Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  When I opened my eyes, I was submerged in freezing water.

  Milky blue liquid floated before my eyes. I kicked, barely able to feel my legs. I couldn’t tell which way was the surface. My lungs throbbing in pain, I blew bubbles, watching dimly as they floated in the opposite direction of where I’d thought to go. I kicked after them into murky darkness, the water growing icier, shadowed fish circling me, their cold, gelatinous skin brushing my toes and fingertips.

  I wanted to scream.

  I kicked again. Suddenly, I breached the lake’s surface, gulping in the icy air.

  I looked around. Dense white fog swirled everywhere, chalky and crystalline. A thin layer of ice on the pond’s surface splintered around my shoulders. I dog-paddled in a circle, groping for something to hold on to, but there was nothing. It was impossible to see more than a foot ahead. Dead white tree trunks rose out of the water around me, retreating into the whiteness overhead.

  It was where Whitley had told us to go. Blue Pond, Cannon’s Birdcage, at 3:33 p.m. on his birthday last year. It was the real-life place in the photo inside the bug Cannon had discovered in Apple’s operating system sophomore year at Darrow. It was a dreamlike setting of chalky mist, and thin black Japanese larch and silver birch trees growing straight out of an icy blue lake.

  There was nothing else here.

  “Cannon?”

  My voice, hoarse and unsteady, ventured only a few feet in front of me before giving up. My legs were so frozen, they felt unattached to me. The cold was like knives in my back.

  “Cannon!”

  A boat motor roared behind me. Startled, I turned to see the paint-chipped bow of a skiff blasting out of the fog, heading straight toward me. I caught a glimpse of faded blue words, Little Bird, Cannon hunched over the motor, his bearded face red, his hair long and matted. The boat hit my head. White pain exploded through my skull. The water silenced my shocked scream as I was dragged under.

  Everything went black.

  * * *

  —

  When I opened my eyes again, I was submerged in freezing water.

  It was silent.

  Blue water clouded my eyes. I could see debris floating around me, seaweed, bits of shell, and mud. Long, dark fish with overbites and bulging eyes drifted around me. They looked dead until I touched one and it shot into the shadows.

  I wasn’t in pain, apart from my lungs. I blew bubbles, kicking after them. Within seconds I had blasted through the surface, gasping.

  It was the exact same scene, the Blue Pond, Cannon’s Birdcage.

  A motor grunted. I whipped around to see the skiff heading for me again.

  I dove back down into the water, madly kicking through the explosion of bubbles as the boat missed my head by inches. My left foot burst with pain as the propeller’s blade sliced it. When I resurfaced, Cannon had circled the boat around and was aiming for me again.

  I dove under again, swimming away a few feet before coming up for air.

  “Cannon, please, just wait a minute—”

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Beatrice.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “What about Jim?”

  He scowled at the mention of the name, killing the engine.

  “Cannon. Please. I just want to talk to you.”

  I held out my hand.

  He leaned over the boat, smiling reluctantly, extending his hand to help me aboard. As I grabbed it, however, he pulled an oar out and struck me with it on the side of the head, my vision exploding into whiteness.

  I screamed. I could feel my body sprawling, coming apart, cold water in my mouth, an oar on my back as he pushed me down.

  No matter how hard I fought, that oar remained on my shoulders, keeping me underwater.

  He was drowning me.

  There was no reasoning with Cannon anymore.

  The Neverworld had driven him mad.

  * * *

  —

  When I opened my eyes again, I was submerged in freezing water.

  The quiet was deafening.

  I realized with a stab of panic exactly what was happening: I was reliving the same wake over and over again. Cannon was killing me, whereupon I remained dead until I was pulled back to the wake. How long did it last? An hour? Minutes?

  I could hardly think. I was nauseous with fear. I had to stay calm. Trying to ignore the pain in my lungs, I kept swimming. Blinking up at the surface, I could see the underside of Cannon’s boat amid large chunks of ice. He was hiding between the trees, waiting. I dove deeper, ignoring the dark fish with their flaking skin shooting around my legs. When I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I swam to the surface, trying not to make noise as I gulped down air.

  Cannon’s boat was yards away. He didn’t see me. He was standing in the skiff, looking around.

  “Beatrice!” he called. His voice sounded calm, even friendly. “You out here?”

  I ducked back under and swam away, the water growing dark and murky, the rotten roots of underwater trees, yellowed and tangled, wafting what looked like chimney soot. I could no longer feel my feet or hands. My thoughts were cloudy and strange. As I swam past the debris of a sunken skiff, the faded words Little Bird barely visible, I felt the pull of an undertow. I tried to fight it, but the current was too powerful. As soon as I recognized the deep thundering drone of a waterfall, it was too late; I was plunging through the air. Spray blasted me like a fire hose. Rocks knocked my head and scraped my hands, branches clawing my face. White trees. Blue sky. They flipped over me and under me. I kept waiting to hit the ground, for it all to go black, but the end refused to come.

  I was falling, falling for what felt like an hour, every inch of my body freezing, stiffening.

  Then I hit a boulder. Life left me like light from a bulb with the flip of a switch.

  * * *

  —

  When I opened my eyes, I was submerged in freezing water.

  How many times had I been here before? Four times? Four million?

  Fish swirled around me like murderous thoughts. I swam into them and they scattered.

  I floated deep under the water until I spotted his boat. The water was getting colder. A thin layer of ice was forming on the surface, growing thicker by the minute. I could see Cannon, searching for me. Grabbing a submerged piece of driftwood, I swam directly underneath the hull, clinging there, breathing through a hole in the ice around the boat’s edge. I yanked off my pink T-shirt and let it drift to the other side. Cannon, thinking it was me, bent over to pull it out, and as he did, I surfaced and jammed the wood in his back as hard as I could. He cried out in surprise, pitching forward, losing his balance, somersaulting through the ice. I climbed into the boat, nearly capsizing it. I yanked the cord to start the engine. I pried off Cannon’s hands gripping the side and veered the boat away.

  “Beatrice!” he howled, waving at me. “Come back!”

  I ignored him. His old gray hoodie and a red flannel blanket were folded up around a thermos in the hull. I yanked on the sweater, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. I unscrewed the thermos and drank. It was tea, so hot it scalded my mouth.

  I drove on. It was impossible to see where I was going. The fog disclosed only inches of the world at a time. Blue water, driftwood, blackened tree trunks—they appeared suddenly, ramming the sides of the boat, causing the engine to stall. After a while I could hear the deafening roar of the waterfall and Cannon far behind me. He was crying.

  “I’m freezing. I’m going to die here. Help me, Beatrice.”

  I wasn’t sure how far I’d gone when I spotted a coil of long blond hair under the ice, ice at least three inches thick. I smashed it with the oar, realizing in shock that it was Whitley floating there. She was barely conscious. A few feet away, trapped under th
e ice, were Martha and Kipling.

  One by one, I heaved them into the boat. They were half dead, heads lolling. I placed them in the stern, pulled off their boots and jeans and T-shirts, pulled the blanket over their legs to get them warm, poured tea into their mouths.

  Soon they showed signs of life.

  “What is happening?” asked Martha.

  I told her. She asked to see Cannon, so I turned the boat back, steering between the trees until we stumbled upon him. He was clinging to a trunk, so much ice encrusting his beard it was completely white.

  He was dead. His lips were blue. He had pulled off all his clothes.

  “His wake must be years if his hair is this long,” whispered Martha, touching a frozen strand. She turned to me. “We have to keep at this, but next time, keep him alive. It’s up to you, Bee. We don’t arrive in time. So get control of the boat, restrain him, but keep him alive until we get here. Then we can vote.”

  Cannon’s not himself anymore. How can he vote?

  I wanted to ask this, only I realized as the boat jerked backward suddenly that we were getting pulled into the waterfall.

  I grabbed the oar, trying to fight it. Martha grabbed the other paddle. Whitley tried to grab hold of passing tree trunks to stop us. Kipling could only stare out at the fog, petrified. It was futile, of course. In less than a minute, the skiff was swinging into the throes of the current, water pounding us. We were rocketing past boulders, ricocheting against trees, overturning into the whiteout. The last thing I saw was Whitley reaching out to try to grab my hand as the boat fell out from under us and we fell.

  * * *

  —

  The vote. The vote. The vote.

  How long did it all go on? The fight for the skiff. Cannon’s rescue. Binding his ankles and wrists. Hauling my friends out of the ice.

  I did it over and over again, in the freezing cold, trying not to drown.

  I tried different tactics every time. Cannon might have been half mad, but he was on to me. He was a strange, terrifying foe, at times vicious, other times childlike. He was the worst person to have to capture alive, because I knew him from before. There were times when he was his old self again, funny and kind and sensitive, vocal about wanting to help me, to do everything in his power to make it better. Inevitably, though, he’d cast this persona off like a Halloween costume, revealing someone upended by rage and regret. I understood then that Cannon had always lived his life with his future glory in mind, that every moment of his every day and every act of kindness had been because he was expecting that at some future date he would be somebody at last. Now that he had no future, he didn’t know how to exist.

  He’d shout his grievances into the fog.

  “I was duped. Swindled. First there was the nightmare of Jim. And now this? Are you kidding me? It isn’t supposed to be like this. I’m supposed to grow up! I’m supposed to have another seventy years! I never made an impression. It’s like I was never even here. Was I here? Was I even here, Beatrice? Beatrice! Where are you?”

  Sometimes, when Cannon gave me trouble, I was too late freeing the others from the ice. When I found them they were all dead except Martha. She was always semiconscious, deliriously whispering the same two words over and over again.

  It’s you.

  After a while, I had a map of the entire Blue Lake in my head like a blind man who’s memorized every inch of his neighborhood. I knew where every dead tree stood, where every boulder sat, when every spray of water would firework over the rocks into oblivion.

  The chance for the vote inched closer. Faster and faster I restrained Cannon. This had as much to do with his increasing fatigue, his resignation, as with my speed and resolve. I bound his hands and ankles with a yellow vine ripped from the bottom of the lake, pulling him up into the boat, leaving him sulking in the bow. Faster and faster I revived the others.

  The remainder of my wake was eleven minutes. Eleven minutes between the time they were warm and under the blanket and the moment I rigged the boat to the trees so we wouldn’t plunge into the waterfall. Eleven minutes to vote.

  “I’m not voting,” Cannon always said.

  “Yes you are,” said Whitley.

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll drown here.”

  He laughed. I’d grown used to his mad cackle by then, but it still scared the others.

  “Drowning? You think I’m scared of drowning? Drowning for me is shaking a hand. It’s saying ‘Have a nice day!’ It’s saying ‘Would you like an Egg McMuffin with those hotcakes?’ It’s saying ‘Welcome to Home Depot, can I help you select a Weedwacker?’ ”

  “Please stop,” whispered Whitley, trying not to cry.

  The vote. The vote. The vote.

  We had no pen and no paper. I pried a piece of splintered wood off the skiff’s bottom boards and we used that to cut the first initial of our chosen survivor into our palms.

  Over time, strange things began to happen in those eleven minutes. The dead trees began to topple and crash into the water, creating waves that surged and flooded the boat. The fog retreated, revealing a gray sky, clouds roiling like potion in a witch’s cauldron. Swarms of red insects like the ones Martha had drawn boomeranged around us like tiny squalls of rain, emitting a high-pitched hum, colliding with our foreheads and ears and getting tangled in our hair, making us scream. A single fat fly appeared too, buzzing around our heads. We all knew it was Pete, the imaginary friend who’d lived inside Cannon’s boyhood computer, the one he’d told us about. Ice encrusted our hair and eyelashes. It thundered and snowed and hailed. In the eleventh minute, the skiff even began to disintegrate under us, blue water seeping up between the beams until the wood began to blacken and crumble to mud.

  I understood what was happening, though I didn’t say a word. No one did. It was the decision, the slow settling in on the single name. It was the death of our dreams, our youth, of possibility. There had always been hope here in the Neverworld, no matter how terrifying things got.

  Now even that was disappearing.

  Cannon ignored our entreaties to vote. He stayed slumped against the side of the boat, staring out, singing “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure under his breath, repeating the phrase “You, soft and lonely” over and over again.

  Then, one wake, he actually snatched the wood from Kipling, and gnashing his teeth in frustration, he too carved what appeared to be someone’s initials into his hand. He did it rashly, blood oozing between his fingers as he collapsed back, staring out, exhausted.

  That was when Whitley sat up, pointing into the fog.

  It was the Keeper. He was rowing a boat toward us, wearing his dark suit and tie. He maneuvered alongside us. In spite of the hail, his boat jerking and bobbing against ours, the spray of water, he was remarkably dry.

  “Congratulations,” he shouted, his voice scarcely audible over the thunder. “There is a consensus.”

  “What?” gasped Whitley.

  The Keeper only smiled, gripping the sides of the boat so as not to be tossed out.

  He cleared his throat, straightening his tie, though almost immediately the wind flung it back over his shoulder.

  “Life does not belong to you. It is the apartment you rent. Love without fear, for love is an airplane that carries you to new lands. There is a universe in silence. A tunnel to peace in a scream. Get a good night’s sleep. Laugh when you can. You are more magical than you know. Take your advice from the elderly and children. None of it is as crucial as you think, but that makes it no less vital. Our lives go on. And on. Look for the breadcrumbs.”

  I think we were only half listening. We were all stupefied.

  “It’s been a pleasure.” He bowed.

  And just like that, he took up the oars again and rowed away.

  The change was immediate. The water stilled. The storm tapered off. The roar of the
waterfall faded to a whisper. The sun emerged out of the blue sky, glaring and hot. In fact, the scene so quickly transformed to a calm, serene lake with shimmering water that the memory of all I’d endured these past twelve wakes—or twelve million—seemed as hazy as some half-remembered dream.

  It grew hot. Whitley and Kip stripped down to their underwear, and whooping and shouting, they cannonballed into the water as if it were the final hours of summer camp. Cannon, with a deadened look, threw himself headfirst over the side, and though I stood in alarm, calling out his name, he only kicked away from me on his back, his eyes closed. He seemed so tired. He seemed to want peace.

  That left me with Martha. I had something important to say to her, and I might never have another chance.

  “Martha.”

  She was watching Whitley and Kipling laughing about something. She turned.

  “We’ve never been friends. I just want to tell you that I understand why. And it’s okay.”

  She stared at me.

  “I was his girlfriend. Everyone was in love with Jim. It wasn’t so hard to imagine that you were too. I just wish we’d gotten to know each other better.”

  She tilted her head, frowning.

  “Jim? You think I was in love with Jim?”

  I nodded. She smiled.

  “I never loved Jim. It was you. What you did for me. You saved my life.”

  She said it faintly. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.

  “Do you remember that night freshman year, during the snowstorm? The night of Holiday Dance. The power went out, and you ran back to the dorm to change your dress. You found me reading in the common room. You laughed because I hadn’t noticed the window was wide open, and there was a snowdrift on the carpet. You stayed and talked with me, even though Jim was waiting for you.”

  I remembered. It was the one time we’d had a good conversation.

  “It wasn’t an accident the window was open.”

  I stared at her.

  “I’d been planning it for weeks. I’d done the math. Sixth floor. Larkin Hall. A simple acceleration due to gravity across seventy-six feet. Even landing in a snowdrift, my chance of survival was less than one percent.”