Warp

by Lev Grossman

  He glanced down at his watch. Peters noticed and leaned over to him.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” he whispered.

  “That’s when they get you!” he shouted. “When you sleep!”

  Blake slid out of the booth, followed by Peters, who heaved himself out and staggered a few steps away. The café was mostly empty, except for a few people at the bar.

  “Jesus!” Peters said, stretching. “I feel like I have polio.”

  They worked out the money and started getting ready to go. Rob had his coat on already. He poured what was left of all their drinks into one single glass, which was already cloudy with the dregs of Basil’s margarita.

  He held it up, saying solemnly:

  “I have created life.”

  They threaded their way single file through the tables and out the door. Hollis’s ears rang in the sudden quietness as he put on his scarf and gloves. A dark figure on a ten-speed bicycle flew by in the darkness, gears ticking, bundled up against the cold. A half-full moon shone in the clear black sky. They stood around for a minute, just taking in deep lungfuls of the clean night air.

  “I’ve been turning into kind of a pedophile lately,” Peters said. “It’s pretty disgusting. I have a real thing for that girl in Jurassic Park. Lex. She can’t be more than fifteen.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Blake. He belched. “Relax, I’m sure she’s like thirty-five by now.”

  “But not only that, there’s this commercial for some local restaurant, on cable, where these two girls are talking to their mom, and—”

  “Oh God,” said Rob. “Don’t tell me.”

  They stood in a loose circle at the mouth of the alley. The whole other side of the street was taken up by an Express/Structure franchise, with a row of flags of no particular nationality hanging over the entrance, shifting listlessly in a barely perceptible wind. Somewhere in the distance a car alarm was going off.

  “A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly.

  “So Rob,” Blake said. “These guys”—he pointed at Hollis and Peters—“are going to go do a crime.”

  “Now you’ve done it,” said Peters. “Now we’re going to have to kill them.”

  “We’re going to go hang out in these people’s house while they’re away. Peters knows them. It’s no big deal, really. We’re going now to pick up the key.”

  “Wow,” said Rob. “Bum-rush all those complacent homeowners.”

  Peters, Blake, and Basil started gravitating together in the direction of Blake’s car. Rob wandered off in the general direction of Harvard Yard.

  It was the last time I was to see him alive.

  “Well, I’ll pick you up at four, anyway,” said Peters. “In two hours.”

  He pointed at Hollis. He was wearing black leather gloves.

  “Why don’t you just come with us in my car, dude?” Basil called back to Hollis. “We have room.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hollis said.

  Sometimes, towards evening, a lone figure would appear on the ancient battlements. He would stand there, gazing out at the horizon. Even at that distance she could distinguish the fine cut of his robe, the glint of orange sunlight on burnished mail.

  “Father, who is that man?” she asked one day.

  “Some say he is the Prince of Aquitania,” the old man replied. “He was banished to the ruined tower, long long ago, by order of the Emperor himself.”

  “Perhaps someday I shall go and visit him,” she said.

  “I think not, my dear,” said her father gently. “Come inside now—it grows late.”

  Perhaps we will fall in love, she added silently, to herself. And marry!

  CHAPTER 4

  FRIDAY, 1:50 A.M.

  Hollis walked slowly back down the alleyway, stumbling when the pavement switched from asphalt to the slippery rounded cobblestones. He was a little drunk. When he turned his head, everything bright left a faint contrail after it: the moon, the streetlights, cars up ahead of him, reflections off puddles.

  Glancing up at the apartment windows that overlooked the alley, he accidentally kicked over a box of empty bottles in the gutter. They were champagne bottles, expensive ones—Moët & Chandon—and he could just make out the green of the thick, dark glass in the semidarkness. He double-checked to make sure they were all empty: they were. He kicked the box again, and one of the bottles ripped free of the damp cardboard, rattling away over the cobblestones for a few yards before it suddenly shattered.

  The container can no longer contain the thing contained.

  A man’s voice yelled something down at him that he didn’t understand.

  Except for a couple of taxi drivers leaning against an orange-and-white cab pulled up against the curb, the street was deserted. They were talking in a dialect that sounded something like Creole. Otherwise the night was quiet, and Hollis could hear the tiny whirring, switching noises the traffic lights made as they changed from green to yellow to red.

  He crossed. In the middle of the street a car horn honked, right behind him, and he leaped onto the sidewalk and spun around. The car was moving so fast the Doppler effect distorted the sound of the horn as it swept past him.

  He watched it go. The brake lights flared as it rounded a corner, and arms waved at him out the windows on both sides. It was Basil’s car.

  I will kill him.

  Yet stay. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  Hollis decided to stop and deposit his check in the extra minutes before his bus came. The ATM was housed in a tiny enclosed storefront with a picture window, too small to be a store. The window lit up the sidewalk with a swath of white fluorescent light.

  Standing outside, Hollis went through his wallet for his bank card, making a face at the brightness. Before he finished the lock clicked open, by itself.

  The door swung open, just an inch. He looked up.

  A woman sat perched on the plastic counter beside the ATM, next to the stacks of deposit envelopes. From where she sat she was holding the door open for Hollis with her foot. She wore black leather boots that hugged her calves, with lots of complicated lacings running up them.

  Hollis opened the door and stepped inside. She withdrew her leg and folded it back under her. Her stockings were black. Inside the tiny space it was bright: fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Crumpled-up receipts with faint purple printing on them lay all over the nubbly rubber floor.

  “Thanks,” said Hollis.

  The woman glanced up at him for a second.

  Hollis guessed she might be in her early twenties. Her longish hair was dyed a mixture of dark red and black, and it was a little lank. A long string of fake-looking pearls hung around her neck. She had pale skin and a large, wide mouth. Her lipstick was a dark shade of reddish brown.

  She was talking, but she wasn’t speaking English. Hollis didn’t recognize the language—it sounded Slavic.

  It took him a second to realize that she wasn’t talking on a pay phone; she was talking on the ATM’s emergency help phone. A sign under it read: IN CASE OF DIFFICULTY, LIFT HANDSET. Hollis tried to eavesdrop, but all he understood was a couple of names.

  When he was done with the cash machine, he put off getting his card back. He toyed absently with the bumps of the Braille instructions on their embossed metal plaque. After another minute the woman said what sounded like good-bye, and since he was standing at the machine, she handed him the phone. He hung it up.

  “I can’t believe you can still do that,” she said matter-of-factly.

  She had a big black leather handbag, and she rummaged around in it and got out some lipstick. She started putting it on in a businesslike way, using her reflection in the window.

  “Do what?” said Hollis.

  “Use that phone.”

  “Use it for what?”

  “Long-distance calls.” She pursed her lips in the window. “You don’t have to pay.”

  The ATM returned Hollis’s card, and he took it and stepped backwards u
ntil he could lean back against the outside window.

  “You don’t have to pay?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  She made an odd clicking noise with her tongue.

  “Who gets the bill? The bank?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “How does it work?”

  Before she answered, the woman gave Hollis a long, very neutral look. It was startlingly pretty.

  “It’s a long story,” she said, finally.

  “That’s my favorite kind.”

  The alcohol was making Hollis calmer than he normally would have been. Still watching him, she felt around blindly in her bag with one hand.

  “Why do you want to know?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Hollis. “It just sounds like a sweet hack, I guess. A loophole. Hey—everybody wants to épater les bourgeois.”

  Them crazy French.

  She came up with a lighter and a pack of Merits. In one impressively quick motion she drew out a cigarette, lit it, and dropped the lighter and the pack back in. Then she took a long drag, held it, and let it back out in a sigh.

  “I thought you were going to pull a gun on me,” Hollis said.

  “Let’s hope your luck holds.”

  She took another drag and held it.

  “I’m only doing this out of a desire to harass corporate America,” she said finally, exhaling. She gestured to him. “Pick up the phone.”

  Hollis picked it up. There was no dial tone: she was holding down the hang-up switch.

  “When I let go of this hook,” she said evenly, “the phone’s going to try to dial into the customer service center. It’s preset to do that. You have to stop it from doing that by dialing first. But you can’t, because there’s no buttons on the phone to dial with.”

  She watched Hollis carefully, to see if he was following, and he nodded with the phone still held up to his ear. A police car went by outside with its siren on.

  “The way you dial a phone like this,” she went on, “is by hitting the switch: you hit it as many times as the number you want to dial. That’s basically how a rotary phone works. The trick is to do it before the phone can do its own preset dialing. So what you have to do is pick up”—she let go of the receiver—“and as fast as you can you start smacking the receiver.”

  She tapped on it smartly, six times in a row. When she stopped, there was silence on the line, and she looked up at Hollis expectantly. The tips of her ears stuck out from under her hair, giving her a slightly elfin look.

  “Who do you want to call?” she said.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Might as well go transcontinental. It’s BayBank’s nickel.”

  Hollis scratched his chin.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Dial anything.”

  She rolled her eyes at him, then went ahead and dialed. It took her about half a minute to get six more numbers tapped in.

  Hollis waited. The phone rang a few times, and an answering machine picked up.

  He listened to the message, then hung up at the beep.

  “Who was that?” he said.

  “Me,” said the woman. She made the clicking noise with her tongue again. “Do I have any messages?”

  “I don’t think so. Which one are you—Alix or Xanthe?”

  “Guess,” she said lightly.

  Hollis thought for a second before he answered.

  “Xanthe.”

  “Nope.” She slipped down off the plastic bench. “I only wish.”

  She straightened her skirt and slung her bag over her shoulder. Glancing at him once, ambivalently, she headed out the door. She wasn’t walking particularly quickly, and Hollis shoved his hands in his coat pockets and followed her out into the cold. It was definitely below freezing, but she let her jacket hang open.

  “What kind of a name is Xanthe?” he said.

  “I don’t know. It’s from some poem, I think.”

  She turned left, the opposite way from Hollis’s bus stop, but he went with her.

  “Is she a good roommate?”

  “She’s quiet.”

  Then she added, as if she were ticking off the points on her fingers:

  “She’s obsessively neat. She sleeps exactly eleven hours a day, from nine every night to eight every morning. She can’t stand noise. She has good skin. She has bad hair. And she writes poems. Oh, and she’s rich, dahling, she’s terribly, terribly rich.”

  “How are the poems?”

  “I never read them.”

  “Maybe you could introduce me.”

  “I don’t think you’re her type.”

  A late-night Rollerblader overtook them from behind, then skated away ahead of them, the reflective patches on his elbows slowly fading away into the darkness.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, your overcoat, for starters,” she said. “That’s enough right there. She’d never go for that. And she likes her men taller.”

  “I’m pretty tall,” he said.

  “But she likes them taller.”

  She skipped her hand lightly along the roof of a parked car, a cheap green Subaru.

  “I used to have this exact car.”

  Hollis looked back at it for a second as they went past.

  “What’s wrong with my coat?” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  She was still walking slowly, swinging the hand with the cigarette. They were headed away from Harvard Square in the direction of Boston, up Mass Ave.; most of the stores were still very upscale—gourmet foods, futon outlets, software, a Crate & Barrel—but they got less and less chic the farther they went. In the doorway of an office building two homeless people sat under army blankets. One of them asked her for a cigarette as they went by.

  She shook her head, without looking: “Sorry.”

  A cold wind blew down the wide street and gusted in their faces.

  “Where’d you learn that phone trick?” Hollis asked.

  “From a book,” she said. “I have this friend in Stockholm who I call sometimes. It started adding up after a while, and I needed a way to cut some corners.”

  “You’re not into e-mail?”

  “We’re not exactly dealing with Phiber Optik on the other end. And foreign character sets can get pretty ugly when you’re crossing national borders. And anyway, where’s the glamour in e-mail?”

  “Good question,” Hollis said. “I was in Stockholm once. I got sick there, and nobody could figure out what it was. I went to the emergency room, and it turned out I had scurvy. I was backpacking around Europe and I just wasn’t getting any citrus. It took them forever to figure out how to translate it.”

  Alix looked at him and made a face. “That’s disgusting.”

  “I guess.” Hollis shrugged. “At the time I thought it was glamorous.”

  She snorted. “It’s a fine line.”

  “I had to live on limes for like, six weeks.” Hollis kicked a pebble along the street with his boot. “So aren’t you afraid the bank’s going to catch you?”

  “In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet.”

  Across the street, a policeman idly rapped on a parking meter with his nightstick, and she raised her voice as they passed him:

  “I’m surprised they haven’t caught me yet! I try to call at different times. So far that’s been good enough.”

  “You know there’s a camera in there.”

  “I know there’s a camera in there,” she said sharply. “Not being a complete idiot.”

  She flicked her cigarette down into the grate of a storm drain. It sparked redly in the darkness before disappearing into the depths.

  “What do you think I was doing sitting up there on that stupid shelf? I’m pretty sure there’s a blind spot there, where the cameras can’t reach. I doubt they monitor twenty-four hours anyway. And who do you think they were looking at the whole time I was on the phone, camera-boy? You, that’s who.”

  Hollis was silent for a f
ew seconds.

  “Well, I always wanted to be on TV,” he said finally.

  His resources of indifference were immense.

  They walked together as far as Central Square, a broad, complicated intersection where the residential neighborhoods of Cambridge started to give way to the poorer, more industrial zone of Cambridgeport. It was a bad area, and even this late at night there was a lot of activity: cops, homeless people, prostitutes, hostile young men, white, black, and Hispanic, all milling around aimlessly. The only stores open were a Rite Aid and a Dunkin’ Donuts that did its business through a window in a metal shutter. Every possible surface—lampposts, bus shelters, construction sites, the stairs down to the subway—was covered with cheap paper fliers. One of the buildings on the square was burned out and sagging in on itself.

  A little past the square an enormous old brick warehouse took up an entire block. It had the words STORAGE WAREHOUSE: FIREPROOF painted along one blind wall in gigantic white letters fifteen feet high; someone had blackened out the first few to make it read, RAGE WAREHOUSE: IREPROOF. Except for a few irregularities in the upper stories, it was built in the shape of a perfect cube. Naked orange security spotlights were bolted to the outer walls.

  Alix turned in at the side street before it and walked as far as the warehouse’s front entrance, a cement loading dock with massive metal double doors painted battleship gray, where she stopped. Set in one of the big doors, like a pass door in a portcullis, was a smaller door with a regular brass doorknob.

  Hollis looked around in the sky for the moon, but he couldn’t find it, even though the sky was clear. Either it hadn’t risen yet or it was blocked by the brick bulk of the warehouse. Somewhere off in the distance, in an indeterminate direction, somebody was doggedly improvising jazz, unaccompanied, on a tinny old piano.

  Alix clicked her tongue again.

  “What’s that noise you keep making?” said Hollis.

  Instead of answering, she stuck her tongue out at him for a second, and he caught a glimpse of silver metal.

  “I got it done a few weeks ago,” she said. “The swelling just went down. Do you have any? Piercings, I mean?”

  He shook his head. Now that he noticed, she had a tiny silver ring in her eyebrow, too.