Dominance (19 page)

Alex dug deeper into the book. References to the Procedure cropped up often. There were other photographs of players; there was a crude diagram of how the Procedure was scored and who was declared a winner. But one thing became apparent as she read:
you never knew when it began.
The Procedure could begin anywhere, at any time, and the player never knew. A line from Fallows would be dropped and the player would have to respond accordingly, in character, the way the dialogue had appeared on the page. This was the game; this was the contest of wits and memory. One simply had to be ready to begin.

“It could be happening now,” Aldiss wrote. “It could be happening to you, wherever you are, and you would simply have to react.”

*   *   *

That night she was late to class. She slipped into the basement room and found her seat. She looked at the others, scanned the small windowless lecture hall. Which one of them had slipped the note inside
her book? Which one had sent her to do the research on the Procedure? When she reached the front row she froze; Michael Tanner was staring right at her.

For a moment neither of them acknowledged the other. Alex could feel the measure of her own breathing, her pulse hammering. The boy continued to look.

Did you do it?
she mouthed, checking the others. No one was listening. Jacob Keller was laughing at some joke Daniel Hayden had told. Christian Kane was scribbling something, probably another of his weird stories, in his red notebook. Melissa Lee was catching up on her reading. Alex looked back at Tanner, saw that he hadn't heard her question. He leaned forward.

Did you leave the note in my book?

But his only response was a question of his own. Alex followed his lips.

Do you like this class?

Instinctively her eyes flicked up: the screen was still black.

No,
she replied.

Neither do I,
he said.
No one does.

Then a shadow twitched on the wall and Michael turned quickly away. When Alex raised her eyes, Aldiss had already appeared on the screen. Had he seen them talking? But the thought was quickly swept away by the man's appearance.

He was disheveled, his hair in wild tufts and his eyes purpled with exhaustion. The collar of his orange uniform was off center, as if he had been yanked into his seat by one of the guards. And there was something else, something even more curious: the man had
drawn closer to them
. Perhaps the camera had tightened in on his face, maybe his steel table had been brought forward a foot or two—something had changed. The professor had become the focus, the absolute center of the room. In the corner, near the foam-tiled ceiling and cradling the western wall, the red eye of their own camera bore down on them.

“I'm sorry,” Aldiss began, his voice broken and slurred, “for what happened the last night we met. My spells . . . they come upon me so suddenly that there is nothing I can do to stop them. When I was a child I called them fugues. I was horribly ashamed of them, and the
other children used to tease me. I was the Go-Away Boy, the Sleeper. I would hold them in, squeeze the blackness inward like a breath. My fugues were rooms I walked around inside. But that . . .” He looked away, toward the unseen walls that imprisoned him. “That was too horrible.” The room was silent; they remembered him that night, his face seizing and that one eye descending toward them, nearly colliding with the camera and holding, pausing on them in those last seconds before the connection dissolved to black. Finally Aldiss smiled, waved a hand idly across the lens. “Enough of that. Let us talk about why we're really here: Paul Fallows. Tell me what you've found.”

No one spoke. The TV screen flickered, maybe from the wind or some movement in the professor's small cinderblock room. A line of static pulled down like a curtain and the professor appeared again, his hands folded before him and his alert black eyes on them. He hadn't shaved, and a graying stubble freckled his cheeks.

“Nothing?” Aldiss said. “Surely you've been doing something with your days.”

“How do you hunt a man who doesn't exist?” asked Lewis Prine. He was sitting in the back row with his head leaned against the concrete wall.

“I assure you Paul Fallows exists, Mr. Prine. He has always existed.”

“But how do we know that?”

“Because I have told you that it's true. Is that not enough?”

“No,” said Melissa Lee, jumping in before Prine could speak.

“And why not?” asked Aldiss, smiling more sharply now. He rested his chin on his right hand, and they could see that he had written something there. A fugitive word snaking over and around the webbing of his thumb. Aldiss did this sometimes, wrote his class notes on his body, but like everything else about him the words were elusive. A date, a motif, a page number, everything always just out of the camera's view.

“Because you're . . .”

“Here?” he asked, extending his arms. The guards, only their torsos and legs visible, shifted as they did each time Aldiss moved. “Is that what you mean, Ms. Lee? The fact that I am imprisoned in this place makes me less trustworthy? Less capable of being correct?”

She looked up, met his eyes fiercely. “Yes.”

“There's also the fact of how much information we have at this point,” put in Daniel Hayden, challenging Aldiss as he so often did. “It isn't much.”

“What more would you like me to give you?” Aldiss asked.

The boy said nothing at first. He watched the screen intently, as if the box itself might instruct him on how to proceed. Then he said, his voice measured and calm, “Your trip to Iowa. Tell us about that.”

Aldiss didn't flinch, but something changed in his face. Something cracked on the right cheek, a fissure of dark skin there like a piece of string being pulled taut. “And that is relevant to Fallows in what way?”

“In every way,” said Hayden. “Isn't the beginning as important as the end?”

“The beginning,” Aldiss repeated, drumming his fingers on the steel table. “I was a student just like all of you when I went to Iowa in search of Fallows. But what I've discovered at Rock Mountain is so much more important than that. I was a child then. I didn't know where Paul Fallows was, I didn't know
who
he was. All I knew was what my mentor, Dr. Benjamin Locke, supplied for me. Now I am much wiser.”

“Locke,” Tanner said. “Who was he?”

Aldiss's eyes fell away. “Someone who knew more about Fallows than anyone alive. But, like so many other scholars, Locke was consumed by the writer. The search became everything to him, and eventually it destroyed him.”

Alex thought about what Dean Fisk had told her, about the scholars the Fallows search had wrecked. She thought about Aldiss in his lonely cell, about the two graduate students at Dumant University who had been murdered. All for this, these meaningless words. Almost independent of her conscious mind she reached out, touched the lined and crinkled cover of
The Coil.
Its cold inanimateness brought her back to the night, to the basement room and all its mysteries.

Ask him about the Procedure.

Before she could catch herself the question was out, dropped into the conversation like a bomb: “Did he introduce you to the Procedure?”

Silence. On his screen Aldiss drew back—a wince, or perhaps a flinch. The man had not expected this. “More research?” he asked, his tone cool.

“Well,” Alex fumbled, “I—I didn't mean to . . .”

“What is it, Professor?” Lee asked, saving Alex from the shame of doing battle with him. Now that something had been uncovered, some new thread of the class, Lee felt a need to unravel it. “What is the Procedure?”

Aldiss looked off toward the edge of the frame. This was a common gesture: his glancing away, his biding time. Everything with the professor was deliberate, measured. They waited for him to continue.

“The Procedure was a game,” he said at last. “A game played with the novels of Paul Fallows.”

“Do you mean like a role-playing game?” asked Sally Mitchell.

“No,” Aldiss said quickly. “It was much more than that.”

“How was it played?”

Again Aldiss seemed almost cautious. He lifted a hand to his hair, swept some of it back out of his eyes. The wind screeched above them, feathering the picture and making the professor appear, in texture and shape, like a thin shadow. He sighed. There was no choice now; he had gone too far.

“The strange thing about the Procedure was that you didn't know you were inside it until you realized something had changed,” he began. “To be part of the game you had to be chosen. I remember when I was chosen as a student at Dumant. I remember the pride I felt, to finally be one of them . . .” Aldiss's voice fell away, and he looked again past the camera's edge. When he continued his voice was more measured. “A message written inside a book told me the game had begun. But as far as I could tell, nothing had happened.”

Three rows away from the television, Alex sat forward.
A message inside a book?
She focused more deeply on the professor.

“You mean the Procedure hadn't really begun?” asked Frank Marsden. He was again dressed as Richard III, his eyes dark and his hair colored with shoe polish.

“No, it had begun. This is the thrill of the game—
you never know.
You never know exactly when real life ends and the Procedure begins.”

Aldiss waited while the class digested this. When everyone was quiet, he continued.

“After the initiation, you wait. You wait until they are ready. Three
weeks after I found the message in the book, odd things began to happen. My friends—they were not behaving in normal ways. They were . . . it was as if they were playing parts in some theater production. This, students, was the Procedure.”

“And these parts,” said Hayden, his gaze leveled directly at the screen. “You were supposed to respond to them accordingly. To pick up the loose threads of these scenes and become a character from Fallows.”

“That's right. It seems silly, yes—but trust me, when the Procedure reaches the highest levels there is
nothing
silly about it. I will always remember: we were at a campus coffee shop one day, and someone looked at me and started speaking lines right out of
The Golden Silence.
For a moment I didn't know what was happening. I was lost. I panicked. Finally this person just got up and left. Another message appeared in one of my books the next week, this time in a copy of Derrida:
WE'RE DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, RICHARD
.”

“You lost,” said Keller.

“That first time, yes. But I got my next chance a couple of weeks later. We were walking down a campus street, the five of us who called ourselves the Iowans, and someone started saying lines. I recognized the passage—it was from deep inside the novel, when Ann Marie has moved into the mansion with her uncle. I fell into my own role, saying the lines and using the gestures exactly from the text. It has to be exact; the player has to show a mastery of Fallows, down to the very last detail. And that second time I knew from the others' faces—I had won.”

“And what happens if you win?” Mitchell asked quietly.

Aldiss turned his gaze up. Something had changed in his face, eclipsed the hard-set tension from before. His eyes flashed. “You are accepted,” he said. “The Procedure ends and you become one of the elite.”

“And if you lose?” asked Alex. “What then?”

Aldiss's eyes dropped again. The faceless guards rocked.

“Then you are shunned. And as a Fallows scholar, to not be inside, to not be one of them—that is a fate worse than death.”

The professor said nothing else. Seconds later the feed was cut.

Later that night she met Keller at Rebecca's. He was there when she arrived, his note cards spread out on the streaked table, a football field cut apart by grid lines and
X
's and
O
's. When he saw Alex across the smoke-filled room, he waved her over.

“Just a little homework,” he said as she sat down. The place was loud, jangling. Good.

“No problem.”

“Order you a beer?”

“I'll take a Number Nine.”

“Magic Hat,” Keller said, impressed. “Excellent choice.” He called the waitress over and ordered for them.

A couple of awkward moments passed. This wasn't like being in the night class with him, Alex thought. This was something else entirely. This was a real date. It wasn't as if she were a homebody at Jasper; she got out as much as anyone else. But since Harvard had accepted her, and since her father had gotten worse, there just hadn't been much time for this sort of thing. She felt foolish, out of her element.

“So, the Procedure.”

She looked up, realized Keller had spoken. It was hard to get a feel for how big he was, how solid his frame was until you were sitting close
to him. There was no softness at all on his body. But he was also good-looking, with kind, quiet eyes and a mouth that always seemed to be bent into an ironic smile.

“What about it?” she asked. Their beers came.

“Stupid, isn't it? To get caught up in books that way? It's almost like they wanted to find a hole and slip right into the Fallows novels.”

“I don't know,” she said, thinking,
a rabbit hole . . .

Keller cocked his head. He smiled, intrigued. Alex had caught him off guard. “You thought the game sounded fun.”

“I can understand why he did it,” she said. She looked beyond him, saw Melissa Lee in a corner booth. She was talking to three or four other English majors, and Alex was surprised to see Michael Tanner among them. Lee caught Alex looking, and Alex turned back to Keller, her cheeks burning.