out to the sidewalk and left there.

  The feeling continued when we piled into an Escalade. We were a large group. Jim was forced to sit in the back next to Luciana. I sat next to an elderly woman wearing red taffeta who reeked of alcohol.

  “Here we go again to do what we do,” she mumbled.

  We were dropped off at Jim’s great-aunt’s apartment on Park Avenue. Jim deposited me on a love seat by a porcelain pug and disappeared on a mission to find me a Coke. After forty-five minutes with no sign of him, I stood up and roamed the dense crowd, perusing bookshelves and photographs, slipping down crowded hallways as if I knew where I was going. I peered into the kitchen, where caterers were sweating over ovens and trays, and a guest bathroom where the wallpaper looked like twenty-four-karat gold. It was all coming back to me, how desolate I’d felt, adrift in a place I didn’t belong. I’d wanted nothing more than to be away from these people, back in Watch Hill, eating lasagna with my parents, hearing my dad talk about a new BBC David Attenborough program on Netflix.

 
Now, five years later, inside the Neverworld, I wasn’t nearly so sensitive, but I was still bothered by Jim’s absence. Where had he gone? He’d told me he’d gotten stuck talking to relatives, and I’d believed him.

  The question gnawed at me.

  I snooped in room after room, searching for him in bedrooms that resembled hotel rooms, offices that looked like libraries, an echoing marble gallery filled with aviation antiques behind glass. Jim was nowhere. Neither, worryingly, were the two girls. At one point, when I opened a closet filled with nothing but Japanese puzzles and board games, Jim’s father, Edgar, stepping out of an office, spotting me, and doubtlessly noticing how awkward I looked, beckoned me.

  “Jessica,” he said to me, smiling warmly, slipping what appeared to be a small black flash drive attached to a rubber bracelet over his wrist. I caught a glimpse of a series of digital numbers flashing along the side before he pulled his shirtsleeve over it.

  “Can I get you a drink, my dear?”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Mason.”

  “Edgar. Come meet my partner, Craig, and his daughter, Greta. Greta just returned from Sri Lanka, where she was a visiting neurosurgeon at the District Hospital in Colombo.”

  Obviously, high-powered Craig and his neurosurgeon daughter didn’t want to be saddled talking to a mute high school freshman, so it was a matter of seconds before they turned to greet someone—“Bertrand? Is that you?”—and I slipped away.

  I couldn’t call Jim. I didn’t have a purse with me, much less a phone. I could wait where he’d left me. Eventually he’d come back. Wouldn’t he?

  Another hour went by. With each passing second my plan to confess, run away with him, began to grow stale and sag. When I was jostled for the third time by a woman toting a giant alligator handbag, and Mrs. Mason slipped past me with a cardboard smile, Martha’s words of warning suddenly leapt into my head.

  We don’t know how we’re going to react. The past hooks you like a drug. The future jolts you like an electric chair. Reliving beautiful memories can be just as devastating as reliving the terrible ones. They’re addictive.