by Ian Caldwell
“He’s gonna piss,” Judas repeats.
From the remaining apostles there arises a sloppy cry of “Jump! Jump!”
Kelly wheels on them. “Shut up, goddamn it! Go get him down!”
Again the man disappears from sight.
“I don’t think he’s from T.I.,” Charlie says with concern. “I think that’s some drunk guy from the Nude Olympics.”
But the man was wearing clothes. I look into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes. This time, the man doesn’t return.
Beside me, the stewed apostles boo.
“Jump!” one of them cries again, but Derek pushes him back and tells him to stay quiet.
“Get the hell out of here,” Kelly orders.
“Easy, girl,” Derek says, and begins rounding up the stray disciples.
Gil watches all of this with the same inscrutable look of amusement he was wearing when the men first arrived. Glancing at his watch, he says, “Well, looks like we’ve sucked all the fun out of thi—”
“Holy shit!” Charlie cries.
His voice nearly drowns out the echo of the second cracking sound. This time I hear the report clearly. It’s a gunshot.
Gil and I turn just in time to see it. The man explodes backward through the glass, and for a matter of seconds he stays frozen in free fall. With a muted thud, his body hits the snow, and the impact sucks all the noise and commotion from the courtyard.
Then there is nothing.
The first thing I remember is the sound of Charlie’s feet as he dashes toward the body in the snow. Then a large crowd follows, converging around the scene, blocking my view.
“Oh, Jesus,” Gil whispers.
Voices in the huddle shout, “Is he okay?” But there’s no sign of movement.
Finally I hear Charlie’s voice. “I need someone to call an ambulance! Tell them we’ve got an unconscious man in the courtyard by the chapel!”
Gil pulls his phone from his pocket, but before he can dial, two campus policemen arrive on the scene. One of them presses through the crowd. The other begins directing the spectators back. For a moment I see Charlie crouched over the man, delivering chest compressions—perfect motions, like pistons stroking. How strange it is, suddenly, to see the trade he plies by night.
“We’ve got an ambulance on the way!”
Faintly, in the distance, I can hear sirens.
My legs begin to shake. I feel the crawling sensation that something dark is passing overhead.
The ambulance arrives. Its rear doors extend open, and two EMTs descend to strap the man into braces and a stretcher. Motion stutters, spectators flickering in and out of view. When the doors swung shut, I can make out the impression where the body landed. The patch of flagstone has an unseemly quality, like a scrape on the flesh of a storybook princess. What I took for mud in the spatter of impact, I begin to see more clearly. Blacks are reds; the dirt is blood. In the office above, there is only darkness.
The ambulance drives off, lights and sirens fading as it shuttles onto Nassau Street. I stare back at the impression. It is misshapen, like a broken snow angel. The wind hisses, and I wrap my arms around my sides. Only when the crowd in the courtyard begins to disperse do I realize that Charlie is gone. He left with the ambulance, and an unpleasant silence has gathered where I expect to hear his voice.
Students are slowly disappearing from the courtyard with hushed voices. “I hope he’s okay,” Gil says, putting a hand on my shoulder.
For a second I think he means Charlie.
“Let’s go home,” he says. “I’ll give you a ride.”
I appreciate the warmth of his hand, but I stand by, just watching. In my mind’s eye the man falls again, colliding with the earth. The sequence fragments, and I can hear the crack of glass breaking, then the gunshot.
My stomach begins to turn.
“Come on,” Gil says. “Let’s get out of here.”
And as the wind picks up again, I agree. Katie disappeared somewhere in the shuffle of the ambulance, and a friend of hers standing nearby tells me that she went back to Holder with her roommates. I decide to call her from home.
Gil places a gentle hand between my shoulders, and guides me toward the Saab that sits in the snow near the auditorium entrance. With that unfailing instinct to know what’s best, he turns up the heat to a comfortable level, adjusts the volume on an old Sinatra ballad until the wind is a memory, and with a little burst of speed that assures me of our impunity before the elements, heads down campus. Everything behind us fades gradually into the snow.
“Did you see the person who fell?” he asks quietly once we’re on our way.
“I couldn’t see anything.”
“You don’t think. . .” Gil shifts forward in his seat.
“Think what?”
“Should we call Paul and make sure he’s okay?”
Gil hands me his cell phone, but there’s no service.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I say, fidgeting with the phone.
We hang in the silence of the cabin for several minutes, trying to drive the possibility out of our minds. Finally Gil forces the conversation elsewhere.
“Tell me about your trip,” he says. I’d flown to Columbus earlier in the week to celebrate finishing my thesis. “How was home?”
We manage a patchy conversation, hopping from topic to topic, trying to stay above the current of our thoughts. I tell him the latest news about my older sisters, one a veterinarian, the other applying for a business degree, and Gil asks about my mother, whose birthday he’s remembered. He tells me that, despite all the time he devoted to planning the ball, his thesis still managed to get written in those last days before the economics department deadline, when I was gone. Gradually we wonder aloud where Charlie has been accepted to medical school, guessing where he intends to go, since these are matters about which Charlie is modestly silent, even to us.
We bear south, and in the murky night the dormitories hunker on either side. News of what happened at the chapel must be spreading through campus, because no pedestrians are visible, and the only other cars sit silently in lots on the shoulder. The drive down to the parking lot, a half mile beyond Dod, feels almost as long as the slow walk back up. Paul is nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 12
There’s an old saw in Frankenstein scholarship that the monster is a metaphor for the novel. Mary Shelley, who was nineteen when she began writing the book, encouraged that interpretation by calling it her hideous progeny, a dead thing with a life of its own. Having lost a child at seventeen, and having caused her own mother’s death in childbirth, she must have known what she meant by it.
For a time I thought Mary Shelley was all my thesis subject had in common with Paul’s: she and the Roman Francesco Colonna (who was only fourteen, some scholars argued, when the Hypnerotomachia was written) made a pretty couple, two teenagers wise beyond their years. To me, in those months before I met Katie, Mary and Francesco were time-crossed lovers, equally young in different ages. To Paul, standing nose to nose with the scholars of my father’s generation, they were an emblem of youth’s power against the obstinate momentum of age.
Oddly enough, it was by arguing that Francesco Colonna was an older man, not a younger one, that Paul made his first headway against the Hypnerotomachia. He’d come to Taft freshman year as a bare novice, and the ogre could smell my father’s influence on him. Though he claimed to have retired from studying the ancient book, Taft was eager to show Paul the foolishness of my father’s theories. Still favoring the notion of a Venetian Colonna, he explained the strongest piece of evidence in favor of the Pretender.
The Hypnerotomachia was published in 1499, Taft said, when the Roman Colonna was forty-five years old; that much was unproblematic. But the final page of the actual story, which Colonna composed himself, states that the book was written in 1467—when my father’s Francesco would only have been fourteen. However unlikely it was that a criminal monk had written the Hypnerotomachia, then
, it was outright impossible for a teenager to have done it.
And so, like the curmudgeonly king inventing new labors for young Hercules, Taft left it to Paul to shoulder the burden of proof. Until his new protégé could shrug off the problem of Colonna’s age, Taft refused to assist any research premised on a Roman author.
It nearly defies explanation, the way Paul refused to buckle under the logic of those facts. He found inspiration not only in Taft’s challenge, but in Taft himself: though he rejected the man’s rigid interpretation of the Hypnerotomachia, he brought the same relentlessness to his sources. Whereas my father had let inspiration and intuition guide him, searching mainly in exotic locales like monasteries and papal libraries, Paul adopted Taft’s more thorough approach. No book was too humble, no location too dull. From top to bottom, he began to scour the Princeton library system. And slowly his early conception of books, like a boy’s conception of water who has lived his whole life by a pond, was dethroned by this sudden exposure to the ocean. Paul’s book collection, the day he left for college, numbered slightly under six hundred. Princeton’s book collection, including more than fifty miles of shelves in Firestone Library alone, numbered well over six million.
The experience daunted Paul at first. The quaint picture my father had painted, of happening across key documents sheerly by accident, was instantly exploded. More painful, I think, was the questioning it forced onto Paul, the introspection and self-doubt that made him wonder if his genius was simply a provincial talent, a dull star in a dark corner of the sky. That upperclassmen in his courses admitted he was far beyond them, and that his professors held him in almost messianic esteem, was nothing to Paul if he couldn’t make headway on the Hypnerotomachia.
Then, during his summer in Italy, all that changed. Paul discovered the work of Italian scholars, whose texts he was able to wade through thanks to four years of Latin. Digging into the definitive Italian biography of the Venetian Pretender, he learned that some elements of the Hypnerotomachia were indebted to a book called Cornucopiae, published in 1489. As a detail in the Pretender’s life, it seemed unimportant—but Paul, coming at the problem with the Roman Francesco in mind, saw much more in it. No matter when Colonna claimed to have written the book, there was now proof that it was composed after 1489. By then, the Roman Francesco would’ve been at least thirty-six, not fourteen. And while Paul couldn’t imagine why Colonna might lie about the year he wrote the Hypnerotomachia, he realized that he’d answered Taft’s challenge. For better or worse, he had entered my father’s world.
What followed was a period of soaring confidence. Armed with four languages (the fifth, English, being useless except for secondary sources) and with an extensive knowledge of Colonna’s life and times, Paul leapt into the text. He gave more and more of each day to the project, taking a stance toward the Hypnerotomachia that I found uncomfortably familiar: the pages were a battleground where he and Colonna would match wits, winner take all. Vincent Taft’s influence, dormant in the months before his trip, had returned. As Paul’s interest slowly took the color of obsession, Taft and Stein became increasingly prominent in his life. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of one man, I think we might’ve lost Paul to them entirely.
That man was Francesco Colonna, and his book was hardly the pushover Paul had hoped. Though Paul flexed his mental muscle, he found that the mountain wouldn’t move. As his progress slowed, and the fall of junior year darkened into winter, Paul became irritable, quick with sharp comments and rude mannerisms he could only have learned from Taft. At Ivy, Gil told me, members began to joke about Paul when he sat alone at the dinner table, surrounded by stacks of books, talking to no one. The more I watched his confidence dwindle, the more I understood something my father had said once: the Hypnerotomachia is a siren, a fetching song on a distant shore, all claws and clutches in person. You court her at your risk.
And so it went. Spring came; coeds in tank tops tossed Frisbees beneath his window; squirrels and blossoms stooped the tree branches; tennis balls echoed in play; and still Paul sat in his room, alone, shade drawn, door locked, with a message on his whiteboard saying DO NOT DISTURB. All that I loved about the new season, he called a distraction—the smells and sounds, the sense of impatience after a long and bookish winter. I knew that I myself was becoming a distraction to him. Everything he told me started to sound like the weather report from a foreign land. I visited him little.
It took a summer alone to change him. In early September of senior year, after three months on an empty campus, he welcomed us all back and helped us move in. He was suddenly open to interruptions, eager to spend time among friends, less fixated on the past. In the opening months of that semester, he and I enjoyed a renaissance in our friendship better than anything I could’ve expected. He shrugged off the onlookers at Ivy who hung on his words, waiting for something outrageous; he spent less time with Taft and Stein; he savored meals and enjoyed walks between classes. He could even see the humor in the way garbage men emptied the Dumpster beneath our window each Tuesday morning at seven o’clock. I thought he was better. More than that: I thought he was reborn.
It was only when Paul came to me in October of senior year, late one night after our last fall midterms, that I understood the other thing our theses had in common: both of our subjects were dead things that refused to stay buried.
“Is there anything that could change your mind about working on the Hypnerotomachia?” Paul asked me that night—and from his tense expression, I knew he’d found something important.
“No,” I told him, half because I meant it, but half to get him to tip his hand.
“I think I made a breakthrough over the summer. But I need your help to understand it.”
“Tell me,” I said.
And however it began for my father, whatever galvanized his curiosity in the Hypnerotomachia, this was how it started for me. What Paul said that night gave Colonna’s long-dead book new life.
“Vincent introduced me to Steven Gelbman from Brown last year when he saw I was getting frustrated,” Paul began. “Gelbman does research with math, cryptography, and religion, all in one. He’s an expert at the mathematical analysis of the Torah. Have you heard of this stuff?”
“Sounds like kabala.”
“Exactly. You don’t just study what the scriptural words say; you study what the numbers say. Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a number assigned to it. Using the order of the letters, you can look for mathematical patterns.
“Well, I was doubtful at the beginning. Even after sitting through ten hours of lectures on the Sephirothic correspondences, I didn’t buy it. It just didn’t seem to relate to Colonna. But by the summer I’d finished the secondary sources on the Hypnerotomachia, and I started working on the book itself. It was impossible. I would try to force an interpretation onto it, and it would throw everything back in my face. As soon as I thought a few pages were moving in one direction, using a certain structure, making a certain point, suddenly the sentence would end, and in the next one everything would change.
“I spent five weeks just trying to understand the first labyrinth Francesco describes. I studied Vitruvius to understand the architectural terms. I looked up every ancient labyrinth I knew—the Egyptian one at the City of Crocodiles, the ones at Lemnos and Clusium and Crete, half a dozen others. Then I realized there were four different labyrinths in the Hypnerotomachia—one in a temple, one in the water, one in a garden, and one underground. As soon as I thought I was beginning to understand one level of complexity, it quadrupled. Poliphilo even gets lost at the beginning of the book and says, My only recourse was to beg the pity of Cretan Ariadne, who gave the thread to Theseus to escape from the difficult labyrinth. It’s like the book understood what it was doing to me.
“Finally I realized the only thing I knew that definitely worked was the acrostic with the first letter of every chapter. So I did what the book told me to do. I begged the pity of Cretan Ariadne, the one person who might be able
to solve the maze.”
“You went back to Gelbman.”
He nodded. “I ate crow. I was desperate. In July, Gelbman let me stay with him in Providence after Vincent insisted I was making progress with the method. He spent the weekend showing me more sophisticated decoding techniques, and that’s when things started to pick up.”
I remember looking out the window beyond Paul’s shoulder as he spoke, sensing that the landscape was changing. We were sitting in our bedroom in Dod, alone on a Friday night; Charlie and Gil were somewhere below our feet, playing paintball in the steam tunnels with a group of friends from Ivy and the EMT squad. The following day I would have a paper to work on, a test to study for. A week later I would meet Katie for the first time. But for that moment, Paul’s hold on my attention was complete.
“The most complicated concept he taught me,” he continued, “was how to decode a book based on algorithms or ciphers from the text itself. In those cases, the key is built right in. You solve for the cipher, like an equation or a set of instructions, then you use the cipher to unlock the text. The book actually interprets itself.”
I smiled. “Sounds like an idea that could bankrupt the English department.”
“I was skeptical too,” Paul said. “But it turns out there’s a long tradition of it. Intellectuals during the Enlightenment used to write entire tracts like that as a game. The texts looked like regular stories, epistolary novels, that kind of thing. But if you knew the right techniques—maybe catching typos that turned out to be intentional, or solving puzzles in the illustrations—you could find the key. Something like ‘Use only primes and perfect squares, and letters every tenth word shares; exclude the words of Lord Kinkaid, and any questions from the maid.’ You would follow the directions, and there would be a message at the end. Most of the time it was a limerick or a dirty joke. But one of these guys actually wrote his will like that. Whoever could decipher it would inherit his estate.”
