The Faculty Club

33

“Where are we?” Sarah whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“This is where you saw the ceremony?”

“No. This is nothing like that. Too small. Too… homey. The place I saw was like a cathedral.”

“Well, where is that?”

“I have no idea.”

The place we were in looked like a junior common room in one of the dorms, in a state of bad neglect. There were several couches with cracked and worn leather. There was a rug in the center of the room that had never been fancy, but now it was threadbare. The air was stale. I shut the door behind us and switched on a dim lamp. Old photos covered the walls, hard to make out through thick layers of dust.

On the wall opposite us were two doors.

“I guess we try those,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Sarah whispered.

“Why not?”

“No lock on the door, out there in the hall. Don’t you think that’s weird? Why wouldn’t they lock their door?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we just got lucky for once.”

“I doubt it. The only way you’d come through that door is if you were looking for it. I think this room is the lock.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Sarah said. “I just wouldn’t go touching everything.”

“Look at this,” Miles said.

We turned around.

On a small end table, he’d found two statues; miniature kings standing side by side, carved out of limestone. The pedestals put them at eye level with us.

They were intricately detailed, with lined robes and faces. You got the feeling they were meant to be brothers. One looked kindly, the other cold.

“Look,” Sarah said. She was next to me, pointing at a plaque on one of the pedestals. It had an inscription in foreign letters. It looked like Greek.

“Miles, do they take your Classics degree back if you actually use it for something?”

“You mock,” Miles said, “but what would you do without me?”

He leaned over the plaque and ran his finger across the raised letters.

“It’s a parable,” he said. He laughed. “About two brothers, sworn to guard a crossroads. Not just any crossroads. One path leads to glory beyond your wildest dreams. The other leads to… oh.”

“What-death?”

“I wish. It’s from Paradise Lost. ‘To bottomless perdition, there to dwell, in adamantine chains and penal fire, who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.’”

“Penal fire?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s the crossroads between heaven and hell?”

Miles nodded.

I looked at the far wall.

“Two doors. Two paths. How do we choose?”

Miles put his finger back on the words. “According to the parable, you can ask each brother which way to go. But there’s a hitch. By law, one of the brothers must always lie. The other must always tell the truth.”

“No hint on which one’s which?”

Miles read the rest.

He shook his head.

“That’s all it says.”

“What does it matter?” Sarah whispered. “They’re statues. How are we supposed to ask them anything?”

I looked at the two men. Each had one arm raised over his heart, the other down by his side. At the base of each statue was a small rectangular stone that rose slightly above the stones around it.

“Okay,” I said. “We push that stone. That’s how we ask. Does it say anything about chances? How many chances do we get?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“We should be careful.”

“You’re right,” Miles said. He reached out and pressed the stone in front of one statue.

“Miles!” Sarah cried.

The stone sank down under his finger. We heard the clicking of chains, and then, suddenly, the statue’s arm began to move. Where the forearm met the elbow, there was a joint, disguised by the grooved folds of his robes. His arm actually rotated, like the hand of a clock, toward the statue’s right. He came to rest pointing toward the right-hand door across the room.

“Well, it works.”

“That was stupid,” Sarah snapped. “This isn’t a game. Stop acting like it is. Someone could get hurt.”

“We had to try. What’d you want to do, talk about it until we lost our nerve?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said again, poking him in the chest with her finger.

“Okay, sorry.” He rubbed his chest, then nodded at the statue. “Now we know. He wants us to go that way.”

“We don’t know anything,” Sarah said. “Is he the brother who lies or the brother who tells the truth? Maybe he’s pointing us to our death.”

“Fine,” Miles said. He pushed the other stone.

“Crap!” Sarah shouted.

This time, the brother statue rolled his arm in the opposite direction, toward the door on the left.

“Great! Which way do we go now, genius?”

“Miles,” I said, “stop touching and start thinking. Of course they were going to point in opposite directions. One’s lying, one’s not.”

“I knew that,” he said, sounding hurt. “I don’t hear you offering any brilliant ideas.”

“Just give me a minute to think.”

“Take your time,” Miles said. “I feel really comfortable here.”

I closed my eyes. This was just logic. And logic was just math.

I was good at this.

Say that Truth equals +1. And a Lie is -1. Ask the lying brother, get a negative answer. Ask the truthful brother, get a positive answer.

But we don’t know which one’s which…

Come on… think.

It was a magic trick: we had to turn a lie into truth. In other words: how does a negative number become a positive number?…

Multiply it by another negative! Two negatives equal a positive!

So if you ask the liar, you have -1. How do you throw in another negative? Do the opposite of what he says! If he says go left, you go right! -1 times -1 equals +1.

But how do you know you’re talking to the liar??

I mean, if you ask the truthful brother, then you’re multiplying -1 times +1. You’re back to the wrong answer.

Shit!

So the question is: How do you make sure that second negative is in the equation?

Come on…

I felt my brain stretching, groaning…

Almost there…

“I got it,” I said.

Miles and Sarah stared at me.

“We ask either statue what his brother would say, and then we do the opposite.”

“What?”

“Huh?”

“Think it through. We don’t know who is who. So if you ask the liar what his brother would say, his brother would tell us the truth, but the liar would lie about his brother’s answer. So we do the opposite!”

+1 × -1 × -1 = +1!

“Or, say we ask the truth-teller. His brother would lie, and he’d truthfully tell us which way his brother recommended. So again, we do the opposite.”

– 1 × +1 × -1 = +1!

It was kind of like a cartoon. Both their eyes drifted upward as they each worked it through. It clicked for Sarah first.

“Yes!” she said. She smiled. “How did you think of that so fast?”

“It’s just logic,” I said.

“Impressive,” she replied. I felt all warm and goose-bumpy.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Miles said. “Except for one thing. THEY’RE FUCKING STATUES! You can’t ask them anything. You just push a button and they move. Jesus Christ, and I’m the professional academic?”

Shit.

I felt the air go out of my balloon. He was right, of course. I’d been so excited about the logic that I’d forgotten the reality of the situation. Still, the answer was so clever, so pure, so… V &D. It had to be right. I couldn’t see any other way.

The button. The gears and chains inside. That was the statue’s guts-gears and chains, not blood and viscera. The joint at the elbow, hidden in the seams of his robe…

I walked over to the statue on the left and grabbed his head. I traced my finger over the line between his neck and his robes… could it be?

We hadn’t come this far to give up or turn around.

I closed my eyes and twisted. Nothing, at first, and then I felt a gritty giving-way, as if the twisting was pulverizing the bits of dust filling the groove, and then the king’s head turned. It rotated to my right under my hands, the sound of a mechanism clacking and trucking inside the statue, until his head wouldn’t turn anymore. I opened my eyes and looked. The statue’s head was now rotated to the right, and his lips fit perfectly against the opening of his brother’s ear.

I looked at Miles and Sarah and gave them a wide smile.

“You see?” I sounded like a giddy idiot. But it was awesome!

I stepped in front of the second brother, the one who was now receiving instructions, metaphorically speaking, from the lips of his brother nestled in his right ear.

“Ask one statue what his brother would say,” Sarah whispered.

She came over and put her hand on top of mine, and together we pressed down on the button in front of the second statue. His hand was already pointing to his right, from our previous attempt. There was a clicking-higher-pitched this time-and the arm ticked all the way to his left.

“YES!!” Miles shouted. He pumped his arms in victory. “You did it, by God, Jeremy, you really did it!” He ran and jumped toward the left-hand door and put his hand on the knob.

“MILES!” we both screamed at once. “MILES, NO!!” Were we seconds from death? By what means? Would the room start hissing with gas? Or maybe the opposite: the air would suck out until we were gasping on the floor, a couple of heartbeats away from the penal fire…

Would it be quick? Would it hurt?

Miles turned around, grinning.

“Just kidding,” he said. “Ask one statue what his brother would say”-here he winked-“and do the opposite.”

Miles walked to the right-hand door and, without looking back at us, turned the knob.

There was a release of air, a quiet hissing, and then the door opened inward.