by Lev Grossman
He dragged on his cigarette.
“Besides,” he said, exhaling, “it’s not like they’ll press charges or anything if they catch us. They know me.”
“Close that window, would you, Blake?” Hollis said. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”
A muscle in his chest started to twitch involuntarily, under the bathrobe, and he pulled the lapels around him more tightly.
He looked up at the white Arctic sky.
“That’s what we get for trying to save the world,” he said wryly.
Powdery snow swirled across the white crust.
“How’re you going to get a key?”
“We have to sneak in and get it. That’s the catch. There’s one door in the back that they always leave unlocked. It’s their Achilles’ heel. Their tragic flaw. We’ll have to get kind of pumped up for this, Hollis, it’s a punk thing. Sid Vicious, man. Épatez les bourgeois. Ne travaillez jamais. Anyway, aren’t you sick of hanging around this fucking slum? I sure as hell am.”
Peters turned around and faced the other window, with his hands clasped behind his back. He was broad enough that his shoulders filled the frame, obscuring Hollis’s view. His hair made a wavy silhouette against the light outside.
“What do you pay on this place, anyway?” he said, after a while.
“Four twenty-five.”
“That’s not bad,” said Blake.
“Anyway, what else do you have to do?” Peters turned back around to face them. “You need something to tell your grandkids about, when you’re old and horrible and drooling and nobody loves you anymore. They’ll have a spare set of house keys somewhere—we’ll just take those and then go back tomorrow night when they’re gone. They’ll never catch us. ‘All that which is necessary for life is the rightful property of the people.’ Comme a dit Robespierre.”
“Oh, très bon,” Blake said. “Did you just make that up?”
“You know, Vanessa Redgrave used to leave the door of her house unlocked when she went out. She said all her stuff was supposed to belong to the people.”
“Why don’t you just go over to her place?”
“Who’s Vanessa Redgrave?” said Hollis.
“Their son is doing some kind of internship or something at Hallmark, too,” Peters went on. “As in Hallmark cards. I hear he’s going out with the heiress to the Honeywell fortune, or whatever’s left of it. A real fucking comer, anyway. He and I were playfellows, in our youth.”
He looked up.
“Anyway, if we’re going it has to be tonight. Don’t you want to get out of your bubble for a change?”
“We fear change.”
“What ever happened to boys in bubbles?” said Hollis. “Aren’t they news anymore? Are you going, Blake?”
He shook his head.
“I shouldn’t even hang around with you guys. This is the kind of stuff that comes up at confirmation hearings.”
Hollis went back into the anteroom to finish dressing. He let the robe slip off his shoulders. Looking through a heap of clean clothes on the floor of the closet, he found a white tuxedo shirt with the collar ripped off and a dark red suit jacket. As he put on the jacket, he felt something in the inside pocket and took it out: a piece of onionskin typing paper folded in thirds. There was a block of text on it, typed with a manual typewriter—the whole rectangle of words was palpably impressed into the paper.
“She’s still writing you poems?” Eileen looked over at him, then reached out and took the piece of paper.
“It’s not to me just because she gave it to me.”
“Don’t you think it’s time you and she had a frank conversation, Hollis? I’m trying to make an honest man of you here.”
She walked over to the couch, sat down on the arm, and flopped backwards onto the old vinyl seat cushions. Air whooshed out of them, a little maelstrom of dust in the sunlight from the window. Her dress slid part of the way up her pale thighs. The folded piece of paper rested on her stomach.
She stared up at the ceiling, blankly.
“I can’t read it,” she said.
“Is there anything to drink?” Peters said. He stepped out of the bedroom into the kitchen alcove. Blake was looking through the stacks of tapes on the floor.
“You just asked me that,” said Hollis. “There’s water.”
He heard the sound of water running and Peters shifting dishes in the sink. Then it stopped. Peters opened the freezer.
“Jesus,” he said. “You’re holding out on me, Hollis—there’s gin back here.”
“Oh. Sorry, I forgot it was there.”
“Look at this stuff: Crystal Palace. You want some?”
“Maybe a shot. With some water.”
“The police are so weird,” Peters said, over the sound of his mixing drinks. “I was watching some of those transit police guys the other day. Just hanging around. Pounding the beat. I have this theory that about a hundred years from now it’s just going to be different kinds of police, fighting it out in the nuclear rubble—nomadic tribes of highway patrolmen and state troopers, roaming around in the ruins of our nation’s shattered infrastructure. Troglodyte subway police who surface at night to steal our children and raise them as their own.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“Or not,” Blake said, from the bedroom.
“Police are on the way out,” said Hollis. “I read it on Usenet. In the future it’s supposed to be all multinational corporations. Zaibatsus. Then they’ll all have their own private paramilitary forces.”
“Yeah. True.” Peters stirred. “I guess that nuclear holocaust stuff is pretty passé anyway.”
He did a fake computer-voice: “Let’s play … Global Thermonuclear War.”
When he came back into the room he brought the drinks with him, a gin and water for himself and a shot and a glass of water for Hollis. He sat down heavily on the futon next to Blake, and Hollis came in from the anteroom and sat at the desk. From outside in the street the sound of the trolley drifted in, rumbling past with its bell ringing.
“What are you thinking about, Hollis?” said Eileen.
He looked up at the ceiling without answering.
“You know,” he said, after a few seconds, “whenever you say something incredibly cliché like that, I can’t help thinking about all the other people you’ve probably said it to after you had sex with them.”
“Well, I never think about them.”
“I think my favorite’s that one you met on the subway.”
“Christ, Hollis, must you be so psychotically fucking jealous all the fucking time?” she said, sitting up, the sheet slipping down off her bare breasts. “God knows you’ve slept with some lovely individuals in your own time, and you don’t hear me whining about it!”
She flopped back down again, and the bed creaked.
“Besides, I haven’t seen him in years.”
“You’re right you haven’t seen him,” Hollis said. “He’s dead. I killed him.”
Blake yawned.
“Damn,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I didn’t go to bed till around five this morning. I saw a roach in my room and I couldn’t go to sleep. The sun’s rising, and I’m completely naked, on my hands and knees under the kitchen table, with a rolled-up newspaper.”
“That’s a pretty picture.” Peters sipped his drink. “Look, are you coming tomorrow?”
“Why don’t we ask some girls?” said Hollis.
“Girls ruin everything.”
“There’s no point without any girls.” Hollis was buttoning his shirt slowly, with one hand, staring off into space.
“Let’s ask Sarah and Ashley and them,” he said.
“We’ll talk about it later. Come on, we’re going to catch Metropolis at nine. You want to come?”
“Seen it. Look, we’re going to have to call them tonight if we want them to come.”
“They won’t come anyway, Hollis. Forget it. Think about something else. Take your mind off it. Look, why do
n’t you meet us after the movie? We’re all going to the GT.”
“What about Emily?”
“Emily? That girl.” Peters snorted. “She’s too cheap to meter.”
As they walked over to the door, something heavy hit the floor upstairs with a bang, and the light fixture rattled.
“Jesus!” Peters said, looking up. “Look, why don’t you call her yourself? You’re coming, though, tonight? To Dover?”
“Tonight?” Hollis frowned. “Why?”
“Why? How soon they forget. To get the key, that’s why.”
“I guess so.”
He snapped open the locks.
“Don’t fall asleep,” said Peters, stepping out into the hall.
In the darkness of the garden I could dimly make out rows of giant pods, each one visibly beginning to take on human form.
“Don’t fall asleep!” he shouted. “That’s when they get you!”
“Why don’t you call Alison?” Blake said.
“Oh, that was a droll little affair,” said Peters. “Forget about it. You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them.
“Every once in a while I ask myself if Alison and I are ever actually going to get together, and of course the answer is no, and it’s upsetting, so I quit thinking about it, and soon I get back some of my self-esteem, and then I squander it all again running around after her. It’s kind of a cycle. Good thing I’m getting wasted tonight or this might actually start to bother me. Midnight, right? The movie’s at the other theater, down on JFK Boulevard. Not the main one.”
“She ain’t worth the salt in yer tears,” Blake said.
“Courage,” I said. The young adjutant came up with his horse.
He glanced back at me piercingly—his vision was unusually acute—and a little sadly.
“As for that, mon vieux,” he said, “je n’en ai rien.”
He swung up into the saddle. It was the last time I was to see him alive.
Hollis waited at the door while Peters and Blake walked away down the hall, backwards, facing back towards him, their shoes echoing loudly on the tiled floor.
“See you there,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
FRIDAY, 12:15 A.M.
Hollis stepped down from the rear doors of the bus. The doors folded closed behind him, and the bus roared and pulled away. He smelled the warm, invisible exhaust roiling around him in the darkness. The street was almost deserted, and bits of crumpled trash rustled along the pavement in the wind. The galleries of shops and cafés were mostly closed. Ahead of him, five or six blocks up the street, shone the lights of Harvard Square.
The temperature had dropped, and he pulled his coat around him more tightly. He could make out the white light of the tiny marquee where he was supposed to meet Peters and Blake, and he walked towards it. The sidewalk was pieced together unevenly, its old bricks slowly subsiding into the mud. Passing a café with a sunken patio, he looked down at the stacks of white wire furniture. A single long chain ran through the chairs and tables, one by one, forming a big loop that was closed with a big steel padlock.
The glass doors of the cinema were locked from the inside. A red velvet rope had been slung across all but one of them, and a woman in a white blouse and a red bow tie was wiping down the candy counter with a damp sponge. Hollis stood outside and looked at the Metropolis poster, which was on display in a lighted box. A handsome hero and his winsome lover, who seemed to be made out of some kind of metal, embraced in the shadow of a futuristic city that loomed up over them in the background.
“Hollis. Hollister!” Peters was standing behind him. “I’ve been calling your name for like half an hour.”
“Sorry, dude,” said Hollis. “Like, I was spaced.”
They joined the crowd of people leaving the cinema in twos and threes. Peters walked quickly, hands in the pockets of his jeans, while Hollis tagged along after him.
“I have to start getting more sleep,” he said.
“If you get any more sleep we’re going to have to put you on an IV.”
They separated to walk around a strolling couple. A green-and-white ambulance stood idling at the curb, and Hollis peeked in one of the small rear windows as they passed. The driver sat in the front seat, studying a clipboard by the light of the dome light.
“I always try to see what’s going on inside,” Hollis said. “I don’t know why. I’d probably be appalled if I ever did.”
“Probably somebody got overexcited at Spoken Word Night at the Fern Bar.”
“What happened to Blake? I thought he was with you.”
“He took off before the end. Had to do something.”
“He left before it was over?” Hollis wrinkled his nose. “How can he do that?”
Peters shrugged. “Nerves of steel, I guess. You ever been there?” He pointed out a basement Thai restaurant. “The waiter tried to pick up my date. I think he thought I was gay. Oh, look, can you cover me tonight? All I have is ten dollars.”
Hollis thought for a second.
“I guess so.”
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”
To be precise, Doctor, I am not a robot, I am an android—a sophisticated computer endowed with the form of a human simulacrum, and capable of many human functions.
Hollis blew into his hands.
“Who’s going to be there tonight, anyway?” he said.
“I’m not sure. Basil, probably.”
“God. I hate that guy.”
The wind came up from behind them, from the direction of the river, stirring the dead leaves in the street. Bars were closing. People were making their way home. Hollis watched a cleaning woman moving around in the office windows above a row of stores.
An orange sawhorse was set up in the middle of the sidewalk, where some bricks were missing.
“In the student revolt in Paris they ripped up the cobblestones out of the streets,” Peters said as he walked around it. “I guess they threw them at people or something. Maybe they were for the barricades. Anyway, there was all this nice yellow beach sand under them, so people started saying ‘Under the Pavement, the Beach.’ It turned into a big slogan in the sixties.”
“Them crazy French.”
Peters looked through his jacket pockets for a cigarette, then reached over and put his hand in Hollis’s pocket. He pulled out the lining, along with a clump of lint.
“Don’t you smoke anymore?”
“I never smoked,” Hollis said, stuffing the lining back in.
“You smoke pot.”
“Pot is easier. Anyway, I don’t anymore—I keep getting the paranoid trip.”
Peters snorted. “Maybe you can be a lung model.”
Two young women turned the corner out of a side street and walked ahead of them, in the same direction. Both were slender and stylishly dressed, and Peters put his hand on Hollis’s arm. He pointed and made a gurgling noise in his throat. They passed a little green public park, a rectangular swath of grass with a few trees and a memorial statue. The grass showed some bare patches. A few couples still sat there in the dark, huddled together on benches.
“I think I know one of them,” said Peters, jerking his head at the two women. “Oh, guess who called me yesterday—Evan Goldsmith. I was just going out last night, and he calls me up out of the blue and asks me if I get Channel 5. So I say, sure. So he says, well, I can’t get it, so could you turn on your TV for a while—the Tony awards were on or something—so he can listen to it over the phone.”
He laughed.
“He was still on when I got home.”
“He’s insane,” Hollis said. “There’s something wrong with him. He once watched Predator all the way through on cable, scrambled.”
This close to Harvard Square the street was still full of
traffic, even though it was after midnight. Peters and Hollis had to wait to cross the street. The two women were waiting too.
“Eleanor,” said Peters, after a second, and one of the women started. She turned around. She was tall, at least as tall as Hollis, and she had a scarf wrapped around her head that made her short brown hair stand straight up.
“Oh, hi, Peters,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. “You scared me. How are you? I thought you graduated.”
She smiled sweetly, showing her teeth, which stuck out slightly. She wore a dark blue overcoat with a man’s suit jacket underneath. She’d tucked the scarf into her collar.
“I did,” said Peters. “I’m teaching for Professor Delahay now.”
“I thought Delahay went to Rutgers.”
“Not till the spring. It’s a dual appointment.”
Peters put his hand behind Hollis’s shoulders.
“This is my bosom friend Hollis.”
They shook hands.
“Eleanor Garr.”
Peters turned to the other woman, who introduced herself as Kirsten. She was short, and plain, with straight blond hair cut in a China Chop. The light changed, and traffic started going the other way, but they didn’t cross.
“So how’s Jason?” said Peters. “Is he still working for Giuliani?”
Eleanor nodded. “He hates it.” She wrinkled up her nose. “He was up this weekend. They’re sending him to the Carolinas.”
“What are you guys doing right now?”
“Oh, God knows. Probably going home.”
“I have midterms all this week,” Kirsten said. She turned her head to one side, slightly languorously, and looked over at Eleanor. “We were just at the Casablanca. I think Ron Howard was there—I think I recognized him.”
A lock of Eleanor’s bangs had escaped the scarf and was falling down over her high forehead.
“You’re not related to Teri Garr, are you?” Hollis said, looking at her. “You look a little like her.”
“Do I?” She flashed him a smile and raised a hand to her cheek experimentally. “God, I hope not.”