Codex

by Lev Grossman

  When they were moving again Margaret rummaged in her bag and took out another book. She began turning pages at an impossibly rapid rate.

  “So you really think it could be there?” Edward said, playing the kid brother who wouldn’t shut up. “What would you say the odds are?”

  “Who knows?” She flipped another page irritably. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Well, right. But—”

  “You really want to know? No, I don’t think it’s there. And I’ll tell you why.” She snapped the book shut on her finger. She seemed to need to get something off her chest. “Because it’s just too modern. People in the Middle Ages didn’t use books for the same things we do. We read books for fun, to escape from the world around us, but back then books were serious business. In Gervase’s time literature was for worship and instruction, for moral improvement. Books were vessels of the Truth. A book like the Viage, a fictional narrative written to be read alone in your room, for pure enjoyment, would have been considered immoral and unhealthy, if not positively satanic.

  “Off in France they were busy formulating a sinister invention called the romance. Pure escapism: knights in armor, quests, adventures, all of it. That kind of thing was fine for the French, but it hadn’t caught on in England yet. For the English the idea of fiction, of using a book to escape into another world, was new. It was wild, illicit, even narcotic. You can see it in Chaucer. There’s a scene from The Book of the Duchess where the narrator is reading in bed, reading a story about a queen whose husband dies. He gets so caught up in it that he confuses what’s real and what’s on the page:

  That trewly I, that made this book,

  Had such pittee and such rowthe

  To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe,

  I ferde the worse al the morwe

  Aftir to thenken on hir sorwe.

  “Fiction was hot stuff, wild and new and dangerous, and the lines between what was made up and what was real were all tangled up. Edward III had a real Round Table in his castle, to be like King Arthur. Mortimer, Edward III’s stepfather, told people that he was descended from King Arthur. And God knows, if there was ever a time to escape from reality, the fourteenth century in England was it. War, bubonic plague, anthrax, famine, relentless rain, civil unrest—it was probably the worst time and the worst place to be alive in the last two thousand years. A little escapism would have been perfectly understandable.

  “But I know Gervase. He wasn’t the type to get mixed up with a book like this.”

  It was almost three o’clock, and by now Edward had turned off the highway onto a back road lined with pine trees on both sides, and occasionally a gas station or a farm stand offering unshucked summer corn in cardboard boxes. With Margaret giving directions they wound their way toward the center of Old Forge. It turned out to be a double row of antique shops and restaurants, some quaint and some just tawdry, with a single traffic light at the halfway point and a movie theater showing the big blockbuster from two months ago, slightly misspelled on the marquee.

  Eventually a motel appeared up ahead on the right, a neat one-story building with a row of shrubs along the front growing in a moat of wood chips. It was called the White Pine Inn. Edward hauled the wheel over and pulled into a fresh black asphalt parking lot. Theirs was the only car in it. When he shut off the engine it was strangely silent. They took their bags inside and checked in.

  Back outside in the parking lot, it was three in the afternoon, and the sun was still high in the sky. It was weird to see Margaret standing there on the hot asphalt dusted with green pine needles, drenched in sunlight, holding her bookbag. She looked a long way from her native element, hushed stacks and chilled air. The air was rich with biological stuff, pollen and insects and fluffy motes, and Margaret sneezed quaintly. She squinted pallidly in the pale light like a little girl just waking up from a nap.

  “What now?” Edward said.

  She looked him up and down critically.

  “Don’t you have anything to carry? A bag, or a notebook?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “It would add some verisimilitude. You’re supposed to be a visiting scholar.”

  She gave him a pencil and a spiral notebook from her bag, then led him down the motel driveway and out onto the sandy shoulder. They picked their way along it. Fragments of glass glittered in the gravel, and a massive tractor-trailer hauling logs almost killed them as it roared past. It honked deafeningly and threw billows of fine road dust in their faces. A sheet-metal guard rail ran along the other side of the road, and the sun flashed blindingly off the unpainted steel. Margaret took mincing steps in her good leather shoes. Edward was about to ask her if she was sure she really knew where they were going when they pushed past a colossal tuft of ragweed and he saw for himself.

  He hadn’t realized how close they were to the Hudson River. It was the first thing he saw, a broad flat expanse like a lake sparkling far below them down in the valley. They were standing at the foot of a long, curving gravel driveway that ran between two parallel rows of trees. Beyond them he could see spacious grounds, manicured lawns dotted with modern sculptures in iron girders and polished marble that looked like giant alien punctuation marks. In the middle distance stood a pink granite building, a two-story modernist oblong with large tinted windows. He could have mistaken it for a software company or a high-priced rehab clinic.

  “This is it,” Margaret said.

  She set off up the driveway, her feet making soft crunching noises in the quiet.

  “Damn,” said Edward under his breath. He hurried to catch up with her. “There’s a lot of money in this place.”

  She nodded. “Yes, the Chenoweth is very wealthy.”

  “Wealthy enough to build an extra room for the Went collection?”

  “Wealthy enough. Too stingy.”

  They walked side by side. The landscaper had left several natural-looking stands of pine and birch trees in place. A bird sang three sweet solo notes, then repeated them.

  “You’re sure this is going to work?” Edward asked.

  “Of course. Security here is virtually nonexistent.”

  “But you’re sure—”

  “They know me. They’ll let me into the vault, no questions asked. There’s a side door. Meet me there twenty minutes before closing and I’ll let you in. If they ask you what you’re looking for, tell them you’re interested in Longfellow. They’ll show you some letters. Have you read ‘The Song of Hiawatha’?”

  “No.”

  “Grapes of Wrath?”

  “In high school.”

  “Well, say Steinbeck then. The curators will love you. They have his journals here. They were very expensive, and no one ever asks for them.”

  There was a sweeping view of the river valley below them. Edward turned to look downstream, where a bridge supported by two stone towers crossed between the two steep banks, silhouetted against the bright silvery water. Tiny cars zipped across it at irregular intervals. An icy shock of recognition ran through him. All of a sudden he knew where he was, but it was somewhere he couldn’t be, because it was somewhere that wasn’t real. He stood stock-still.

  “My God,” he said, half to himself. “My God. This is part of the game.”

  Margaret looked at him suspiciously over her shoulder.

  “Just keep walking.”

  15

  EDWARD SAT ON A HARD plastic chair at a computer terminal. His eyes refused to focus on the monitor in front of him. He couldn’t type, for the simple reason that he was so nervous that he couldn’t feel his hands. This was all happening much too fast. He pressed the keyboard with all ten of his frozen carrot fingers—fjj;dk safskl—and hit return. THAT COMMAND WAS NOT RECOGNIZED.

  Margaret was up at the front desk talking to the staff. He watched her slim, straight form from where he sat. Despite himself, he was impressed: She handled herself like a pro. She was holding up better than he was. There had been a minor stir when she came in, when the staff reco
gnized her and gathered together on the other side of the counter to say hello, but she looked perfectly composed. She even seemed to be smiling, something he hadn’t known her to do in civilian life. Where in that cloistered academic soul of hers had she found such heroic reserves of sangfroid? Maybe she didn’t have enough of a soul to be terrified, he thought meanly. He noticed the way the curved wings of her shoulder blades showed through her thin cardigan.

  The library turned out to have been built right into the side of the river valley, making it bigger on the inside than he expected. The far side of the building, the side facing the river, was one single sheet of smoked glass three stories high that looked out on the water. As it descended through the trees the sun shone weakly through the gray-brown translucence, creating dramatic circular lens-flare effects.

  After a few minutes Margaret came back and sat down at the terminal next to him. She pretended not to see him.

  “You see the circulation desk?” she said quietly, looking only at the screen in front of her. “Follow it with your eyes. Look where it would meet the far wall if it continued on. There’s a door there—you can’t see it from here because it’s paneled wood like the wall, and there’s no handle on this side, but it’s there. That’s the door you’ll go through.”

  “Okay.”

  “I prepared a map for you. I’m going to leave it under the keyboard of this terminal—”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he snapped. “Just give it to me.”

  Margaret hesitated, then slid it to him sideways along the tabletop. It was drawn on the back of a yellow index card.

  “There’s the desk,” she said. “There’s the door.” She could have been a knowledgeable former employee initiating a neophyte researcher in the mysteries of Boolean operators. “If you keep going along that wall there’s a room where people hang their coats. If something goes wrong you can pretend you were just heading back there.”

  “I didn’t bring a coat. It’s summer.”

  “Well, think of something else.”

  “An umbrella?” Edward had never seen a day that looked less like rain in his life.

  “If you like. Check your watch. Mine says”—she looked down—“3:47 exactly. The library closes at 5:30. At 5:00, I want you to go up to the front desk and sign us both out at the registry. Then, at 5:05 exactly, I will open the door. You will step through. I will close it after you. If you’re late, I won’t wait.”

  “What if somebody sees me go in?”

  “They’ll probably assume you belong here. Just look like you know what you’re doing.”

  As she talked Edward felt like he should at least pretend to use the computer he was sitting at. His fingers automatically typed the word “blimp,” and the search returned a list of memorabilia from famous dirigibles: the Dixmude, the Shenandoah, the Hindenburg. That last seemed like an omen of disaster. We’re stealing a book from a library, he thought. A very valuable book. I could lose my job over this.

  “Once you’re through the door what you do next is very important, because there are cameras in the stacks. Turn left immediately, walk as far as the corner, and wait for me there.”

  “Okay.”

  A tall man wearing a maroon fez sat down at a terminal opposite from Margaret’s, his long, Peloponnesian face ravaged with deep acne scars.

  “What should I do till then?” said Edward.

  “Try not to be noticed. Consult the reference books. There’s usually an exhibit on the second floor, go look at that. If you get in trouble, remember Steinbeck. I have to go now, they’re waiting for me in the vault.”

  “Fine. Go.”

  She hit a key. A dot matrix printer on a nearby table chattered insanely and spewed out paper. She stood up, tore off the printout, and took it up to the circulation desk where she was swiftly ushered back through a swinging gate and then through a doorway into the stacks.

  This is unwise, Edward thought lucidly. Nothing I could gain by finding the codex could possibly be worth the chance I’m taking

  now. He mentally rephrased and amplified and expanded on this thought in a variety of ways, and in every form it took it seemed equally true, if not truer with every passing second.

  What was he going to do for the next hour and thirteen minutes? He looked around furtively at the lobby of the Chenoweth Annex, feeling lost and abandoned. It was almost empty, and the air had the sterile chill he recognized from his visit to the main branch back in the city. The walls were all paneled in pale blond wood. The ceilings were high and lit with lots of teeny-tiny track lights. There was a row of low, comfortable-looking couches along the glass wall facing the river.

  The exhibit upstairs turned out to be closed for a private function, so he stood up and went over to a bookcase along one wall. The books were all books about books—bibliographies of obscure literary figures, catalogs of long-dispersed scriptoria, histories of printing and publishing and bindings and typefaces. Taking one down at random, Twelve Centuries of European Bookbindings 400–1600, he walked over to one of the couches. He still had the notebook Margaret gave him, and partly to be convincing and partly to relieve the tension he scribbled down some notes on its contents: The Book of the Dead, Le livre de Lancelot du Lac, Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Lindisfarne Gospels....

  A massive double-decker Rothko hung on the wall to his left, balanced by a brown, two-lobed mappamundo on his right. In spite of himself Edward started to relax. There were a few terrifying moments when members of the library staff seemed to be about to say something to him, but none of them ever actually did. He wondered what it would be like to belong here the way Margaret did. Settling back into the overstuffed leather, with the notebook in his lap, he imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile. It wouldn’t have been so bad. A summer breeze silently ruffled the coarse green grass that clung to the steep slope of the valley. After a while he stopped even pretending to read. Down below, the river glittered in the late-afternoon sun; it was only the smoked glass of the window that allowed him to look directly at it. A white powerboat was forcing its way vigorously upstream, bouncing across the water, swell by swell, surging against the current, the sun flashing rhythmically off its wet hull.

  He looked at his watch again. It was almost five. All the panic that had drained away gradually in the past hour came back in one freezing splash. He shot up out of the couch and looked around. He was the only patron left: The room was empty except for staff. An olive-complected young woman walked by pushing a wooden cart with squeaky wheels. She offered to reshelve the book he’d been reading. He let her take it from his numbed fingers.

  Edward sat down again at one of the computer terminals and waited, checking his watch every few seconds. His investor’s mind was intimately familiar with the calculus of risk, and it was urgently flagging this expedition as a very bad one. This wasn’t making poker bets with somebody else’s pin money. This was real life. Sweat prickled on the palms of his hands. The letters on the dusty monitor screen burned a lurid, hallucinatory green. He had to go to the bathroom.

  At 5:03 he stood up and walked to the far end of the room. This was it. The time was now. A random phrase from a poem he’d read in college came back to him involuntarily, like acid reflux: It was no dream. I lay broad waking. He was suddenly preternaturally aware of his peripheral vision—the walls, the furniture, the faces, everything seemed to be jumping wildly in the corners of his eyes.

  He walked parallel to the circulation desk, trying to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead of him. He couldn’t have felt more conspicuous if he were walking a tightrope or doing a series of flying jetés across the room, though in reality he could barely manage even basic bipedal locomotion, because his arms and legs were suddenly stif
f and wooden like a toy soldier’s.

  A crack opened in the wall in front of him. Inside was nothing but intense blackness. It reminded him of something.

  THE AIR WAS COLD. It was pitch dark, and there was an intense smell of damp leather. He could literally see nothing—it was like swimming in a deep sea of oil. He was on the other side. Edward reached out into the darkness and his knuckles clanged painfully against something metal. He turned left, robotically, and started walking, the way Margaret had told him to.

  White light flashed behind his eyes, and he reeled backward. He had smacked face-first into a concrete wall. He sat down backward onto somebody’s feet.

  “Ow!” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Ow!” hissed Margaret.

  He struggled to get up, and the top of his head caught her hard under the chin. He heard her teeth click together.

  “I’m sorry!” he whispered. He put out his hand to reassure her and encountered her breast. He snatched it back.

  A door opened on the other side of what was suddenly a large room. Bright light spilled towards them between rows of tall metal bookcases. Then it closed, and he was blind again.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “They changed it,” she whispered angrily. She rubbed her chin. “I think they changed the layout. Put up new partitions.”

  Edward stood up, more carefully this time. That hadn’t felt like a partition. He rubbed his forehead and leaned against what felt like the end of a bookcase.

  “Are you sure you remembered right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Who was that who opened the door?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Edward’s knuckles and forehead throbbed warmly in the chilly air.

  “It’s cold in here.”

  “‘A sunny pleasure-dome, with caves of ice,’” she said oddly, but her voice was reassuringly calm and even again in the darkness. He reached out his hand and this time found her elbow. He held on to it. Together they listened to muffled conversation from the public area, on the other side of the door, suddenly a world away.