Page 29 of The Paradox Club

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Any of the above backward or forward

At the bottom of the page, she wrote: How would Harry want them arranged?

She hadn’t spent any time in Harry’s study since she was a child, and in those days she paid no attention to how the books on his shelves had been organized. But she suddenly remembered something Harry had said the last time she had sprawled across her beanbag chair, committing the heresy of reading a Nancy Drew book in a room crammed with the scientific knowledge and literary achievements of generations.

“Someday these books will speak to you, Tess,” he had said. “Listen to them.” If Nancy had not been so close to solving the mystery, she might have asked for some further explanation of that cryptic statement, but she had simply returned to her book with a shrug. Harry never brought up the subject again.

“I’m trying, Harry,” Tess said aloud, her voice echoing in hallway. “I’m trying to listen, but the books aren’t speaking loudly enough.”

She sat down in the window seat and opened Beowulf to the title page. It did not speak. All she heard was the distant echo of her father’s voice when he caught her reading the last page of an Agatha Christie mystery before beginning the first chapter. “Begin at the beginning,” he had said. “In reading and in life, begin at the beginning, go on until you get to the end, then stop.” She knew even then he was quoting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She thought at the time he was saying something profound about his own field—the study of astrophysics. Ultimately, after all, Harry Maxwell was trying to discover the beginning of everything. But now she wondered if the advice had been more practical.

The title page of Beowulf, which promised A Copious Glossary, Preface, and Philological Notes by John M. Kemble, Esq., M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, seemed like the beginning of the book, but Tess knew Harry better than to assume the obvious. She turned back to the previous page, which bore simply the word Beowulf in bold type. Before that was nothing but the endpapers—plain white with the occasional brown freckle of foxing, but nothing printed on them. At the top right corner of the free endpaper a bookseller had penciled a price, £35. Whether Harry had bought the book on a trip to London for an academic conference or from a dealer’s catalog, she had no idea. But she couldn’t very well arrange the books by price, could she? On the paste-down was the bookplate of the man Tess assumed was the original owner of the book. Below an intricate armorial design, the name Lewis Duncan McCall was printed in gothic type. Harry had bought more than half of his books new, so she couldn’t shelve them by original owner.

She was just about to slam the book shut in frustration when she noticed another small pencil mark in the lower left corner of the free endpaper. She had seen enough secondhand books to know that book dealers usually wrote at the top of the endpaper, not at the bottom. The mark at the foot of the page was so small she couldn’t make it out, and that in itself was enough to make her think Harry had put it there.

“Size is relative,” he had told her one night on the dock. “Compared to many other stars, our sun is tiny. Compared to an atom, a grain of sand is almost infinitely large.” Just the sort of thing a man who put miniscule writing in his books would say. One of the random objects that Tess had cleared from the shelves had been a magnifying glass—not some gold-handled antique, but the rectangular plastic kind that came in the little drawer of the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It took her twenty minutes digging through the garbage bags on the curb out front to find it, and under its lens she made out Harry’s micro-writing: E–789. She pulled another book off the shelf and found, in the same spot on the front free endpaper, Y–38. The next one was marked M–1251. She didn’t need to wonder how to organize the books. Harry had told her.

Everything started off well enough. She had shelved A–333 and A–786, left room for the Bs and Cs, shelved D–883, and several others when she came across two books in a row with numbers but no letters. 727 and 1445. A quick search of the rest of the box she had been emptying revealed that more than 10 percent of the books had no letters—some had a dot preceding the number instead of a letter, others just the number. Fine, thought Tess. Then A–333 didn’t belong in the first spot, it belonged in the three hundred thirty-third spot. For the third time that day, she started over. This time she didn’t stop shelving books until the heap of boxes she had thrown down the stairs grew to forty-two and every volume from D–1 (Simon Singh’s Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe) to O–1502 (The End of the Dream, a 1972 novel by Philip Wylie about the end of human life on Earth) sat in order on the shelves. Tess couldn’t help but smile at Harry’s humor. Naturally his library began with the beginning of the universe and ended with the end of what Harry called “the human experiment.”

Only one book in the entire collection had no writing on the endpaper—the strange copy of The Descent of Man by Charles Darwinn. She treated it as book zero and placed it at the left end of the first shelf.

She might not have realized that Harry’s numbers were anything other than an organizational paradigm if the last four books out of the final box hadn’t been numbers six, seven, eight, and nine—their order preserved from Harry’s shelf to the packing box, which, being the last off the truck, must have been the first to be packed. T–6, E–7, S–8, S–9. Tess. Harry had wanted Tess to inherit his books, and he knew that she would obsessively organize them. When he told her his books would speak to her someday, Harry hadn’t been talking metaphorically. Harry Maxwell had left his daughter a message.

TESS AND HARRY ON THE DOCK

Tess had been ten when she read a book about the Apollo missions and encountered a new word.

“What’s quarantine?” she had asked her father as they lay on the dock gazing up at a waning moon.

“Do you remember when I read you The War of the Worlds?” asked her father.

“Yes.”

“What killed the Martians?”

“You said it was, like, a cold.”

“Tess,” said her father with a hint of warning in his voice.

“Sorry,” said Tess. “You said it was a cold.” Harry abhorred the misuse of the word like.

“Exactly. There are all sorts of illnesses and viruses on Earth that our bodies have learned to deal with.”

“What’s a virus?”

“A tiny speck, so tiny you can’t see it without a microscope, that can make you sick. It’s sort of alive, but it needs other life-forms to reproduce—that’s why it likes people. Now if we get exposed to a cold virus, our bodies are used to that. We might get a stuffy nose or a headache, but probably nothing worse. But the Martians had never been exposed to a terrestrial virus.”

“What’s terrestrial?”

“Having to do with the planet Earth. The Martians had never been exposed to a terrestrial virus, so their bodies didn’t know how to handle even the common cold.”

“And it killed them.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, and the astronauts were afraid the same thing would happen!” said Tess excitedly.