Page 33 of The Paradox Club

“Can you convince her?”

“Can I convince Pilgrim 3 that I want to support her ambitions, make her trust me completely, and then serve as a mole for you and the president?”

“Yes. Can you do that?”

“Absolutely. But what exactly are you planning to do?”

“Nothing anytime soon. But I want to have all the pieces in place so when I’m ready…”

“Pilgrim 3 won’t stand in your way,” Nemo 7 said.

“Something like that,” said Harry.

And Nemo 7 agreed. He had wormed his way into Pilgrim 3’s inner circle, although Harry had done his crazy and irresponsible thing without Nemo 7’s help. But after Harry died, Nemo 7 had quietly made overtures to the president to tell him that whenever Richard needed to know anything about Pilgrim 3, Nemo 7 would be happy to provide information from within the vault keeper’s camp. And now that he finally had something compelling to report, he had that brute Montag 5 sitting two feet from him, tracking his every move. For now, Nemo 7 would simply watch and wait, but the time might come, and soon, when the sleeper agent planted by Harry Maxwell over ten years ago would finally take action.

HARRY’S MESSAGE

By the time Tess had unboxed, examined, and shelved over fifteen hundred books, it was nearly ten p.m. Vivian had come upstairs at seven asking Tess if she wanted any dinner, and again about nine thirty to go to bed.

“Don’t stay up too late, dear,” she had said before disappearing into her bedroom.

Tess warmed up some navy bean soup in the microwave and ate sitting at the table in the kitchen. After putting the empty bowl in the dishwasher, she crept into Vivian’s study to look for a pen and paper. The task at hand required something more elegant than a used sheet of notebook paper and a number two pencil, she thought. Vivian’s study was the opposite of what she remembered of Harry’s. Harry always had a clean desk, with a single pile of neatly arranged papers in one far corner and an antique pottery mug holding his collection of pens in the other. The books on his shelves were perfectly aligned as if by a butler in some grand English country house. Vivian’s study looked like the world’s smallest EF5 tornado had just passed through. Heaps of papers cascaded off a desk and two tables. Accumulations of magazines, journals, and newspapers on the floor had ceased to be piles and had become mountains long ago. Books were shoved haphazardly on shelves, some sideways, some backward. Some had fallen to the floor. Finding blank paper and a pen, which would have taken ten seconds in Harry’s office, occupied Tess for ten minutes.

Back in the upstairs hall, she began to transcribe Harry’s message, pulling each book off the shelf to record the letter on her paper. Books with no letters indicated a space between words, she soon discovered, and those with dots indicated punctuation. At the rate of a little better than five books a minute, the whole process took her nearly five hours, so that it was past three a.m. when she sat in the window seat and read the message over for the fifth time.

Dear Tess,

If you are reading this by yourself, rather than sitting on the dock under the stars listening to me read it to you, it means that my greatest scientific theory was almost completely correct. I hope you and Marie are happy, even if I am not there to enjoy the results of my experiment. Surely, she will be glad to have you back. I have asked Marie to give you all my books when you turn eighteen. You are both clever and an obsessive organizer, so I have no doubt you will discover my message. As you enter adulthood, it is time you begin to understand the true nature of my life’s work. Your aunt Vivian is the best person to explain it to you. Tell her you want to know about October 14, 2015. She will understand. There is a good chance that you may be in danger as that date nears. If danger comes, you will recognize it. When you do, find Vivian and get to the island. Marie has something you may need. She will know if you ask her for it, though she may take some convincing to give it up.

I love you, my little Tess. I’ll see you on the other side.

Much Love,

Harry

P.S. I added some extra books so I can also say this. Don’t be angry with your mother. Don’t blame her. Nothing bad that happens is her fault. Only good ever came from Marie.

P.P.S. Vivian may tell you some strange things over the years, but it’s important that you know that, in a very real way, everything Vivian tells you is true.

P.P.P.S. Don’t you admire the way I made this letter just long enough to use up every bo

What the hell, thought Tess. October 14, 2015, was tomorrow. Why didn’t Marie give her these books when she turned eighteen like Harry wanted her to? And what did Marie have that Tess needed? And what did Harry mean about Marie being glad to have her back? Back from where? Could it be true that only good came from Marie? Maybe before Harry died, but not so much after. And why hadn’t Vivian already told her whatever it was she needed to know about tomorrow?

She read the message again, and, despite a mixture of anger, fear, and confusion, she couldn’t resist a chuckle at the final postscript. She knew her father well enough to know he could have ended the message both with the final book and with the end of a sentence, but Harry thought it would be more fun to break off in the middle of a word. And the whole message explained why he had some truly odd books in his collection. He hadn’t had enough volumes to complete the letter to Tess, so he had probably thought it would be funny to go down to the local Goodwill and buy the strangest books he could find. But how could he be funny when this message from beyond the grave was so riddled with mysteries and warnings?

She tiptoed down the hall to Vivian’s room, where the door stood slightly ajar, and listened to the sound of her aunt’s gentle snoring. She considered waking Vivian, hoping that understanding Harry’s message would quiet the voices, but, as a frequent insomniac, Tess had respect for the luxury of sleep and no intention of depriving her aunt of its pleasure.

Sleep rarely came easily for Tess. Her brain simply refused to stop working. Her father had called it her peculiar blessing—perhaps because he equated her insomnia to his own late-night sessions trying to make scientific sense of the universe—but to Tess it had never been anything but a curse. It wasn’t like she could bend her mind to something useful—like contemplating the Big Bang or outlining a paper in her history class. Even more than during the day, her brain made the rules at night, rules she had no power to alter. Rules like whatever is bad during the day is worse at night or if you fall asleep, all the threats of the voices will come to fruition. Ultimately her mind feared sleep because it meant loss of control.

And so, she lay awake listening to the voices, even talking to the voices. Although she hated the voices, hated the way they made her feel, at times she couldn’t imagine life without them. At times the voices were her only friends. This, she knew, was exactly what the voices planned. They made it impossible for her to make friends, so she came to rely on them for friendship. And the more she listened to them the harder it became to interact with people in the real world and so the more she became friends with the voices the more she listened to them and so on. Before the night the headlights disappeared into the lake, Tess didn’t understand how a circle, a simple geometrical construct, could be vicious. Now she knew.

As a teenager living with Vivian, Tess had plastered her ceiling with little plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, carefully arranged to represent the constellations, but by four a.m. they had lost their power to glow, and so Tess stared up into a darkness as deep as a cloudy night on the lake.

HARRY AND VIVIAN MAKE A PLAN

Her last summer at the lake, Tess heard the voices almost every night, more often than ever before. She stayed up late arranging the crayons in her box alphabetically or recording the sixth letter on each page of her copy of The Hobbit or lining up Legos on the floor of her closet. She shared a bedroom with Vivian, so she always knew when Vivian came to bed—and when Vivian did not come to bed. Tess often had to scramble back under the sheets from her desk or her closet—wherever she happened to be doing the voices’ bidding—when she heard Vivian’s footsteps in the hall outside her door. She had not told anyone about the voices, even though as the summer wore on, they become more insistent that if Tess did not do some mindless, meaningless act, something horrible would happen.

What will happen? she wanted to ask. Tell me what it is and then I’ll decide if that’s bad enough to make it worth my time doing all these silly tasks.