Warp

by Lev Grossman

  “Hang on,” Hollis said, from where he was lying. “My Spidey-sense is tingling. That means trouble.”

  Eileen sat down on a boulder.

  The sun was only about an hour above the horizon. The sea was a dark blue. The air was cooling, but the rocks were still warm, and from where they were sitting they could see the beach and the row of summer mansions that ran along behind it, and the tiny beachgoers laid out in ragged parallel rows along the sand.

  Half an hour went by.

  “Okay,” said Hollis finally. He sat up and stretched. “I give in.”

  Eileen’s eyes were closed. She wriggled a little where she was lying.

  “I was just getting comfortable,” she said. “Gimme another sec.”

  “You can have all the sex you want.”

  The bus stopped every few blocks, but no one got on or off. Hollis let his head lie back against the hard back of the seat, with his legs stretched out across the aisle. He felt the bus turn a corner and climb up a bridge which ran over an abandoned railway yard. He knew what it looked like in daylight: brown steel rails and brown wooden sleepers with weeds poking up between them. There were complicated mechanical shunting devices at the intersections, now rusted into place. A few blasted-looking old railroad cars still stood on the tracks, painted bright primary toy-colors.

  Here lies the wasteland of X, where once the mighty wizard Y did battle with the mighty wizard Z.

  The bus turned a sharp corner, and a collection of candy wrappers and Styrofoam cups slid out from under the seats and across the floor. An oversized can of Foster’s rolled after them in irregular, sloshing jerks.

  At that moment, the futility of his existence was suddenly borne in upon him.

  Hollis slid down even farther in his seat, until he could see the streetlights opposite him going by overhead, linked to one another by power lines that resembled long rising and falling swells. The sky behind them was a mist of orange and gray. The tiny woman and her boyfriend were sitting next to each other again. At the back of the bus a thin black man sat bolt upright, listening to a Walkman.

  After ten minutes they were almost at Hollis’s stop, and he got up and went to stand at the front of the bus for the last block. A trio of twentysomething women were getting off at the same time, tipsy secretaries having a night out.

  “Please retrieve your baggage from under the seats,” said one of them, giggling. “Before exiting the airplane.”

  I am not capable of human emotion, Doctor. I am unable to “laugh” at what you call “humor.”

  The whole intersection was lit up with floodlights, and a crowd was milling around noisily on the sidewalks—mostly college students from Boston University and Boston College. A few bars and clubs were still open, and a Store 24. Hollis pushed through the crowd as fast as he could. The night was quieter and darker after he got a few blocks up Commonwealth to where the residential buildings started. For some reason, the roofs were all crenellated, and silhouetted against the sky they looked like one single unbroken fortified wall. He passed a lamppost festooned with yards and yards of magnetic ribbon from an unwound cassette tape.

  On May 21, 1991, while campaigning in Sriperumbudur, south of Madras, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was approached by a young woman wearing a loose-fitting green-and-orange robe. As the woman bowed to Mr. Gandhi in a traditional gesture of respect, she apparently detonated a bomb made of plastique mixed with steel ball bearings which she wore strapped to her body beneath her clothing. All that remained after the explosion was her head, which was found nearby almost perfectly intact.

  The street in front of Hollis’s building was divided by the trolley tracks, and someone had gotten stuck in one of the lanes going the wrong way. Now the driver gingerly tried to back up to where he’d made the mistake, in the glare of the headlights of the oncoming cars. A group of partygoers watched from the sidewalk.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” said a woman’s voice.

  The trolley had stopped running hours earlier. He could hear the wind blowing in the trees, and there was a crisp smell of snow in the air. A plastic upright fan stood leaned up against a tree in front of his building; for some reason the trash people wouldn’t collect it.

  In the elevator, Hollis leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath. The door opened. He walked mechanically to his apartment and unlocked it—it took him a few tries to get both locks undone. His futon was still folded up into a couch. There were no messages on the machine.

  As he unlocked his bicycle outside her apartment, he noticed he was having trouble breathing.

  “I’m dead,” he thought. “I’ll never survive.”

  The square dial of the clock on his desk read 3:55. Hollis went into the bathroom and sat down on the cold tile floor, still wearing his green corduroy overcoat. The radiator hissed crazily.

  One night Hollis came back to his building late. He was surprised to see a man standing in the hallway outside his apartment—it was unusual for anyone else in the building to be up at this hour. The man was dressed in a gray suit, somber but expensively cut. For some reason he struck Hollis as strangely familiar.

  “Hollis Kessler,” said the stranger. “Do you know who I am?”

  Hollis stopped.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m here to ask for your help. There isn’t much time. I’ve come a long way to find you.”

  They faced each other.

  “Our world is dying. Only you can save us.”

  For some reason the bathroom light was incredibly bright. Hollis ran some cold tap water into a glass and drank it. It tasted like old toothpaste.

  My hands were unsteady, and a drop splashed onto the white linen of the tablecloth.

  Same old Caulfield. When are you going to grow up?

  Hollis closed his eyes.

  It was very late. Lying on the bed, Hollis watched Eileen take off her jewelry. Her back was to him, but he caught glimpses of her face in the mirror.

  “Nadia’s mother looked like hell tonight,” she said.

  “She had that huge pin on her dress,” said Hollis. “What was that thing, the Hope Rhinestone?”

  When she was done Eileen came over and lay down on top of him, still in her evening gown, with the back unzipped down to the small of her back. They kissed.

  After a while she pulled back and wrinkled her nose at him, smiling.

  “You sweat like a pig,” said Eileen. “Whenever you wear a suit.”

  “But I smell like a man.”

  “You smell like several men.”

  The sun is going down on a salt marsh. The tops of the reeds are all but drowned in seawater. A post marks the channel out to the ocean.

  The flow of the tide carries a flat-bottomed skiff on the current, faster and faster, out towards the bay, faster and faster and faster and faster.

  Eileen smoothed his forehead with her hand.

  “There, then,” she said. “There, then.”

  CHAPTER 6

  FRIDAY, 4:15 A.M.

  Twenty minutes later, Hollis was downstairs in the vestibule of his apartment building. Even inside it was cold, and he could see his breath in the air. The floor was decorated with tiny colored mosaic tiles, and littered with red-and-white Chinese menus and thick bundles of newsprint coupons.

  It was still dark out. He sat down on the icy marble steps and looked out through the glass door at the hotel across the street: all the lights were out, and chintzy white curtains hung in the windows. In the parking lot a pair of police cars idled, their driver’s-side windows facing each other. Plumes of white exhaust from their engines floated up into the light of the streetlights.

  Pulling his coat around him, Hollis stepped out onto the stoop. The early-morning air was bitterly cold. He leaned back against the door. His face felt a little raw from having been hastily washed and shaved. A pair of headlights caught his eye as they appeared at the top of the hill. He watched them as they headed towards him. At the l
ast possible second the car slowed down and stopped, its tires whimpering on the pavement.

  It was a clean, sleek, new-looking gray Lexus sedan. Hollis could barely hear the engine running. A moth fluttered crazily in front of one of the headlights, in and out of the thick white beams.

  One day, my son, all this will be yours.

  Hollis jogged down the steps, between the parked cars, and out into the street. He opened the door: it was warm in the car, and Peters sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead at the road, wearing a furry leather hunting cap with earflaps. There were dark circles under his eyes. Hollis climbed in and Peters eased off the brake. They rolled forward up to the stoplight at the corner.

  “Pretty nice car,” said Hollis, while they waited.

  Peters nodded.

  “Where’s your hat?” he said.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Take one.” Peters gestured towards the backseat. “Have a hat. Thieves always have hats.”

  Hollis turned around; there was a fedora on the backseat. He made a face and turned back around again.

  “My father wears those,” he said.

  “How is the old man, anyway?”

  The light changed, and Peters stamped on the accelerator.

  “Who knows?” said Hollis.

  Trees, street signs, and gray stoops flew by. They passed a block of nicer buildings with identical green canopies over the doorways; in the window of each one was an identical little brass-colored chandelier.

  “Did you sleep?”

  “No,” Peters said. “Blake and I played poker at his place.”

  “Did you win the car?”

  “We stuck to bets I could cover.”

  “A deck of cards is the devil’s prayerbook.”

  Peters nodded, yawning.

  “I’m not really feeling all that verbal right now, dude,” he said.

  They beat three or four red lights in a row until they reached the main intersection, where Hollis had gotten off the bus half an hour earlier. The street corners were mostly empty now, and in the window of a Woolworth’s Hollis could see rows of cages with parakeets in them, in various fluorescent colors, sleeping with their heads resting on their own shoulders. There was no other traffic, and when the light changed Peters pushed the Lexus up to fifty. The road widened out into eight lanes. Off to their left the Charles appeared and disappeared in the darkness between the buildings. They cut right through the BU campus, with high-rise classroom buildings on one side and rows of campus stores on the other.

  Hollis leaned his seat back and closed his eyes.

  IT WAS A RACE TO THE EDGE OF SPACE …

  The ship was the size of a six-story apartment building, and not much more aerodynamic. The squared-off hull was built for interstellar flight, and in the thick lower atmosphere it was all he could do to keep its nose pointed at the sky. The gravity projectors that held it up were drawing every last watt of reserve power.

  He knew he had no hope of outrunning the nimble military fighters that harried him, but there was a chance his shielding might hold out until they reached the ionosphere. Then the hyperdrive would kick in, and in an instant the bulky ship would become as quick and agile as a fish in water. It was a race to the edge of space.

  If only, he thought, if only I knew for sure it was a race I wanted to win.…

  After another five minutes Peters swung them up the on-ramp to the westbound Massachusetts Turnpike. When the plump middle-aged woman in the tollbooth leaned down to give Peters his ticket, her blouse fell open a little, and even from the passenger seat Hollis got a generous look at her freckled cleavage. She wore an ebony pendant shaped like a fish. Then they were through, and Peters pushed them up to eighty-five without the engine showing any sign of strain.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” Hollis said drowsily. “I mean, shouldn’t we talk about it beforehand?”

  “Good question,” said Peters. “I don’t really know.”

  Hollis grimaced and closed his eyes again.

  There was a pretty girl on my vidphone screen.

  I’d never seen her before. It was the last time I was to see her alive.

  “EEC security is chiefly dependent on the Mendel algorithm for generating its passcodes,” she was saying. “Once you have the encryption chip, you’ll be able to walk right in the front door.”

  She started reciting a long list of interface parameters. The vidphone display showed a pretty oval face, with a high forehead and short brown hair wrapped up in a scarf. The room in the background was dark and indistinct.

  “Your Mitsubishi-Hirsch contact will be at the gate,” she went on. “He has a tattoo, here”—she touched a place on her neck—“that will register only with your augmented vision. Don’t break stride when you see him.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait a minute. Who are you?”

  She cut me off. I realized only then that she couldn’t hear me. I was talking to a recording.

  “If my status at EEC has not been compromised, I may still be alive when you receive this message. Do not try to contact me. For our mutual safety, we must never meet.”

  The girl’s eyes seemed to lock with mine, and there was a trace of pleading under the even coolness of her demeanor. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

  “Watch for the sign of the black fish.”

  The vidphone screen went dark.

  A two-by-four lying in the road flashed in the headlights for an instant, and Peters swerved nimbly to put it between the front wheels. Hollis watched him feel around with one hand for the cigarette lighter, then look down and punch it in.

  “I guess it should be me who goes in,” Peters said finally. “If they catch me I’ll be sort of fucked, because they know who I am, but on the other hand they probably won’t call the police or anything. They’ll just be a little weirded out—like, what am I doing robbing their house?”

  “Good question,” said Hollis.

  “Even if I step in, they’d probably call the police on you. That would be a disaster.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’d say.”

  “Besides, I know the house,” Peters said. “It’ll take five minutes. Max. You just stay in the car.”

  Hollis nodded and looked out the window.

  “We’ll never make it there by dawn,” he said.

  The lighter popped back out, but Peters didn’t seem to notice.

  The elevated highway slowly descended towards ground level as they left the city. In the darkness, beyond the pale sand of the shoulder, a bumpy line of dark trees flew by. A wide, placid reservoir appeared, and it took almost a minute for it to slide slowly past in the moonlight. There was a tiny island in the middle, with trees that leaned out from the shore to overhang the dark water.

  Our island home is far beyond the waves.

  “Is it still daylight savings time now?” Hollis asked.

  “Not anymore, old sport. Look for a sign that says 128. 128 or 95, they’re the same thing. Jesus, it’s been ages since I did this.”

  He reached up and angled the rearview mirror so he could look into it. Pushing back his bangs, he examined his forehead.

  “I ate a whole bag of potato chips with Blake,” he said. “It was disgusting.”

  “Are you looking for boils?”

  “Boils? What are boils? Pimples.” He looked again. “Jesus. I think I can see my third eye.”

  “At camp we used to call them fee-foos.”

  Hollis glanced into the backseat again. There was a Wesleyan sticker on the back window.

  “Do you think Blake really owns this thing?” he said.

  “I don’t know. He’s no pauper, our Blake. Look at the registration, if you’re insatiably curious. He ain’t no pauper, and he sure ain’t no prince. I of course abjure all material wealth.”

  Peters straightened the mirror out again, and Hollis opened the glove compartment and started looking through the sheaf of papers inside. He stopped and
held up a little spiral notebook.

  “Check this out,” he said. “Someone’s keeping track of every time they stop for gas. What their mileage was, how much they used. How much it cost. Some people just have too much energy. What does a registration look like, anyway?”

  “Don’t worry about it, we’re better off not knowing.” He looked out the window at the horizon. “I wonder what time the sun comes up.”

  “I dunno.” Hollis closed his eyes again. “I left my almanac in my other suit.”

  Peters snorted. “Everybody’s a comedian.”

  He started singing:

  “There is a house in something something

  They call the Rising Sun.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “And it’s been the ruin of many a man

  And God, I know I’m one.”

  Hollis powered down the window a crack, and as they passed another off-ramp he pointed it out.

  “That’s my home exit,” he said. “I grew up about a mile from here.”

  Beams of white light lanced down from somewhere above us, growing a deeper and deeper red as they penetrated into the blood plasma. There was something about it that seemed achingly familiar. Even Peterson abandoned the helm for a minute, to watch through a forward viewport. For a while nobody spoke.

  “What is it?” somebody asked finally.

  “We’ve reached the ear,” Peterson said. “We’re looking out through the tympanic membrane, from the inside. That light is probably sunlight.”

  “Jesus God!” I said. Tears flooded my eyes. “Will we ever get out of the President’s body alive? Will this fantastic voyage ever end?”

  A giant flashing-arrow sign passed by on their right, mounted on a little yellow trailer in the breakdown lane. The right lane was closed off. The grass of the median strip looked pale in the darkness—sometimes there was a glimmer of water in the middle where the ground was especially low, or even a stand of cattails. Where the strip widened and the opposite lane drifted farther away, whole thickets and groves of trees sprang up. A midnight-blue state trooper parked in a turnaround watched them flash past without moving.

  Hollis ran his finger along a seam in the leather upholstery.