Warp

by Lev Grossman

  Then we’re driving back out of the city, back to the Enterprise, and we’re going around a corner, and our truck skids off the road into a snowdrift. Somehow the door comes open, and I get thrown out into the snow. Captain Picard falls out on top of me. He gets up right away, but for some reason I can’t get up after him. I’m lying there in the snowdrift, and he gets back into the truck and closes the door. The truck starts up again, and they all drive away without me.

  After a while I get up. I start walking back the other way, back towards Boston, to see if I can find Counselor Troi. I walk for hours and hours, and the road curves through a forest, then out across a wide, empty plain.

  It’s getting on towards dusk when I finally see the ruined skyline of Boston in the distance, through a scrim of falling snow, with a few lights still on among the crumbled-looking skyscrapers. There’s somebody coming up the road towards me from out of the city, and when she gets closer I recognize her. It’s Counselor Troi.

  She comes up to me without saying anything, and we look into each other’s eyes. Powdery snow swirls across the white crust and settles on her wavy dark hair, where it melts. I press my communicator badge.

  “Away Team to Enterprise. Come in, Enterprise.”

  We listen, but nobody answers. I press it again.

  It’s busy.

  The door buzzer was going off. Hollis opened his eyes.

  He was curled up under the comforter in the middle of his bed. The apartment was dark. The radiator hissed. Condensed moisture beaded on the insides of the windows, behind the venetian blinds. Books and clothes lay all over everything. He could see the white shape of the Sunday Help Wanted section of the Globe spread out on the floor.

  Hollis sighed and stretched under the blanket. There was a poster of Breughel’s Icarus on the opposite wall, but it was too dark to see the figures on it. The air was warm and humid. Whoever it was buzzed again, and he sat up, and his eyes filled with blobs of color. The clock on his desk said 7:50 P.M. In the pinkish light coming in through the windows from a streetlight he found an embroidered bathrobe on the floor and put it on. He went over to the wall panel and held down the DOOR button.

  When he was done, Hollis flopped back down on the bed and pulled the blanket up over his legs. Clasping his hands behind his head, he looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. Through his window he could see into the hallway of the building next door, which was a modern high-rise condo. Fluorescent lights flickered on and off along the ceiling. A woman passed by, holding both her hands at the back of her head, adjusting her French braid as she walked.

  After a minute there were footsteps outside in the hall, and Hollis heard people talking.

  “Why does he even live here?”

  “It looks like one of those existential heavy metal videos. With some old guy in a cell.”

  Hollis got up and opened the door without waiting for them to knock.

  “Hello, Hollis,” said Peters crisply.

  “Hey guys.”

  Peters was tall, with broad shoulders and shoulder-length wavy brown hair, and he wore tiny round glasses with metal rims. He had on a gray overcoat, a green flannel shirt, and jeans with a blue ink stain on the pocket. Blake was shorter, and he was dressed immaculately: an expensive suit jacket and pants with a white T-shirt. He had a neat blond goatee.

  Peters took a step inside and looked around.

  “Christ, it’s dark in here,” he said. Hollis closed the door. “Don’t you have any more lights?”

  “Nope.”

  Peters walked over to the desk, picking his way through the stuff on the floor.

  “Pip pip,” he said. “Don’t just stand there moping, Hollis. Cheerio. Jesus, look at this place, it looks like a squirrel’s nest.”

  Hollis followed him, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

  “Quit with the snappy patter, will you?”

  Peters swiveled the desk lamp up so it faced the ceiling, then snatched his hand away and shook it.

  “Fucking Christ!”

  “I knew somebody named Christ once,” Blake said, leaning against the door frame. “He said it ‘Krist,’ like you say ‘whist.’”

  “Blake, you don’t have the conversation God gave a goat,” said Peters. “Listen, I had this dream last night—I forgot to tell you this, Blake.”

  He spun the desk chair around and sat down on it backwards, facing them.

  “It was about me and Axl Rose,” he said. “We were in this cross-country motorcycle chase. The government was seeking us in connection with some unspecified but probably heinous crime. Which we probably actually did commit, but for some good reason that we just couldn’t explain in terms that would make it legally acceptable. Anyway, it was just us and these guys in suits, all just blasting down the highway after each other on motorcycles. Blue sky, blazing sun, waving wheat. Finally they catch up with us in this huge swamp, where we’re sort of cornered. There’s hordes of police cars blocking off the road—it’s just like the end of Thelma and Louise. Lots of flashing lights. Police sharpshooters lying on the ground and stuff. You can see these swamp plants waving in the wind, all around us.

  “Everybody’s really quiet. Axl slowly takes out his shotgun and fires two shots, straight down into the swamp. He pulls the trigger a couple of extra times, just to make sure everybody sees that the gun’s empty. Click click. Everybody relaxes. Then, in slow motion, he takes out his lighter, and he lights it. It turns out there’s all this flammable swamp gas in the swamp, and he’s deliberately releasing it by making these holes in, like, the upper layer of the mud, with his gun. So then he throws his lighter down into the swamp, and all the swamp gas explodes. He and I get away in the confusion.”

  There were a few seconds of silence.

  “Is that it?” Hollis said.

  “At least there’s a happy ending,” Blake said.

  “I just keep wondering if that would really work.”

  “What are you guys doing all the way out here, anyway?” said Hollis. He went over to the bed and started straightening out the comforter. “I was just going to try calling you.”

  “Blake has a car,” Peters said. “I had to take back some jeans that were too small, but the place was closed. You weren’t asleep, were you?”

  “No, I went over to that park in Brookline. Where’d you get a car?”

  “It’s mine,” Blake said.

  “What kind?”

  “Lexus.”

  “Jeezus.”

  “You should be careful, Hollis,” Peters said, swiveling himself around in circles on the desk chair. “One day you’re going to go to bed and not wake up for like, twenty years.”

  “I hope I do.”

  “Why don’t you just kill yourself?”

  Hollis started folding up the futon into a couch, holding his robe closed with one hand.

  “I cannot self-terminate,” he said, in a Schwarzenegger accent.

  Blake went over to the other side of the futon to help him. When they’d wrestled it into its upright position, he sat down and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “Let’s put on some music.”

  “My stereo’s broken. There’s something wrong with the power in this building—the wiring’s old.”

  “Hmmm.” Peters looked around the room with a bored expression on his face. “Quite a three-pipe problem, Watson.”

  Hollis’s short hair was still standing on end. The desk lamp cast a glowing lozenge on the ceiling, leaving the corners of the room dark. The only other light came from the window, except for a line of light under the door from the hall.

  It was a brisk evening in early September, and my celebrated colleague and I were passing a quiet evening in his room when the landlady announced a young woman waiting to speak to us on the landing.

  Peters walked over to a bookcase standing against the wall.

  “I was over at Alison’s the other day,” he said. “She has two copies of The Gulag Archipelago. Can you imagine that?
What would you do with two copies of The Gulag Archipelago? Can you even imagine anybody actually reading that book?”

  He took one down at random and started looking through it.

  “Got anything to drink?”

  “No,” Hollis said.

  “What about food?”

  “Just some Corn Pops.”

  “Hell.”

  “They’re fat-free.”

  Peters looked up and snapped the book shut.

  “Okay, check this out. You fall out of an airplane—it’s some kind of skyjacking gone awry. The bomb goes off, there’s a hole in the wall, and you get sucked out by the difference in air pressure. You’re unhurt, but you’re falling through the air at like terminal velocity.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s like one of those Ripley’s things. I was thinking about this last night. Somebody falls out of a plane and lands on something soft, like a haystack or something—it happens all the time. Or a bog. Or they just fall into the sea or something and they survive.”

  “I hear the wind tears off all your clothes while you’re in the air,” Blake said. “If you aren’t wearing special skydiving clothes.”

  He thoughtfully nudged a copy of Wired along the floor with the toe of his boot.

  “At plane-crash sites you have all these naked bodies lying around.”

  “Peters, you’re standing on my overcoat,” Hollis said. “My shades are in there.”

  Peters took a step backwards and picked up the overcoat. He held it up by the collar and slapped it a few times, then dropped it in the corner.

  “That coat is getting really horrible, Hollis,” he said. “By the way, I have plans for you this weekend. Don’t let me forget. Did you follow up on that tip David gave you—the Houghton Mifflin thing? He asked me about it.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I would, if I were you. Just go by their office. It wouldn’t be a real job, you know. And so what if it was, anyway? They’re going to throw you out of here pretty soon, if you don’t pay some rent. It’s not like you’d be breaking a moral principle or anything, is it? Christ, do you ever open these windows?”

  He walked over to the futon and cleared off the windowsill behind it, which was covered with an assortment of bits and pieces—coins, glasses, empty tape cases, a screwdriver, a wine bottle with a candle stuck in it.

  “It’s like a fucking hyperbaric chamber in here.”

  “What the hell is a hyperbaric chamber?” Blake said.

  When Peters got the window open, it turned out there was an old storm window in place behind it. He got up on his knees on the futon, fumbled around for the latches, and heaved up on it. Nothing happened. He braced himself and tried again, this time putting his considerable weight behind it. There was an intense crunching noise, and instead of sliding up the window jumped out of its frame and flew straight out into the air. Peters grabbed at it once and missed.

  It shattered faintly on the concrete of the courtyard. A gust of cold air blew in through the empty frame.

  Blake started laughing helplessly. Peters looked around quickly, then ducked his head back into the room.

  He mimed dusting off his hands.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “You should have seen your face,” Blake said, dabbing at his eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hollis said languidly. “I don’t pay for heat.”

  Peters looked a little shaken. He took a thin black wallet out of his back pocket.

  “I guess I should give you some money or something. I’m really sorry about that. Jesus, why don’t they make those things out of plastic?”

  “Uh-oh,” Blake said. “Maybe it was an antique.”

  Hollis waved him away, but Peters took out a ten-dollar bill and put it on his desk, saying:

  “Buy yourself something nice.”

  “Have you guys ever heard of hand models?” Hollis held up his hands with the backs outward, like a surgeon waiting to be gowned. “One of those people who model watches and pens and stuff? I don’t know what else. Rings. It’s cool—they wear gloves when they eat. They get their hands insured for millions of dollars. And how would you even know if you were one? Statistically speaking, you’d think everybody would have some part of their body that was worth modeling with. It’s really just a question of figuring out which one it is.”

  “Don’t quit your day job,” Blake said.

  “Look at his hands—like a child’s hands!”

  Wonderingly, the peasants took the stranger’s hands in their own thick, callused fingers, eyeing him with a newfound respect.

  “Never meant for toil, that’s sure!”

  The man who seemed to be their leader stepped forward.

  “Stranger,” he said, “I wote well ye’re of an higher blood than we wend ye were.”

  “So what about this weekend?” said Peters. “Are you doing anything?”

  “Nothing so far. The jury’s still out.”

  “Does anybody have a cigarette?”

  Hollis shook his head. There was a broken piece of mirror leaned against the wall, and he surreptitiously looked down at his reflection.

  “Why?” he said. “Are you going to New York?”

  “Some friends of the family are going away. They have a house in Dover. I thought maybe we could go hang out there for a few days.”

  “What’s in Dover?”

  “Not much. It’s like a gated community—everything’s privately owned. All the roads are private and stuff.”

  “It’s the second-richest town in Massachusetts,” Blake said. “Fun fact.”

  “Out in the sticks?” said Hollis. “I don’t know. What’s the first-richest?”

  Peters shrugged.

  “I guess it’s pretty rural. About forty minutes out of Boston. You should see the house, though, it’s very cool: hot tub, weight room, everything. Cable. Nintendo. A laser-disc player. We can put in some serious screen time. There’s like a million fucking rooms in it.”

  Hollis got up off the futon and went out into the anteroom by the door, which had a tiny closet. Out of sight of the others he picked out a pair of clean boxers and stepped into them, pulling them up underneath the robe.

  “That’s all I was thinking,” Peters called from the other room, raising his voice. “We can’t really have people over there. They’ll be gone till next Friday.”

  “Are you house-sitting for them?” Hollis called back.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “What are you doing, exactly?”

  “Just using their stuff, I guess.”

  “Are they going to know?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I don’t think they’d like it.”

  Hollis came out and stood in the door frame, in his socks and boxers. They were green, with little white whales on them.

  “So we’re supposed to break into their house?”

  “Relax. I have a key. If we’re careful they’ll never find out—they’re overseas.” He yawned. “Well, they’re in the Caribbean.”

  Hollis watched him, feeling with one foot for the opening of a pair of jeans. Peters stood up and went back over to the bookcase. He took out a book and looked at it in the half-darkness.

  “Did you know that J. D. Salinger has two whole novels, brand-new, locked up in a bank vault somewhere in Vermont? He won’t publish them.”

  “Why not?” Blake said, from the couch.

  “I don’t know. Some hippy-dippy Zen-type reason.”

  “What’s their name?” said Hollis. “The family friends, I mean.”

  “Donnelly.”

  Hollis thought for a second.

  “Didn’t we use their Cape house once? Why don’t we go there?”

  “No.” Peters made a face. “I’d never go there now. There’s something about beaches in the fall—I can’t stand it. Dead horseshoe crabs. Old people with metal detectors. Heaps of fucking … I don’t
know. Whatever it is. Kelp. Makes you want to kill yourself.”

  He looked up. His glasses flashed in the light from the desk lamp. He put his hands in his pockets and took out a pack of Marlboros and a book of matches. With a tricky little sleight-of-hand gesture, he opened the matchbook and lit a match with one hand.

  “Besides, I hate that stupid prefabricated cottage. It looks like a displaced motel room. You start feeling like fucking Alfred J. Prufrock out there. Life’s passing you by, I’m so insignificant, etc., etc. There was a movie I saw once, about these guys who were desperately trying to kill this alien who was morphing weirdly all over the place in this research station somewhere up above the Arctic Circle. Some really revolting special effects. It was a trip. Anyway, at the way end there’s just these two guys sitting in the middle of nowhere, in this Arctic wasteland, with their whole camp destroyed, and you basically know they’re going to die, even though they’ve just saved the world from this alien. It’s Kurt Russell, actually. Kind of like a metaphor for his whole career, in a way.”

  “Not since Stargate,” Blake said. “Now he’s B-list again.”

  “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

  “No,” said Hollis.

  “Knock yourself out,” said Blake.

  Peters watched the match flame meditatively, as it dwindled down to a little blue pearl and finally vanished in a puff of smoke.

  “I need something to ash in,” he said.

  “There’s a can next to your foot.”

  “Anyway, it’s probably all closed up,” he went on. “The cottage. Besides, I doubt if I could get the key, except if it’s in the Dover house.”

  “I don’t know,” Hollis said. “The whole thing sounds a little weird.”

  “Well, look, go or don’t go, I don’t care. Don’t spoil it for me with your, like, moral qualms.” He rolled his eyes. “What else do you have to do? Anyway, think what Mr. Donnelly made last year—probably about five hundred thousand? You probably live on about ten thousand a year, at this point. Is that social justice? These are troubled times, Hollis: we have to look at the underlying causes. Is it for us to settle questions of right and wrong? Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”