The Rule of Four (39 page)

“That’s the idea. If he does, he’ll come looking for me.” Paul pauses before speaking again. “And besides, I want you to get used to having it around.”

“Why?”

He sits back. “Because I want us to work together. I want us to find Francesco’s crypt together.”

Finally I understand. “Next year.”

He nods. “In Chicago. And Rome.”

The vent whirs one last time, whispering through the grille.

“This is yours” is all I can think to say. “Your thesis. You finished it.”

“This is so much bigger than a thesis, Tom.”

“It’s much bigger than a Ph.D. dissertation too.”

“Exactly.”

Now I hear it in his voice. This is just the beginning.

“I don’t want to do this alone,” he says.

“What can
I
do?”

He smiles. “Just keep the map for now. Let it burn a hole in your pocket for a while.”

It unnerves me, how light the envelope is, the impermanence of what I’m holding. It seems to argue against the reality of all of this, that the wisdom of the
Hypnerotomachia
can sit in the fold of my palm.

“Come on,” he says finally, glancing down at his watch. “Let’s go home. We need to pick up some things for Charlie.”

He takes down the last remnant of his work with one final swoop of his arm. There is no more trace in the carrel of Paul, or of Colonna, or of the long trail of ideas connecting them over five hundred years. The sheet of black paper on the window is gone.

Chapter 24
                           

The last question the recruiter from Daedalus asked during my job interview was a riddle: If a frog falls down a fifty-foot well and has to climb his way out, making three feet of progress every day, but slipping back two feet every night, in how many days will he escape?

Charlie’s answer was that he never escapes, because a frog that falls fifty feet doesn’t get back up. Paul’s answer had something to do with an ancient philosopher who died by walking into a well while staring up at the stars. Gil’s answer was that he’d never heard of a frog climbing wells, and what did all this have to do with developing software in Texas, anyway?

The right answer, I think, is that it takes the frog forty-eight days, or two days less than you might expect. The trick is realizing that the frog climbs one foot per day after all is said and done—but on the forty-eighth day, he climbs three feet and reaches the top of the well before he can slide back again.

I don’t know what makes me think of that just now. Maybe this is the sort of moment when riddles have an afterglow of their own, a wisdom that illuminates the edges of experience when nothing else can. In a world where half of the villagers always lie and half of them always tell the truth; where the hare never catches the tortoise because the distance between them shrinks by a never-collapsing infinity of halves; where the fox can never be left on the same bank of the river as the hen, or the hen on the same bank as the grain, because with perfect regularity the one will consume the other, and nothing you can do will prevent it: in that world, everything is sensible but the premise. A riddle is a castle built on air, perfectly habitable if you don’t look down. The grand impossibility of what Paul has told me—that an ancient rivalry between a monk and a humanist has left a crypt of treasures beneath a forgotten forest—rests on the much more basic impossibility that a book like the
Hypnerotomachia
, written in code, impenetrable, ignored by scholars for five centuries, could exist. It couldn’t; yet it’s as real to me as I am to myself. And if I accept its existence, then the foundation is set, and the impossible castle can be built. The rest is just mortar and stones.

When the elevator doors open, and the library lobby seems weightless in the wintry light, it feels like we’ve emerged from a tunnel. Every time I think of that Daedalus riddle, I imagine the frog’s surprise when, for the first time, on his last day, three steps forward are not followed by two steps back. There is a suddenness at the top of the well, an unexpected quickening of the journey at its end, that I feel now. The riddle I’ve known since I was a child—the riddle of the
Hypnerotomachia
—has been solved in less than a day.

We click through the turnstile at the library’s front border, and the nip of the wind returns beneath the entrance. Paul presses the door open, and I tighten my coat around me. There is snow everywhere, no stones or walls or shadows, only brilliant tornadoes of white. All around me is Chicago and Texas; graduation; Dod and home. Here I am, suddenly, above ground.

We start south. On the way back to the dorm, a Dumpster has been overturned. Little nests of garbage poke up from mounds of snow, and the squirrels are at them already, pulling out apple cores and near-empty bottles of lotion, passing everything in front of their noses before beginning to eat. They are discriminating little creatures. Experience has taught them that there will always be food here, replenished every day, so everywhere nuts and acorns go unburied. When a vulture-size crow lands on the wheel of the upturned Dumpster, expressing priority, the squirrels just chitter and nibble, ignoring it.

“You know what that crow makes me think of?” Paul says.

I shake my head, and the bird flies off angrily, spreading its wings to a fantastic length, escaping with a single bag of crumbs.

“The eagle that killed Aeschylus by dropping a tortoise on him,” Paul says.

I have to glance at him to see that he’s serious.

“Aeschylus was bald,” he continues. “The eagle was trying to break the shell open by dropping it on a rock. It couldn’t tell the difference.”

This reminds me again of the philosopher who fell down the well. Paul’s mind is always doing that, tucking the present into the past, making yesterday’s bed.

“If you could be anywhere right now,” I ask him, “where would it be?”

He looks over at me, amused. “Anywhere?”

I nod.

“In Rome, with a shovel.”

A squirrel looks up from a slice of bread he’s found, watching us.

Paul turns to me. “What about you? Texas?”

“No.”

“Chicago?”

“I don’t know.”

We pass through the rear courtyard of the art museum, the one separating it from Dod. There are footprints here, back and forth in zigzags.

“You know what Charlie told me?” he says, staring at the marks in the snow.

“What?”

“If you fire a gun, the bullet falls as fast as if you’d dropped it.”

This sounds like something I learned in introductory physics.

“You can never outrun gravity,” Paul says. “No matter how fast you go, you’re still falling like a rock. It makes you wonder if horizontal motion is an illusion. If we move just to convince ourselves we’re not falling.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“The tortoise shell,” he says. “It was part of a prophecy. An oracle said Aeschylus would die of a blow from heaven.”

A blow from heaven, I think. God, laughing.

“Aeschylus couldn’t escape an oracle,” Paul continues. “We can’t escape gravity.” He weaves his fingers together, a dovetail. “Heaven and earth, speaking in one voice.”

His eyes are wide, trying to take in everything, a kid at the zoo.

“You probably say that to all the girls,” I tell him.

He smiles. “Sorry. Sensory overload. I’m all over the place. I don’t know why.”

I do. There’s someone else to worry about the crypt now, someone else to worry about the
Hypnerotomachia
. Atlas feels lighter without the world on his shoulders.

“It’s like your question,” he says, walking backward in front of me as we head toward the room. “If you could be anywhere, where would you be?” He opens his palms, and the truth seems to land in his hands. “Answer: it doesn’t matter, because wherever you go, you’re still falling.”

He smiles when he says it, as if there’s nothing depressing about the idea that we’re all just in free-fall. The ultimate equality of going anywhere, doing anything, Paul seems to mean, is that being in Dod with me is as good as being in Rome with a shovel. In his own way, I think, in his own words, what he’s saying is that he’s happy.

He fishes for his key and slips it into the lock. The room is still when we enter. So much action has circled this place since yesterday, break-ins and proctors and police officers, it’s unsettling to see it empty and dark.

Paul wanders into the bedroom to put down his coat. Instinctively, I lift the phone and check our voicemail.

Hey, Tom,
Gil’s voice begins, through a hiss of static.
I’ll try to catch up to you guys later but . . . looks like I won’t be able to get back to the hospital after all so . . . Charlie for me. . . . Tom . . . black tie. You can borrow . . . need to.

Black tie. The ball.

By now the second message has begun.

Tom, it’s Katie. Just wanted to let you know I’m going to the club to help set up as soon as I’m done here in the darkroom. I think you said you were coming with Gil.
A pause.
So I guess we’ll talk tonight.

There’s a hesitation before she hangs up, as if she’s unsure she put the right emphasis on those last words, the reminder of unfinished business.

“What’s going on?” Paul calls from the bedroom.

“I have to get ready,” I say quietly, sensing the turn things are taking.

Paul comes out of the room. “For what?”

“The ball.”

He doesn’t understand. I never told him what Katie and I talked about in the darkroom. What I’ve seen today, everything he’s told me, has turned the world on its ear. But in the silence that follows, I find myself standing where I’ve stood before. The ancient mistress, forsworn, has returned to tempt me. There is a cycle here which, until this moment, I’ve been too engrossed to break. Colonna’s book flatters me with visions of perfection, an unreality I can inhabit for the tiny price of my mad devotion, my withdrawal from the world. Francesco, having invented this strange bargain, also invented its name:
Hypnerotomachia,
the struggle for love in a dream. If ever there were a time to stay grounded, to resist that struggle and its dream—if ever there were a time to remember a love that has devoted itself madly to
me,
to remember the promise I made to Katie—that time is now.

“What’s wrong?” Paul asks.

I don’t know how to tell him. I’m not even sure
what
to tell him.

“Here,” I say, extending my arm.

But he doesn’t move.

“Take the map.”

“Why?” At first he only looks puzzled, still too excited to follow.

“I can’t do it, Paul. I’m sorry.”

His smile fades. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t work on this anymore.” I place the map in his hand. “It’s yours.”

“It’s ours,” he says, wondering what’s come over me.

But it isn’t. It doesn’t belong to us; from the beginning, we have belonged to the book.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

Not here; not in Chicago; not in Rome.

“You
did
it,” he says. “It’s done. All we need is the blueprint for the lock.”

The certainty of it, though, is already between us. A look is crawling into his eyes, a drowning look, as if the force that once buoyed him up has suddenly let him down, and all the world is topsy-turvy. We have spent so much time together that I can see it without his even having to say a word: the freedom I feel, my emancipation from a chain of events that began before I was born, is mirrored in reverse with him.

“It’s not either/or,” he says, gathering himself up. “You could have both if you wanted to.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Your father did.”

But he knows my father didn’t.

“You don’t need my help,” I tell him. “You’ve got what you want.”

But I know he doesn’t.

A strange silence follows, each of us sensing that the other is right, but that neither of us is wrong. The math of morality falters. He looks as if he wants to plead with me, to make his case one last time, but it’s hopeless and he knows it.

Instead, Paul quietly repeats a joke I’ve heard a thousand times from Gil. He’s got no other words for what he’s feeling.

“The last man on earth walks into a bar,” he murmurs. “What does he say?”

Paul turns his head toward the window, but doesn’t offer the punch line. We both know what the last man on earth says. He looks into his beer, lonely and besotted, and says, “Drink, I’d like another bartender.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

Paul is somewhere else now, though. “I need to find Richard,” he mumbles.

“Paul?”

He turns. “What do you want me to say?”

“What do you want from Curry?”

“Remember what I asked you on the way to Firestone?” he says. “What would’ve happened if I’d never picked up your dad’s book? Remember what you answered?”

“I said we never would have met.”

A thousand delicate accidents have piled up just so that he and I would meet—so that we could be here, now. Destiny, from the shambles of five hundred years, has fashioned a castle in the air so that two college boys could be kings. This, he means, is how I treat it.

“When you see Gil,” he says, picking up his coat from the floor, “tell him he can have the President’s Room back. I don’t need it anymore.”

Thinking of his car, broken down on a side street by the Institute, I imagine him walking through the snow to find Curry.

“It’s not safe to go alone . . .” I begin.

But alone is how he’s always gone. He’s already walking out the door.

I might have followed him, had the hospital not called a minute later to relay a message from Charlie.

“He’s up and talking,” the nurse says. “And he’s asking for you.”

I’m already putting on my hat and gloves.

Halfway to the medical center it stops snowing. For a few blocks there’s even a sun visible above the horizon. Clouds everywhere take the shape of table settings—tureens and soup bowls and pitchers, a fork rolling by with a spoon—and I realize how hungry I am. I hope Charlie’s doing as well as the nurse said. I hope they’re feeding him.