Page 7 of The Paradox Club

“It’s been a hard year.”

“She says she doesn’t want to go to the island this summer, but she’ll come around.”

“You could always take me instead,” said Richard. “I could help with any projects you have in mind.”

“Look after the club, Richard,” Harry said, standing and draining his snifter. “You look after the club and let me worry about what goes on at the lake.”

Richard had intended to do just that—to look after the club. And after the fire he had intended to look after Marie, too. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Marie blamed Richard for what happened at the island almost as much as she blamed Vivian and Tess, and she shut them all out of her life as completely as she could. After the fire, Richard had left Wisconsin and taken a job at Columbia so he could be close to the club. Over the past ten years he had kept reaching out to Marie. She had shut the door in his face or hung up on him more times than he could remember. He’d never even spoken to Tess.

In the first couple of years, Vivian sent him a message once in a while: a postcard with a perfunctory greeting or a Christmas card—just enough to let him know that she and Tess were safe. Richard had wanted to visit Vivian, to see her and Tess, but Vivian said it was safer if he stayed away. Richard wondered if she also didn’t want to be reminded of the days before the fire when they had all been so close. And, considering the increasing hold on the Paradox Club exerted by Pilgrim 3, she was probably right about the safety issue. He had finally convinced Vivian to accept a bimonthly phone call of five minutes or so, but she never put Tess on the line. He wished he could do more for Harry, but at least he kept up his efforts to suppress the influence of Pilgrim 3 at the club.

Then, eight months ago, he had been on his usual thrice-weekly run in Riverside Park when he had stumbled and fallen. He hadn’t inflicted any serious damage, but two cracked ribs and some frightening-looking facial bruising left him wincing in the mirror a week later, at which point he came to a decision. Richard was a seventy-two-year-old man living alone in a fifth-floor walkup. It had snowed two days ago and turned frigid last night; it was twenty-one degrees outside and there were frozen slush pools on every street corner. He was having flashbacks to childhood winters in Sterling, Kansas. In his hand he’d held a brochure for the Waves Beachside Retirement Community. In Florida the temperature was seventy-five. Richard had announced his retirement that afternoon, finished out the academic year, and packed his bags. He knew that Pilgrim 3 would be not-so-secretly celebrating his departure from New York, but he had been careful to give himself eyes and ears inside the Paradox Club. When he had joined the club almost forty years ago, he couldn’t have kept tabs on its inner workings from a thousand miles away. But in the age of instant communication, nothing would happen in the halls of the Paradox Club that the president wouldn’t know about within minutes. And New York was just a plane ride away if his presence should be required.

In his first four months at the Waves, Richard had taken up croquet and tennis. He had read a stack of spy novels. He had learned to play bridge and mah-jongg. He had taken to writing long rambling letters to Vivian. He had even had a brief affair with a younger man. To all the other residents of the Waves, Richard Pollard appeared as retired as they come. They had no idea that he received almost daily dispatches from the Paradox Club. They had never even heard of the Paradox Club.

Richard took a sip from his piña colada, shifted in his chair to keep his legs in the shade, and opened his copy of The Enigma Affair. He looked not at the text, but at his bookmark—a strip of yellowing paper with two dates written on it in Harry Maxwell’s handwriting: June 17, 2005, the night of the fire, and October 14, 2015, ten days from now.

MAXWELL’S ISLAND

In the middle of a lake in northeastern Wisconsin, a mile from the closest shore, stands a ten-acre island shaped, its owner Horatio Maxwell Sr. had once said, like a cocker spaniel. Horatio’s father, Tess’s great-grandfather, had purchased the island after World War I and in the 1930s had built a rustic cabin on a rise on the island’s west side, affording views in all directions. Improvements such as electricity and hot water came along when Tess’s grandfather inherited the cabin, but its chief luxury remained isolation. From the dock, a hundred yards or so from the cabin’s deck, one can, when fog does not intervene, just make out the boat launch that provides access to the cabin and the two other cottages on the lake, which can be reached only by water.

The lake is far enough north that only summer residence is feasible. The nearest town is far enough away that residents bring supplies for two or three weeks at a time. By mutual consent, there are no outdoor lights at any of the houses, making the lake, and particularly the island, an ideal spot for stargazing. Whether Horatio Maxwell Jr., Tess’s father, loved the lake because of his fascination with the stars or developed an interest in astrophysics because of the view from the island, Tess never knew. To her, it didn’t matter. The lake and the stars were inextricably interconnected.

Tess had not set foot on the island in a decade, but when therapist n + 1 had asked her where she felt safe, Tess didn’t hesitate with her answer. When she was a child, the lake had been her “happy place.” But that happiness was not just about the lake and the island and the peace and the beauty. The happiness of the lake had everything to do with her father. She had sometimes gone for days or even a week at a time without thinking about Harry and the island. But lately, as the stress had been weighing on her and the darkness closing in, she had felt their pull more and more strongly. Four days after her appointment with therapist n + 1, as she sat staring out the window of a bus headed from Champaign, Illinois, to Madison, Wisconsin, that tug only increased.

Her memories of the lake were as liquid as its dark waters. She remembered most clearly lying on her back on the dock, long past her usual bedtime, gazing up at a sky ablaze with a hundred million stars and listening to her father explain the universe. She remembered his story about the night he lay on that same dock looking up at the moon knowing that men were walking on its surface. The fact that, for the first time in human history, its representatives were strolling about on a celestial body seemed miraculous to Harry Maxwell, then a six-year-old boy who already knew more about celestial bodies than most adults. Tess remembered her father telling her that, even though the word in the corner of the television read Live, the images his parents were watching and the words he heard through his transistor radio, like the light from the moon itself, took over a second to make their way back to Earth. What Harry Maxwell saw when he looked at the night sky was the past.

Tess remembered the night—she couldn’t have been more than six or seven herself—when her father told her about measuring the speed at which a star is moving away from Earth by looking at the Doppler shift. She could still feel that moment of epiphanic clarity when she realized that the amazing panorama above her was not a stationary vista—every dot of light was in incomprehensibly rapid motion. And so was she. That realization made Tess deliriously happy. And of course, she remembered the night he had first told her about his special star—the one he said would always be watching over her.

Even now, so many years later, if she came across a reference to orbital wobbles or Hubble’s law or the search for Earth-like planets, whole conversations with her father on the dock would come flooding back, as if the recordings had been locked away waiting for her to discover the key.

What she found harder and harder to remember were the ordinary moments. Vivian, in her rare nostalgic moods, had told her about rainy afternoons reading books by the fire and playing endless rounds of canasta, but those memories slipped away from Tess, as impossible to catch as a slithering eel in murky waters. And of the house itself, other than the silhouette seen in the moonlight from the end of the dock, she could recover only snippets, as if it existed in another universe—close enough to feel yet infinitely far away.

What she did remember about the lake was Marie and Vivian and Harry. Her mother, Marie, emerging from her kitchen with a tray of cookies or pulling Tess close on the sofa to read aloud a favorite book; Vivian taking her for walks around the island or swims in the lake on warm days; and especially Harry. She remembered the way he smelled after a day on the water (all sweat and fish and a hint of oil from the outboard motor) and the way he smelled after he showered and dressed for dinner (Old Spice and tweed and some sort of hair tonic so old-fashioned it might as well have been Macassar oil). She remembered the feel of his corduroy pants on her bare calves when he hoisted her into his lap after dinner and the sharp taste of the hard lemon candies he’d slip her when her mother wasn’t looking. She remembered his voice, so comforting in its basso profundo, whether he was talking about his day on the lake or explaining the uncertainty principle.

She could remember, too, the shadows cast by her father and Vivian as they sat by the dying fire late at night talking about science. Silhouettes and shadows—like Plato’s cave—were the memories Tess carried of the lake house. It seemed to her, though, that those shadows, and not the figures that cast them, represented the ideals: the ideal father, the ideal mother, the ideal family friend, the ideal spot in the world, protected from everything in the middle of a lake. The real people, and the real house, had not lived up to those ideals. But the shadows remained perfect in her memory.

She remembered captured fragments of those conversations between her father and Aunt Vivian—whispered tête-à-têtes that lasted deep into the night. Like a radio straining to catch a faraway signal and achieving only brief flashes of clarity, she would discern words like universe and paradox and Armageddon.

But, although so much of life at the lake was hazy with time and nostalgia, Tess remembered three nights with cinematic clarity: the night the voices first spoke, the night she heard every word of Harry and Vivian’s conversation, and the last night she ever saw Maxwell’s Island.

A QUIET MORNING AT THE PARADOX CLUB

In a secure basement room of the Paradox Club, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a young woman in a black suit sat in the midst of an array of antique computers listening to the buzz of a fluorescent light overhead. The only piece of equipment in the room that postdated the creation of the smartphone was the iPad on which she played word games and math puzzles. A low-resolution display covering one wall of the room pulsed in various shades of green. To the digital native sitting in front of it, the wall looked like a matrix of Christmas tree lights, but if she squinted and looked from the back of the room, it was possible to tell that this display was meant to show a map of the world. At the bottom of the display was a series of numbers capable of flipping over like an old railway station departure board. This morning, like every morning, they were all zeros.

She had no idea how most of the equipment worked, or even if it worked at all. Her job was to sit in the room and pick up a red phone if a red light appeared on the map. She couldn’t believe they actually had a red phone—connected to a landline, no less. In this bunker of a room with its antique display and its red phone she felt as if she were back in the Cold War—or at least in a Cold War movie. At twenty-six, she had no recollection of the actual Cold War, but she had seen Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove.

She had a name, carefully chosen by her parents after long consideration and only days before her birth in a Long Island hospital. But in this room, and in the rest of the Paradox Club, she was Valentine 6, having named herself, like five other members before her, after the central character in Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Valentine 6 did think, when she had been recruited to the Paradox Club after finishing her doctorate in theoretical physics, that she might have some responsibilities beyond babysitting ancient computer equipment, but so far that had not turned out to be the case. Many of the members of the club, she knew, had never even seen the “big board,” and she supposed she ought to feel grateful to have access to a room that was off-limits to all but a few. But the room she really wanted to explore—the room even deeper in the earth than the basement in which she whiled away four hours several times a week—remained forbidden. Perhaps, she thought, if she did this job well, she might see for herself the collection that was the sole reason for the club’s existence.

Valentine 6 was on the verge of solving her twentieth sudoku when she heard a small ping, and a reminder appeared at the top of her iPad screen. Was it noon already? She looked up at the wall display, which she had ignored for the past several minutes, but nothing had changed. Even though it wouldn’t send until she went back aboveground, she tapped a message into her iPad, then went on with her game.

Five floors above Valentine 6, in her top-floor office, Pilgrim 3 (named for Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five) sat in a green leather wingback chair in front of a marble fireplace large enough for her to stand in. Granted, Pilgrim 3 was only five feet tall, but the fireplace was nonetheless impressive. She had instructed Nemo 7 to turn the thermostat down to fifty-five and light a fire. So, despite the unusually warm October day outside, Pilgrim 3 sat wrapped in her favorite cardigan reading, by the light of a flickering fire, a novel that was almost familiar.

Pilgrim 3’s official title was “keeper of the vault,” but in fact on a day-to-day basis she wielded more power than the president, especially now that Calvin 4 had exiled himself to some seniors’ penitentiary in Florida. Presidential lifetime terms, thought Pilgrim 3, had been a bad idea by the club’s founders. One of many bad ideas, if you asked her. With any luck, President Calvin 4 would be dead in a year or two and Pilgrim 3 would become president, appointing her own vault keeper as second-in-command. She’d have plenty of people from which to choose—there was no lack of members willing to suck up to Pilgrim 3, many of them younger recruits who hadn’t even attended the Great Debate, members who had only a vague idea of Pilgrim 3’s agenda. People were drawn to power and Pilgrim 3 exuded it.

It wouldn’t take a brilliant therapist to discover the roots of Pilgrim 3’s obsession with both power and fame. Orphaned at five, bounced around among foster homes, finally taken in by an abusive aunt and uncle—ever since she had escaped to college, Pilgrim 3 had sought to control not only her own destiny, but that of as many other people as she could. When she had been invited, while still an undergraduate, to join the Paradox Club, she had seen her chance. While most members at that time saw the club as a quiet caretaker, Pilgrim 3 saw it as a chance to control the fate of the world. So what if the rules of the club expressly forbade what she had in mind? Once you had enough power, rules didn’t matter. In the decade since the Great Debate, she had recruited members with a wide variety of skill sets to support her. She only lacked one thing—someone who was smart enough to understand Harry Maxwell’s math.