Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  She knew I was there, watching her. Yet she was unconcerned. The next wake, she did the same thing at a different mall. The third time, another.

  There was no way Martha spent her Neverworld wandering malls. She was doing that because she knew I was following her. She seemed to be banking on my eventually growing bored and moving on.

  So I did. I stopped. Instead, I devoted the next few wakes—or was it a few thousand?—to figuring out how to follow her unseen.

  And so began my illustrious career in grand theft auto.

  * * *

  —

  I was a panicky and apologetic thief.

  Hundreds of times I was caught red-handed.

  “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my garage?”

  “Hi. Sorry.”

  Thankfully—probably because there was something intrinsically sad about me, which could only be blamed on the Neverworld—everyone let me off the hook.

  The only car I could steal without getting caught was a rusted white van emblazoned with the words MCKENDRICK PEST CONTROL.

  It belonged to the McKendricks, a hyper militia-family of seven living in a modest ranch house four doors down from Wincroft. All seven McKendricks were always home, so to get my hands on the keys was the closing act of Cirque du Soleil.

  It took me forever to get it right.

  One: hide in rhododendrons outside the kitchen, waiting for Bud McKendrick to wander into the living room for his Camel Lights. Two: dart into the kitchen pantry, trying not to trip on the bags of Healthy Weight cat food or the Macaroni and Cheese Storage Bucket with Gamma Lid from Target. Three: wait for Pete McKendrick to grab a Kit-Kat and head to the basement to watch The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Bud to go upstairs for a nap, and Gerry and Paul, the twins, to go play soccer in the front yard in the rain. Four: slip into the den, scaring Tupac, the cat, who jumps six feet into the air and climbs the curtains. Five: snatch the car keys off the table and duck behind the sofa as Laurel McKendrick takes forty dollars from her husband’s wallet. “Heading to the store!” Six: run back into kitchen and try to avoid four-year-old Kendall McKendrick.

  “Who are you?” she asked me, eyes wide in surprise.

  There was no avoiding Kendall. No matter what, she always caught me.

  It was the most incendiary moment of all: finding the perfect recipe of words that would stop her from wailing like a smoke alarm. I had tried everything. Nothing worked.

  “I’m an angel.”

  “I work for the tooth fairy.”

  “I’m the Elf on the Shelf, and I need to borrow your daddy’s truck.”

  How many times had I expertly trapezed my way through the McKendricks’, only to crash to the ground, thanks to Kendall yelling her head off, prompting every McKendrick to descend on me.

  “Dad! Dad!”

  I’d run for my life as the McKendricks—all with variations on the same bulldog marine face—swarmed their front yard.

  “Stop! Burglar!” they shouted through the rain.

  “Dad, you’re letting her get away!”

  Good old Bud McKendrick never called the police. Probably because after five kids, it took more than some teenage housebreaker to rattle him. Frowning quizzically after me from the porch, more than a little blasé, he always let me go.

  Finally there came the wake when I told Kendall the truth.

  “My name is Beatrice Hartley. I’m trapped between life and death in a place called a Neverworld. I’m trying to make it out of here, and to make a long story short, I need you to be quiet and go watch cartoons with your brothers. Now.”

  She nodded mutely and padded downstairs.

  Light-headed with amazement, I snatched Bud’s Rams baseball cap off a chair, grabbed his Oakley sunglasses, unlatched the door to the detached garage, and ran out. I pulled on Bud’s coveralls, hat, sunglasses, climbed behind the wheel of the van. Starting the engine, I was just wondering how in the world I was going to drive past the twins playing soccer, when Paul punted the ball into a neighbor’s yard. I inched down the drive, turned right, pulled into another drive a few houses down, my heart hammering.

  A minute later Martha drove past me.

  I followed her Honda Accord all the way to Providence, to Brown University, to the third floor of a redbrick building on Thayer Street, to a corner office.

  ARNOLD BELORODA, PH.D. read the brass plaque on the door.

  I watched Martha knock. A male voice answered “Yes?” and she entered. I heard her say hi as the door closed, and though I slipped closer in the crowded hallway, straining to hear the muffled voices inside, I couldn’t make out any more.

  I Googled the name. Arnold Winwood Beloroda. He was an award-winning psychiatrist and professor emeritus specializing in group dynamic theory. He taught a host of classes at Brown. Making Ethical Decisions: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly. The Psychology of Manipulation and Consent. The Fantasy of Free Will. A senior seminar, Laboratory for Experiments in Social Persuasion. He had published thirteen nonfiction books, winning a slew of awards for one from the nineties, Heroes and Villains. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was about “the master-slave dynamics of concentration camps” and other situations in which “a large populace allows themselves to be controlled by a select few.”

  I scanned Beloroda’s articles in the Harvard Review, the Economist, and Scientific American. What was so compelling about him? What was so critical that Martha had gone to such lengths to hide him?

  Then it hit me. It felt like a pair of hands had begun to squeeze my neck.

  While the rest of us had been wasting time warring against the reality of our circumstances, Martha had been using the Neverworld’s infinity to study.

  Beloroda had been teaching her how to manipulate the group so we would choose her.

  She was figuring out how to win.

  I tailed Martha over and over again. Every time, she drove to Brown’s Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences building. Every time, she visited Beloroda. They remained holed up in his office for three, four hours. Clearly she’d figured out a way to hook him, captivate him with some high-level question about group dynamics or a detail mined from his own papers that served as the magic key to Open Sesame the close connection, the meeting of like minds. When they finally emerged, Beloroda—an elfin man with a turned-up nose and an overmanicured inky beard like a Rorschach test—was beaming at Martha (now hauling a pile of textbooks he’d given her, as well as a legal pad covered with notes), bewitched by the sudden appearance of such an engaging new student.

  Sharing an umbrella, they always strolled outside, deep in conversation, and chatted for another twenty minutes on the sidewalk. Once I crept behind them, hiding in an alcove where a few students were smoking under the awning.

  “You’re absolutely correct,” said Beloroda. “But here I would cite the philosophy of M. Scott Peck. In all groups there are four stages. Pseudocommunity. Chaos. Emptiness. And true community.”

  “Could you tell me more about the Milgram experiment?”

  “Ah. The blind obedience to authority figures.” Beloroda chuckled. “There’s nothing I’d like more, but I’m afraid I’m due to join my wife at a party. How about we resume this conversation tomorrow after my Group Cohesion lecture?”

  He was unlocking his car, climbing in.

  “It was a delight to meet you, Miss Peters. Until tomorrow?”

  He drove off. Martha stared after him, her affable smile abruptly falling from her face as she pulled up her hood and took off. She sat for the next few hours in a window booth at Greek Taverna, poring over the books, taking notes. When the diner closed, she moved to her Honda and read in there, seat reclined, overhead light on.

  The longer I watched from the darkness of the park across the street, the more I felt a choking anxiousness and fear, as if the
Neverworld were closing in on me.

  Martha was brilliant. Martha understood. She was light-years ahead of the rest of us. She had summarily accepted the crushing reality of the Neverworld, and rather than fighting it, she had dedicated her time to figuring out how to master it.

  I wanted to live, didn’t I? I wanted to be chosen. Yet, staring at the pale light inside Martha’s car, fighting back tears, I sensed I was too late, that I’d already lost.

  My gaze suddenly fell on a dark figure pushing a wheelbarrow toward me down the path through the park. It was heaped with black compost.

  I should have been used to the Keeper’s presence by now. I should have ignored how no matter where I went, however near or far, when I least expected it, he would come to me like a terrifying thought, the Neverworld’s omnipresent alarm, its memento, its tolling bell.

  The vote. The vote. The vote.

  The temperature had dropped. The rain was turning to snow again.

  I sprinted to the McKendrick van, climbed in, and took off, swerving into the road so wildly I almost hit a streetlamp. The Keeper paused to watch me go, a shovel balanced on his shoulder.

  I caught a glimpse of his face through the swirling snowflakes, the chilling smile.

  I couldn’t imagine what Martha was planning. Whatever it was, I suspected it’d be so well considered and masterful, none of us would ever see her coming.

  How right I was.

  How did I pass the next few wakes?

  Was it months? Or was it years?

  I was the only one left. Wincroft was my castle to rule, my tiny home planet. The solitude was infinite. Gandalf was there, but he backed away and barked whenever I tried to pet him, as if aware I wasn’t quite real. I wandered the creaking hallways and musty rooms, had conversations with stuffed deer and grizzly bears. I read every book in E.S.S. Burt’s library, sprawled across daybeds, love seats, and carpets; dining room tables, window seats, and grand pianos. I watched every show on every cable channel at every time. I ate chocolate. I played Scrabble by myself, and chess by myself, and sang pop songs. I drew everything I could think of—eyes, faces, landscapes, shadows. I made a dream soundtrack, song lyrics to a fake four-hour movie about the end of the world called Ned Gromby’s Last Day Alive Ever, scribbling the mad rhymes about life and death, war and peace, all over the wallpaper and floors and ceilings of Wincroft. Wincroft was my bridge underpass spangled with my graffiti. I squeezed my eyes closed to beat back the silence, and sifted through memories of my old life as if inside them I’d find a key to a door that would lead me somewhere.

  I visited the elderly. They were my favorite. Because they were locked inside their own Neverworlds too, impenetrable rooms of repetition and loneliness. I made a habit of ringing their doorbells with an excuse about selling early Christmas calendars for my church. I ate their fruitcake and petted their old dogs with bad breath before they scampered away with twitching backs. I sipped the weird tea and watched TV, inhaled the curdled house odors the owner was oblivious to. Most of all, I listened to the stories. I untangled the gnarled pileups of anecdotes and convoluted tales of dead husbands, failing health, childhoods of taffeta and milk that cost ten cents.

  I figured if I remained in the Neverworld, alone, until the end of time, I would be like an ancient traveler wandering the side of the road with a calloused heart and hands, weighted with the world’s tales and secrets.

  At least then, if nothing else, I would be wise.

  It was inevitable that I’d be sitting there, listening to the story about the broken engagement, the dead child, the cat, when suddenly I’d see the decay. It always came out of nowhere and made me jump. Every windowpane in every single window around me would be silently cracking. Or a family photo would suddenly drop down the wall with a thump, revealing a garish rectangle of wallpaper that hadn’t seen daylight in forty years.

  “What in the name of Jesus is going on…?”

  In Mrs. Kahn’s case, it began with a faint popping noise.

  “Damn raccoon’s got in again,” she muttered, tightening her robe. When she started shrieking in the den, I ran to her, astonished, to find her prized collection of snow globes—gifts from Paul, a lost suitor—detonating like grenades, water and snow and glass, plastic Santas, Eiffel Towers, St. Peter’s Basilicas, exploding around the room.

  Mrs. Kahn shielded her face. “It’s the Day of Judgment!”

  Of course, I’d noticed the deterioration before, back at my house with my mom. Again that night at the Crow. I didn’t know why, or what it meant, but whenever I was away from Wincroft, the world began to decay and disintegrate around me.

  It always made me scared. I ran away, muttering some excuse and that I’d be back tomorrow, leaving Mrs. Kahn, Mr. Appleton, Mrs. Janowitz, Miss Bellossi, bent over, disconcerted, as they inspected the rot, the mold, the cracks traveling like lengthening skeletal fingers along the windows. I’d sprint back to Wincroft to search the gardens and grounds for the Keeper. I wanted to confront him, demand to know what was happening.

  Yet, bafflingly, whenever I willed him to appear, he stayed away.

  The corrosion appeared to be getting stronger. What did it mean? Was the Neverworld going to swallow itself like a black hole? Were we running out of time to vote? Was it all because of what happened to Jim?

  The answer jolted me like an electric shock.

  Jim. It had to be because of Jim.

  * * *

  —

  Then came the day Wit didn’t leave.

  I discovered her upstairs, buried under an avalanche of duvet, her face swollen with tears as she watched Heathers on her laptop. I stared at her, dumbfounded. I felt like some shipwreck survivor finding another person who’d washed up alive on my island.

  She glared at me. “Leave me alone, Bee.”

  I was worried I’d frighten her away, so I did just what she said. I made her tea, left the mug on her bedside table, and ducked out.

  The next wake, to my relief, she was there again, watching The Breakfast Club; the wake after that, Goonies. I always left her tea. Then, one wake, as I did, she threw off the comforter and surveyed me with a sad smile.

  “Want to watch Ferris Bueller with me?”

  Cannon reappeared a few wakes later. Mayhem, as it turned out, wasn’t as much fun without an accomplice. He was as exhausted as Whitley, holed up in the library with his laptop in DOS mode, typing some mysterious hacker’s command as the screen belched code. I printed out an obscure article written by a Stanford doctorate student about the future of Internet security and left it next to his laptop for him. The next wake, it was an essay about Steven Spielberg and brain cloning written by a freshman scientist at Harvard, then a blog posting by some genius sixteen-year-old Cambridge student about the future of robotics.

  “How are you finding these articles?” Cannon asked once before I darted out. “I mean, they’re so obscure.”

  With all my free time in the Neverworld, I’ve read the entire Internet. Twice.

  “I just stumbled upon them.”

  He smiled. “They’re really cool. Thanks, Bee.”

  Shortly after that, Kip stopped going hitchhiking. The moment he strolled into Wincroft, I couldn’t help it. I threw my arms around him, hugging him.

  “Sister Bee, you’re breakin’ my neck. I’m not Elvis back from the dead, child.”

  He pulled away, said nothing more, headed upstairs. Yet I could tell from his faint smile that he was happy to see me. That night I made him Boudreaux’s Stomp Shrimp Gumbo, the recipe served in his favorite hole-in-the-wall café in Moss Bluff. I left him a bowl in the bedroom where he was holed up watching Hoarding: Buried Alive on TLC.

  “How’d you get Auntie Mo’s secret recipe?” he blurted, incredulous.

  I had a million wakes to make her believe I was her long-lost niece.

  �
��Just whipped it up,” I said with a shrug.

  So there they were, three wild animals I was doing my best to cajole into remaining at the zoo in captivity, rather than roaming the wild.

  Then, one night, as the four of us sat reading in the library, I realized from the way Kip kept glancing curiously at the clock on the mantel that he was waiting for something. Martha must have said something to him about a group meeting, because when she appeared a few minutes after midnight, entering without a word, hauling her heavy black bag and taking a seat on the couch, he didn’t look the least bit surprised.

  “It’s time,” Martha announced.

  Whitley and Cannon surveyed her in shock.

  “Nice to see you too,” said Cannon.

  Martha gave him an official smile, clasping her hands like a judge.

  “We’ve come back to where we started,” she said. “It’s as if the Neverworld’s walls are slippery and slanted, always sending us back to where we began. I suspect, like me, you were each pursued by the Keeper, often when you least expected it?”

  I nodded. So did the others.

  “He’s our caretaker. He tends us, keeping us alive and thriving, making sure we have the sustenance we need but also keeping us in check. This means he’s capable of anything, being at once a guide and a taskmaster, a custodian and a thorn. Maybe he leaves you alone, or offers you a sprinkling of advice. Or else he hounds you, reminding you of the one thing you wish to forget. He will become anything to make you grow in a certain direction. Most of all, he is the chairman of a grand design we can’t see.”

  No one said a word, all of us listening in wonder, in shock. The way Martha sat there—squared shoulders, steady stare. She was no longer the mute nerd who blurted unfunny comments at weird moments, the girl more comfortable buried in the pages of an underground fantasy novel than living in the real world. This was a new Martha, one who had studied with Beloroda. She was a confident presence now. I had no idea where she was going with this speech, but she’d given it considerable thought, her every word as carefully selected as stones in an ornate necklace, each one meticulously polished and gleaming.