Codex (6 page)

Edward snapped awake as the Chinese driver pulled up in front of his building. He had to struggle to get his wallet out of the front pocket of his pants. He was so tired he felt like he could fall asleep at any second, right in the middle of the sidewalk. For a minute he stabbed futilely at his front door with the key to his office before he found his building key. He was going to pass out. Finally he was inside, he was climbing the stairs, he was closing the latches behind him in his apartment. He didn't even make it to the bedroom, just lay facedown on the couch.

G
ROWING UP IN MAINE,
Edward hadn't especially wanted to be an investment banker, or anything else for that matter. He wasn't one of those children who had his sights set on being something specific: a doctor, or a fireman, or an astronaut with a mission specialty in long-range sensing. When he thought about his childhood, which was rarely, the image that came to mind was of watching snow pile up on a porch railing in the late afternoon, the line of it holding perfectly steady like the line on a graph, then curving up a little where it rose to meet the corner post, and wondering if school would be canceled tomorrow.

His family lived in an old white-painted Victorian house with a thinning patch of lawn out front and a tire swing in back. His parents were ex-hippies, communards who turned out not to have the stomach for life on the farm, and by the time they went straight they found themselves established in the narrow suburban fringe that encircled the old brick city of Bangor and separated it from the cold, piney vastness beyond.

Bangor was a nineteenth-century lumber capital fallen on hard times. It took a lot of snow to cancel school, but fortunately for Edward, Bangor got a lot of snow. If it started before he went to bed—and the later it started, the better his chances were—he would lie awake listening to the snow-muffled silence, and once his parents were asleep he would shine a flashlight out the window, watching each snowflake gleam once as it passed through the beam and then vanished into collective anonymity on the lawn. He would stare feverishly out into the moonless darkness and try to gauge the frequency and quality of the flakes, factoring in temperature and duration, humidity and wind speed, praying inarticulate but fervent prayers to the Superintendent of Schools. Usually he would wake up to the sound of the snowplow scraping orange sparks from the asphalt as it bulled its way down the street, followed a few minutes later by the roar of the sand truck, burying his hopes in a mixture of dirt and road salt.

Growing up in that black-and-white landscape, with snow on the ground from October to May, it made a certain kind of sense that Edward would have a gift for chess.

Once, while his mother was driving them the five hours south to Boston to see relatives, Edward's father gave him an indulgent ten-minute lesson on a miniature magnetic travel chess set, passing it back and forth between the front and back seats. Edward stalemated his father on the first try, beat him on the second, and never lost again. He was seven. For the next five years he spent every weekend—all of Saturday and most of Sunday—at a chess club in Camden, a once grand, now shabby mansion that smelled of peeling wallpaper and old horsehair upholstery. It was populated almost exclusively by annoyingly precocious little boys like Edward and melancholy old men, including two homesick Russian émigrés who would mutter
Bozhe moi!
and
Chyort vozmi!
through their flowing beards as Edward gracefully trapped their knights and forked their rooks.

By the time he was twelve a Bowdoin professor was coaching him every day after school, and he was traveling to Boston and New York and once, thrillingly, to London for chess tournaments. He had a national ranking and a shelf of chess trophies in his bedroom. The very sight of him—already tall, pale as a white bishop, with starch-stiff posture at the board—struck fear into the tiny hearts of his underaged adversaries.

By the time he was thirteen it was all over. Edward's gift evaporated like dew in the harsh dawn of puberty, painlessly and almost overnight, and though afterwards he could clearly remember what it was like to wander through those gleaming mental corridors, the doors to that secret edifice were now firmly closed, the silver key lost, the path overgrown, never to be found again. His ranking plummeted, and his matches became a series of tearful early concessions. He sometimes caught his parents looking at him as if they wondered what had happened to their brilliant changeling of a son.

But despite the tears, and the puzzled looks from his parents, deep down Edward wasn't devastated by the loss of his gift. It left as mysteriously as it had arrived. He missed it, but it had never seemed entirely his in the first place—he'd always felt like its host, a temporary custodian, nothing more. He wasn't bitter. He only wished it well wherever its invisible wings had taken it.

Nevertheless, there were times when he looked back on his years as a wunderkind with nostalgia. In the years that followed he caught himself again and again trying to recapture the feeling of effortless mastery and easy serenity that he'd known on the chessboard, the sense that he was special and meant for better things. He looked for it in his schoolwork, in sports, in sex, in books, and even, much later, in his job at Esslin & Hart.

He never found it.

 

WHEN EDWARD WOKE
up he was still lying on the couch. It was dark out. He sat up and slid off his tie, which was creased and wrinkled from having been trapped underneath him.

A weak, pinkish glow from the streetlights outside lit up the two front windows. Edward's apartment was long and narrow, the shape of the skinny Upper East Side apartment building the top floor of which it occupied. It was all one big room, more or less: Up front was the living room, which gradually became the study, which gave way onto a crawlway-thin galley kitchen, and behind it an ill-lit bedroom and a disproportionately sumptuous bathroom. He could have afforded a place twice the size, but he'd never had the time to look for one, and what was the point? He was hardly ever here. The air-conditioning blew out last summer and he hadn't even bothered to get it fixed.

His clock radio spelled out 9:04 in skinny red trapezoids. Edward stood up and went over to his desk in the darkness, undoing his white shirt with one hand. It was too early to go to bed, but he wasn't sure he really wanted to be awake either. Yawning mightily, he picked up his jacket where he'd dropped it on the floor, and he felt the stiff shape of the manila envelope in the inside pocket—Zeph's present. He took it out and looked at it.

Zeph had written on the envelope, in block letters,

 

FOR EDWARD, WHO HAS PLENTY OF TIME

 

He slipped the CD out into his hand. It was completely unmarked, and he had to guess which way up it went. As he tilted it in the light, two rainbow spokes chased each other around the center hole.

Edward sighed. He had a colleague named Stewart, a couple of years younger than he was but still a grown man, who kept a GameBoy in his office. He was addicted to it—he played with it constantly, during meetings, on the phone, by the water-cooler, in the back of a limo. It was one of the jokes around the office, Stewart and his purple GameBoy, but Edward just found it embarrassing. He loathed the slack expression on Stewart's face while he played it—the fixed gaze, the loose, parted lips, like a moron trying to solve a calculus problem. If he ever saw that GameBoy come out in front of a client, Edward swore he would throw it out a window.

But he had no choice: He would at least have to take a look at the game. Zeph would ask. Edward walked over to his desk and felt around under it for the power button on his computer. He yawned and stretched while it booted up, then slipped the disc into the CD-ROM drive. A program calling itself “imthegame.exe” asked permission to install itself. He consented. The program spent a few long minutes unpacking and copying a series of colossal files to his hard drive, setting itself up, looking around, making itself at home. When it was done there was a new shortcut on his desktop. He double-clicked on it.

The screen blacked out abruptly, and the speakers gave a vicious staticky
snap.
The hard drive chooked and whirred to itself like a hen laying an egg. For a minute nothing else happened. Edward looked at the clock again. It was half past nine. He could still change his mind about that party at Joe Fabrikant's office if he really wanted to. His desk lamp made an island of light in the darkened apartment. He leaned his head on his hand.

Then his computer was awake again. Tiny white letters appeared on the screen, against a black background.

 

ONE PLAYER, OR MANY?

 

Edward clicked on
ONE
. The words disappeared.

 

CHOOSE ONE:

•  MALE
  
•  FEMALE
  

 

He blinked. That seemed a little personal. He toyed with the idea of lying, then went ahead and clicked on
MALE.

 

CHOOSE ONE:

•  LAND
  
•  SEA
  
•  RIVER
  

 

RIVER.

 

CHOOSE ONE:

•  EASY
  
•  MEDIUM
  
•  HARD
  
•  IMPOSSIBLE
  

 

He was on vacation.
EASY.

 

CHOOSE ONE:

•  SHORT
  
•  MEDIUM
  
•  LONG
  

 

SHORT.

 

The CD-ROM drive whined and clicked some more, then went silent. The screen went black again for so long that Edward started to wonder if the program had hung. He was about to try aborting it when the hard drive started thrashing again. He hesitated, his hands poised over the keyboard. The screen cleared.

At first Edward thought he was looking at a photograph, frozen and digitized. The scene was strikingly realistic. It was like looking through a window onto another world. The light was green, and there were trees around him, a grove of slender birches and aspens with sunlight falling between them. A light breeze ruffled their tiny leaves. Beyond the delicate scrim of trees was open air and green grass.

Edward moved the mouse experimentally. His point of view swung to one side like a movie camera. He carefully tilted it down and saw a leaf-strewn path. He tilted it back, toward the sky. It was blue, with a single white puff of cloud dissolving in it like a drop of milk in a pool of water.

It occurred to Edward that Zeph had never called him about that party he was going to. Now he couldn't remember what the address was anyway. They were probably there by now, mingling and chatting and half drunk already. He went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of cold red wine from a half-full, recorked bottle in the fridge, and brought it back to his desk. The cold wine felt good in the heat.

There was something weird about the game. The images moved perfectly smoothly, with no cartoonish jumping or stuttering. The colors were drawn from an intense, hyperreal palette, like a green landscape seconds before a thunderstorm, and the level of detail was impossibly fine. Focusing in on a nearby branch, he saw that one leaf on it had a tiny, irregular half circle nibbled out of one of its edges. It was less like a movie than an old master painting come to life.

Condensation beaded on the surface of his wine glass. He looked at the clock: It was almost ten.

Edward had just about resolved to stay in for the evening when he noticed a square white shape lying on the floor near his couch. It was an envelope. Somebody must have shoved it in under the door by hand, forcefully enough that it slid a few feet into the room. It was a thick, square envelope with his name and street address on the front in calligraphic handwriting. He thought it looked vaguely familiar, and it was: Inside was an invitation to Fabrikant's party.

“Well,” he said aloud. “God damn.”

How did they even get into the building? He looked at the invitation for another second, then set it aside on the table and turned back to the computer screen.

Trees and branches crackled around him as he pushed his way through them. When he was in the clear he saw that he was on top of a bluff that dropped off steeply down to a wide river far below. The water was the uniform gray of brushed steel and wrinkled with wavelets. The sun hung above it, a bright gold disk in a blue sky across which more white cotton clouds rushed with unnatural speed.

Further off, gentle golf-course-green hills rolled away from the river on both sides, broken in places by patches of dark forest. Downstream a huge stone bridge stretched across the valley. He looked down and caught a glimpse of his own feet: black leather shoes and brown twill pants. Nearby, on the very edge of the cliff, was a solitary, weather-beaten wooden post with a mailbox nailed to it. Inside the mailbox was a plain white envelope, a pistol, and a silver hourglass, lying on its side. He knew instinctively that they had been left there for him and nobody else.

He started toward them, but something caught his eye from the edge of the screen, and without thinking he turned toward it and stepped off the edge of the cliff.

The screen reeled around him: blue skies, silver river, red cliff walls, blue skies again. He was falling. He'd been so involved with the game that his body started up a panic response: His neck prickled, and his inner ear spun. There was a last flash of bright sun before he hit the water, then the light changed, becoming weak and murky, brown and green and gray. His body settled slowly down toward the river bottom, swaying from side to side like a falling leaf, and came to rest on his back, facing up toward the shining, wobbling surface.

He pressed a few keys. Nothing happened. His point of view was tilted slightly; he could see a bit of the sandy bottom, some slimy green plant life, the shimmery surface above him. A drab freshwater fish—a trout?—swam by far above him, momentarily eclipsing the watery sun. He realized he was dead.