Shift: A Novel

Cambridge, MA

November 1, 1963

The coo of a mourning dove eased Chandler from sleep. He let the percussive gurgle tickle his eardrums while the last images from his dreams faded from his mind. He’d been back in his grandmother’s house, trapped at the table while the old battle-axe presided over one of her endless, tasteless meals. The really strange thing, though, was that the sooty portrait of his grandfather over the fireplace had been replaced by a one-way mirror behind which sat Eddie Logan, the annoying little brother of his best friend from boarding school. What was even stranger, Eddie was holding a movie camera with one hand and himself with the other. Chandler hadn’t thought of Percy’s pipsqueak brother in a decade. And what the hell was he doing with a movie camera?

Yet this was nothing compared to the other dream.

The girl.

He couldn’t bring himself to voice her name, lest, like Eurydice, she should disappear at the first sign of attention. Instead he savored the residue of her voice, her eyes, her lips. Her kiss. Her body. God, he hadn’t had a dream like that since he lived in his grandmother’s house. Hadn’t been that naively optimistic since his father had been alive.

And all of a sudden there was the other image, one that was never far from his thoughts, waking or sleeping. His father. Dressed in his three-piece suit, creases pressed, collar starched, every hair in place—a perfect imitation of Uncle Jimmy, as if sartorial splendor could mask the failure of his life. But in this memory one detail was out of place; namely, the noose that had jerked the tie from his father’s waistcoat, so that it hung in front of his chest in grotesque echo of the tongue that bulged from his mouth. And the crowning glory: the piece of paper pinned to his jacket like a teacher’s note on a toddler’s shirt:

PUTO DEUS FIO.

The line was Emperor Vespasian’s, uttered just before he died: I am becoming a god. His father had missed the first word of the quotation, however: vae, which could be translated as “alas” or “woe” or just plain “damn.” Leave it to his dad to get it wrong right up till the end.

Chandler’s eyes snapped open. Light filled the room, outlining everything in sharp relief, from the stacks of books piled three deep against the walls to the stack of dishes nearly as high in the kitchenette. He pressed his finger to the bridge of his nose to see if he’d fallen asleep wearing his glasses, but even as he did so, he saw them folded up on the bedside table. But still. The single room of his apartment, from the crumbs on the carpet to the cracks on the ceiling, was crystalline as a photograph. Weird.

He sprang from bed, his limbs snapping with energy. That was when he saw the bird. The mourning dove that had awakened him. It sat on the sill of the open window over the sink, pecking at crumbs of food on the topmost plate.

“Hey, little fellow. I didn’t know your kind liked Chinese food.”

The bird cocked one dark eye at him. Claws as thin and sharp as freshly sharpened pencil lead clicked and clacked over the sill, and its head and throat were a pearly gray that reminded him of something. The color of the girl’s dress, that was it. He still didn’t say her name. Didn’t even think it.

He walked toward the bird slowly, worried that it might fly into the room. He talked to it softly, but the bird seemed completely unbothered by his approach. He was five feet from it, three, he was standing at the counter’s edge. He reached toward the animal with his right hand.

“Don’t be scared, little guy. I just want to make sure—”

Just before his hand touched it, the bird looked up. Cocked that one eye at him again. Except this time when Chandler looked into the eye he seemed to fall down it as though the dove’s eye was an impossibly deep well. All the way down at the bottom a round, pale face stared up at him out of the inky water, only to disappear when he splashed through.

Naz.

He heard glass breaking, felt a sharp pain in his hand. The next thing he knew, he was standing over the kitchen sink. The window was closed, the glass in the bottom left pane broken. A thin trickle of blood ran down his hand and there was no sign of a bird. The dishes were still there, though, reeking faintly of mildew.

For a moment he stared at the blood trickling down his hand as though it might turn out to be another hallucination. He could feel the tiny pressure as the warm red stream pressed on each hair of his wrist, felt the weight of it pressing on the very vein that was pumping more blood to the wound. He stared at it until he was sure it was real, because if the blood was real, if the cut was real, then that meant she was real too. Only when he was absolutely sure did he say her name out loud.

“Naz.”

The word rippled into the world like a sonic cry. Out and out it went, but nothing bounced back. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t real. It just meant she was lost, and he would have to find her. Like Eurydice, he told himself again, and did his best to forget how that story ended. Then, catching himself, he chuckled sheepishly.

“I have got to stop drinking on an empty stomach.”

His protest rang hollow. He had no headache, no sign of a hangover. He wasn’t even hungry, even though he usually woke up starving after a bender. He remembered drinking the day before—remembered drinking a lot—but it seemed to have had no effect. He looked at his body for some sign that he’d had sex but found no incriminating marks. Not that he usually found marks after sex, but still. After an encounter like that, you’d think there’d be some trace. But that made him think of his eyes. Of his oddly clear vision. He’d worn glasses for nearly two years now, and his deteriorating eyesight was the kind of thing that was supposed to get worse, not better. So why was he seeing with 20/20 vision this morning—20/15, 20/10—and why did he feel like it had something to do with what happened last night?

What happened last night?

“Nothing happened last night,” he said out loud, but this protest was even more unconvincing than the last.

He filled the percolator and set it on one ring of his hot plate, opened the fridge, put a pan on the other ring of the hot plate, dropped in half a stick of butter and, while it melted, cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl. When the butter was sizzling, he poured the eggs in and scrambled them quickly, dumped some salt and pepper on top, ate them out of the pan. The coffee was done by then, and he poured himself a cup, added three teaspoons of sugar, and, more or less on instinct, sat down in front of his typewriter. He reached for his glasses by reflex, but they only blurred his vision—for a moment, anyway, and then it cleared again. He took his glasses off and the same thing happened: his sight blurred, then cleared, the sentence at the top of the page springing out in bold relief:

Toward the end of the Achaemenid era, the fire principle, atar, representing fire in both its burning and unburning aspect, became embodied in a demigod Adar, a divine elemental akin to the four winds of ancient Greece: Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus, and Notus.

It was the thousandth incarnation of a sentence he’d been writing for the past three months. His goal was to trace the history of fire through the world’s religions, from Akhenaten’s replacement of Amun with the sun god Ra in ancient Egypt to Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods in Greece to the Persian incarnation of Adar and onward. His intention was to show how the sun, the giver of all life, is first deified (Ra), then demystified (Prometheus), then resignified (Adar) as human beings realize that fire, like a stallion, can be only partially tamed—which is why most religions contain an apocalyptic vision of the earth consumed by flames in a final judgment against mankind’s hubris. It was this quasi-animist belief that Chandler believed was fueling the nuclear arms race: from primitive fire arrows to medieval trebuchets to nuclear bombs, humanity was doing the bidding of the fire god, building the tools that would enable it to realize its ultimate goal: the purification of the world through its annihilation.

He knew the arguments backward and forward, had scoured the dusty corners of every library between Cambridge and Princeton for supporting evidence. But every time he sat down at the typewriter, something stopped him. There was always one more fact he needed to look up, a distracting errand he had to get done. Chandler knew the truth, of course. The truth was that if he ever finished his dissertation he’d have to leave school. Go out into the world and make something of himself, and he knew how that story ended. Knew how it had ended for his father at any rate, and Uncle Jimmy, and Percy Logan, his best friend at Andover: a slab of white marble forty-two inches tall, thirteen inches wide, and four inches thick. For now he’d settle for the less frightening prospect of a blank sheet of paper.

And besides, this time there was no getting around it. He had to write something. His advisor had given him a deadline of 5 p.m. to turn in a draft of this chaper or she was going to cancel his monthly stipend.

He glanced at his watch—7:18. Just under ten hours to write fifty pages. Chandler didn’t think he could fill that many pages even if, like the proverbial monkey, all he did was hit random keys for the next ten hours, let alone attempt to lay out a cogent argument spanning five continents and as many millennia.

He set his fingers on the keyboard, let his mind fill with the image of Adar. Like all fire, Adar was always moving from one place to another. To Chandler, he was like Hanuman, Rama’s devoted servant, not as powerful as his king, but made invincible by unwavering fealty. Hanuman’s chin was scarred by a lightning bolt when he was a child. Adar was the lightning itself: a limbed comet, a warrior made of pure flame—

The clacking of keys pulled him from his thoughts. He looked down, was surprised to see that he’d typed everything that had just run through his mind. He’d substituted the word “Urizen” for “Adar” (one of Blake’s deities? he wasn’t quite sure, although he could see the god clearly enough, beard and hair streaming in a cosmic breeze). Emboldened, his fingers flew over the keys. Words, sentences, paragraphs poured onto the page. One page, two, a third. In the middle of the fourth he needed to check a quotation but was afraid to get up. He knew the quote, could almost see it in front of him, written out on one of the thousands of index cards that filled a dozen drawers in his carrel in the library. And then, suddenly, he could see it:

There will be a mighty conflagration, and all men will have to wade through a stream of molten metal that will seem like warm milk to the just and a torrent of igneous lava to the wicked.

He didn’t ask himself how this was happening or if it could possibly have something to do with last night. When he finally looked up, it was just after four. A stack of pages sat next to the typewriter. He was about to count them when the number came to him: seventy-two. He had no idea how he knew this number, but he knew it was accurate. He threw the pages into his briefcase and ran out the front door. The campus was half a mile away. He was going to have to sprint if he wanted to get this in on time. He set off down Brattle Street at a run, but before he’d gone half a block he pulled up short. Something had caught his eye. A stack of newspapers at the corner kiosk. The Worker, of all papers. He glanced at the headline—FPCC AND DRE FACE OFF ON NEW ORLEANS RADIO—then realized it was the words above the headline that had caught his eye. I.e., Friday, November 1, 1963.

Friday?

Friday?!

Never mind that he was able to see letters a quarter-inch high from ten feet away (and at a run to boot): if the paper was right, he’d somehow lost five days. He stood there dumbfounded, wracking his mind for some memory of the last 120 hours. Had he slept it all away? Wandered through it in some kind of alcohol blackout? An image of Urizen flashed in his mind again, stamped on a little square of translucent paper that floated in a glass of clear liquid for a second before dissolving. The taste of warm vodka was so palpable that his eyes watered.

Confused and frightened, he turned and walked back home. His key was in the door when he heard a throat clear. Even before he turned, he felt her. Her sense of barely controlled panic as she waded through the pyroclastic emotions streaming by with the other people on the sidewalk. She was hunched inside a dark jacket, her face shielded by sunglasses with lenses as big as the saucers on which espresso is served in cafes in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The most real thing about her seemed to be the ruby ring on her right hand, which she twisted nervously with the fingers of her left.

“Naz.” Chandler’s voice was as dry as the crust of food on the plates in his sink upstairs. “I—I thought I dreamed you up.”

Naz didn’t say anything for so long that Chandler thought she was just another hallucination. Then:

“I think you did,” she said, and fell into his arms.