by Curtis Hox
Dr. Sterling appeared from the stairwell. Her movement triggered the overhead lights. “You have a minute?”
“Sure.” Masumi closed her laptop.
“Where did you put the laminate?”
In a trashcan.
“I found a fitting place for it.”
“Good,” Dr. Sterling said. “Have you heard from Stephan?”
“We’re in a battle of wills right now. He won’t call again. He wants me to recant, play the part of a modern-day Galileo, continue to believe my heresy but deny it openly.” And then, “I considered this option. My job was in jeopardy, my education. You understand.”
“Of course.”
Masumi rubbed her eyes, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. “One more semester of research and my final Ph.D. project would be done. Dr. Ross is my committee chair, for Christ’s sake. All I have to do is say something like, but I think the apple is part of the hoax, and I’ll be fine. He wouldn’t even mind if I followed Galileo’s false recanting.”
“Oh, right. He accepted the lie that the earth was at rest—”
“Then whispered, and so it moves.”
“You can continue to think the instantiation is real,” Dr. Sterling said, obviously understanding.
“Right. He actually called and asked me if I could be certain of what I saw in your studio.”
“Certainty, huh? What did you tell him?”
“That I could not be certain of anything.”
“Wise.”
Masumi had double-majored as an undergrad in biology and the philosophy of science. Her switch to an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program that blended cognitive and computer science was genius on her part. Biology had been the standard route of choice to medical school. She opted out when she realized she liked fixing computers better than humans. But along the way she’d taken an interest in the love of wisdom. That meant studying the human mind. That meant recognizing its weaknesses.
“After all this time, he doesn’t know how I think,” Masumi said. “To ask me if I was certain is so amateurish.”
“Was he baiting you?”
“He’s heard me critique Descartes’ highly problematic first principle—”
“The cogito.”
“Yes.”
“Go on.” Dr. Sterling sat down.
“Descartes suggested that the world of our senses could be a trick played by a pesky demon,” Masumi said. “He didn’t have the benefit of the computer revolution. I-think-therefore-I-am can also be a construct. My very notion of myself can be false. Every scientist worth her salt understands that no matter how well run the experiment and solid its results, how well-articulated a theory, things can change. Certainty is for literalist theologians and the simple-minded.”
“Stephan asked you for certainty because he knew you couldn’t give it.”
“That’s when I realized my boss is a dogmatist—the worst kind I’ve fought all my life to avoid. He knows this. He’s met my family. I even told him I once broke the heart of a boyfriend with Jehovah’s Witness parents. I turned away from their silly religion, even though it hurt them. Damage was done that could be felt on holidays when his parents went to church and we stayed home. Damage was done when I finally graduated high school early with a full scholarship to the University of Michigan. Damage was done when I finally sat them down and told them how I felt about traditional religion, and its offshoots. His science is blinkered. That’s when I knew I’d apprenticed myself to a man who was just as rigid as any theologian, if immensely more sophisticated.”
“Well, good riddance then.” Dr. Sterling reached out and grabbed her hand. “These are the right feelings, Masumi. We’ll need you in the future. Come to me any time.” She stood. “I’m going to bed. You’ll be coming down?”
“In a little while.”
Dr. Sterling waved goodbye and left.
Masumi heard a noise and glanced up.
High in the galleries, she saw Towns walking between two shelves toward the protective reinforced glass-and-iron railing that allowed you to lean slightly over for a look.
He spotted her and waved.
He’d done this several times already, almost obsessively, as if any time he neared the open space he had to steal a glimpse. She knew his crush grew daily, also knew that she had been a fool to have encouraged it. Masumi assumed he’d get the picture after she gave him the cold shoulder. It was one thing to get drunk and fool around, another thing to get involved. She figured that if she showed interest only in a distant, work-oriented friendship, he’d understand. It hadn’t worked. They both knew he was bordering on open adoration. When she was around, he couldn’t manage to string a sentence together without stumbling over his words. Alice noticed as well. She began to needle him about “older women,” or about “boys trying to be men,” or (this made Masumi chuckle) “rock stars with red hair.”
He disappeared again.
Masumi downloaded a PDF of a course syllabus she taught; then she heard the library’s front door swing open on its sturdy hinges. She assumed either Dr. Brandeis or Dr. Sterling was leaving for some reason.
Instead, she saw a figure standing in the doorway.
Coming, not going.
The center of the atrium sat in a dark pocket even though lights along the galleries flickered on and off as Alice and Towns moved through the upper levels.
Masumi saw a tall, lean man in a beige trench coat—the kind you’d see fluttering up and down Wall St. and Broad. She sat still, realizing he couldn’t see her. She quashed a thought to offer help when she remembered they were here because they might be harassed.
That door should have been locked.
The concern turned to fear when she saw his face.
* * *
The intruder paused because of a disturbing sensation. He couldn’t see into the dark space beyond the two open doorways leaving the vestibule. Instead, he stared at the large sculpture in the round for a moment thinking it might come to life and stomp him into the ground.
The statue was unsettling, but that wasn’t it.
He looked around at the formal interior, realizing that wasn’t it either. He took another step forward and felt his chest constrict, his bowels tighten, and his gonads rise into his pelvis. Sharp pain radiated into his legs, as if his sciatic nerves were attempting to pull themselves upward.
He stood rigid for a moment, trying to breathe. He clutched his belly. A grimace revealed yellow and twisted teeth that should have been fixed in his teens. His tongue lolled in his mouth as he choked, while his eyes bugged. Little lines of red formed as pressure built. He told himself to breathe, even forming the word, but the rising tide that started with his toes and forced its way up meant he’d probably pass out in a few seconds.
He fell backwards.
A bang resounded as he crashed into the door.
He didn’t care if they heard him; he didn’t care if they caught him with his filleting knife. He grasped for the door handle as he felt his mind unwinding. He assumed that’s what it was. Why else would he feel as if he were being torn in two, as if something in him were being sucked away into another place?
A tidal wave of psychic energy blasted his cerebral cortex.
He saw a shape beyond a glimmering sheen, not in the vestibule, no, on a road in a meadow in daylight. The glare cast enough light to allow him to see a hulking horse and armored rider rise up in front of him, a shaft in hand. The fear, though, was something beyond recognition he would die. The knowledge caused him a despair he had never experienced—that he, a thinking human being, was now subjected to this cruelty, to the reduction of his entire being into something about to be cut down.
He shut his eyes, turned the door handle, and yanked. It opened outward, and he fell onto the cool steps. The horror diminished in waves, but not totally, as if the figure still hovered near the doorway, daring him to return.
He vomited, glancing one last time at the antiquated steel-and-wood door.
He
ran from the quad, out of the university, to a car he’d parked on a busy boulevard. He drove to a sports bar in the Heights, telling himself he just wanted a drink.
* * *
According to the bartender, the man later identified as Arnold Perniskie should not have shown another customer his knife or mentioned what he had planned to do with it. The fact tears welled in Mr. Perniskie’s eyes and hysteria inched its way into his voice caused the bartender to reach for a pistol he kept hidden under the bar.
Mr. Perniskie finished his beer, brandished his knife again, and reiterated he’d killed six people with it, the last one a man in Ohio who wouldn’t be missed. He then approached a patron sitting two stools away, raised his arm, and paused when the bartender yelled at him.
The flash from the .357 magnum tungsten-carbide round actually flashed in his eyes, like white-hot fire. The round hit his sternum from arm’s length. It tore through his spine and out his back in a massive hole.
He dropped as if his legs had turned to rubber.
* * *
Masumi found Dr. Sterling alone in her basement office. Small mountains of cardboard boxes filled with books blocked the way to her desk, where she sat reading.
“Why would a man walk into a vestibule,” Masumi asked, “then throw himself backward, scared to death? I nearly jumped out my chair. When he clawed for the door and stumbled out, I thought something dangerous was in there with him. When I looked, it was empty of course. Who was he?”
“I’ll change the locks tomorrow.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Do you really want to know?” Dr. Sterling asked.
Masumi glanced at the bookcase behind the desk. “Yes, I really want to know.”
“Okay, then. Here it is. I’ve spent the last few hours reading through my notebook looking for stitches to keep us protected. My Saint George interpolation is one of the most powerful wards of place that I’ve created. I bet, if you go check, you’ll find a bit of ash in Kant’s palm instead of a laminate.”
“A little bit of plastic made that man run away?”
“No, it’s a bleedover ward, Masumi, of summoning.”
Masumi considered turning around to go check.
“Uh huh. A ward of summoning.”
“Go check.”
“I will.”
“The individual ID cards you carry are inscribed with a variant of my Bastard Buster ward. I found the primary text in a home improvement magazine sent to my institute. I knew instantly it would keep a person safe from bodily harm. It repeats the word safe two hundred and eleven times, in eighteen different languages, with a number of etymological variants a philologist would be proud to investigate. I stitched two other interpolations onto it that describe the type of safety. You know, body and mind.”
“For some reason, I believe you’re not kidding.” Masumi sat in the lone chair, then put her head in her hands. “You ask too much. How can carrying a card with some writing on it, or a picture, or laminates spread around the building keep us safe? How is that any different from centuries of superstitious nonsense where people thumbed rosaries or burned candles before fetishes?”
“Very different. I have a gift for understanding what is happening. I’m convinced we have rational proof, even if we don’t fully understand it yet.”
“He looked like he might die of fright.”
“Saint George is imposing.”
“Please.”
Masumi considered demanding something she could validate. Instead, she allowed herself to stare a bit longer than necessary at the bookcase, almost to say, at some point in the future:
All of this will need a full accounting.
She left the office, then went upstairs to the vestibule. She reached under the book held in Kant’s hand, looking for a laminate. Instead, she retrieved her hand and saw an ashy smudge on her thumb.
“Clever.”
* * *
Eliot returned from patrolling the building.
“It’s secure now,” he said to Hattie, who was still at her desk. “No damage to the door, and it was locked. Someone opened it with a key. That means the intruder got the key from the university. That means we have to change the locks and get a security company in here ASAP.” And then, “I’ll take the first shift. Two hours?”
“Thank you. Security is no problem. I know someone who’s worked for me before.”
“Alice and Towns are sleeping on opposite sides of the atrium.”
“Masumi?”
“In one of the empty offices.”
Hattie before a scratched and stained calfskin-leather folder opened to database printouts organized in several folios. The first bulk of papers contained references to the interpolations she had received over the years—nearly twelve thousand of them.
Eliot saw what she was looking at. “You want to tell me what’s in that notebook of yours, and why you haven’t mentioned the door behind the book shelf?”
She spread out the pages, then sighed, knowing she had to give him something. “It contains references to database entries that separate key interpolations into categories, the largest of which is noise vs. information. In the information category I’ve placed a hundred or so interpolations that resonate.” She hated that word, but she had no alternative that described their ability to call to her.
“Resonate? What, exactly, does that mean?”
She raised a finger. “I also have a handful of functional interpolations that work as enactment elements in a number of combinations. These fall into a variety of classes, like the Red Delicious apple Towns generated. That’s a single interpolation with a single meaning. When I read it, I jumped up and down. It resonated. I just knew it would work.”
She withdrew another page.
“I’ve never shown this to anyone. My page of stitches is my most valuable data. These interpolations function differently, some like wards, others like instantiations. Yes, Eliot, there’s a doorway behind me that we instantiated, but it’s incomplete. The most challenging spinning involves not one combinatory stitch, but a series that form a framework. I need one piece to complete the portal, Eliot, just one. And you’ll see.”
He stared at her as if concerned for her state of mind. “So it’s true: you generated a door, like Alice said, in a concrete wall?”
“Yes.”
“Where does it go?”
Hattie raised a hand to silence him. “Like I said, I’m missing an important element. When I open that door for the first time, my entire N.P.B. metanarrative will be challenged. If it leads where I hope, I’ll be vindicated. If not, I’ll be no wiser than the Lyells, who claim to understand the why and the how, when they do not.” She waved him over. “Come, take a look.”
Eliot rounded the desk.
“These are my most precious stitches,” she said. “I’ve organized them under the headings text, date, class, etc. The most important one, Crossover, currently consists of a single framework of interpolations. The first combination, Portal, has already been used to instantiate the doorway.” She pointed. “See, I’ve marked it: F.G.O. executed. The other three continue the framework. The fourth stitch consists of a few interpolations. I’ll read it to you: your rendered landscape / filled with imagined heroes / who went before and never were but always are / at home in / …”
“I don’t understand. What’s it mean, Hattie?”
“At home, where? None of my interpolations work with it, not the single words, not the phrases, not even complete sentences. I’ve repeatedly looked through them, even scanning the list of ‘noise’ to see if I missed something, which I rarely do. Whenever my eyes fall on a piece of genuine bleedover information, the text throbs in bold, even increases its font size, as if attempting to jump off the page because it wants to be known.”
“You’re telling me Towns incanted another stitch and generated a doorway in that wall?”
“Yes, and I need one piece to finish the framework into the miraculous. Crossove
r, I call it.”
Eliot rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “And the intruder?”
She swallowed her anger. “The Lyells.”
“What will you do?”
Retaliate.
She shook her head. “While I’ve been working in my office so many years, teaching classes, writing books, Corbin and Dreya have been casting their web and ensnaring their army of believers. The force of the Lyells’ fervor might come crashing down on us. The intruder may just be the first instance. But I have a plan.”
She had one hope: to complete the Crossover framework, generate the instantiations, and prove her intuition was correct by taking a journey. If she were correct, she’d know how to handle the Lyells.
If that door led to where she thought, and she could come back with proof …
“What’s your plan, exactly, to make this understandable?” Eliot asked.
“First, the demonstration. Then the doorway and the Society. Then, I’ll explain myself.”
“More waiting. Is that it?”
Hattie picked up her cell phone. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs. I need to call Corbin Lyell.”
* * *
After a tasty late meal of roast duck at an investor’s upscale, hip restaurant, Corbin and Dreya Lyell returned home and waited in their Upper East Side luxury condominium. Their suite occupied two floors on the top story of an exclusive building for the stratospherically rich. The East River and Roosevelt Island lay before them in a silent stretch of darkness.
Neither of them said a word. Both waited like frozen statues in the middle of their living room.
Dreya thumbed the cool, round face of her expensive watch, the rim studded with diamonds.
2 a.m., and no message.
“Perniskie’s handler is never late,” she said. “That means something happened.”
“I’ve used him four times in eight years,” Corbin said. “He has always followed every piece of instruction to the letter. He was to visit the university by 4:30 p.m., locate Hattie Sterling, follow her, and approach her at his convenience.”
They’d both agreed Arnold Perniskie was the best choice because the crime would appear to be a campus murder perpetrated by a mysterious psychopath, probably a student or someone associated with the university. Neither spoke, both contemplating that maybe they should have tried a more conservative approach.
