The Rule of Four

Tom. Tell me you've been seeing a senior on the side all this time. Tell me it's because she doesn't do all the stupid things I do, she doesn't dance naked in front of you like some kind of idiot because she thinks you enjoy her singing, or wake you up at 6 a.m. to go running because she wants to make sure, every single morning, that you're still there. Tell me something.

She looked up at me, broken in a way that I know ashamed her, and I could only think of one thing. There was a night, not long after the accident, when I accused my mother of not caring for my father. If you loved him, I said to her, you would've supported his work. The look that crossed her face, which I can't begin to describe, told me there was nothing more shameful in the world than what I had just said.

I love you, I told Katie, stepping toward her so that she could press her face into my shirt and be invisible for a moment. I'm so sorry.

And that was the moment, I think, when the tide began to change. My terminal condition, the love affair I thought was in my genes, slowly started to lose its grip on me. The triangle was collapsing. In its place stood a pair of points, a binary star, separated by the smallest possible distance.

A jumble of silences followed, all the things she needed to say but knew she shouldn't have to, all the things I wanted to say but didn't know how to.

I'll tell Paul, I said, the best and most truthful thing I could, I'm going to stop working on the book.

Redemption. The realization that I wasn't putting up a fight, that I'd finally figured out what was best for my own happiness, was enough to make Katie do something I think she was saving for much later, after I was back on the wagon for sure. She kissed me. And that moment of contact, like the lightning that gave the monster his second shot at life, created a new beginning.

I didn't see Paul that night; I spent it with Katie and ended up telling him my decision the next day at Dod. He, too, seemed unsurprised. I'd been suffering so much with Colonna that he sensed I might throw in the towel at the first sign of relief. He'd been persuaded by Gil and Charlie that it was the best thing anyway, and somehow he didn't hold it against me. Maybe he guessed I'd be back. Maybe he'd come far enough to think he could finish the riddles alone. Whatever it was, when I finally told him my reasoning-the lesson of Jenny Harlow and Carracci's engraving-he seemed to agree. I could tell from his expression that he knew more about Carracci than I did, but he never once corrected me. Paul, who had more reasons than anyone to believe that some interpretations are better than others, and that the right ones make all the difference, was generous about my spin on things, the same way he'd always been. It was more than his way of showing respect, I think; it was his way of showing friendship.

It's better to love something that can love you back, he told me. It was the only thing he needed to say.

What began as Paul's thesis, then, became Paul's thesis once more. At first, it looked as if he might pull it off alone. The fourth riddle, which had taken a whip to me, came to him in three days. I suspect he'd had the idea all along, but kept it from me because he knew I wouldn't take his advice. The answer was in a book called the Hieroglyphica, by a man named Horapollo, which turned up in Renaissance Italy in the 1420s, purporting to solve the ages-old problem of interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics. Horapollo, taken by humanists to be some kind of ancient Egyptian sage, was in fact a fifth-century scholar who wrote in Greek and probably didn't know much more about hieroglyphics than Eskimos know about summer. Some of the symbols in his Hieroglyphica involve animals that aren't even Egyptian. Still, amidst the humanist fervor over new knowledge, the text became wildly popular, at least in the small circles where wild popularity and dead languages weren't mutually exclusive.

The night-owl, according to Horapollo, is a symbol of death, for the night-owl suddenly descends upon the young of the crow in the flight, as death comes upon a man suddenly. An eagle with a twisted beak, Horapollo wrote, signifies an old man dying of hunger, for when the eagle grows old, he twists his beak and dies of hunger. The blind beetle, finally, is a glyph that means a man has died from sunstroke, for a beetle dies when blinded by the sun. Cryptic as Horapollo's reasoning was, Paul knew immediately that he'd fixed on the right source. And he saw very quickly what the three animals had in common: death. Applying the Latin word for it, mors, as his cipher, he produced Colonna's fourth message.

You who have come so far are joined by the philosophers of my day, who in your time are perhaps the dust of ages, but who in mine were the giants of mankind. 1 am soon to put upon you the burden of what remains, for there is much to tell and I grow fearful that my secret is too easily spread. But first, out of deference to your accomplishment, I will offer you the beginnings of my story, so that you will know I have not led you this far in vain.

There is a preacher in the land of my brethren who has brought a great pestilence upon the lovers of knowledge. We have battled him with all our wit and influence, but this single man raises our countrymen against us. He thunders in the squares and from the pulpits, and the common men of all nations take up arms to do us harm. Just as God, out of jealousy, brought to nothing the tower in the plain of Shinar, which men built toward the heavens, so He raises His fist against us, who attempt the very same. I did long ago hope that men wished to be delivered from ignorance, just as slaves wish to be freed from bondage. It is a condition unbecoming our dignity, and contrary to our nature. Yet I find now that the race of men is a cowardly thing, a perversion like the owl of my riddle, which though it might enjoy sunlight, prefers darkness. You will hear no more of me, reader, upon the completion of my crypt. To be a prince to such people as this, is to be a castled kind of beggar. This book will be my only child; may it live long, and serve you well.

Paul hardly paused to contemplate it; he pushed on to the fifth and final riddle, which he'd found while I struggled with the fourth: Where do blood and spirit meet?

It's the oldest philosophical question in the book, he told me, while I puttered around the room, preparing for a night with Katie.

What is?

The intersection of mind and body, the flesh-spirit duality. You see it in Augustine, in contra Manichaeos. You see it in modern philosophy. Descartes thought he could pinpoint the soul somewhere near the pineal gland in the brain.

He continued that way, paging through a book from Firestone and sputtering philosophy, while I packed.

What are you reading? I asked, pulling my copy of Paradise Lost off the shelf to bring with me.

Galen, Paul said.

Who?

The second father of western medicine, after Hippocrates.

I remembered. Charlie had studied Galen in a history of science class. By Renaissance standards, though, Galen was no spring chick: he died thirteen hundred years before the Hypnerotomachia was published.

Why? I asked.

I think the riddle is about anatomy. Francesco must've believed there was an actual organ in the body where blood and spirit met.

Charlie appeared in the doorway with the remains of an apple in his hand. What are you amateurs talking about? he said, hearing talk of things medical.

An organ like this, Paul said, ignoring him. The rete mirabile. He pointed to a diagram in the book. A network of nerves and vessels at the base of the brain. Galen thought this is where vital spirits turned into animal ones.

What's wrong with it? I asked, checking my watch.

I don't know. It doesn't work as a cipher.

That's because it doesn't exist in humans, Charlie said.

What do you mean?

Charlie looked up and took a last nibble from his apple. Galen only dissected animals. The rete mirabile's something he found in an ox or a sheep.

Paul's expression faded.