Codex (28 page)

Finally she turned around. He shifted his weight to an old crate next to her, and they kissed. It was a soft, tender kiss. A good kiss. After a few minutes she moved his hand up her slender ribcage and placed it over her small, soft breast.

Another long time later they broke apart. Margaret's eyes were closed. She seemed to be half sleeping, half dreaming. They didn't speak, and the silence was deep around them. They were like two slaves buried alive together for all eternity in the tomb of some cruel Asiatic king. She leaned her head against his chest, and he put his arms around her shoulders. He was grateful for the warmth.

He looked up at the shadowy ceiling far above their heads, then carefully, so as not to disturb her, he glanced down at his watch. It was one in the morning.

 

AT 6:58 A.M., TWO DIRTY,
shivering refugees stood at an out-of-the-way fire exit in an obscure corner of the basement of the Chenoweth Rare Book and Manuscript Repository Annex. Margaret stood slightly apart from Edward. He carried the heavy suitcase containing the Wents' books, looking like a bedraggled immigrant with chalk marks on his coat waiting to be processed at Ellis Island. She carried a rare copy of De Quincey's
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
in her folded arms; she'd picked it up at some point the night before and refused to part with it. They watched and waited. At exactly 7:00 a tinny electronic tone chimed, and a tiny red light over the door winked out.

The door opened onto a thick evergreen hedge covered with dew. They pushed their way out through it and across a moat of brown wood chips. It was daylight, but no one saw them, or if they did they didn't raise the alarm. The air was as warm and humid as a rainforest after the dry chill of the library, and they shivered uncontrollably as they warmed up. Margaret's face was streaky and red where her tears had dried. A bird called sweetly from further down the riverbank, nearer the water, where a mist was burning off in the morning sun. The grass was drenched with moisture that soaked into their socks. Edward would happily have murdered for a sip of scotch.

Margaret walked ahead of him through the carefully manicured grounds, whether out of embarrassment or eagerness to get out of there, he couldn't tell. She limped slightly; she must have hurt her foot when she kicked the suitcase. Edward hadn't slept much, and he hadn't eaten since yesterday afternoon. Now the hunger and fatigue caught up with him, and he felt faint. His mouth flooded with saliva. She waited impassively, sphinxlike, while he puked into a rhododendron.

A half-dozen cars were lined up in the motel parking lot like suckling pigs. All the windows were dark, the curtains drawn. Edward had the key. There were twin beds in their room, covered with synthetic floral bedspreads, fresh and unslept-in. Two water glasses stood on the dresser, still wrapped in hygienic tissue paper.

Edward sat down on the nearer bed.

“Just give me a minute,” he mumbled. He'd get up in a second. “I just need to close my eyes for one minute.”

The mattress was hard, and the bed was made so tightly it was an effort to pull back the covers. Finally he just lay down on top of them, still wearing his shoes, and put his hands under the flat, flaccid pillow and closed his eyes. A warm, glowing, pulsing pattern appeared behind his eyelids. He heard the shower come on.

After a while he felt hands untying his shoes, urging him under the covers, tucking him in, and then Margaret lay down next to him, warm and pink and clean, and they fell asleep together in the bright white sunlight streaming in through the windows.

T
HE DAY AFTER THEY
got back Edward came down with a summer cold.

It might have been the chilly air in the library, or the dust or the stress or the lack of sleep, or all of them combined, but when he woke up the next morning everything around him felt different. He knew that his apartment was full of sunlight and heat, but he couldn't feel it. Time was slower. Gravity was weaker. His head felt like it was full of some thick, heavy, viscous liquid.

For two days Edward lay on his couch with his head on the cushions and his legs hooked over one of the arms, his blue office shirt unbuttoned and his hair unwashed. He wore plaid flannel pajama bottoms and drank cartons of orange juice in little sips because he couldn't breathe through his nose. He ate once a day. He left the TV on all the time, watching shows he'd never seen before, or even suspected existed. One show was devoted exclusively to horrific sporting accidents captured on videotape. Every episode followed the same formula: a festive occasion, bright sunlight, crowded bleachers, “loving” family members present. Often the fateful incident took place in the background while the amateur cameraman, oblivious for the first few seconds, focused on the loved ones chattering away blissfully in the foreground, while behind them a funny car unexpectedly spewed burning fluid all over itself, or a double-hulled speedboat took graceful flight and floated toward a beach packed with sun-bathers, or a privately owned Cessna lumbered into the air, overloaded with happy hunters bound for a carefree weekend upstate that they would never, ever enjoy.

After two or three days of this he lost all remaining sense of connection with his old working life. He should have been in a panic. It was almost time for him to go to England; a glance at his offer letter, disinterred from his briefcase, confirmed that he was due there tomorrow. With a casual mendacity that was totally uncharacteristic of him, he called Esslin & Hart in London and gave them an exaggerated account of his illness. Afterward he couldn't remember exactly what he said, but they agreed that he sounded terrible and that he could postpone his arrival for another two weeks, to the beginning of September.

One strange thing: He called Margaret and left messages, but she never picked up and never called him back. He didn't understand. It hurt that she was ignoring him—or at least, it would have hurt if he'd really been able to feel much of anything, but not much got through the soft, warm blanket of illness that was wrapped around his brain. He felt physically unable to think about the codex, either. He forgot about the past and the future; only the miserable, meaningless present existed. And when even that was too much, he played MOMUS.

Time was in free-fall in the game. The sun raced by overhead, faster and faster, until it blurred into a single glowing band, a burning streak across the sky. Day and night, clouds and sky, sun and moon blended together into an even gray-blue luminescence.

Talk about wasting time. He had climbed up to the roof of a skyscraper, and from there he watched as centuries passed like minutes. Entire ages arose and subsided, millennia came and went, civilizations waxed and waned. The city became a jungle crowded with towering ginkgo trees between which sailed enormous birds of paradise trailing long feathered plumes. Then the trees withered and fell away, and New York became an oasis in a vast desert. Scalloped dunes of yellow sand hundreds of feet high drifted by like great waves, one after the other, mountains of dust marching inland over the horizon, driven by the wind. Finally, when it seemed like the desert age would never end, the sea rose and covered everything, until he could have leaned down from his rooftop perch and dabbled his fingers in the salt water.

Edward was joined by a strange man—his presence was never satisfactorily explained by the narrative—who moved the story forward in genteel, surprisingly cultured tones.

“It's actually pretty simple,” the man said. “Aliens are planning to invade Earth, but first they need to make it habitable. They come from a cold planet, and Earth is heated by the hot molten lava at its core. When that core cools and hardens, millions of years from now, Earth will be cold enough for them to colonize. So the aliens are accelerating the passage of time until Earth has cooled down enough to be comfortable. If they're lucky, humanity will have died out by then, too.”

“Right, okay,” Edward typed. “So how do we stop them?” He wasn't interested in the details. He was tired of being a passive observer. He was spoiling for a fight. But the man—whether out of stoicism or because of some gap in his programming—didn't answer him.

Tens of thousands of years slid by. With oceans covering the land masses, mankind evolved a society that lived entirely aloft in massive dirigibles made from whale skins sewn together and inflated with hot air. Edward left his high tower and joined a band of aerial buccaneers, and together they cruised the jetstream, miles above the glittering seas, preying on smaller craft. For food they dragged the oceans with massive nets and snared seabirds from the endless flocks that darkened the skies. They flew jury-rigged gliders made of bamboo harvested from the peaks of the Himalayas, the only mountains that still poked their tips up above the water.

After a while he forgot all about the alien invasion. After all, he reasoned, from his point of view, within the accelerated time-stream, he had millions of years to go before they would even begin to be a threat. He could go on like this practically forever—bronzed by the sun, knife clenched between his teeth, living by his wits, caring for nothing.

 

THEN ONE MORNING
Edward woke up feeling better. His sinuses were clear. His head had returned to its normal size. The dull yellow scrim of fever had lifted.

In fact, he felt fabulous, if a little light-headed. His momentum was back, and with interest. My God, he'd wasted so much time! It had rained torrentially the night before, and the sky was still overcast. The air smelled moist, and the day had a freshly washed look to it, as if it had been vigorously scrubbed with a steel brush. Edward showered, dressed, and did ten push-ups.

He picked up the phone and dialed Margaret's number. No answer, as usual. No problem. A quick search online yielded her address in Brooklyn.

Bounding out the door, he felt—for no particular reason, and despite quite a few reasons to the contrary—relaxed and happy and refreshed. Purged. It was the first time he'd left his apartment in a week, and he was exploding with energy. Armed with a bundle of newsprint—the
New York Times,
the
Journal,
the
Financial Times
—to bring him up to speed on the world at large, he jogged down the steps to the 6 train. An hour later he reemerged, blinking, in Brooklyn.

Zeph was exaggerating when he said Edward had never been to Brooklyn, but not by much. Apart from a night or two of artsy slumming in Williamsburg, and one accidental detour the wrong way down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he'd almost never crossed the East River. He looked around at a sinister cityscape of brownstones and row houses receding away from him in all directions at strange off-angles, and he wished he'd thought to bring a map. Clearly he was in foreign territory,
terra incognita,
way outside the easy Cartesian grid of Manhattan. The streets were leafier, with a ginkgo or some other hardy urban flora planted every twenty yards, and dirtier.

When he finally found Margaret's building, he had another problem: She wasn't in it. He rang her bell for a good five minutes with no answer. It was midafternoon. The strolling mommies and elderly stoop-sitters scrutinized him, then looked away when he looked back. Staring up at what he assumed to be her window, Edward felt anger infecting his sunny postrecovery mood. How dare she disappear on him now! Was she just going to cut him off like this? Was she even in town? Had she lost interest in the codex? Or had she left him behind to go off on her own, pursuing some more promising lead?

In the end he wedged a note under her door and got back on the train. Somewhere around Soho he realized he was ravenous—he hadn't had a real meal in days—so he got out and ate a huge late-afternoon lunch sitting at the counter in a cheap Japanese diner in Chinatown. He watched as a short, wide man with a shaved head and strangler's arms cooked dumplings in a frying pan the size of a manhole cover. He thought about Zeph and Caroline—he'd been ignoring their calls the way Margaret was ignoring his. He called Margaret on his cell phone, but she didn't answer. The hell with her, he thought. He was having a fine old time without her. He called Zeph and Caroline, but they didn't answer, and that was fine, too. He didn't feel like talking. Talking would just lead to explanations, and discussions, and sober evaluations, and stock-taking, and other things he wasn't in the mood for.

By that time it was getting dark, so he took the subway up to Union Square and saw a pointless action movie about CIA assassins. Then he stayed for another one about good-looking teenage surfers, and by the time he got out it was almost midnight. On his way back to the subway he stopped at a bar that was barely wider than its front door, with a cheap-looking papier-mache dragon hanging from the ceiling, and ordered vodka gimlets—the favored drink of the CIA assassin from movie number one—until he was drunk. Then it was late and somehow he'd teleported onto the subway platform. A team of men and women in fluorescent vests hosed down the platform, and the air smelled comfortably of warm, soapy water. A blind Chinese woman picked out “The Girl from Ipanema” on a hammered dulcimer. A gray pigeon floated by weaving hopelessly between the pillars, a lost soul trapped in the underworld.

Tomorrow Margaret will call, Edward thought. Tomorrow I'll get back on track. Staring dreamily at the lights that glittered far down in the subway tunnel, he felt like he was gazing into the secret, jeweled interior of the earth.

 

BUT MARGARET
didn't call, and Edward didn't get back on track. Instead he spent five thousand dollars on an expensive laptop, a tiny technological masterpiece: black, wicked-looking, nearly weightless, and so thin it seemed almost occult—it felt like it was constructed out of the chitin of some monstrous black tropical beetle. He bought a high-tech laptop case for it, too, made of black synthetic gel-filled fabric, and he started carrying it around with him. Its function, as he saw it, was to maximize the efficient use of his increasingly abundant free time. Whenever he had the urge—in a café, on the subway, sitting on a park bench—he would crack it open, boot it up, and play MOMUS.