“Want me to warm you up?”
He crossed the room in a black-and-white blur, and before she knew it his hands were on her arms again, rubbing gently. There was nothing fake in the gesture, or domineering, or sexual. He didn’t knead her like a lump of human dough. He was just rubbing her arms to warm them up, and, helplessly, she pressed herself against him, turned her face up to look at his.
“My God,” he said in a hoarse voice that was neither whisper nor groan. “You are so
He gazed into her eyes and she stared back, looking for the thing that made him different from all the others. For the first time she saw that they were hazel. The kind of eyes that change color depending on how the light strikes them. Brown, amber, green. A little of each all at the same time. Flecks of purple, too. Blue. Pink. Amazing eyes, really. The irises were kaleidoscopes surrounding the tunnels of his pupils, and all the way at the back of that inky darkness was yet another spark of color. Gold, this time. Pure, immutable, like an electrical charge.
She knew what that spark was. It was his essence. The thing that made him different from every other person she’d met since she came to this country a decade ago. It was right there, flickering at her. Inviting her in.
Even after he closed his eyes and kissed her she could still see it.
She reached for it with her hand, but it was too far inside his head. She would have to go in after it. She had to push at the edges of his pupil to squeeze through, but once she was inside, it was roomier than she’d’ve expected: when she reached out her hands she couldn’t touch the sides. Couldn’t feel anything beneath her feet, either, and it was so dark that all she could see was the spark in the distance. For a moment she felt her own spark of panic, but even before she recognized the feeling she heard Chandler’s voice.
She giggled like a teenager at a monster movie. The light seemed to have grown limbs, as if it were not simply a spark, a flame, but a person. A person on fire. She thought that should have scared her, but it didn’t. There was no sense of torture from the figure leading her deeper inside Chandler, of agony or fear, but rather a sense of protection. Righteousness even. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego cavorting in the fiery furnace.
The spark was larger now. Had lost its limbs and taken on a more solid shape, taller than it was wide, flat on the bottom and sides but curved slightly on top. A tombstone, she thought at first, but when she got closer she realized that it was in fact an arched, open doorway.
It was only when she poked her head through that she saw the books. Thousands of them, stacked atop one another in spindly columns that sprang from the floor of Chandler’s brain and receded into impenetrable heights. She’d thought the spark had been his essence, his secret, but now she realized it had only led her here. The real secret was hidden in one of these thousands upon thousands of moldering tomes. A slip of paper folded between the covers of some favorite childhood story long since migrated to the bottom of one of these hundreds— thousands—of stacks.
An embarrassed chuckle sounded off to the side.
“I thought it would look more like a cave. Dark, slimy, water dripping somewhere out of sight.”
Chandler stood behind a stack of books just high enough to conceal his nakedness. She glanced down at herself, saw that she was naked too, and similarly shielded.
“Apparently you’re a scholar.” Even as she said it, she remembered what Morganthau had told her. He
Chandler shrugged. “Safer than the real world, I guess.”
“‘Politics,’ you mean?” Naz made air quotes, although it seemed a fairly ridiculous gesture, given the context.
“In my family we didn’t call it politics. We called it service. But from where I stood it just looked like servitude.”
Naz laughed. “So, uh, what do we do now?”
“I’m not sure, but I think we’re already doing it.” Before Naz could ask him what he meant, he opened the topmost book on the stack in front of him. “Look.”
Naz squinted. Not because the image was hard to see, but because it was hard to believe. It showed the motel room—the motel bed, to be precise, on which lay the apparently naked bodies of Chandler and Naz, although most of their flesh was covered by the blanket. But that wasn’t the part Naz had trouble accepting. The vantage point of the scene was the mirror over the dresser. It was as though she was looking at herself and Chandler through the eyes of Agent Morganthau, whose husky breathing came in time with the rhythmic squeak of springs beneath his body….
And all at once it was over. Naz was back in the room. On the bed. Under the covers. In Chandler’s arms. Naked.
Wow, she thought. That was some trip. But then she looked in Chandler’s eyes.
“Urizen?”
It took Naz a moment to remember the bearded man on the stamp.
“Oh no,” she said, and turned fearfully toward the mirror.
Cambridge, MA
November 1, 1963
The coo of a mourning dove eased Chandler from sleep. He let the percussive gurgle tickle his eardrums while the last images from his dreams faded from his mind. He’d been back in his grandmother’s house, trapped at the table while the old battle-axe presided over one of her endless, tasteless meals. The really strange thing, though, was that the sooty portrait of his grandfather over the fireplace had been replaced by a one-way mirror behind which sat Eddie Logan, the annoying little brother of his best friend from boarding school. What was even stranger, Eddie was holding a movie camera with one hand and himself with the other. Chandler hadn’t thought of Percy’s pipsqueak brother in a decade. And what the hell was he doing with a movie camera?
Yet this was nothing compared to the other dream.
