Warp (20 page)

“You know Stephen Hawking was our age when he found out he was sick? This is right when it happens to people. And we could turn into schizophrenics, too. Right now. Do you realize that? In your early twenties: that's how long the latency period is, or whatever it's called, before the disease starts showing up. I even knew a guy it happened to. He was in his dorm in college, watching reruns on a black-and-white TV with his roommates. Suddenly he started seeing everything in color. That's how it started. After that he cracked right up.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don't really know. It was pretty serious. I think he's in an institution somewhere.”

There were some red spots on the rug, and Hollis rubbed his sock over them.

“I hope nobody notices I wined on the carpet.”

“Forget it,” said Peters. “You can hardly see it.”

“He has a tattoo, here”—she touched her neck—“that will register only with your augmented vision.”

Peters cleared his throat.

“I meant to tell you,” he said. “I saw Eileen the other day. It was just by chance—I met her on the street.”

“Oh, yeah? When was that?”

“I don't know. A few days ago. I meant to tell you when it happened. She wasn't with anybody.”

“It doesn't matter.”

Hollis stared at the candles. The flames made green blobs on his vision, which then stayed in the center of his field of view after he looked away. One of the nearby candles burned unevenly, a reservoir of hot wax forming around the base. Hollis reached over and pressed his fingertips into it.

“She wasn't a virgin before I slept with her,” he said. “I know I told you she was. There were plenty of guys before me.”

“Jesus, Hollis. My God, I can't believe you even bothered to lie about that. Nobody cares, dude. Anyway, I never believed you—nobody's a fucking virgin.”

“I know.”

Peters pushed his hair back behind his ears with both hands.

“Forget about it. Let's do something. Fire up that Nintendo, and I'll whup your ass at something.”

“You already whupped it,” said Hollis.

“I'll spot you an extra dude.”

Peters threw a pillow at his chest.

“Leave me alone,” he said. “You're like a fucking camp counselor.”

The library smelled like melted wax. Peters sighed and stretched out, leaning his head back in the corner of the armchair. His pale white legs stuck out onto the rug between them. Hollis found a pizza crust and chewed on it for a minute, staring at nothing, then got up and got another chair for them to put their feet up on. He restarted the CD and went back to his magazine.

“Look how fat Sally Struthers is now,” he said after a while. “No wonder those kids are starving—she ate all the food.”

He held up the ad.

“I'm thinking about getting drunk.”

“Me too,” said Peters. “There's still that bourbon downstairs. Are you buzzed yet?”

“I can't tell,” Hollis said. “It's touch and go. I think I'm halfway there.”

“I better take out my contacts soon. Oh, guess what I found? In the other room they have one of those Sharper Image auto-massage chairs.”

“Maybe we could just kill them and assume their identities.”

They both watched one of the candles flickering and strobing as it went out.

His resources of indifference were immense, his capacity for remorse minimal.

“Let's wake up Xanthe,” said Peters. “Consult the feminine perspective.”

“Oh, let her sleep. She needs her rest. She's going to be hung-over as it is.”

“What's this? Does chivalry yet live?”

Hollis sniffed.

“If you can call it living.”

He was looking around for the remote control.

“What's her last name, anyway? Xanthe's?”

“Oh, leave it alone, Peters. People like Xanthe don't have last names. Anyway, you're going to jinx us.”

Hollis toggled the TV back to a regular channel. It was showing some obscure class of auto racing involving cars that looked like turbocharged station wagons. Once in a while the point of view would switch to a special camera that showed the inside of one of the cars' rear wheels, and every time the car braked its brake pads would glow bright orange from the heat.

“I went by where Eileen's office is today,” Hollis said. “That investment company where she works, downtown. That's what I didn't tell you before.”

Peters opened his eyes and looked at Hollis.

“What happened?”

“I shouldn't have gone. It was depressing. Brian was there.”

“Brian? Jesus. It sounds pretty intense.”

“No. Not really. It wasn't at all.” Hollis toggled the TV back to static, then shut it off. “It was the opposite of intense, whatever that is.”

“I don't know. Boring.”

“It definitely wasn't boring.”

The grandfather clock downstairs chimed a quarter past three. Hollis reached out with his foot and pressed the fire button on a Nintendo controller lying next to his chair. Nothing happened. There was a hole in his sock, and his pink big toe stuck out.

“What are you thinking about, Hollis?” the young woman asked.

“Someone I once knew. It was a long time ago—”

He shook his head, drawing a hand over his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's nothing.”

Even for all his melancholy, she found him strangely, almost overpoweringly attractive. It wasn't his fame that drew her to him, or his legendary wealth, or the fabulous mansion in upper Manhattan that he had had brought over, stone by stone, from his estate in Europe. It was something else, something very much deeper, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it—

If only I could do something for him, she thought suddenly. He's so young. So brilliant. So wronged.

She looked up into his piercing eyes.

“Kiss me,” she said suddenly, impulsively. “Let me help you forget her!”

“I wonder how fast you'd have to go, if you wanted to stay just on the night side of the earth,” Hollis said. “I mean, if you wanted it to be night all the time, forever, and you just kept on moving.”

Peters thought for a minute.

“Why don't you just go to Scandinavia?”

“Maybe I will,” he said. “Do you remember in grade school, when there was that solar eclipse? We all went outside, and then when it actually happened you weren't even supposed to look at it? I guess it's bad for your eyes, or something—instead we used those cardboard pinhole-projector things, that didn't really work all that well.”

Assuming that the earth is a sphere, if Hollis's present latitude is 42 degrees 20 minutes north of the equator, he would need to match the speed of the earth's rotation along a circle

2
π
[cosin 42°20' (3,950 miles, the radius of the earth)]

or 18,347 miles in circumference to remain stationary with respect to a point on the earth's surface.

Given that the earth makes a full rotation approximately once every twenty-four hours, if Hollis were able to move west at

or just 764.5 miles/hour—slightly faster than Mach I at sea level—he could stay on the night side of the earth forever.

“At least it stays dark longer, now that it's almost winter. I can sleep fine when it's light out, but it's so much easier when it's dark. I never watch the sunrise—I don't even know which way east is, for that matter. When the sky starts getting light I just get so fucking
depressed.
I wonder if there's a name for that. Solarphobia? Heliophobia? That sickening, baby-blue-colored glow on the horizon. The radiator starts scraping, all the water pipes start banging in the walls. Everybody taking their morning showers. You know, I wish, just once, it wouldn't come up at all.

“And why is it that even though I don't have a job, suddenly I feel like I've just done about a year's worth of work?”

Hollis pulled his shabby jacket tighter around him.

“Who would've thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?”

Peters took a metal Band-Aid box out of the pocket of his bathrobe. He slid out a pack of Marlboro Lights and offered Hollis one, silently, but Hollis shook his head. Peters took one himself, picking up a short, fat candle to light it with. Hollis splashed the rest of the wine into his glass. Some of it missed, pooling on the tabletop, then spreading slowly until one edge touched the cardboard pizza box. He laid the bottle on its side next to the first one.

“Two dead soldiers,” Peters said.

A minute went by. The smoke from Peters's cigarette floated up in the light of the candles and disappeared into the darkness.

“Did you hear about that guy who used to live in our dorm, in college?” said Hollis, after a while. “I forget his name—he was in the math department.
He
used to stay up all night all the time, practically every night. It was pretty extreme—he would go to bed at like nine in the morning and get up at six at night.

One night Malo stayed awake until his parents were asleep. Then he slipped out the window and ran down to the docks, where the fishing boats were kept.

“After a while he couldn't stop—he could only get up at night and only fall asleep during the day. It was as if he got stuck. It was weird—he had to go to the hospital. In the end it turned out there was actually something physically wrong with him, like his circadian rhythms were reversed or something, and they had to shine these giant sunlamps on him for a couple of weeks to try to get him back on schedule. He had to take time off from school.”

Ancient legends tell of a time when a flaming disk traveled across the sky in a great arc. Its brightness was such that the whole of the heavenly firmament was rendered a pale blue, and those who gazed on it for more than a moment were struck blind by its brilliance.

Hollis took a sip from his glass. Peters reached over and felt around on the table for the box of Oreos.

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

Malo's palms were stinging where the rope had cut them. He turned the other way and looked back out to sea.

“So what happened to him?” said Peters. “The guy who couldn't wake up? Did he ever come back?”

“I don't really know,” Hollis said. “It's not like he was a real pal of mine, or anything.”

He shrugged and leaned his armchair back on its hind legs again. They creaked ominously. The candles were all going out. The far end of the room was almost dark.

“I guess he probably got better.”

 

Discussion Questions

  1. In the foreword,
Lev Grossman
describes the unique experience he had rereading his earliest work with fresh eyes and a different perspective. Have you ever reread your own writing after a break and learned new things in the process? Did you enjoy the experience?

  2. Many readers can relate to the often difficult and confusing time after graduation when one is a young adult struggling to make their way in their twenties. Did you recognize yourself in Hollis or his friends?

  3. What role does Hollis's imaginary subtext play in the novel?

  4. What is the significance of the title?

  5. Grossman tells us that pop culture is important to the novel. Where do you see this represented?

  6. In the foreword, Hollis is compared to many other “alienated … outwardly ineffectual” characters that have come before him such as Holden Caulfield and Stephen Dedalus. Which characters do you see in Hollis?

  7. What does Xanthe bring to the story as a character? How does she compare and contrast with Eileen?

  8. Hollis tells his friends that he wishes it could be night all the time. What does night signify for Hollis?

  9. How do the stories and events that Hollis imagines relate to what's happening in the world around him?

10. What details do you notice that set the action in the early 1990s?

11. What do you imagine happening to Hollis later in life?

12. Do you like the ending? Why or why not?

13. Do you recognize any of Quentin Coldwater from Grossman's Magicians trilogy in Hollis?

 

ALSO BY
LEV GROSSMAN

CODEX

THE MAGICIANS

THE MAGICIAN KING

THE MAGICIAN'S LAND

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR