Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  He seemed unwilling to go on.

  “Cannon hacked Darrow’s network for him,” blurted Whitley. “All senior year. Kipling had every test from every teacher ahead of time. Including midterms and finals.”

  “Not every teacher,” said Cannon.

  She glared at him. “It was still cheating.”

  “It was assisting a beloved friend,” he said stonily.

  Whitley huffed. “You could say the same thing about what I was doing as the White Rabbit. Everyone thinks I’m the bad person? Look at what you guys were doing.”

  Cannon said nothing. For years he had assisted Darrow’s notoriously backward IT department. It wasn’t unusual for him to be summoned from class to help with some bug or networking error. And though he was glaring at Whitley now in obvious annoyance, he didn’t appear to feel in the least bit guilty about this disclosure.

  “How did you do it?” I asked him.

  Cannon shrugged. “Social engineering. The weakest component in any given network is always the human. I sent a faculty-wide email, a required update for Darrow’s intranet. For Kipling’s teachers I included a RAT. They downloaded the trojan and I became root. It was as easy as untying a shoelace.”

  He frowned at the look of disbelief on my face.

  “Come on, Sister Bee. You of all people should understand. Darrow-Harker was an obstacle in the way of Kipling’s bright future. Kicked out junior year? He’d have to start over at some second-rate institution. Away from us. It’d look like shit on his record. And anyway, Kipling can’t be measured by such blunt objects as As, Bs, and Cs. No. Kipling is an experience. I had to help him in the best way I could.” He shrugged. “There are the rules of this world, and there is what you do when life comes crashing down around you.”

  Cannon stared at me with such a penetrating look, I felt chills inching down my arms. I’d forgotten how intense a presence he could be, how when he focused, he seemed more energy than flesh and bone.

  “So that’s it,” said Kipling. “That’s the two-headed monster in my closet who can’t stop drooling.”

  “The question is,” Martha whispered, looking him, “will your secret help us change the wake?”

  She fell silent, frowning, lost in thought. For a minute no one said a word.

  That was what Martha did sometimes—let a question dangle for minutes, sometimes even an hour, before suddenly blurting the answer when everyone else had forgotten the problem.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  That was how we came to be parked in the wild beach rose along the empty coastal road at 4:47 in the morning, four minutes before the end of the wake.

  Directly across the street was where we’d had the accident—where, according to the Keeper, one Mr. Howard Heyward, age fifty-eight, of 281 Admiral Road, South Kingstown, had smashed his tow truck into our car, condemning us to the Neverworld, where somewhere, in some other dimension of time more real than this one, we were lying inside a totaled car inside a single second waiting to unlock.

  Martha knew the exact spot, a hairpin curve twisting one hundred and sixty degrees through dense pine trees. She admitted she’d come back here to inspect it in the Neverworld.

  How had it happened? I could hardly remember. Aggressive flashes of headlights blinding me. Hedges of beach rose trembling in the torrential rain. Windshield wipers waving as if in warning. Liquid night. Our drunken laughter spilling everywhere. Honking. Spinning. The car bouncing off the road, leaping into the dark. A loss of gravity.

  “He’s a drunk,” Martha said. “He sits in the Raccoon and Hound Saloon in Warwick and drinks twelve Coors Lights. Twelve. Then he climbs behind the wheel. He can hardly stay awake. Nearly crashes into a telephone pole. In the Neverworld, he drives straight past the spot where he hits us. But that marks the end of the eleven point two hours of our wake.”

  Rain hammered the roof. The windshield and windows were fogged. I felt as if we were sealed inside a submarine at the bottom of the sea. The radio stuttered classical music.

  Only one car had passed us, a blue pickup. Spotting us nestled in the bushes on the side of the road, it braked and backed up. Martha unrolled the window.

  “You guys got a flat?” asked a middle-aged man in a hunting vest. “Need a hand?”

  “No, thanks,” said Martha. “We’re fine. We’re looking for our lost dog.”

  He frowned, baffled by the sight of five teenagers dressed in green hooded ponchos smiling stiffly. With a perplexed grimace and nothing left to say, he drove off.

  “Three minutes,” said Martha, checking her watch.

  I felt like I was going to be sick. Kipling and Cannon’s revelations, shocking as they were, had elicited more questions than answers. For one thing, everyone was acting strange, though it was difficult to put my finger on why. They were irritable and out of it. Twice, when they weren’t aware I was watching, I saw Kipling and Cannon exchange long, knowing glances, the meaning of which seemed vaguely ominous. What was going on? What were they planning?

  And though Martha was coaching us, assuring us it was going to be fine—August twenty-ninth, nine-thirty-five a.m., Villa Anna Sophia, Amorgos Island, Greece, that’s all you have to remember, okay?—the fact that she of all people was in charge of this operation only made it worse. What was she up to? Was she pushing us to follow in the footsteps of characters in The Bend so she could condemn us somehow, trap us in some train compartment of time? Or was it only about the vote for her?

  The vote. The vote. The vote.

  Now, hunched beside Whitley in the backseat, I could feel the wake coming over me, that familiar ocean-wave immensity pressing down on my feet, inching into my shins. Abruptly, the radio belched with static, then began to cough and stutter “Boys Don’t Cry” by the Cure.

  The rain grew louder, as if the volume had been turned way up.

  “I don’t feel so swell,” said Kip, pressing a hand to his throat.

  Martha turned to him. “I feel it too. And it’s not just the wake. It’s the open window. It’s happening.”

  She was filled with excitement—as much as someone as deadpan as Martha could be filled with excitement.

  “Can you feel it?”

  I did. There was an electrical charge in my hands, as if I’d just shuffled across a heavy carpet in socks. I held my hand an inch from the steamed window. It made a print. I waved it back and forth, and it magically wiped the window clean. I held my hand a few inches behind Whitley’s hair hanging outside the hood of her poncho, and the gold strands leapt right into my hand like the tentacles of some strange sea creature.

  “Two minutes,” said Martha. “Let’s move.”

  She nodded at us and scrambled out, Cannon and Kipling taking off after her without a word. I opened the door and was instantly drenched by a blast of rain. Whitley grabbed my arm.

  “I can’t do this, Bee,” she whimpered. “I can’t keep it straight in my head.”

  “What?”

  She was crying. Never in my life had I seen her so afraid.

  “I’m going to get lost in the past. I know it.”

  “No. You’re not.” I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. August twenty-ninth. Nine-thirty-five a.m. Villa Anna Sophia. Say it.”

  “Villa Anna Sophia.”

  “Remember the sea. The sky. The pristine white beauty of it all. The curtains. The smell of oranges.”

  “Oranges. Right.”

  “You’ve got this.”

  She blinked at me, unsure. I held out my hand. She grabbed it. Then we both climbed out of the car into the downpour.

  I hadn’t anticipated how chaotic it would be. The rain felt like nails. There was a gravitational pull intent on thrusting us back to the car. My thoughts turned to liquid, splattering the inside
of my head. All we had to do was approach the spot of the accident and lie down in a Black-Footed Sioux Carpet the way Kipling had explained it. So far only Martha had made it. She was lying on her back along the faded yellow line. I headed toward her, trying to drag Whitley after me, but I was dizzy, and every step was like lifting four cinder blocks tied to my feet. Kip was standing in the road, turning in a circle like a cork caught in a toilet flush, and Cannon was on all fours, trying to crawl. I forced my thoughts to slow. I took big steps, one at a time, squeezing Whitley’s hand. Finally we reached the spot and lay down beside Martha. A minute later Cannon arrived with Kipling.

  I blinked, raindrops pounding my face. I couldn’t see. The rain was falling too hard, so I closed my eyes. The wake had crept up to my knees, pushing me into the pavement.

  August twenty-ninth. Nine-thirty-five a.m.

  I could picture the rocky, windswept cliff, the modern white house poised there like an eagle’s nest, nothing in the windows but a reflection of the sea.

  “Fifty seconds!” bellowed Martha.

  Villa Anna Sophia.

  “I can’t do this!” Whitley screamed.

  Someone scratched me in the face. I moved my arm to shield my eyes, realizing it was a giant oak branch torn off a tree. It had careened over us before cartwheeling down the road.

  Whitley was sobbing, trying to scramble to her feet. Cannon held her in place.

  “Stop it!” he shouted.

  “Let go of me! I can’t do it!”

  “Calm down!” shouted Martha.

  “I can’t! I keep thinking of other things! I can’t stop my thoughts!”

  I heard the roar of the approaching engine. Howard Heyward, age fifty-eight, drunk and half asleep, was seconds away now. My entire body was shaking. I squeezed my eyes closed, my fingers gripping the pavement, trying to hold on.

  Amorgos Island. Greece.

  Someone else was screaming now. Kipling.

  “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “Don’t you see? We’re going to lose each other!”

  “It’s a trick! It’s a trap!”

  Thunder exploded like an atom bomb. My ears blew out, squeals and whines ricocheting strangely around my head. The wake was pressing down on my heart now, so strong it took a moment for me to realize something was viciously stabbing my neck. I cried out in pain, my cold, numbed fingers fumbling to see what it was. I felt something small, hard. I yanked it out of my neck, screaming.

  It was the bumblebee pin, the one Jim had given me, the one stolen from me.

  The rest happened at once. Headlights sliced through me. The truck was honking, careening toward us. Raindrops fell in slow motion. A howl of brakes. Someone was still screaming. I opened my eyes, catching a fleeting glimpse of a figure in a green poncho sprinting away, vanishing into the woods. Clanging metal. The truck was jackknifing, massive tires sliding on the wet pavement right toward my skull. A smell of scorched rubber. And hell.

  One…two…

  Bumblebee pin.

  Jim.

  When I opened my eyes, it was daylight.

  I was facedown in the grass. I lifted my head, heart pounding, feeling an overpowering wave of nausea. I was sick to my stomach, my body spasming. It took a minute to catch my breath. I wiped my mouth, looking around, my eyes stinging in the light.

  I was not on any coastal road. I was not being run over by Howard Heyward’s tow truck—at least, not anymore. I was in no physical pain.

  I also wasn’t in the back of the Jaguar. For the first time in a century it wasn’t raining. The sun was shining. I was lying on the ground—dead leaves, dirt, surrounded by trees. It was brisk out, a bite in the air, the sky hard blue. I held out my hands, opening them.

  They were empty.

  The bumblebee pin. Where is it?

  I looked around. I definitely wasn’t near Villa Anna Sophia or on any Greek island.

  I was in the middle of a forest. I stared down at my clothing.

  The burgundy Ann Taylor wool coat my mother had picked up years ago at a secondhand store in Woonsocket. Black tights. Black wool dress. Scuffed black leather pumps.

  Puzzled, I stumbled to my feet. My shoes were too tight, my dress scratchy. I lurched forward, staring through the trees at a grassy clearing. There was a lake littered with small white sailboats, people milling around the perimeter. I stumbled toward it, wondering if I looked like some deranged lunatic. But as I stepped out of the woods and down the bank, no one gave me a second glance. There were at least twenty sailboats out on the lake, children and a few teenagers operating them by remote control.

  I understood where I was: Central Park. The Conservatory Lake. I’d visited here a long time ago with Jim.

  “There you are.”

  Hearing his voice was like having the floor drop out under my feet. I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes, my mind jelly. I was falling through a hole a mile deep.

  “Where’d you go? Are you already trying to get rid of me?”

  He was alive. He was right behind me, his hand on my shoulder. He smelled the same: peppermint soap, wind, and fresh laundry.

  “I came out here all the time as a little kid. Once, the remote control broke and my sailboat got stranded in the middle of the lake and my father said, as I cried, ‘If you want it, go get it.’ I had to wade out there and retrieve the thing. Clearly it was some survival-of-the-fittest, free-market personality test he’d learned in business school and— Hey, what’s wrong?”

  He spun me around to face him.

  What’s wrong? How can I begin to answer that question?

  “Look at me.”

  I opened my eyes.

  The sight of Jim Mason inches away from me—sun blazing behind him, birds chirping, kids squealing in delight—was so unfeasible, my head turned inside out.

  This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

  But it was. It was Jim. He was the same, but he wasn’t. As I stared up at him, it struck me how no one ever really sees anyone. Memory turns out to be a lazy employee, intent on doing the least amount of work. When a person is alive and around you all the time, it doesn’t bother to record all the details, and when a person is dead, it Xeroxes a tattered recollection a million times, so the details are lost: the freckles, the crooked smile, the creases around the eyes.

  “Come,” Jim said. “We can’t be late.”

  He tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. I’d forgotten how he always did that. He escorted me down the path, past women wheeling babies in strollers—all of whom glanced at him with varying degrees of admiration—and a man pushing a shopping cart filled with plastic bottles.

  It seemed the wake had brought me to one of the occasions when I’d visited Jim’s family in New York.

  It wasn’t Christmas. And it was too chilly for spring break.

  So when was it?

  I could ask him what we were going to be late to, but it was a daunting prospect to speak. Every time I looked at Jim, I felt jolts of disbelief. I wanted to annotate everything about him, every blink, sniff, and sideways grin. I was terrified too. There was a lump in my throat like a giant wad of gum, threatening to dislodge. If it did, I’d end up crying or rambling on madly about the Neverworld, the fact that he was dead now.

  You’re dead, my love. You have such little time.

  Biting my lip, I let him escort me across Fifth Avenue. We rushed into his building—944 Fifth Avenue read the elegant script on the green awning—its lobby pungent with hydrangea and roses from the colossal flower arrangement on the table, asteroid-like and silencing. Jim casually waved at the doorman.

  “Hola, Murdoch.”

  Then we were alone in the elevator. Jim leaned back against the wood-paneled wall, surveying me. I had forgotten the way he studied people as if they were priceless pieces of art.


  “Don’t be nervous,” he said.

  He was clutching my hand again, grazing his lips against my knuckles as he pulled me, walking backward, into his apartment. I had forgotten how grand it was, echoing like a museum, iron sculptures of birds and oil paintings of stark faces, spindly furniture more giant praying mantises than viable places to sit. Looking down, I noticed the scuffs on my Mary Jane pumps, the lint balls on my old stockings, and felt that familiar cringe of embarrassment. As we moved into the living room, slipping through the crowd, I noticed everyone was wearing black—black dresses, black and white and red silk scarves, blue suits—and I understood where I was.

  Freshman year at Darrow. Five years ago. A weekend in late September.

  Jim had invited me to come home with him for his great-uncle Carl’s funeral. I barely knew Jim back then.

  He’d only introduced himself a week before.

  * * *

  —

  “Jim Mason.”

  He was sitting behind me in English. He pulled his chair over, so close I could feel his peppermint breath on my cheek as I tried to work out a rhyme for a song I was writing.

  “Whatcha doing?” He frowned at the notebook I was scribbling in. “What’s Fenfang’s Chinese Laundry Meltdown: An Original Soundtrack?”

  Embarrassed, I slid the book under my laptop.

  “Nothing.”

  “That didn’t look like nothing.”

  I cleared my throat. It sounded like a swamp.

  “I create fake album soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. It’s just something I do. Don’t ask me why.”

  “I see.” He nodded matter-of-factly. “So, when’s the commitment to the mental institution happening? Next week? Next year?”

  I laughed.

  He extended his hand. “Jim Mason. Really delighted to make your acquaintance before they cart you off to your padded cell.”

  “Beatrice Hartley.”

  He winked. “I’m a mad poet too.”

  I smiled. There was a stretch of awkward silence, during which Jim did nothing but sit back and survey me. I turned to my laptop, trying to stop blushing, pretending to type something important. I assumed he was about to return to his desk and leave me alone.