The Rule of Four (45 page)

Paul turns to look, but Curry’s eyes are fixed on Gil and me. I’m paralyzed by the sight of him. The ridges of his face are so drawn that gravity seems to be pulling at him, dragging him down.

“Richard,”
Paul says firmly, as if to a child,
“we all have to get out.”

“Move away,” Gil shouts, stepping forward.

But as he does, Curry smashes the bottle on a table and lunges, swiping Gil’s arm with the jagged bottleneck. Blood runs between Gil’s fingers in black ribbons. He staggers back, watching the blood pour onto his arm. Seeing this, Paul sags against the wall.

“Here,” I call out, yanking the handkerchief from my pocket.

Gil moves slowly. When he pulls a hand away to take the cloth, I see how deep the cut is. Blood runs over the furrow as soon as the pressure is gone.

“Go!” I say, pulling him to the windows. “Jump out! The bushes will break your fall.”

But he is frozen, staring at the bottleneck in Curry’s hands. Now the door to the library is quaking, hot air building on the other side. Tendrils of smoke are starting to stream in from beneath the door, and I can feel my eyes watering, my chest getting heavy.

“Paul,”
I cry through the smoke.
“You have to get out!”

“Richard,” Paul yells. “Come on!”

“Let him go!”
I bellow at Curry—but now the fire is roaring to be let in. From beyond comes a terrible ripping sound, wood tearing under its own weight.

Suddenly Gil collapses onto the wall beside me. I rush to the window and open it, propping him against the frame, struggling to keep him upright.

“Help Paul . . .” Gil mumbles, the last thing he says to me before the life begins to fade from his eyes.

A frigid wind strikes through the room, kicking up snow from the bushes below. As gently as I can, I lift him into position. He looks angelic in the light, effortless even now. Staring down at the bloody handkerchief, clinging to his arm out of nothing but its own weight, I begin to feel everything dissolve around me. With one last look, I let go. In an instant, Gil is gone.

“Tom,”
comes Paul’s voice, so distant now that it seems to come from a cloud of smoke.
“Go.”

I turn to see Paul struggling in Curry’s arms, trying to pull him toward the window, but the old man is much stronger. He won’t be moved. Curry shoves Paul toward the service stairs instead.

“Jump!”
I hear below me, voices pouring up through the open window.
“Jump down!”

Firefighters, spotting me inside.

But I turn back. “Paul!” I yell. “Come on!”

“Go, Tom,”
I can hear him say, one last time.
“Please.”

The words become distant too quickly, as if Curry has carried him down into the haze. The two of them are retreating into the ancient bonfires, wrestling like angels through the lifetimes of men.

“Down”
is the final word I hear from inside the room, spoken in Curry’s voice.
“Down.”

And again, from outside:
“Hurry! Jump!”

“Paul,”
I scream, backing up toward the ledge of the window as the flames begin to corner me. Hot smoke presses like a fist against my chest. Across the room, the door to the service stairs swings shut. There is no one to be seen. I let myself fall.

Those are the last things I remember before the slush of snow engulfs me. Then there is only an explosion, like a sudden dawn at midnight. A gas pipe, bringing the entire building to its feet. And the soot begins to fall.

In the silence, I am shouting. To the firemen. To Gil. To anyone who will listen. I have seen it, I am shouting: Richard Curry, opening the entrance to the service stairs, pulling Paul away.

Listen to me.

And at first, they do. Two firemen, hearing me, approach the building. A medic is beside me, trying to understand.
What stairs?
he asks.
Where do they come out?

The tunnels,
I tell him.
They come out near the tunnels.

Then the smoke clears, and the hoses make sense of the club’s face, and everything begins to change. There is less searching, less listening. There is nothing left, they are saying, in the slowness of their steps. There is no one inside this.

Paul is alive,
I shout.
I saw him.

But every second is a strike against him. Every minute is a fistful of sand. By the way Gil is looking at me now, I realize how much has changed.

“I’m okay,” he says to the medic tending to his arm. He wipes a wet cheek, then points to me. “Help my friend.”

The moon hangs over us like a watchful eye, and as I sit there, staring past the silent men who hose down the shattered clubhouse, I imagine Paul’s voice.
Somehow,
he says, far away, staring at me over coffee,
I feel like he’s my father too.
Over the black curtain of the sky I can see his face, so full of certainty that I believe him even now.

So what do you think?
he is asking me.

About you going to Chicago?

About
us
going to Chicago.

Where we were taken that night, what questions were asked of us, I don’t remember. The fire kept burning in front of me, and Paul’s voice hummed in my ears, as though he might still rise from the flames. I saw a thousand faces before that sunrise, bearing messages of hope: friends roused from their rooms by the fire; professors awakened in their beds by the sound of sirens; the chapel service itself stopped in mid-reading by the spectacle of it all. And they gathered around us like a traveling treasury, each face a coin, as if it had been declared on high that we ought to suffer our losses by counting what remained. Maybe I knew then that it was a rich, rich poverty we were entering. What dark comedy the gods favored, who made this. My brother Paul, sacrificed on Easter. The tortoise shell of irony, dropped heavy on our heads.

That night the three of us survived, together, out of necessity. We met in the hospital, Gil and Charlie and I, bedfellows again. None of us spoke. Charlie fingered the crucifix around his neck, Gil slept, and I stared at the walls. Without news about Paul, we all invested ourselves in the myth of his survival, the myth of his resurrection. I should have known better than to believe there was anything indivisible about a friendship, any more than there was about a family. And yet the myth of it sustained me then. Then, and ever after.

Myth, I say. And never hope.

For the box of hope lay empty.

Chapter 29
                           

Time, like a doctor, washed its hands of us. Before Charlie was even out of the hospital, we had become old news. Classmates stared at us as if we were out of context, fugitive memories with an aura of former significance.

Within a week, the cloud of violence over Princeton had burned off. Students began to walk across campus after dark again, first in groups, then alone. Unable to sleep, I would wander off to the WaWa in the middle of the night, only to find it full of people. Richard Curry lived on in their conversations. So did Paul. But gradually the names I knew disappeared, replaced by exams and varsity lacrosse games and the yearly spring talk, a senior who’d slept with her thesis advisor, the final episode of a favorite television show. Even the headlines I read while waiting in line at the register, the ones that kept my mind off being alone when everyone else seemed to be with friends, suggested that the world had moved forward without us. On the seventeenth day after Easter, the front page of the
Princeton Packet
announced that a plan for an underground parking lot in town had been nixed. Only at the bottom of page two was it reported that a wealthy alumnus had donated two million dollars toward the rebuilding of Ivy.

Charlie was out of his hospital bed in five days, but spent another two weeks in rehab. Doctors suggested cosmetic surgery on his chest, where patches of his skin had become thick and gristly, but Charlie refused. I visited him at the medical center every day but one. Charlie wanted me to bring him potato chips from the WaWa, books for his classes, scores from every Sixers game. He always gave me a reason to come back.

More than once he made a point of showing me his burns. At first I thought it was to prove something to himself, that he didn’t feel disfigured, that he was much stronger than what had happened to him. Later I sensed that the opposite was true. He wanted to make sure I knew he
had
been changed by this. He seemed to fear that he’d stopped being a part of my life and Gil’s at the moment he ran into the steam tunnels after Paul. We were getting along without him, mending our losses alone. He knew we’d begun to feel like strangers in our own skins, and he wanted us to know that he was in the same position, that we were all still in this together.

It surprised me that Gil visited him as much as he did. I was there for a few of the visits, and there was the same awkwardness every time. Both of them felt guilty in a way that was intensified by seeing the other. However irrational, Charlie felt that he’d abandoned us by not being at Ivy. At times, he even saw Paul’s blood on his own hands, weighing Paul’s death as the price of his own weakness. Gil seemed to feel that he himself had abandoned us long ago, in a way that was harder to express. That Charlie could feel so guilty, having done so much, only made Gil feel worse.

One night before he went to bed, Gil apologized to me. He said he wished he’d done things differently. We deserved better. From that night on, I never found him watching old movies. He took his meals at restaurants that seemed farther and farther from campus. Every time I invited him to lunch at my club, he found a reason not to come. It took four or five rejections for me to understand that it wasn’t the company he objected to; it was the thought of seeing Ivy on the way there. When Charlie got out of the hospital, he and I were together breakfast, lunch, and dinner. More and more, Gil ate and drank alone.

Slowly our lives fell out of scrutiny. If we felt like pariahs at first, when everyone grew tired of hearing about us, then we felt like ghosts afterward, when everyone began to forget. The university’s memorial service for Paul was held in the chapel, but could’ve fit in a small classroom for the tiny crowd it drew, hardly as many students as professors, and most of those just members of the EMT squad or of Ivy, showing up out of compassion for Charlie or Gil. The only faculty member who approached me after the service was Professor LaRoque, the woman who first sent Paul to see Taft—and even she seemed interested only in the
Hypnerotomachia,
in Paul’s discovery rather than in Paul himself. I told her nothing, and made a point of doing the same every time the
Hypnerotomachia
came up after that. I thought it was the least I could do, not giving away to strangers the secret Paul had worked so hard to keep between friends.

What briefly caused a resurgence of interest was the discovery, a week after the headline about the underground parking lot, that Richard Curry had liquidated his assets just before leaving New York for Princeton. He had placed the money in a private trust, along with the residual properties of his auction house. When banks refused to reveal the terms of the trust, Ivy asserted a right to the money, as compensation for its damages. Only when the club’s board decided that not a stone of the new building would be bought with Curry’s money did the flap subside. Meanwhile, papers flocked to the news that Richard Curry had left all of his money to an unnamed trustee, and a few even suggested what I already believed—that the money was meant for Paul.

Knowing nothing of Paul’s thesis, though, the greater public could make little sense of Curry’s intentions, so they dug into his friendship with Taft until the two men became a farce, an explanation for all evil that was no explanation at all. Taft’s home at the Institute became a ghost house. New Institute Fellows refused to live there, and townie teenagers dared each other to break in.

The only benefit of the new climate, the one of fantastic theories and sensational headlines, was that it soon became impossible to suggest that Gil and Charlie and I had done anything wrong at all. We weren’t flamboyant enough to play a role in what had happened, bizarre as everyone thought it was, not when the local news could fill its coverage with pictures of Rasputin Taft and the lunatic Curry who killed him. The police and the university both acknowledged that they had no intention of pursuing any action against us, and I suppose it made a difference to our parents that we would graduate without disgrace. None of it mattered much to Gil, since that sort of thing never did, and I couldn’t get around to giving much of a damn myself.

Still, I think it took a load off Charlie’s mind. He lived increasingly in the shadow of what had happened. Gil called it a persecution complex, the way he expected misfortune at every turn, but I think Charlie had simply convinced himself that he could’ve saved Paul. Whatever it was, there was going to be a reckoning for his failures—if not at Princeton, then in the future. It wasn’t so much persecution Charlie feared; it was judgment.

The only hint of pleasure in my final days of college came from Katie. At first she brought food to Gil and me, while Charlie was still in the hospital. In the wake of the fire, she and other Ivy sophomores had begun a co-op, buying their own food and making their own meals. Afraid that we weren’t eating, she always cooked for three. Later, she would take me on walks, insisting that the sun had restorative powers, that there were traces of lithium in cosmic rays you could only catch at dawn. She even took pictures of us, as if she saw something in those days worth remembering. The photographer in her was convinced that the solution lay somehow in the right exposure to light.

Without Ivy in her life, Katie seemed even closer to what I wanted her to be, and even less like the side of Gil I never understood. Her spirits were always up, and her hair was always down. The night before graduation, she invited me back to her room after a movie, claiming she wanted me to say good-bye to her roommates. I knew she meant something else, but that night I told her I couldn’t do it. There would be too many pictures of the certainties she carried with her, family and old friends and the dog at the foot of her bed in New Hampshire. A final night in a room surrounded by all her fixed stars would only remind me of how much my own life was in flux.