The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  In the silence I can hear the voices more clearly—rowdy ones; students, not proctors. Dozens of them, moving around our heads.

  Charlie begins to smile. “The Nude Olympics,” he says.

  It dawns on Gil. “We’re right under them.”

  “There’s a manhole in the middle of the courtyard,” I remind them, leaning on the stone wall, trying to catch my breath. “All we have to do is pop the lid, join the pack, and disappear.”

  But from behind me, Paul speaks up in a hoarse voice. “All we have to do is undress, join the pack, and disappear.”

  For a moment there’s silence. It’s Charlie who starts to unbutton his shirt first.

  “Get me out of here,” he says, choking out a laugh as he pulls it off.

  I yank off my jeans; Gil and Paul follow. We begin stuffing our clothes into one of the packs until it’s bulging at the seams.

  “Can you carry all that?” Charlie asks, offering to take both packs again.

  I hesitate. “You know there’ll be proctors out there, right?”

  But by now Gil is beyond doubt. He begins to climb the rungs.

  “Three hundred naked sophomores, Tom. If you can’t make it home with that kind of diversion, you deserve to be caught.”

  And with that, he forces open the cover, letting a gust of freezing air cascade into the tunnel. It rejuvenates Paul like a balm.

  “Okay, boys,” Gil calls down, looking back one more time. “Let’s get this meat to market.”

  My first memory of leaving that tunnel is how bright it suddenly became. Overhead lamps lit the courtyard. Security lights fanned the white earth. Camera flashes pulsed across the sky like fireflies.

  Then comes the rush of cold: the howl of the wind, even louder than the feet stomping and the voices roaring. Flakes melt on my skin like dewdrops.

  Finally I see it. A wall of arms and legs, spinning around us like an endless snake. Faces pop in and out of view—classmates, football players, women who caught my eye crossing campus—but they fade into the abstraction like clips in a collage. Here and there I see strange outfits—top hats and superhero capes, artwork painted across chests of every description—but it all recedes into the great, rolling animal, the Chinatown dragon, moving to hoots and shouts and flashbulb firecrackers.

  “Come on!” Gil shouts.

  Paul and I follow, mesmerized. I’ve forgotten what Holder is like on the night of the first snowfall.

  The great conga line swallows us and for a second I’m lost even to myself, pressed tight against bodies in all directions, trying to keep my balance with a pack on my shoulders and snow underfoot. Someone pushes me from behind and I feel the zipper burst. Before I can shut it, our clothes have spilled out the top. In an instant all of them are gone, trampled in the mud. I look around, hoping Charlie’s behind me to catch what’s left, but he’s nowhere to be seen.

  “Breasts and buttocks, buttocks and breasts,” a young man somewhere is chanting in a cockney accent, as if he were selling flowers on the set of My Fair Lady. Across the way I see a fat junior from my lit seminar sneaking into the crowd of sophomores, belly rocking. He’s wearing nothing but a sandwich board that reads FREE TEST DRIVE on the front and INQUIRE WITHIN on the back. Finally I spot Charlie. He’s already made his way to the other side of the circle, where Will Clay, another member of the EMT squad, is wearing a pith helmet flanked with beer cans. Charlie snags it off the top of his head and the two begin chasing each other through the courtyard until I can’t see them anymore.

  Laughter fades in and out. In the commotion, I feel a hand grab my forearm.

  “Let’s go.”

  Gil yanks me toward the outside of the circle.

  “What now?” Paul says.

  Gil looks around, spotting proctors at every exit.

  “This way,” I tell them.

  We near one of the dorm entrances and duck into Holder Hall. A drunk sophomore opens the door to her room and stands there, confused, as if we’re the ones who are supposed to greet her. She sizes us up, then raises a bottle of Corona in her hand.

  “Cheers.” She belches, then shuts the door just in time for me to see one of her roommates warming up by the fireplace, wearing nothing but a towel.

  “Come on,” I say.

  They follow me up a flight of stairs, where I bang loudly on one of the doors.

  “What are you doi—” Gil begins.

  But before he can finish, the door opens and I’m greeted by a pair of great green eyes. The lips below them open faintly at the sight of me. Katie is dressed in a tight Navy T-shirt and a pair of weathered jeans; her auburn hair is pulled back into a short ponytail. Before letting us in, she bursts out laughing.

  “I knew you’d be here,” I say, rubbing my hands. When I step in and hug her, the embrace is warm and welcome.

  “A birthday suit for my birthday,” she says, looking me up and down. Her eyes are glowing. “So this is why you didn’t call.”

  As Katie backs into the room I see Paul fixated on the camera in her hand, a Pentax with a telephoto lens almost as long as her forearm.

  “What’s that for?” Gil asks when Katie turns to put the camera on a bookshelf.

  “Taking shots for the Prince,” she says. “Maybe they’ll print one this time.”

  This must be why she’s not running. Katie has been trying all year to get a photo on the front page of the Daily Princetonian, but the seniority system has worked against her. Now she’s turned the tables. Only freshmen and sophomores have rooms in Holder, and hers overlooks the entire courtyard.

  “Where’s Charlie?” she asks.

  Gil shrugs, staring down through the window. “Out there playing grab-ass with Will Clay.”

  Katie returns to me, still smiling. “How long did it take you to plan this?”

  I falter.

  “Days,” Gil improvises, when I can’t think of a way to explain that this whole performance wasn’t for her. “Maybe a week.”

  “Impressive,” Katie says. “The weathermen didn’t know it would start snowing until this morning.”

  “Hours,” Gil revises. “Maybe a day.”

  Her eyes never leave me. “So let me guess. You need a change of clothes.”

  “We need three.”

  Katie retreats to her closet and says, “Must be pretty chilly out there. Looks like the cold was starting to get to you guys.”

  Paul looks at her as if she can’t possibly mean what he thinks. “Is there a phone I could use?” he asks, gathering his wits.

  Katie points at a cordless on the desk. I move across the room and press up against her, pushing her into the closet. She tries to shake me off, but when I press too hard, both of us fall onto the rows of shoes, high heels in all the wrong places. It takes a second to untangle ourselves, and I stand up expecting moans from Paul and Gil. But their focus is elsewhere. Paul is in the corner, whispering into the phone, while Gil peers out the window. At first I think Gil’s looking for Charlie. Then I see the proctor in his line of sight, speaking into his radio as he approaches.

  “Hey, Katie,” Gil says, “we don’t need matching outfits here. Anything works.”

  “Relax,” she says, coming back with handfuls of clothing on hangers. She lays out three pairs of sweatpants, two T-shirts, and a blue dress shirt I’ve been missing since March. “It’s the best I can do on short notice.”

  We throw ourselves into them. Suddenly, from the entryway downstairs, the hiss of a hand radio cuts the air. The outside door to the building thuds shut.

  Paul hangs up the phone. “I have to get to the library.”

  “You guys go out the back,” Katie says, voice quickening. “I’ll deal with it.”

  I take her hand as Gil thanks her for the clothes.

  “I’ll see you later?” she says to me, conjuring something in her eyes. It’s a look that always comes with a smile now, because she can’t believe I still fall for it.

  Gil groans and drags me out the door by
my arm. As we duck out of the building, I can hear Katie’s voice calling down to the proctor.

  “Officer! Officer! I need your help. . . .”

  Gil turns back, eyes trained on her room. When he sees the proctor arrive in the crosshairs of Katie’s leaded window, his expression lightens. Before long, as we head into the piercing wind, Holder vanishes behind a curtain of snow. Campus is nearly empty as we descend toward Dod, and any residue of the tunnels’ heat seems to radiate away, washed off in tiny beads of snow that roll from my cheeks. Paul walks slightly ahead of us, keeping a more purposeful pace. The entire time, he doesn’t speak a word.

  Chapter 4

  It was through a book that I met Paul. We probably would’ve met anyway at Firestone Library, or in a study group, or in one of the literature classes we both took freshman year, so maybe there’s nothing special about a book. But when you consider that the one in question was five hundred years old, and that it was the same one my father had been studying before he died, the occasion somehow seems more momentous.

  The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which in Latin means “Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream,” was published around 1499 by a Venetian man named Aldus Manutius. The Hypnerotomachia is an encyclopedia masquerading as a novel, a dissertation on everything from architecture to zoology, written in a style that even a tortoise would find slow. It is the world’s longest book about a man having a dream, and it makes Marcel Proust, who wrote the world’s longest book about a man eating a piece of cake, look like Ernest Hemingway. I would venture to guess that Renaissance readers felt the same way. The Hypnerotomachia was a dinosaur in its own time. Though Aldus was the greatest printer of his day, the Hypnerotomachia is a tangle of plots and characters connected by nothing but its protagonist, an allegorical everyman named Poliphilo. The gist is simple: Poliphilo has a strange dream in which he searches for the woman he loves. But the way it’s told is so complicated that even most Renaissance scholars—the same people who read Plotinus while waiting for the bus—consider the Hypnerotomachia painfully, tediously difficult.

  Most, that is, except my father. He marched through Renaissance historical studies to the beat of his own drum, and when the majority of his colleagues turned their backs on the Hypnerotomachia, he squared it in his sights. He’d been converted to the cause by a professor named Dr. McBee, who taught European history at Princeton. McBee, who died the year before I was born, was a mousy man with elephant ears and small teeth who owed all of his success in the world to an effervescent personality and a canny sense of what made history worthwhile. Though he wasn’t much to look at, the little man stood tall in the world of the academy. Every year his closing lecture on the death of Michelangelo filled the largest auditorium on campus with spectators and left college men wiping their eyes and reaching for their handkerchiefs. Above all, McBee was a champion of the book that everyone else in his field ignored. He believed there was something peculiar about the Hypnerotomachia, possibly something great, and he convinced his students to search for the old book’s true meaning.

  One of them searched even more avidly than McBee could have hoped. My father was an Ohio bookseller’s son, and he arrived on campus the day after his eighteenth birthday, almost fifty years after F. Scott Fitzgerald made it fashionable to be a midwestern boy at Princeton. Much had changed since then. The university was shedding its country club past, and in the spirit of the times, it was falling out of love with tradition. The freshmen of my father’s year were the last class required to attend chapel service on Sundays. The year after he left, women arrived on campus for the first time as students. WPRB, the college radio station, ushered them in to the sound of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” My father liked to say that the spirit of his youth was best captured in Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant, in his mind, was like the Bob Dylan of the 1790s.

  That was my father’s way: to erase the line in history beyond which everything seems stuffy and arcane. Instead of timelines and great men, history to him was ideas and books. He followed McBee’s advice for two more years at Princeton, and after graduating he followed it all the way back west to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. on Renaissance Italy. A year of fellowship work in New York ensued, until Ohio State offered him a tenure-track position teaching quattrocento history, and he leapt at the chance to go home. My mother, an accountant whose tastes ran to Shelley and Blake, took up the bookselling business in Columbus after my grandfather retired, and between the two of them I was raised in the fold of bibliophiles, the way some children are raised in religion.

  At the age of four I was traveling to book conferences with my mother. By six I knew the difference between parchment and vellum better than I knew a Fleer from a Topps. Before my tenth birthday I had handled some half-dozen copies of the printing world’s masterpiece, the Gutenberg Bible. But I can’t even remember a time in my life when I didn’t know which book was the Bible of our own little faith: the Hypnerotomachia.

  “It’s the last great Renaissance mystery, Thomas,” my father would lecture me, the same way McBee must have lectured him. “But no one has come even close to solving it.”

  He was right: no one had. Of course, it wasn’t until decades after the book was published that anyone realized it needed solving. That was when a scholar made a strange discovery. When the first letters of every chapter in the Hypnerotomachia are strung together, they form an acrostic in Latin: Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit, which means “Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia tremendously.” Since Polia was the name of the woman Poliphilo searches for, other scholars finally started to ask who the author of the Hypnerotomachia really was. The book itself doesn’t say, and even Aldus, the printer, never knew. But from that point on, it became common to suppose that the author was an Italian friar named Francesco Colonna. In a small group of professional researchers, particularly those inspired by McBee, it also became common to suppose that the acrostic was only a hint of the secrets that lay within the book. That group’s quest was to discover the rest.

  My father’s claim to fame in all this was a document he found during the summer I turned fifteen. That year—the year before the car accident—he brought me with him on a research trip to a monastery in southern Germany, then later to the Vatican libraries. We were sharing an Italian studio apartment with two rollaway beds and a prehistoric stereo system, and each morning for five weeks, with the precision of a medieval punishment, he chose a new Corelli masterwork from the compilations he’d brought, then woke me to the sound of violins and harpsichords at exactly half-past seven, reminding me that research waited for no man.

  I would rise to find him shaving over the sink, or ironing his shirts, or counting the bills in his wallet, always humming along with the recording. Short as he was, he tended to every inch of his appearance, plucking strands of gray from his thick brown hair the way florists cull limp petals from roses. There was an internal vitality he was trying to preserve, a vivaciousness he thought was diminished by the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, by the thinking man’s wrinkles across his forehead, and whenever my imagination was dulled by the endless shelves of books where we spent our days, he was always quick to sympathize. At lunchtime we would take to the streets for fresh pastries and gelato; every evening he would bring me into town for sight-seeing. One night in Rome, he led me on a tour of the city’s fountains, telling me to toss a lucky penny into each one.

  “One for Sarah and Kristen,” he said at the Barcaccia. “To help mend their broken hearts.”

  My sisters had each been in a painful breakup just before we left. My father, who never took much to their boyfriends, considered it a blessing in disguise.

  “One for your mother,” he said at the Fontana del Tritone. “For putting up with me.”

  When my father’s request for university funding had fallen through, my mother kept the bookstore open on Sundays to help pay for our trip.

  “And one for us,” he said at the Quatt
ro Fiumi. “May we find what we’re looking for.”

  What we were looking for, I never really knew—at least, not until we stumbled onto it. All I knew was that my father believed scholarship on the Hypnerotomachia had reached a dead end, mainly because everyone was missing the forest for the trees. Thumping his fist on the dinner table, he would insist that the scholars who disagreed with him had their heads in the sand. The book itself was too difficult to understand from within, he said; a better approach was to search for documents that hinted at who the author really was, and why he’d written it.

  In reality, my father alienated many people with his narrow vision of the truth. If it hadn’t been for the discovery we made that summer, my family might soon have found itself relying entirely on the bookstore for its livelihood. Instead, Lady Fortune smiled on my father, hardly a year before she took his life.

  On the third-floor branch of one of the Vatican libraries, in a recessed aisle of bookshelves that even the monkish dusters had not dusted, as we stood back-to-back searching for the clue he’d been pursuing for years, my father found a letter inserted between the pages of a thick family history. Dated two years before the Hypnerotomachia was published, it was addressed to a confessor at a local church, and it told the story of a high-ranking Roman scion. His name was Francesco Colonna.

  It’s difficult to re-create my father’s excitement when he saw the name. The wire-frame glasses he wore, which slunk down his nose the longer he read, magnified his eyes just enough to make them the measure of his curiosity, the first and last thing most people ever remembered about him. At that moment, as he sized up what he’d found, all the light in the room seemed to converge inside those eyes. The letter he held was written in a clumsy hand, in broken Tuscan, as if by a man who was not accustomed to that language, or to the act of writing. It rambled on and on, sometimes directed at no one in particular, sometimes directed at God. The author apologized for not writing in Latin or in Greek, which were unknown to him. Then, at last, he apologized for what he had done.