The Rule of Four (3 page)

“You and the Boy Scouts,” I mumble.

“
Eagle
scouts,” Charlie says, because he knows I never made it past tenderfoot.

“You ladies ready?” Gil interrupts, standing by the door.

Paul breathes deeply, waking himself up, then nods. From inside his room he grabs his pager and hitches it to his belt.

At the front of Dod Hall, our dormitory, Charlie and I part ways with Gil and Paul. We will enter the tunnels at different locations, and be invisible to each other until one team finds the other underground.

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a black Boy Scout,” I tell Charlie once he and I are on our own, heading down campus.

The snow is deeper and colder than I expected. I wrench my ski jacket around me, and force my hands into gloves.

“That’s okay,” he says. “Before I met you, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white pussy.”

The trip down campus passes in a haze. For days, with graduation so near and my own thesis out of the way, the world has seemed like a rush of unnecessary motion—underclassmen hurrying to night seminars, seniors typing their final chapters in sweating computer labs, now snowflakes everywhere in the sky, dancing in circles before they find the ground.

As we walk down campus, my leg begins to ache. For years the scar on my thigh has been predicting bad weather six hours after the bad weather arrives. It’s a memento of an old accident, the scar. Not long after my sixteenth birthday I was in a car crash that laid me up in a hospital for most of my sophomore summer. The details are a blur to me now, but the one distinct memory I have of that night is my left femur snapping clean through the muscle of my thigh until one end of it was staring back at me through the skin. I had just enough time to see it before passing out from shock. Both bones in my left forearm broke as well, and three ribs on the same side. According to the paramedics, the bleeding from my artery was stopped just in time for them to save me. By the time they got me out of the wreckage, though, my father, who’d been driving the car, was dead.

The accident changed me, of course: after three surgeries and two months of rehab, and the onset of phantom pains with their six-hour weather delay, I still had metal pins in my bones, a scar up my leg, and a strange hole in my life that only seemed to get bigger the more time wore on. At first there were different clothes—different sizes of pants and shorts until I regained enough weight, then different styles to cover up a skin graft on my thigh. Later I realized that my family had changed too: my mother, who’d retreated into herself, first and most of all, but also my two older sisters, Sarah and Kristen, who spent less and less time at home. Finally it was my friends who changed—or, I guess, finally I was the one who changed them. I’m not sure if I wanted friends who understood me better, or saw me differently, or what exactly, but the old ones, like my old clothes, just didn’t fit anymore.

The thing people like to say to victims is that time is a great healer.
The
great healer is what they say, as if time were a doctor. But after six years of thinking on the subject, I have a different impression. Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it’s just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn’t much to see. I suspect that whoever buys that shirt, the one great patron of the everlasting theme park, whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it. We’re the paint in that analogy, as I tried to explain to Charlie when I mentioned it once. Time is what disperses us.

Maybe the best way to put it is the way Paul did, not long after we met. Even then he was a Renaissance fanatic, eighteen years old and already convinced that civilization had been in a nosedive since the death of Michelangelo. He’d read all of my father’s books on the period, and he introduced himself to me a few days into freshman year after recognizing my middle name in the freshman face-book. I have a peculiar middle name, which for parts of my childhood I carried like an albatross around my neck. My father tried to name me after his favorite composer, a slightly obscure seventeenth-century Italian without whom, he said, there could’ve been no Haydn, and therefore no Mozart. My mother, on the other hand, refused to have the birth certificate printed the way he wanted, insisting until the moment of my arrival that Arcangelo Corelli Sullivan was a horrible thing to foist on a child, like a three-headed monster of names. She was partial to Thomas, her father’s name, and whatever it lacked in imagination it made up for in subtlety.

Thus, as the pangs of labor began, she held a delivery-bed filibuster, as she called it, keeping me out of this world until my father agreed to a compromise. In a moment less of inspiration than of desperation, I became Thomas Corelli Sullivan, and for better or worse, the name stuck. My mother hoped that I could hide my middle name between the other two, like sweeping dust beneath a rug. But my father, who believed there was much in a name, always said that Corelli without Arcangelo was like a Stradivarius without strings. He’d only given in to my mother, he claimed, because the stakes were much higher than she let on. Her filibuster, he used to say with a smile, was staged in the marriage bed, not on the delivery bed. He was the sort of man who thought a pact made in passion was the only good excuse for bad judgment.

I told Paul all of this, several weeks after we met.

“You’re right,” he said, when I told him my little airbrush metaphor. “Time is no da Vinci.” He thought for a moment, then smiled in that gentle way of his. “Not even a Rembrandt. Just a cheap Jackson Pollock.”

He seemed to understand me from the beginning.

All three of them did: Paul, Charlie, and Gil.

Chapter 2
                           

Now Charlie and I are standing over a manhole at the foot of Dillon Gym, near the south of campus. The Philadelphia 76ers patch on his knit hat is hanging by a thread, fluttering in the wind. Above us, under the orange eye of a sodium lamp, snowflakes twitch in huge clouds. We are waiting. Charlie is beginning to lose patience because the two sophomores across the street are costing us time.

“Just tell me what we’re supposed to do,” I say.

A light pulses on his watch and he glances down. “It’s 7:07. Proctors change shifts at 7:30. We’ve got twenty-three minutes.”

“You think twenty minutes is enough to catch them?”

“Sure,” he says. “If we can figure out where they’ll be.” Charlie looks back over across the street. “Come
on,
girls.”

One of them is mincing through the drifts in a spring skirt, as if the snow caught her by surprise while she was dressing. The other, a Peruvian girl I know from an intramural competition, wears the trademark orange parka of the swim and dive team.

“I forgot to call Katie,” I say, as it dawns on me.

Charlie turns.

“It’s her birthday. I was supposed to tell her when I was coming over.”

Katie Marchand, a sophomore, has slowly become the kind of girlfriend I didn’t deserve to find. Her rising importance in my life is a fact Charlie accepts by reminding himself that sharp women often have terrible taste in men.

“Did you get her something?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I make a rectangle with my hands. “A photo from this gallery in—”

He nods. “Then it’s okay if you don’t call.” A grunting sound follows, sort of a half-laugh. “Anyway, she’s probably got other things on her mind right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Charlie holds his hand out, catching a snowflake. “First snow of the year. Nude Olympics.”

“Jesus. I forgot.”

The Nude Olympics is one of Princeton’s most beloved traditions. Every year, on the night of the first snowfall, sophomores gather in the courtyard of Holder Hall. Surrounded by dorms crawling with spectators from across campus, they show up in herds, hundreds upon hundreds of them, and with the heroic unconcern of lemmings they take their clothes off and run around wildly. It’s a rite that must have arisen in the old days of the college, when Princeton was a men’s institution and mass nudity was an expression of the male prerogative, like pissing upright or waging war. But it was when women joined the fray that this cozy little scrum became the must-see event of the academic year. Even the media turn out to record it, with satellite vans and video cameras coming from as far as Philadelphia and New York. Mere thought of the Nude Olympics usually lights a fire under the cold months of college, but this year, with Katie’s turn coming around, I’m more interested in keeping the home fires burning.

“You ready?” Charlie asks once the two sophomores have finally passed by.

I shift my foot across the manhole cover, dusting off the snow.

He kneels down and hooks his index fingers into the gaps of the manhole cover. The snow dampens the scrape of steel on asphalt as he drags it back. I look down the road again.

“You first,” he says, placing a hand at my back.

“What about the packs?”

“Quit stalling.
Go.
”

I drop to my knees and press my palms on either side of the open hole. A thick heat pours up from below. When I try to lower myself into it, the bulges in my ski jacket fight at the edge of the opening.

“Damn, Tom, the dead move faster. Kick around until your foot finds a step iron. There’s a ladder in the wall.”

Feeling my shoe snag the top rung, I begin to descend.

“All right,” Charlie says. “Take this.”

He pushes my pack through the opening, followed by his.

A network of pipes extends into the dark in both directions. Visibility is low, and the air is full of metallic clanks and hisses. This is Princeton’s circulatory system, the passageways pushing steam from a distant central boiler to dorms and academic buildings up north. Charlie says the vapor inside the pipes is pressurized at two hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. The smaller cylinders carry high-voltage lines or natural gas. Still, I’ve never seen any warnings in the tunnels, not a single fluorescent triangle or posting of university policy. The college would like to forget that this place exists. The only message at this entrance, written long ago in black paint, is
LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH
’
INTRATE
. Paul, who has never seemed to fear anything in this place, smiled the first time he saw it.
Abandon all hope,
he said, translating Dante for the rest of us,
ye that enter here.

Charlie makes his way down, scraping the cover back onto its place after him. As he steps from the bottom rung, he pulls off his hat. Light dances across the beads of sweat on his forehead. The afro he’s grown after four months without a haircut barely clears the ceiling.
It’s not an afro,
he’s been telling us.
It’s just a half-fro.

He takes a few whiffs of the stale air, then produces a container of Vick’s VapoRub from his pack. “Put some under your nose. You won’t smell anything.”

I wave him off. It’s a trick he learned as a summer intern with the local medical examiner, a way to avoid smelling the corpses during autopsies. After what happened to my father I’ve never held the medical profession in particularly high esteem; doctors are drones to me, second opinions with shifting faces. But to see Charlie in a hospital is another thing entirely. He’s the strongman of the local ambulance squad, the go-to guy for tough cases, and he’ll find a twenty-fifth hour in any day to give people he’s never met a fighting chance to beat what he calls the Thief.

Charlie unloads a pair of pin-striped gray laser guns, then the set of Velcro straps with dark plastic domes in the middle. While he keeps fiddling with the packs, I start to unzip my jacket. The collar of my shirt is already sticking to my neck.

“Careful,” he says, extending an arm out before I can sling my coat across the largest pipe. “Remember what happened to Gil’s old jacket?”

I’d completely forgotten. A steam pipe melted the nylon shell and set the filler on fire. We had to stomp out the flames on the ground.

“We’ll leave the coats here and pick them up on the way out,” he says, grabbing the jacket from my hand and rolling it up with his in an expandable duffel bag. He suspends it from a ceiling fixture by one of its straps.

“So the rats don’t get at it,” he says, unloading a few more objects from the pack.

After handing me a flashlight and a two-way hand radio, he pulls out two large water bottles, beading from the heat, and places them in the outer netting of his pack.

“Remember,” he says. “If we get split up again, don’t head downstream. If you see water running, go against the current. You don’t want to end up in a drain or down a chute if the flow increases. This isn’t the Ohio, like you got back at home. The water level down here rises
fast.
”

This is my punishment for getting lost the last time he and I were teammates. I tug at my shirt for ventilation. “Chuck, the Ohio doesn’t go anywhere near Columbus.”

He hands me one of the receivers and waits for me to fasten it around my chest, ignoring me.

“So what’s the plan?” I ask. “Which way are we going?”

He smiles. “That’s where you come in.”

“Why?”

Charlie pats my head. “Because you’re the sherpa.”

He says it as if sherpas are a magical race of midget navigators, like hobbits.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Paul knows the tunnels better than we do. We need a strategy.”

I mull it over. “What’s the nearest entrance to the tunnels on their side?”

“There’s one in back of Clio.”

Cliosophic is an old debating society’s building. I try to see each position clearly, but the heat is clogging my thoughts. “Which would lead straight down to where we’re standing. A straight shot south. Right?”

He thinks it over, wrestling with the geography. “Right,” he says.

“And he
never
takes the straight shot.”