Warp

by Lev Grossman

  Hollis blinked his eyes against the cold, dry wind.

  “So what was she doing?” he said.

  “Who? Eileen? Just standing there, I guess. On the sidewalk. Looked like she was having some kind of a sneezing fit.”

  “She’s allergic to practically everything.”

  “What about this place where she works?” Brian said. “It’s in Boston?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  Hollis gestured vaguely.

  “It’s downtown somewhere. Where all those places are. The financial district, I guess. Jesus, it’s not like I memorized the address.”

  Munson, Hanson, Gund, Inc.

  75 State Street, Suite 2176

  Boston, MA 02154

  Member FDIC

  “So you guys don’t hang out anymore?” said Brian.

  “Not really.” Hollis sniffed.

  “Maybe I’ll give her a call.”

  “Look, go right ahead. It’s a free Commonwealth.”

  “Say no more—I hear you.” Brian held up his hands defensively. “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!”

  He bent over and started stretching his calves. A seagull landed a few yards away, hunting for trash in the tall grass. Down below in the park the woman and the ferret orbited around each other at opposite ends of the leash. The couple had stopped playing catch. They were sitting together on a dugout bench next to the chain-link backstop, drinking cans of soda.

  “Jesus, how can they stand that stuff?”

  “I didn’t even know they had Diet Mountain Dew,” said Hollis.

  An hour went by, and Malo still hadn’t caught anything. He paddled farther out towards the mouth of the bay, where the water was deepest. Standing up in his skiff, he looped the rope around his wrist and threw out the net one last time.

  For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a gentle tug on the line. Malo looked over the side, down into the water.

  A big shape was moving under him, and he heard a little splash, very tiny, and something heaved hard on the other end of the rope, which was still tied to his wrist.

  It pulled him right out of his boat and into the water.

  “So are you working?”

  Hollis blinked and looked in the other direction.

  “Not really,” he said. “Not right now.”

  “What have you been up to?” said Brian, looking up at him while still hanging on to his ankles. “I never know when I’m going to run into bad old Hollis Kessler anymore. I thought you were at some design company in Back Bay, they did museum displays or something—”

  “I was. I quit.”

  Brian straightened up and patted his stomach.

  “I should keep going,” he said. “All those Eurobankers think I’m going to be some kind of fat American. You like these sneakers?”

  He held one out towards Hollis. It was a complicated patchwork of canvas and rubber and leather.

  “They have gel in them.”

  “Gel, I put on my head,” said Hollis, in a fake Yiddish accent. “To put on my feet, who knew?”

  Brian looked out across the park at the couple again.

  “She sure as fucking hell is cute,” he said.

  “Oh. I almost forgot—Prasad says hi.”

  “I know. I saw him too.”

  “Did he clue you in? Wise you up?” Brian turned and looked at him suddenly. “Set you straight? You know how he’s always laying this stuff on people, about what’s wrong with them? I bet he had a high old time with you. Not that there’s anything wrong with you, cowboy,” he added hastily, holding up his hands. “Hey, we need you. You’re probably the last person I know who isn’t—I don’t know. Fucking somebody else over for more Experience Points, or something like that. You’re not—you know what I mean. Infected.”

  Formerly a public health inspector, I am now the last human being left alive on earth.

  I am Chingachgook. The Last of the Mochicans.

  “Prasad. What a penis that guy is. You know what Sree called him? An ABCD: American-Born Confused Deshi. ‘Deshi’ is supposed to be slang for Indian, or something. You want to jog with me?”

  “I can’t,” Hollis said. “I don’t have sneakers.”

  Brian nodded and looked back over his shoulder at the steep slope that ran down the other side of the hill, down to the road. He pushed his long hair back behind his ears.

  “I should go,” he said. “Anyway, what are you waiting around here for? Shouldn’t you be getting out of here too?”

  “Yes.” Hollis sighed and looked around for the woman with the ferret, but she was nowhere in sight. “I should try to get back to the building before they do—I can’t have him catching me coming in. They’ll be a while, though. I think they’re having an affair. I should try blackmailing him.”

  The sun had sunk lower on the horizon, the bottom edge eclipsed by the tops of the trees, and they could look straight at it without squinting. Brian put his hand on Hollis’s shoulder for balance and switched to his other leg. Their long shadows ran back into the shadow of the hill and merged with it.

  The ball-playing couple had a tiny white subcompact parked on the grass at the other end of the field. They watched the woman as she went through her purse on the hood of the car, looking for her keys.

  Pretty. Must destroy.

  “So when’s your flight?” Hollis said.

  “Next Thursday. A week from today. Boston to New York to Stuttgart. On Lufthansa!”

  He did a Nazi salute, still standing on one leg.

  “Das bestes Airflügt! Ist zo chip!” He dropped the ankle and stood up straight. “I’ll send you a postcard from the Reichstag. Does Steve have your address?”

  Hollis nodded. They shook hands.

  “Okay, dude.”

  “Super.”

  Brian turned away, skipped once or twice as he got going, and jogged off along the crest of the hill. His sneakers pounded softly on the turf. Then he plunged down onto the slope, out of the sunlight, galloping out of control down towards the bottom.

  “Whoa!”

  Hollis watched him run easily through the parking lot and out along the edge of the road, until he disappeared around the bend. Hollis took his hands out of his pockets and blew into them to warm them up.

  A car horn blared behind him, a dissonant interval, and there was the sound of skidding tires. He turned around: the white Camry was stopped sideways in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes. An oncoming car had just barely managed to screech to a stop a few feet short of a collision. The driver honked his horn and shook both his hands at Hollis’s landlord. Apparently he’d started to pull out without looking, then panicked and changed his mind, and now he was trapped in between.

  As Hollis watched, the Camry made a couple of laborious cuts until it could swing back into its lane. His landlord honked his horn back at the other car and accelerated away out of sight.

  “God, I have to get out of this city,” Hollis said to nobody.

  The old men in the village told stories about the Devilfish, but Malo had never believed them. Wings thirty feet wide, and horns, and a strange, horrible face on its underside. It only came into the bay at night.

  Malo came up to breathe. The speed with which it was dragging him piled up water against his chest. Already he was even with the sandbar that marked the mouth of the bay.

  He was doomed if the Devilfish reached the open sea—it would pull him out into the depths and drown him. There was an old wooden post that stood in the middle of the channel, that had been there for longer than the oldest fisherman in the village could remember, and Malo felt for it in the darkness.

  When he found it he took a deep breath and dove down to the bottom. He made a loop around it with the rope.

  His mind was racing. Would the old post hold? Or would he be dragged out to sea, to drown?

  By degrees the sunlight became more and more golden and less and less transparent. The wind was turning Hollis’s
ears pink against his short, razor-cut hair, which was dyed a bright white blond. Afternoon was moving into early evening. He’d locked his bike to a guard barrier made of thick rusty cables, and past the barrier came a thin line of trees, and past them the ground kept sloping away downhill. Far away in the distance he could see the rest of Brookline—bare trees and evergreens and brick buildings all mixed together, still lit up by the sun.

  He started jogging down the hill. His shoes slipped on the grass, and he had to catch himself with his hands. When he got to the bottom he was breathing hard, and he had to bend over with his hands on his knees for a few seconds before he could go on.

  He was a mysterious figure—arrogant, aristocratic, coldly beautiful, impossible to understand. Even those who tried to draw closer to him, lured by his wealth or the secret of his success, found him enigmatic. Rumors flew around him: bizarre affairs, ruinous addictions, fortunes lost and won, crimes both passionate and dispassionate. His resources of indifference were immense, his capacity for remorse minimal. His contempt for those around him was absolute and matched only by an equal contempt for himself.

  Hollis rode back from the park in twilight, pumping hard down the hill, with sunlight flashing behind the trees and casting thick orange bars across the road. There were no sidewalks this far from the center of town, and he rode the very edge of the asphalt, sometimes straying off onto the sandy shoulder. Station wagons stood in the occasional driveways, and every once in a while a powerboat on a trailer under a blue tarp. A film of sweat burned coldly on his forehead.

  He stopped at a traffic light, breathing hard, and ran his hands through his hair. The gas station on the corner was lit up with white floodlights, and he could see a clock on the wall through the window: it was almost six. A glowing red-and-black Merit sign towered over him against the blue evening sky. His chest hurt. His breath showed white in the cold fall air.

  As he rounded the last corner he passed a few homeless people hanging around in front of the liquor store. The shabby Laundromat on the opposite corner was still open. Hollis’s apartment building—one of three identical buildings in a row on Commonwealth Avenue in Allston—stood a few hundred yards from a busy intersection. A mile or two outside downtown Boston, Commonwealth was six lanes wide, with train tracks running down the middle. The block of stores across the street had a Parliament billboard mounted on the roof: a scene from the Greek islands, in turquoise blue and alabaster white.

  The landlord’s car was already there, parked right in front of his building. Hollis spotted it as he coasted up to the steps. There was no point in hurrying anymore. He jumped off his bike, braced himself, and hoisted it up onto his shoulder. A black leather glove lay on the ground by the curb, in an empty parking space, and he glanced down at it as he walked by.

  It was lying palm-down, with the thumb folded under it. A tire tread ran across the back. He set the bike down again, bent down, and picked up the glove. Holding it by the fingertips, he slapped it against his thigh a few times to get the sand off and stuffed it in the pocket of his overcoat. It was one of his.

  Picking up the bike again, Hollis dug his keys out of his pocket with his free hand and let himself in. The lobby was old and a little run-down: there were scratches on the wallpaper and dents in the walls from years of people moving in and out. He took the stairs, cautiously, lugging his bike with him.

  When he got to the fourth floor he peered carefully around the corner out into the hallway.

  The landlord stood in front of the door to his apartment. He had to stoop a little as he tried to look in through the peephole the wrong way. Hollis watched as he knocked on it smartly a few times. He called Hollis’s name.

  Shhhh. I’m hunting wabbits.

  Hollis kept climbing, up the stairs two more flights to the top floor, then on up an extra flight of steps, littered with trash and dusted with white plaster powder. The aluminum door at the top was padlocked, but somebody had pried out the nails that held the latch to the doorjamb. With his bike still on his shoulder, Hollis kicked the door open and pushed his way out onto the roof.

  From the rooftop the city lights were spread out sparsely across the dark shapes of buildings, like a glittering brush stroke, dominated by pink sodium streetlights. The roof wasn’t built to be walked on: it was made out of nothing more than overlapping scraps of tar paper laid out over something that gave a little when Hollis put his weight on it. Here and there an assortment of vents and ducts and boxy air conditioners poked up at random. There was no railing around the edge, just a low brick wall at about knee height.

  A wrought-iron ladder led down to the fire escape. Hollis unshouldered his bike and locked it to the ladder with a heavy steel chain. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the top rung with both hands and swung himself out over the edge.

  Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

  The concrete courtyard wheeled around under him, six stories below. He’d never been down there. An old stone birdbath lay propped up in a corner, half filled with brown rainwater. It didn’t even occur to Hollis until he was already outside his own window that it might be locked, but when he tried the sash it opened.

  He bent down to look in. His bedroom looked weirdly unfamiliar from this angle. Warm air blew out into his face, and past him out into the chilly late afternoon.

  Hollis took off his combat boots, set them carefully beside him on the cold wrought-iron grille, and crawled in onto his desk in his socks. He brushed against a stack of paperbacks with his hip; it slumped gracefully over onto the floor. He lived in a studio apartment: one big room, a bathroom, and a kitchen annex, with white plaster walls and a high ceiling. Books, clothes, cards, floppy disks, CDs, tapes, comic books, and bottles of pills littered the floor. Hollis went into the bathroom and turned on the hot-water faucet in the bath. He came back out into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  The light on his answering machine was blinking. He pressed the play button.

  “Hollis, it’s Peters.”

  A car honked in the background—he was calling from a pay phone, or a cell phone. Somebody else said something Hollis couldn’t understand.

  “Listen,” he said, “Blake and I have a car. We’re coming over to your place, and then we’re going to drink your booze and make fun of the Establishment. It’s like the Merry Pranksters all over again. We’re—”

  The message cut off with a beep. By now, huge white billows of steam were swirling out through the open bathroom door and dissolving into the cooler air in the bedroom. Hollis was still wearing his overcoat. He shrugged out of it and let it fall on the floor.

  The rope vibrated with the strain, surging with the beats of the manta’s wings. Malo’s lungs ached for air. His eyes were shut tight against the stinging salt pressure.

  Then, all at once, the rope went slack.

  Slowly, Malo unwound it from around the post and kicked his way back up to the surface, through the warm blackness of the water. His legs felt weak. He took a deep breath, holding on to the old, worm-eaten wood. His palms stung where the rope had cut them.

  Across the water the friendly lights of the village still glowed along the shore. Malo turned the other way and looked out to sea. It was dark, and he couldn’t see the horizon. He started swimming back towards his tiny skiff, which was still drifting by itself in the calm bay.

  Malo had learned his lesson: he would never go fishing alone at night again.

  The last of the weak sunlight slanted in through the lowered blinds. The machine beeped again.

  “Hollis,” said a woman’s voice. “Look, Hollis, is this still you? It’s Eileen Cavanaugh.”

  A heavy click on the line interrupted her—her call waiting. When her voice came back she was talking in double-time so as not to miss the other call.

  “Look, if this is your answering machine—and why you can’t have a normal outgoing message like a normal person is beyond me”—the call waiting clicked again—“I know you—”

  Hollis
reached over and turned the volume all the way down.

  Suddenly it was very quiet in the apartment. He went over and retrieved his boots from the fire escape. Before he closed the window, he dug the lost glove out of the pocket of his overcoat and laid it out on the windowsill to dry.

  “I never saw that glove before in my life,” she said irritably.

  She stood there looking down at it, twisting it nervously between her fingers.

  I went to join her at the window, and together we stared down at the green park of my sumptuous estate. Somehow the view was oppressive to me, and I rang for the curtains to be closed.

  I waited for the servants to go before I spoke.

  “I met him today, you know,” I said. “On the moor.”

  “Oh?” she replied coldly. “Riding to hounds, were you?”

  With the light from the candles behind it, her lustrous blond hair looked dark.

  “Everything’s out in the open now,” I said. “I know all about it.”

  “I know.” A flush rose to her high cheekbones. “I saw him, too.”

  Her mouth had a distinctive shape which I had always particularly relished, an unusually full lower lip deriving from her Hapsburg ancestry. I went to the table and poured myself some wine, but my hands were unsteady and a few drops splashed onto the white linen of the tablecloth.

  “He’ll be leaving soon,” I said. “He told me all about it: an official appointment in the capital. King and country, that sort of thing. I expect he’ll be by for you in the night, or some such heroics.”

  Before she spoke, she rang for someone to come and open the curtains again.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  THURSDAY, 7:45 P.M.

  I had this dream where we were all on the Enterprise, from Star Trek.

  Something happens to the Earth, and it blows up, and all these different cities fly off into space. Each one lands on a different planet. We decide we’re going to go find out what happened to Boston, so we fly to the planet where Boston ended up after the explosion, and it turns out to be an ice planet. Everything’s covered over with these deep, powdery snowdrifts. We drive around for a while looking for people we know, and finally we find some people who are friends with Counselor Troi. She gets out and decides to stay with them.