The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  What do a blind beetle, a night-owl, and a twist-beaked eagle share? Horned beetles are hung around the necks of infants as a remedy against disease, Pliny wrote; gold beetles make a poisonous honey, and are unable to survive in a locality near Thrace called Cantharolethus; black beetles congregate in dark corners, and are found mostly in baths. But blind beetles?

  I found more time by not walking out to Cloister for meals: every round trip to Prospect Avenue cost me half an hour, and eating in company, rather than alone, probably cost another half as well. I stopped working in the President’s Room at Ivy, both to avoid seeing Paul and to save the minutes I would otherwise have spent in transit. I kept phone calls to a minimum, shaved and showered only as necessary, let Charlie and Gil answer the door, and made a science of the economies I could produce by giving up the humble reliables of my life.

  What do a blind beetle, a night-owl, and a twist-beaked eagle share? Of creatures that can fly and are bloodless, Aristotle wrote, some are coleopterous or sheath-winged, like the beetle; of birds that fly by night, some have crooked talons, such as the night-raven and owl; and in old age the upper beak of the eagle grows gradually longer and more crooked, such that the bird slowly dies of starvation. But what do the three of them share?

  Katie, I’d decided, was a lost cause. Whatever she’d been to me, she became someone else for Donald Morgan. How I saw so much of them, when I left my room so little, must’ve had its answer in my thoughts and dreams, where they were constantly making fools of themselves. In corners and alleys, in shadows and clouds, there they were: holding hands and kissing and making sweet talk, all of it for my benefit, flaunting the way a shallow heart is quickly broken but just as quickly fixed. There was a black bra of Katie’s that she’d left in my room long ago, which I’d never remembered to return, and it became a sort of trophy to me, a symbol of the part of herself she’d left behind, which Donald couldn’t have. I had visions of her standing naked in my bedroom, souvenirs of the day we’d enjoyed our own company so much that she forgot herself around me, forgot that I was someone else, and let her inhibitions go. Every detail of her shape stayed with me, every freckle on her back, every gradation of shadow beneath her breasts. She danced to the music that came over my alarm clock, running one hand through her hair, keeping one hand over the invisible microphone in front of her mouth, and I was the only audience.

  What do a blind beetle, a night-owl, and a twist-beaked eagle share? They all fly—but Pliny says that beetles sometimes burrow. They all breathe—but Aristotle says that insects do not inhale. They never learn from their mistakes, for Aristotle says that many animals have memory . . . but no other creature except man can recall the past at will. But even men fail to learn from the past. By that yardstick, we are all of us blind beetles and night-owls.

  On Thursday, the fourth of March, I reached the high-water mark of my time with the Hypnerotomachia. That day I spent fourteen hours rereading sections of six Renaissance natural historians and making twenty-one single-space pages of notes. I went to no classes, ate all three meals at my desk, and slept exactly three and a half hours that night. I hadn’t seen Frankenstein in weeks. The only other thoughts that had crossed my mind were of Katie, and those just compelled me to make an even greater shambles of my life. The sheer mastery of myself was addictive. Something must’ve been, because I’d made almost no progress on the riddle.

  “Shut the books,” Charlie finally said that Friday night, taking a stand. He pulled me by the collar in front of a mirror. “Look at yourself.”

  “I’m fine—” I began, ignoring the lupine thing that stared back at me, all red eyes and pink nose and scruff.

  But Gil stood at Charlie’s side. “Tom, you look like hell.” He stepped into the bedroom, something he hadn’t done in weeks. “Listen, she wants to talk to you. Stop being so stubborn.”

  “I’m not being stubborn. I’ve just got other things to do.”

  Charlie grimaced. “Like what, Paul’s thesis?”

  I scowled, waiting for Paul to stand up for me. But he just stood there behind them, silent. For more than a week he’d hoped that an answer was just around the bend, that I was making progress against the riddle, just painful progress.

  “We’re going to the arch sing at Blair,” Gil said, meaning the Friday a cappella concert held outdoors.

  “All four of us,” Charlie added.

  Gil gently closed the book beside me. “Katie’s going to be there. I told her you’d come.”

  But when I flipped the book back open and said I wasn’t going, I remember the look that crossed his face. It was one Gil had never given me before—one he’d always reserved for Parker Hassett and the occasional class clown who didn’t know when to stop.

  “You’re coming,” Charlie said, stepping toward me.

  But Gil waved him off. “Forget it. Let’s just go.”

  Then I was alone.

  It wasn’t stubbornness or pride, or even devotion to Colonna, that kept me away from Blair Arch. It was heartache, I think, and defeat. The fact is that I loved Katie, and also, in an odd way, that I loved the Hypnerotomachia, and that I’d failed to win either of them. The look on Paul’s face as he left meant he knew I’d lost my chance with the riddle, whether I knew it or not; and the look on Gil’s face as he left meant he knew I’d done the same with Katie. Staring at a group of woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia—the same ones Taft would use in his lecture a month later, the ones of Cupid driving women into a forest on a burning chariot—I thought of Carracci’s engraving. Here I was, being pummeled by the little boy as my two loves looked on. This was what my father meant, the lesson he’d hoped I would learn. Our hardships cannot move him. Love conquers all.

  The two hardest things to contemplate in life, Richard Curry once told Paul, are failure and age; and those are one and the same. Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It’s simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

  But love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It’s a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world’s ages. What’s a monkey to think, who with a typewriter and eternity still can’t eke out Shakespeare? To hear Katie say that she wanted to make it final, that she and I were finished, would stunt all my sense of possibility. To watch her there, beneath Blair Arch, warming herself in Donald Morgan’s arms, would strip the pearls and diamonds from my future.

  And then it happened: just as I’d reached the full bloom of self-pity, a knock came at the door. It was followed by a turning of the knob, and the same way it had happened a hundred times before, Katie let herself in. Beneath her coat I could see she was wearing my favorite of her sweaters, the emerald-colored one that matched her eyes.

  “You’re supposed to be at the arch sing” was the first thing I managed to say, and of all the monkey-written combinations, it was probably the worst.

  “So are you,” she said, staring me up and down.

  I knew how I must look to her. The wolf Charlie had shown me in the mirror was the one Katie saw now.

  “Why are you here?” I said, glancing at the door.

  “They’re not coming.” She forced herself back into my focus. “I’m here so you can apologize.”

  For a second I thought Gil had put her up to this, inventing something about how bad I felt, how I just didn’t know what to say. But another glance told me otherwise. She knew I had no intention of saying I was sorry.

  “Well?”

  “You think this is my fault?” I asked.

  “Everyone does.”

  “What everyone?”

  “Do it, Tom. Apologize.”

  Arguing with her was only making me angrier with myself.

  “Fine. I love you. I wish things had worked out. I’m sorry
they didn’t.”

  “If you wish things had worked out, why didn’t you do anything?”

  “Look at me,” I told her. The four-day beard, the unkempt hair. “This is what I did.”

  “You did that for the book.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “I’m the same as the book?”

  “Yes.”

  She glared at me as if I’d dug myself a hole. But she knew what I was about to say; she’d just never accepted it.

  “My father spent his life on the Hypnerotomachia,” I told her. “I’ve never felt more excited than when I’m working on it. I lose sleep over it, I don’t eat because of it, I have dreams about it.” I found myself looking around, searching for words. “I don’t know how else to say it. It’s like going to the battlefield to see your tree. Being near it makes me feel like everything’s right, like I’m not lost anymore.” I kept my eyes away from her. “So are you the same as the book to me? Yes. Of course you are. You’re the only thing that’s the same as the book to me.”

  I made a mistake. I thought I could have you both. I was wrong.

  “Why am I here, Tom?”

  “To rub it in.”

  “Why?”

  “To make me apologi—”

  “Tom.” She stopped me with a look. “Why am I here?”

  Because you feel the same way I do.

  Yes.

  Because this was too important to leave it up to me.

  Yes.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I want you to stop working on the book.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all? That’s all?”

  Now, suddenly, emotion.

  “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you because you gave up on us to act like a slob and live in that book? You ass, I spent four days with my shades down and my door locked. Karen called my parents. My mom flew down from New Hampshire.”

  “I’m sor—”

  “Shut up. It isn’t your turn to talk. I went out to the battlefield to see my tree, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t, because now it’s our tree. I can’t listen to music, because every song is something we sang in the car, or in my room, or in here. It takes me an hour to get ready for class, because I feel like I’m dazed half the time. I can’t find my socks, I can’t find my favorite black bra. Donald’s always asking me, ‘Honey, what’s wrong, Honey, what’s wrong?’ Nothing’s wrong, Donald.” She pushed her wrists into her cuffs and blotted her eyes.

  “That’s not wh—” I began again.

  But it still wasn’t my turn.

  “At least with Peter I could understand. We weren’t perfect together. He loved lacrosse more than he loved me; I knew that. He wanted to get me in bed, and after that he lost interest.” She moved a hand through her hair, trying to push away the bangs that had gotten snarled in tears. “But you. I fought for you. I waited a month before I let you kiss me the first time. I cried the night after we slept together, because I thought I was going to lose you.” She stopped, galled by the thought. “And now I’m losing you to a book. A book. At least tell me it’s not what I think, Tom. Tell me you’ve been seeing a senior on the side all this time. Tell me it’s because she doesn’t do all the stupid things I do, she doesn’t dance naked in front of you like some kind of idiot because she thinks you enjoy her singing, or wake you up at 6 A.M. to go running because she wants to make sure, every single morning, that you’re still there. Tell me something.”

  She looked up at me, broken in a way that I know ashamed her, and I could only think of one thing. There was a night, not long after the accident, when I accused my mother of not caring for my father. If you loved him, I said to her, you would’ve supported his work. The look that crossed her face, which I can’t begin to describe, told me there was nothing more shameful in the world than what I had just said.

  “I love you,” I told Katie, stepping toward her so that she could press her face into my shirt and be invisible for a moment. “I’m so sorry.”

  And that was the moment, I think, when the tide began to change. My terminal condition, the love affair I thought was in my genes, slowly started to lose its grip on me. The triangle was collapsing. In its place stood a pair of points, a binary star, separated by the smallest possible distance.

  A jumble of silences followed, all the things she needed to say but knew she shouldn’t have to, all the things I wanted to say but didn’t know how to.

  “I’ll tell Paul,” I said, the best and most truthful thing I could, “I’m going to stop working on the book.”

  Redemption. The realization that I wasn’t putting up a fight, that I’d finally figured out what was best for my own happiness, was enough to make Katie do something I think she was saving for much later, after I was back on the wagon for sure. She kissed me. And that moment of contact, like the lightning that gave the monster his second shot at life, created a new beginning.

  I didn’t see Paul that night; I spent it with Katie and ended up telling him my decision the next day at Dod. He, too, seemed unsurprised. I’d been suffering so much with Colonna that he sensed I might throw in the towel at the first sign of relief. He’d been persuaded by Gil and Charlie that it was the best thing anyway, and somehow he didn’t hold it against me. Maybe he guessed I’d be back. Maybe he’d come far enough to think he could finish the riddles alone. Whatever it was, when I finally told him my reasoning—the lesson of Jenny Harlow and Carracci’s engraving—he seemed to agree. I could tell from his expression that he knew more about Carracci than I did, but he never once corrected me. Paul, who had more reasons than anyone to believe that some interpretations are better than others, and that the right ones make all the difference, was generous about my spin on things, the same way he’d always been. It was more than his way of showing respect, I think; it was his way of showing friendship.

  “It’s better to love something that can love you back,” he told me.

  It was the only thing he needed to say.

  What began as Paul’s thesis, then, became Paul’s thesis once more. At first, it looked as if he might pull it off alone. The fourth riddle, which had taken a whip to me, came to him in three days. I suspect he’d had the idea all along, but kept it from me because he knew I wouldn’t take his advice. The answer was in a book called the Hieroglyphica, by a man named Horapollo, which turned up in Renaissance Italy in the 1420s, purporting to solve the ages-old problem of interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics. Horapollo, taken by humanists to be some kind of ancient Egyptian sage, was in fact a fifth-century scholar who wrote in Greek and probably didn’t know much more about hieroglyphics than Eskimos know about summer. Some of the symbols in his Hieroglyphica involve animals that aren’t even Egyptian. Still, amidst the humanist fervor over new knowledge, the text became wildly popular, at least in the small circles where wild popularity and dead languages weren’t mutually exclusive.

  The night-owl, according to Horapollo, is a symbol of death, for the night-owl suddenly descends upon the young of the crow in the night, as death comes upon a man suddenly. An eagle with a twisted beak, Horapollo wrote, signifies an old man dying of hunger, for when the eagle grows old, he twists his beak and dies of hunger. The blind beetle, finally, is a glyph that means a man has died from sunstroke, for a beetle dies when blinded by the sun. Cryptic as Horapollo’s reasoning was, Paul knew immediately that he’d fixed on the right source. And he saw very quickly what the three animals had in common: death. Applying the Latin word for it, mors, as his cipher, he produced Colonna’s fourth message.

  You who have come so far are joined by the philosophers of my day, who in your time are perhaps the dust of ages, but who in mine were the giants of mankind. I am soon to put upon you the burden of what remains, for there is much to tell and I grow fearful that my secret is too easily spread. But first, out of deference to your accomplishment, I will offer you the beginnings of my story, so that you will know I have not led you this far in vain.

 
; There is a preacher in the land of my brethren who has brought a great pestilence upon the lovers of knowledge. We have battled him with all our wit and influence, but this single man raises our countrymen against us. He thunders in the squares and from the pulpits, and the common men of all nations take up arms to do us harm. Just as God, out of jealousy, brought to nothing the tower in the plain of Shinar, which men built toward the heavens, so He raises His fist against us, who attempt the very same. I did long ago hope that men wished to be delivered from ignorance, just as slaves wish to be freed from bondage. It is a condition unbecoming our dignity, and contrary to our nature. Yet I find now that the race of men is a cowardly thing, a perversion like the owl of my riddle, which though it might enjoy sunlight, prefers darkness. You will hear no more of me, reader, upon the completion of my crypt. To be a prince to such people as this, is to be a castled kind of beggar. This book will be my only child; may it live long, and serve you well.

  Paul hardly paused to contemplate it; he pushed on to the fifth and final riddle, which he’d found while I struggled with the fourth: Where do blood and spirit meet?

  “It’s the oldest philosophical question in the book,” he told me, while I puttered around the room, preparing for a night with Katie.

  “What is?”

  “The intersection of mind and body, the flesh-spirit duality. You see it in Augustine, in contra Manichaeos. You see it in modern philosophy. Descartes thought he could pinpoint the soul somewhere near the pineal gland in the brain.”

  He continued that way, paging through a book from Firestone and sputtering philosophy, while I packed.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, pulling my copy of Paradise Lost off the shelf to bring with me.

  “Galen,” Paul said.

  “Who?”

  “The second father of western medicine, after Hippocrates.”

  I remembered. Charlie had studied Galen in a history of science class. By Renaissance standards, though, Galen was no spring chick: he died thirteen hundred years before the Hypnerotomachia was published.