The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  “Take the money,” Gil says, never taking his eyes off Audrey Hepburn.

  Gil is a banker’s son from Manhattan. Princeton has never been a destination for him, just a window seat with a view, a stopover on the way to Wall Street. He is a caricature of himself in that respect, and he manages a smile whenever we give him a hard time about it. He’ll be smiling all the way to the bank, we know; even Charlie, who’s sure to make a small fortune as a doctor, won’t hold a candle to the kind of paychecks Gil will see.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Paul says from the other side of the room. “Follow your heart.”

  I look up, surprised that he’s aware of anything but his thesis.

  “Follow the money,” Gil says, standing up to get a bottle of water from the refrigerator.

  “What’d they offer?” Charlie asks, ignoring the magnets for a second.

  “Forty-one,” Gil guesses, and a few Elizabethan words tumble from the fridge as he closes it. “Bonus of five. Plus options.”

  Spring semester is job season, and 1999 is a buyer’s market. Forty-one thousand dollars a year is roughly double what I expected to be earning with my lowly English degree, but compared to some of the deals I’ve seen classmates make, you’d think it was barely getting by.

  I pick up the letter from Daedalus, an Internet firm in Austin that claims to have developed the world’s most advanced software for streamlining the corporate back office. I know almost nothing about the company, let alone what a back office is, but a friend down the hall suggested I interview with them, and as rumors circulated about high starting salaries at this unknown Texas start-up, I went. Daedalus, following the general trend, didn’t care that I knew nothing about them or their business. If I could just solve a few brainteasers at an interview, and seem reasonably articulate and friendly in the process, the job was mine. Thus, in good Caesarian fashion, I could, I did, and it was.

  “Close,” I say, reading from the letter. “Forty-three thousand a year. Signing bonus of three thousand. Fifteen hundred options.”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree,” Paul adds from across the room. He’s the only one acting like it’s dirtier to talk about money than it is to touch it. “Vanity of vanities.”

  Charlie is shifting the magnets again. In a fulminating baritone he imitates the preacher at his church, a tiny black man from Georgia who just finished his degree at the Princeton Theological Seminary. “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”

  “Be honest with yourself, Tom,” Paul says impatiently, though he never makes eye contact. “Any company that thinks you deserve a salary like that isn’t going to be around for long. You don’t even know what they do.” He returns to his notebook, scribbling away. Like most prophets, he is fated to be ignored.

  Gil keeps his focus on the television, but Charlie looks up, hearing the edge in Paul’s voice. He rubs a hand along the stubble on his chin, then says, “All right, everybody stop. I think it’s time to let off some steam.”

  For the first time, Gil turns away from the movie. He must hear what I hear: the faint emphasis on the word steam.

  “Right now?” I ask.

  Gil looks at his watch, taking to the idea. “We’d be clear for about half an hour,” he says, and in a show of support he even turns off the television, letting Audrey fizzle into the tube.

  Charlie flips his Fitzgerald shut, mischief stirring. The broken spine springs open in protest, but he tosses the book onto the couch.

  “I’m working,” Paul objects. “I need to finish this.”

  He glances at me oddly.

  “What?” I ask.

  But Paul remains silent.

  “What’s the problem, girls?” Charlie says impatiently.

  “It’s still snowing out there,” I remind everyone.

  The first snowstorm of the year came howling into town today, just when spring seemed perched on the tip of every tree branch. Now there are calls for a foot of accumulation, maybe more. The Easter weekend festivities on campus, which this year include a Good Friday lecture by Paul’s thesis advisor, Vincent Taft, have been reorganized. This is hardly the weather for what Charlie has in mind.

  “You don’t have to meet Curry until 8:30, right?” Gil asks Paul, trying to convince him. “We’ll be done by then. You can work more tonight.”

  Richard Curry, an eccentric former friend of my father’s and Taft’s, has been a mentor of Paul’s since freshman year. He has put Paul in touch with some of the most prominent art historians in the world, and has funded much of Paul’s research on the Hypnerotomachia.

  Paul weighs his notebook in his hand. Just looking at it, the fatigue returns to his eyes.

  Charlie senses that he’s coming around. “We’ll be done by 7:45,” he says.

  “What are the teams?” Gil asks.

  Charlie thinks it over, then says, “Tom’s with me.”

  The game we’re about to play is a new spin on an old favorite: a fast-paced match of paintball in a maze of steam tunnels below campus. Down there, rats are more common than lightbulbs, the temperature hits three digits in the dead of winter, and the terrain is so dangerous that even the campus police are forbidden to give chase. Charlie and Gil came up with the idea during an exam period sophomore year, inspired by an old map Gil and Paul found at their eating club, and by a game Gil’s father used to play in the tunnels with his friends as seniors.

  The newer version gained popularity until nearly a dozen members of Ivy and most of Charlie’s friends from his EMT squad were in on it. It seemed to surprise them when Paul became one of the game’s best navigators; only the four of us understood it, knowing how often Paul used the tunnels to get to and from Ivy on his own. But gradually Paul’s interest in the game waned. It frustrated him that no one else saw the strategic possibilities of it, the tactical ballet. He wasn’t there when an errant shot punctured a steam pipe during a big midwinter match; the explosion stripped plastic safety casings off live power lines for ten feet in either direction, and might’ve cooked two half-drunk juniors, had Charlie not pulled them out of the way. The proctors, Princeton’s campus police, caught on, and within days the dean had rained down a spate of punishments. In the aftermath, Charlie replaced paint guns and pellets with something faster but less risky: an old set of laser-tag guns he picked up at a yard sale. Still, as graduation approaches, the administration has imposed a zero-tolerance policy on disciplinary infractions. Getting caught in the tunnels tonight could mean suspension or worse.

  Charlie sidesteps into the bedroom he shares with Gil and pulls out a large hiking pack, then another, which he hands to me. Finally he pulls on his hat.

  “Jesus, Charlie,” Gil says. “We’re only going down there for half an hour. I packed less for spring break.”

  “Be prepared,” Charlie says, hitching the larger of the two packs over his shoulders. “That’s what I say.”

  “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 o
n 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.