by Lev Grossman
“What do you think they’d get us on?” he said. “I mean, if we got caught.”
“Breaking and entering, I guess. I don’t know. Criminal trespassing. General moral turpitude. Why?”
“I dunno.”
Hollis glanced up at the sky through the blued-glass band at the top of the windshield and frowned.
“Maybe we can get Blake arrested, too. It’s his car. He aided and abetted us.”
“Sure, let’s all get arrested. Hey, what happened with that girl the other night?”
“What girl?” said Hollis. “I don’t know any girls.”
“From Amanda’s party. She had some Russky name.”
“Oh. Tanya. I actually went out with her the other night,” he said. “Friday night. We went out for a drink, and then we ended up sitting around in her apartment. It was sort of gothic—she has some kind of obscure wasting disease that nobody knows what it is. She has to eat this special macrobiotic herb all the time, that she grows herself. Her whole apartment is full of little trays of it.”
“Sounds bucolic,” Peters said. “Pastoral.”
“It wasn’t, though, it was a disaster.” He stared out the window. “She started talking about Bob Mould, and what a genius he’s supposed to be, and I faded out.”
“You have to cut these girls some slack, Hollis—they feel like they have to say a certain amount of stuff, you know, first, so if you actually sleep together it won’t just turn out to be an empty sex act.”
Peters looked over at him, then back at the road.
“It’s supposed to be a medium for communication, right? So there has to be something that’s being communicated. They know it doesn’t really matter all that much what it actually is, exactly, but you can’t just do it: you have to say something first. It’s like foreplay. Do your part. Quit being so genuine all the time. You’re going to have to start dissembling a little.”
He stopped and punched in the cigarette lighter again.
“If you ever want to get any.”
“Maybe I don’t want any,” said Hollis.
“Sure you do. Everybody wants some. Maybe if you had a job you’d be more in circulation.”
“I don’t really want a job either,” said Hollis. “To be brutally frank.” He powered the window back up.
“She had nice eyes,” said Peters.
“Everybody has nice eyes. Eyes are nice.”
A pickup truck pulled abreast of them on the right. It had brackets for carrying panes of glass, but they were empty. Peters read a green-and-white highway sign that was attached to an overpass:
“A mile to 128.”
“Maybe I’ll ask out my Temporary Employment Contractor,” said Hollis. “She told me last week that I have a lot of ‘horse sense,’ quote unquote. God, they despise me there.”
“I bet you make a lousy temp. Jesus, Hollis, I’m going to start getting worried about you. You know what happened to you?”
“I give up. What happened to me?”
“I just thought of this—it’s the American university system. This is my new theory: the New Feudalism. You go to college and you get used to living like some kind of medieval overlord, with people waiting on you and everything, and it warps your mind. It happens to everybody. By the time you graduate you have all the personal habits of an aristocrat, and none of the money. No wonder you’re dysfunctional—you’re a twentieth-century office temp who’s channeling a nobleman in the British Raj.”
They watched a pair of red taillights appear and disappear in the distance. The embankment was so high they were on a level with the tops of the trees beside the highway.
“Maybe,” Hollis said. “Maybe I’m just too good for this damn, dirty world.”
They stopped talking. Hollis leaned his cheek against the cold glass of the window and closed his eyes. The vibration of the car transmitted itself through his jawbone. It was almost five by the clock in the dashboard. Hollis pressed his hands between his knees. There was a ragged back issue of The New Republic in a pocket in the door, but it was still too dark to read.
After a while he felt the car slow and turn onto Route 95. He groped around under the seat until he found the row of buttons that would recline it all the way back. Peters asked him if he was going to sleep. He grunted. He curled his legs up onto the seat.
Something sharp in his pocket was poking his thigh, and he dug it out and put it on the dashboard: his keys.
* * *
When he opened his eyes again it was after five. The very edge of the sky had turned a glowing cornflower blue, though closer to the zenith it remained a deep black.
“Morning, buttercup,” Peters said. He pointed out a huge blue-glass-and-steel hotel that was emerging from the trees at the top of a low bluff. Even from the highway they could see that the lobby was at least six or seven stories high.
“Bloody great hotel,” he said. “Smack in the middle of Lynn, or whatever this fucking town is. Who the hell would pay to stay here?”
The facade faced east. Some of the rising blue of the sky was reflected in it, divided into rectangles by the panes of glass.
“This is America’s Technology Highway,” said Hollis. He cleared his throat. “Zaibatsu territory. That’s who must use it.” He sniffed. “Next step, everybody lives in corporate arcologies. Never go outside. I for one can’t wait.”
Suddenly Peters swerved to the right. They cut across all four lanes at sixty miles an hour.
“Jesus fucking hell!” said Hollis, grabbing onto his armrest. “What the hell are you doing?”
Peters whooped as they squealed onto the exit ramp, barely missing the grass shoulder. They decelerated around the curve and managed to come to a stop by the time the ramp ended in a T intersection with a flashing yellow light.
Suddenly it was dark and still. A miniature delta of stray gravel crackled under the wheels. A white-on-green sign on the corner showed arrows pointing both ways, to Wellesley and to Dover.
“Mr. Peabody,” said Peters, “set the wayback machine.”
They took the Dover road. Even in the center of town the traffic lights were still flashing yellow. The houses were huge and white and covered with columns and widow’s walks and balconies and gables.
Hollis cleared his throat.
“So where is this place, anyway?” he said.
“Not that far. A few miles. Look.” He pointed to a grocery store with a sign that read FATHER & SON MARKET. “Two generations of successful capitalism.”
“I just decided,” said Hollis. “I’m going to go see Eileen.”
“You are? Why?”
“I don’t know. I just decided.”
Peters frowned.
“When are you going to go see her?”
“Next couple of days, I guess.”
Hollis’s palms started sweating, and he wiped them on his thighs. He yawned nervously. The trees let up for a few minutes while they passed a sumptuous golf club, wide expanses of grass gleaming with dew. Afterwards the houses resumed. A police car drove past in the other direction.
“That’s one,” said Peters. “There’s only one more cruiser in the whole town. At least we won’t have the gendarmerie to deal with.”
“This had better work, you know,” said Hollis.
“It’ll work.”
He hid his mounting misgivings behind a mask of calm, easy wit.
As they went farther the landscape got more and more rural. The roads narrowed, and the woods were dark for minutes at a time. Where the land was marshy, a thick white mist flowed across the road. At the same time, the neighborhoods became wealthier: the houses were set farther back, and the driveways tended to be semicircular loops, with two separate wrought-iron gates, instead of straight lines. There were tennis courts behind lines of trees. Once they passed a fenced-off pasture with an oval dirt track, although Hollis couldn’t see any horses.
They bumped over a tiny bridge that looked like it was made out of old telephone poles. Peters re
marked that the stream that ran under it eventually turned into the Charles River that ran through Boston.
It seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Finally they turned off the main road and entered a maze of curving gray streets without street signs. Peters pointed out the mouth of the street he had grown up on. Hollis turned to look over his shoulder as they passed it.
He could make out no trace of the bygone past.
Five more minutes passed, in tense silence. Then Peters wordlessly pulled over to the side of the road and killed the engine. It was exactly half past five. He switched off the lights. They were on a wide, dove-gray street with a few sizable houses visible, partly screened by trees, with more trees behind them. The only sound was the ticking of the engine as it cooled and contracted in the early morning air.
CHAPTER 7
FRIDAY, 5:30 A.M.
“This reminds me of some movie,” said Hollis.
His voice sounded weirdly loud in the silence.
“It’s like a lot of movies.”
“We should have talked about it more.”
Peters shrugged.
“What’s there to talk about, really?”
A thin layer of cloud was rolling in with the dawn. The half-light reduced the landscape around them to a composition of different shades of gray, the only color being the hint of gray-blue just above the horizon. Hollis yawned again and shivered. With the heater off, the air in the car was starting to get cold. He put his hands together and breathed into them. A pair of improbably long black skid marks stretched along the asphalt in front of them and curved away around the corner out of sight.
“All right,” said Peters. “You sit in the driver’s seat.”
He took the keys out of the ignition and dropped them jingling into Hollis’s lap.
“You can drive, if we have to leave in a hurry. Which I very much doubt will happen.”
“Look, why don’t I just come with you?”
Hollis opened the car door a crack, and the dome light came on.
“Whatever,” said Peters.
The door opened into a dark fir tree that was sopping wet with dew, and Hollis could feel the cold branches pressing against his back through the thickness of his overcoat. Peters climbed out on the other side.
“There’s really no point,” he said. “It’ll take like two minutes. There’s just more of a chance you’ll knock something over and set off a motion detector or something.”
“Do they have those?” said Hollis.
“They’re never on.”
He slammed the door and started walking away down the street, backwards.
“They’re probably just a pain in the ass. Look, do you want to come?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s just that there isn’t really any point.”
The street was so wide it could have been divided into four lanes, but the town had left it blank. The lawns on either side flowed into one another with no dividing lines, the property lines marked only by a hedge, or a row of trees, or a difference in the color or height of the grass.
“Well, lock the car, anyway.”
Hollis jogged around to the driver’s-side door and locked it, and together they walked up to the corner. As they turned onto the next street they could see only two houses. The first was a grand Victorian farmhouse with a two-tiered veranda, paired with an even larger barn. It had a folly gazebo on the land behind it, and farther back they could see a swimming pool with a high green chain-link fence around it.
They walked in the middle of the road. A crow cawed.
“Which one is it?” Hollis said.
Peters pointed to the house on the left, farther along. It was newer and even bigger than the farmhouse: colonial, three stories tall, painted white, with a row of classical columns along the front. It was set back a few hundred feet from the road, and from where Hollis was standing he could see that it had two wings that extended back as far again as it was wide. The windows were arranged in long, regular rows, with black shutters. Five or six red brick chimneys stuck up from the gray roof at irregular intervals.
Next to the driveway, where it approached the front of the house, stood a little wrought-iron lamppost with a globular white light on top of it. The light was on.
Fair friends, here is a great marvel, for I seem to see a tree of iron.
Peters slowed his pace as they came up to the lawn, then stopped when he reached the edge. Wide stripes of ever-so-slightly lighter and darker green ran across it, left behind by a lawnmower.
“So,” said Peters, in his regular speaking voice. “Somebody here order a pizza?”
“Where’s the door? Around back?”
Peters nodded. He stared off into the backyard, squinting. A big black bird rose up out of the trees, clapping its wings together, and flew away over their heads.
“I guess if we see anybody we can say we were cutting through,” Peters said. “I don’t really know what’s back there. So I’m not sure exactly what we’d be cutting through to.”
Jerking his shirt front down to smooth it out, he stepped decisively onto the grass. Hollis followed him.
They cut across the property diagonally. Dew from the grass seeped into their sneakers, and a thin white mist hung in the air a few feet above the turf. For an instant Hollis glimpsed his own face reflected in the dark windows of the first floor. As they came around the back the house turned out to be shaped like a U, with the two rear wings connected by an arched colonnade that closed off the fourth side, defining a small courtyard in the middle. A few hundred feet farther back, in the trees behind the backyard, it was still pitch dark.
Peters pointed out a little landing against the rear of the house, at the base of one of the wings. Hollis watched as he climbed up the two wooden steps. There was a metal screen door, and Peters put his hand on the handle and swung it open in slow motion. A rusty metal spring twanged as it stretched.
Behind the screen door was a wooden one, with a little cut-glass window set in it at eye level.
“Jeez, man,” whispered Hollis.
“Now must to be velly kefful,” said Peters softly.
He rubbed his hands together briskly and reached out for the brass knob. Glancing back at Hollis over his shoulder, he pushed in without turning. The door opened.
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
Hollis followed Peters in, wiping his feet on a mat on the floor as he crossed the threshold. He closed the door behind him, and suddenly it was dark. The room was a storeroom, a kind of pantry, with shelves along the walls crammed with canned goods. There was a bundle of snow shovels standing in one corner, and a huge humming white freezer against one wall. Bales of faded old New York Times Magazines tied with twine were piled up around it.
When they opened the door on the opposite wall, warm air puffed out around the edges. It had been sealed with weather stripping, and there was a difference in air pressure.
They stepped carefully into a silent, shining, immaculate kitchen.
For a few seconds neither of them said anything, then Hollis closed the door softly behind them.
“Welcome to the cyberbs,” he whispered.
Rows and rows of copper-bottomed pots of various shapes and sizes hung on the walls. Peters walked softly across the yellow linoleum floor to a cabinet and opened a drawer. Hollis strolled after him. He opened the fridge: it was crammed. There was a six-pack of Rolling Rock on one of the bottom shelves, pine-green cans, and he detached one.
“Nice going,” Peters said. “Like they won’t notice.”
Hollis looked at the beer in his hand.
“The die is cast,” he said, and he took out the rest of the beer. He left it standing on the butcher-block counter.
“We can drink it on the way back.”
It was 5:44 in the morning, according to the green LED clock in the microwave. They moved on through an open archway into a long, hushed dining room with a huge dark-wood table in it. All
the curtains were drawn, and an unearthly white light filtered in through them. An enormous mirror with a heavy gilt frame hung on the wall.
Hollis looked at himself in it.
Peephole to a better world.
Peters came up behind him.
“What do you think?” Hollis said. “Should I shave my head?”
“Grow it out,” said Peters. “Grow it out. All the cool kids are doing it.”
“What about Michael Stipe?”
Peters snorted. “Like I said.”
They went on into the entrance hall, which was decorated with oriental rugs and British-looking paintings of hunting scenes. A grandfather clock stood in one corner, its pendulum frozen. Hollis watched impassively, drinking his beer, as Peters went through a closet full of umbrellas and overcoats, whispering nervously to himself under his breath.
“Where’s her fucking purse? Come on, you mother. Where the fuck are you?”
The entrance hall had a grand staircase up to the second floor. Glancing down, Hollis noticed that his feet were leaving dark impressions in the white carpet. He hoped the Donnellys wouldn’t notice. It was chilly; the thermostat was turned down for the night.
It was an ice planet. Everything was covered over with deep, powdery snowdrifts.
A little light crept in through a few glass rectangles in the front door, and Hollis could see the dawn creeping up. There were two or three framed family photographs, which he avoided looking at.
“All right,” Peters whispered, closing the sliding door of the closet. “That was a bust.”
He opened it again a crack, to where it had been before.
“Look around for a purse or something,” he said. “Drawers. Little hooks for hanging keys on. If it turns out it’s in their bedroom, we’re fucked.”
They went into a kind of parlor, a long, meticulously neat room divided into two halves: at the far end was a white baby grand piano, cluttered with sheet music.
Peters looked around alertly.
“They’re not going to be in here,” said Hollis.
“Never say never, my dear Watson.” He picked up some of the magazines and looked under them. “You see—but you do not observe.”
