The last question the recruiter from Daedalus asked during my job interview was a riddle: If a frog falls down a fifty-foot well and has to climb his way out, making three feet of progress every day, but slipping back two feet every night, in how many days will he escape?
Charlie's answer was that he never escapes, because a frog that falls fifty feet doesn't get back up. Paul's answer had something to do with an ancient philosopher who died by walking into a well while staring up at the stars. Gil's answer was that he'd never heard of a frog climbing wells, and what did all this have to do with developing software in Texas, anyway?
The right answer, I think, is that it takes the frog forty-eight days, or two days less than you might expect. The trick is realizing that the frog climbs one foot per day after all is said and done-but on the forty-eighth day, he climbs three feet and reaches the top of the well before he can slide back again.
I don't know what makes me think of that just now. Maybe this is the sort of moment when riddles have an afterglow of their own, a wisdom that illuminates the edges of experience when nothing else can. In a world where half of the villagers always lie and half of them always tell the truth; where the hare never catches the tortoise because the distance between them shrinks by a never-collapsing infinity of halves; where the fox can never be left on the same bank of the river as the hen, or the hen on the same bank as the grain, because with perfect regularity the one will consume the other, and nothing you can do will prevent it: in that world, everything is sensible but the premise. A riddle is a castle built on air, perfectly habitable if you don't look down. The grand impossibility of what Paul has told me-that an ancient rivalry between a monk and a humanist has left a crypt of treasures beneath a forgotten forest-rests on the much more basic impossibility that a book like the Hypnerotomachia, written in code, impenetrable, ignored by scholars for five centuries, could exist. It couldn't; yet it's as real to me as I am to myself. And if I accept its existence, then the foundation is set, and the impossible castle can be built. The rest is just mortar and stones.
When the elevator doors open, and the library lobby seems weightless in the wintry light, it feels like we've emerged from a tunnel. Every time I think of that Daedalus riddle, I imagine the frog's surprise when, for the first time, on his last day, three steps forward are not followed by two steps back. There is a suddenness at the top of the well, an unexpected quickening of the journey at its end, that I feel now. The riddle I've known since I was a child-the riddle of the Hypnerotomachiahas been solved in less than a day.
We click through the turnstile at the library's front border, and the nip of the wind returns beneath the entrance. Paul presses the door open, and I tighten my coat around me. There is snow everywhere, no stones or walls or shadows, only brilliant tornadoes of white. All around me is Chicago and Texas; graduation; Dod and home. Here I am, suddenly, above ground.
We start south. On the way back to the dorm, a Dumpster has been overturned. Little nests of garbage poke up from mounds of snow, and the squirrels are at them already, pulling out apple cores and near-empty bottles of lotion, passing everything in front of their noses before beginning to eat. They are discriminating little creatures. Experience has taught them that there will always be food here, replenished every day, so everywhere nuts and acorns go unburied. When a vulture-size crow lands on the wheel of the upturned Dumpster, expressing priority, the squirrels just chitter and nibble, ignoring it.
You know what that crow makes me think of? Paul says.
I shake my head, and the bird flies off angrily, spreading its wings to a fantastic length, escaping with a single bag of crumbs.
The eagle that killed Aeschylus by dropping a tortoise on him, Paul says.
I have to glance at him to see that he's serious.
Aeschylus was bald, he continues. The eagle was trying to break the shell open by dropping it on a rock. It couldn't tell the difference.
This reminds me again of the philosopher who fell down the well. Paul's mind is always doing that, tucking the present into the past, making yesterday's bed.
If you could be anywhere right now, I ask him, where would it be?
He looks over at me, amused. Anywhere?
I nod.
In Rome, with a shovel.
A squirrel looks up from a slice of bread he's found, watching us.
Paul turns to me. What about you? Texas?
No.
Chicago?
I don't know.
We pass through the rear courtyard of the art museum, the one separating it from Dod. There are footprints here, back and forth in zigzags.
You know what Charlie told me? he says, staring at the marks in the snow.
What?
If you fire a gun, the bullet falls as fast as if you'd dropped it.
This sounds like something I learned in introductory physics.
You can never outrun gravity, Paul says. No matter how fast you go, you're still falling like a rock. It makes you wonder if horizontal motion is an illusion. If we move just to convince ourselves we're not falling.
Where are you going with this?
The tortoise shell, he says. It was part of a prophecy. An oracle said Aeschylus would die of a blow from heaven.
A blow from heaven, I think. God, laughing.
Aeschylus couldn't escape an oracle, Paul continues. We can't escape gravity. He weaves his fingers together, a dovetail. Heaven and earth, speaking in one voice.
His eyes are wide, trying to take in everything, a kid at the zoo.
You probably say that to all the girls, 1 tell him.
He smiles. Sorry. Sensory overload. I'm all over the place. I don't know why.
I do. There's someone else to worry about the crypt now, someone else to worry about the Hypnerotomachia. Atlas feels lighter without the world on his shoulders.
It's like your question, he says, walking backward in front of me as we head toward the room. If you could be anywhere, where would you be? He opens his palms, and the truth seems to land in his hands. Answer: it doesn't matter, because wherever you go, you're still falling.
He smiles when he says it, as if there's nothing depressing about the idea that we're all just in free-fall. The ultimate equality of going anywhere, doing anything, Paul seems to mean, is that being in Dod with me is as good as being in Rome with a shovel. In his own way, I think, in his own words, what he's saying is that he's happy.
He fishes for his key and slips it into the lock. The room is still when we enter. So much action has circled this place since yesterday, break-ins and proctors and police officers, it's unsettling to see it empty and dark.
Paul wanders into the bedroom to put down his coat. Instinctively, I lift the phone and check our voicemail.
Hey, Tom, Gil's voice begins, through a hiss of static. I'll try to catch up to you guys later but looks like I won't be able to get back to the hospital after all so Charlie for me Tom black tie. You can borrow need to.
Black tie. The ball.
By now the second message has begun.
Tom, it's Katie. Just wanted to let you know Tm going to the club to help set up as soon as Fm done here in the darkroom. I think you said you were coming with Gil. A pause. So 1 guess-we'll talk tonight.
There's a hesitation before she hangs up, as if she's unsure she put the right emphasis on those last words, the reminder of unfinished business.
What's going on? Paul calls from the bedroom.
I have to get ready, I say quietly, sensing the turn things are taking.
Paul comes out of the room. For what?
The ball.
He doesn't understand. I never told him what Katie and I talked about in the darkroom. What I've seen today, everything he's told me, has turned the world on its ear. But in the silence that follows, I find myself standing where I've stood before. The ancient mistress, forsworn, has returned to tempt me. There is a cycle here which, until this moment, I've been too engrossed to break. Colonna's book flatters me with visions of perfection, an unreality I can inhabit for the tiny price of my mad devotion, my withdrawal from the world. Francesco, having invented this strange bargain, also invented its name: Hypnerotomachia, the struggle for love in a dream. If ever there were a time to stay grounded, to resist that struggle and its dream-if ever there were a time to remember a love that has devoted itself madly to me, to remember the promise I made to Katie-that time is now.