Ian Caldwell - The Rule of Four

Charlie sidesteps into the bedroom he shares with Gil and pulls out a large hiking pack, then another, which he hands to me. Finally he pulls on his hat.

Jesus, Charlie, Gil says. We're only going down there for half an hour. I packed less for spring break.

Be prepared, Charlie says, hitching the larger of the two packs over his shoulders. That's what I say.

You and the Boy Scouts, I mumble.

Eagle scouts, Charlie says, because he knows I never made it past tenderfoot.

You ladies ready? Gil interrupts, standing by the door.

Paul breathes deeply, waking himself up, then nods. From inside his room he grabs his pager and hitches it to his belt.

At the front of Dod Hall, our dormitory, Charlie and I part ways with Gil and Paul. We will enter the tunnels at different locations, and be invisible to each other until one team finds the other underground.

I didn't know there was such a thing as a black Boy Scout, I tell Charlie once he and I are on our own, heading down campus.

The snow is deeper and colder than I expected. I wrench my ski jacket around me, and force my hands into gloves.

That's okay, he says. Before I met you, I didn't know there was such a thing as a white pussy.

The trip down campus passes in a haze. For days, with graduation so near and my own thesis out of the way, the world has seemed like a rush of unnecessary motion-underclassmen hurrying to night seminars, seniors typing their final chapters in sweating computer labs, now snowflakes everywhere in the sky, dancing in circles before they find the ground.

As we walk down campus, my leg begins to ache. For years the scar on my thigh has been predicting bad weather six hours after the bad weather arrives. It's a memento of an old accident, the scar. Not long after my sixteenth birthday I was in a car crash that laid me up in a hospital for most of my sophomore summer. The details are a blur to me now, but the one distinct memory I have of that night is my left femur snapping clean through the muscle of my thigh until one end of it was staring back at me through the skin. I had just enough time to see it before passing out from shock. Both bones in my left forearm broke as well, and three ribs on the same side. According to the paramedics, the bleeding from my artery was stopped just in time for them to save me. By the time they got me out of the wreckage, though, my father, who'd been driving the car, was dead.

The accident changed me, of course: after three surgeries and two months of rehab, and the onset of phantom pains with their six-hour weather delay, I still had metal pins in my bones, a scar up my leg, and a strange hole in my life that only seemed to get bigger the more time wore on. At first there were different clothes-different sizes of pants and shorts until I regained enough weight, then different styles to cover up a skin graft on my thigh. Later I realized that my family had changed too: my mother, who'd retreated into herself, first and most of all, but also my two older sisters, Sarah and Kristen, who spent less and less time at home. Finally it was my friends who changed-or, I guess, finally I was the one who changed them. I'm not sure if I wanted friends who understood me better, or saw me differently, or what exactly, but the old ones, like my old clothes, just didn't fit anymore.

The thing people like to say to victims is that time is a great healer. The great healer is what they say, as if time were a doctor. But after six years of thinking on the subject, I have a different impression. Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever buys that shirt, the one great patron of the everlasting theme park, whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it. We're the paint in that analogy, as I tried to explain to Charlie when I mentioned it once. Time is what disperses us.

Maybe the best way to put it is the way Paul did, not long after we met. Even then he was a Renaissance fanatic, eighteen years old and already convinced that civilization had been in a nosedive since the death of Michelangelo. He'd read all of my father's books on the period, and he introduced himself to me a few days into freshman year after recognizing my middle name in the freshman face-book. I have a peculiar middle name, which for parts of my childhood I carried like an albatross around my neck. My father tried to name me after his favorite composer, a slightly obscure seventeenth-century Italian without whom, he said, there could've been no Haydn, and therefore no Mozart. My mother, on the other hand, refused to have the birth certificate printed the way he wanted, insisting until the moment of my arrival that Arcangelo Corelli Sullivan was a horrible thing to foist on a child, like a three-headed monster of names. She was partial to Thomas, her father's name, and whatever it lacked in imagination it made up for in subtlety.

Thus, as the pangs of labor began, she held a delivery-bed filibuster, as she called it, keeping me out of this world until my father agreed to a compromise. In a moment less of inspiration than of desperation, I became Thomas Corelli Sullivan, and for better or worse, the name stuck. My mother hoped that I could hide my middle name between the other two, like sweeping dust beneath a rug. But my father, who believed there was much in a name, always said that Corelli without Arcangelo was like a Stradivarius without strings. He'd only given in to my mother, he claimed, because the stakes were much higher than she let on. Her filibuster, he used to say with a smile, was staged in the marriage bed, not on the delivery bed. He was the sort of man who thought a pact made in passion was the only good excuse for bad judgment.

I told Paul all of this, several weeks after we met.

You're right, he said, when I told him my little airbrush metaphor. Time is no da Vinci. He thought for a moment, then smiled in that gentle way of his. Not even a Rembrandt. Just a cheap Jackson Pollock.

He seemed to understand me from the beginning.

All three of them did: Paul, Charlie, and Gil.

Now Charlie and I are standing over a manhole at the foot of Dillon Gym, near the south of campus. The Philadelphia 76ers patch on his knit hat is hanging by a thread, fluttering in the wind. Above us, under the orange eye of a sodium lamp, snowflakes twitch in huge clouds. We are waiting. Charlie is beginning to lose patience because the two sophomores across the street are costing us time.

Just tell me what we're supposed to do, I say.

A light pulses on his watch and he glances down. It's 7:07. Proctors change shifts at 7:30. We've got twenty-three minutes.

You think twenty minutes is enough to catch them?

Sure, he says. If we can figure out where they'll be. Charlie looks back over across the street. Come on , girls.

One of them is mincing through the drifts in a spring skirt, as if the snow caught her by surprise while she was dressing. The other, a Peruvian girl I know from an intramural competition, wears the trademark orange parka of the swim and dive team.

I forgot to call Katie, I say, as it dawns on me.

Charlie turns.

It's her birthday. I was supposed to tell her when I was coming over.

Katie Marchand, a sophomore, has slowly become the kind of girlfriend I didn't deserve to find. Her rising importance in my life is a fact Charlie accepts by reminding himself that sharp women often have terrible taste in men.

Did you get her something? he asks.

Yeah. I make a rectangle with my hands. A photo from this gallery in-