When Alex arrived at the Fisk Library that Wednesday evening to finish her Fallows reading, she opened The Coil and found a note inside. It had been written on a small strip of paper, no larger than a sliver of glass. It read, Find out about the Procedure.
Her backpack—had she left it somewhere on campus? Mentally she retraced her steps that day: lunch at the Commons, 1:00 p.m. with Dr. Mew (Japanese Literature After the Bomb), afternoon study session in Lewis Prine’s dorm room, back to her dorm to retrieve the Fallows. Someone had gotten to her book.
She looked around, paranoia tickling the back of her neck. There was a group of students leaning over a physics text two tables over. A lone reader in a lighted cubicle on the other side of the library. A few others drifting lazily through the stacks. Other than that the library was empty, quiet. She fingered the note.
Find out about the Procedure.
Alex had heard the term somewhere. Had Aldiss said it in one of his lectures? Had she read it somewhere? Again she scanned the library. A boy lifted his gaze to look at her. He was a floppy-haired sophomore, a Kappa Tau she’d danced with at a party—she glanced away. There was the loose feeling of something coming unraveled, a thread tipping from a spool. The Procedure—had she seen it in a book? She stopped, her hands absently crinkling the note into brutal origami, her breath coming fast. A book, she thought. That’s it.
She was up and moving, her backpack slung over her shoulder. Outside, into the biting cold, and over the lawn toward Philbrick. The day was ending, the trees shot through with bloodred sunlight. The old Alex would have stopped and observed this, maybe appreciated it. The silent quads, the way the snow diamond-sparkled on the ground. But this was the new Alex, the girl who’d been changed by the night class. By Aldiss. She pumped her legs harder, walking fast, wind striking her cheeks like a thousand needles. She entered the dorm, breathing in the blast of warmth, and took the elevator up to her room.
The book was exactly where she had hidden it.
Mind Puzzles by Richard Aldiss. For a moment she stood in the empty room, thinking about how her life had changed because of this. One little volume, a collection of pages held together by cheap glue. A flimsy thing—and yet so powerful. So profound.
As she had done that night in the library two weeks ago, Alex searched the index. It was easy to find: there were over ten references. PROCEDURE, THE. She scanned the subentries and picked one: RULES, VARIATIONS OF. Her hands trembling, she turned to the page.
It was a game. That much was clear right away. Alex ran her eyes over the text, making sure her back was to the door in case her roommate returned. But this game—it was unusual. It was only played by what Aldiss called “the enlightened,” those Fallows scholars adept enough with the texts to keep up. And there was something else; something about the tone Aldiss used to discuss the Procedure. A certain demure quality she had never seen in his other work. About this the professor had cared deeply. He wanted the reader to understand that this game, these pages, were important.
One section particularly struck her.
A game, yes, but the Procedure is not some innocent children’s pastime. Half memory contest, half puzzle, the objective is this: to reenact scenes from Paul Fallows’s novels as perfectly as one can. There are levels of complexity—from the true Masters to neophytes who are simply looking for a new experience on campus—but the form and function of the Procedure is always the same. It is a method of deconstruction, a method of understanding the texts in a completely new way outside of a dusty lecture hall. Of tunneling inside the pages themselves.
There was a photograph accompanying the section of text. It showed a group of students on a campus, their ’80s fashion clearly evident, talking to one another. There was something about their faces, about their stance and their manner of dress, that struck Alex right away. They’re acting, she thought. It’s like they’re in a production. A play of some sort.
She continued reading. She read about the variations of the game, how it had been invented (at Yale, perhaps by Benjamin Locke—though this was disputed), its rules and objectives. “Some believe you cannot understand Fallows,” Aldiss wrote, “unless you learn how to play the Procedure. That you cannot truly know the two existing novels unless you become enlightened in the game. And if one does not know the novels, if one does not fully understand them, then how is one to even begin his search for Paul Fallows?”
Alex dug deeper into the book. References to the Procedure cropped up often. There were other photographs of players; there was a crude diagram of how the Procedure was scored and who was declared a winner. But one thing became apparent as she read: you never knew when it began. The Procedure could begin anywhere, at any time, and the player never knew. A line from Fallows would be dropped and the player would have to respond accordingly, in character, the way the dialogue had appeared on the page. This was the game; this was the contest of wits and memory. One simply had to be ready to begin.
“It could be happening now,” Aldiss wrote. “It could be happening to you, wherever you are, and you would simply have to react.”
* * *
That night she was late to class. She slipped into the basement room and found her seat. She looked at the others, scanned the small windowless lecture hall. Which one of them had slipped the note inside her book? Which one had sent her to do the research on the Procedure? When she reached the front row she froze; Michael Tanner was staring right at her.
For a moment neither of them acknowledged the other. Alex could feel the measure of her own breathing, her pulse hammering. The boy continued to look.
Did you do it? she mouthed, checking the others. No one was listening. Jacob Keller was laughing at some joke Daniel Hayden had told. Christian Kane was scribbling something, probably another of his weird stories, in his red notebook. Melissa Lee was catching up on her reading. Alex looked back at Tanner, saw that he hadn’t heard her question. He leaned forward.
Did you leave the note in my book?
But his only response was a question of his own. Alex followed his lips.
Do you like this class?
Instinctively her eyes flicked up: the screen was still black.
No, she replied.
Neither do I, he said. No one does.
Then a shadow twitched on the wall and Michael turned quickly away. When Alex raised her eyes, Aldiss had already appeared on the screen. Had he seen them talking? But the thought was quickly swept away by the man’s appearance.
He was disheveled, his hair in wild tufts and his eyes purpled with exhaustion. The collar of his orange uniform was off center, as if he had been yanked into his seat by one of the guards. And there was something else, something even more curious: the man had drawn closer to them. Perhaps the camera had tightened in on his face, maybe his steel table had been brought forward a foot or two—something had changed. The professor had become the focus, the absolute center of the room. In the corner, near the foam-tiled ceiling and cradling the western wall, the red eye of their own camera bore down on them.
“I’m sorry,” Aldiss began, his voice broken and slurred, “for what happened the last night we met. My spells . . . they come upon me so suddenly that there is nothing I can do to stop them. When I was a child I called them fugues. I was horribly ashamed of them, and the other children used to tease me. I was the Go-Away Boy, the Sleeper. I would hold them in, squeeze the blackness inward like a breath. My fugues were rooms I walked around inside. But that . . .” He looked away, toward the unseen walls that imprisoned him. “That was too horrible.” The room was silent; they remembered him that night, his face seizing and that one eye descending toward them, nearly colliding with the camera and holding, pausing on them in those last seconds before the connection dissolved to black. Finally Aldiss smiled, waved a hand idly across the lens. “Enough of that. Let us talk about why we’re really here: Paul Fallows. Tell me what you’ve found.”
No one spoke. The TV screen flickered, maybe from the wind or some movement in the professor’s small cinderblock room. A line of static pulled down like a curtain and the professor appeared again, his hands folded before him and his alert black eyes on them. He hadn’t shaved, and a graying stubble freckled his cheeks.
“Nothing?” Aldiss said. “Surely you’ve been doing something with your days.”
“How do you hunt a man who doesn’t exist?” asked Lewis Prine. He was sitting in the back row with his head leaned against the concrete wall.
“I assure you Paul Fallows exists, Mr. Prine. He has always existed.”
“But how do we know that?”
“Because I have told you that it’s true. Is that not enough?”
“No,” said Melissa Lee, jumping in before Prine could speak.
“And why not?” asked Aldiss, smiling more sharply now. He rested his chin on his right hand, and they could see that he had written something there. A fugitive word snaking over and around the webbing of his thumb. Aldiss did this sometimes, wrote his class notes on his body, but like everything else about him the words were elusive. A date, a motif, a page number, everything always just out of the camera’s view.
“Because you’re . . .”
“Here?” he asked, extending his arms. The guards, only their torsos and legs visible, shifted as they did each time Aldiss moved. “Is that what you mean, Ms. Lee? The fact that I am imprisoned in this place makes me less trustworthy? Less capable of being correct?”
She looked up, met his eyes fiercely. “Yes.”
“There’s also the fact of how much information we have at this point,” put in Daniel Hayden, challenging Aldiss as he so often did. “It isn’t much.”
“What more would you like me to give you?” Aldiss asked.
The boy said nothing at first. He watched the screen intently, as if the box itself might instruct him on how to proceed. Then he said, his voice measured and calm, “Your trip to Iowa. Tell us about that.”
Aldiss didn’t flinch, but something changed in his face. Something cracked on the right cheek, a fissure of dark skin there like a piece of string being pulled taut. “And that is relevant to Fallows in what way?”
“In every way,” said Hayden. “Isn’t the beginning as important as the end?”
“The beginning,” Aldiss repeated, drumming his fingers on the steel table. “I was a student just like all of you when I went to Iowa in search of Fallows. But what I’ve discovered at Rock Mountain is so much more important than that. I was a child then. I didn’t know where Paul Fallows was, I didn’t know who he was. All I knew was what my mentor, Dr. Benjamin Locke, supplied for me. Now I am much wiser.”
“Locke,” Tanner said. “Who was he?”
Aldiss’s eyes fell away. “Someone who knew more about Fallows than anyone alive. But, like so many other scholars, Locke was consumed by the writer. The search became everything to him, and eventually it destroyed him.”
Alex thought about what Dean Fisk had told her, about the scholars the Fallows search had wrecked. She thought about Aldiss in his lonely cell, about the two graduate students at Dumant University who had been murdered. All for this, these meaningless words. Almost independent of her conscious mind she reached out, touched the lined and crinkled cover of The Coil. Its cold inanimateness brought her back to the night, to the basement room and all its mysteries.
Ask him about the Procedure.
Before she could catch herself the question was out, dropped into the conversation like a bomb: “Did he introduce you to the Procedure?”
Silence. On his screen Aldiss drew back—a wince, or perhaps a flinch. The man had not expected this. “More research?” he asked, his tone cool.
“Well,” Alex fumbled, “I—I didn’t mean to . . .”
“What is it, Professor?” Lee asked, saving Alex from the shame of doing battle with him. Now that something had been uncovered, some new thread of the class, Lee felt a need to unravel it. “What is the Procedure?”
Aldiss looked off toward the edge of the frame. This was a common gesture: his glancing away, his biding time. Everything with the professor was deliberate, measured. They waited for him to continue.
“The Procedure was a game,” he said at last. “A game played with the novels of Paul Fallows.”
“Do you mean like a role-playing game?” asked Sally Mitchell.
“No,” Aldiss said quickly. “It was much more than that.”
“How was it played?”
Again Aldiss seemed almost cautious. He lifted a hand to his hair, swept some of it back out of his eyes. The wind screeched above them, feathering the picture and making the professor appear, in texture and shape, like a thin shadow. He sighed. There was no choice now; he had gone too far.
“The strange thing about the Procedure was that you didn’t know you were inside it until you realized something had changed,” he began. “To be part of the game you had to be chosen. I remember when I was chosen as a student at Dumant. I remember the pride I felt, to finally be one of them . . .” Aldiss’s voice fell away, and he looked again past the camera’s edge. When he continued his voice was more measured. “A message written inside a book told me the game had begun. But as far as I could tell, nothing had happened.”
Three rows away from the television, Alex sat forward. A message inside a book? She focused more deeply on the professor.
“You mean the Procedure hadn’t really begun?” asked Frank Marsden. He was again dressed as Richard III, his eyes dark and his hair colored with shoe polish.
“No, it had begun. This is the thrill of the game—you never know. You never know exactly when real life ends and the Procedure begins.”
Aldiss waited while the class digested this. When everyone was quiet, he continued.
“After the initiation, you wait. You wait until they are ready. Three weeks after I found the message in the book, odd things began to happen. My friends—they were not behaving in normal ways. They were . . . it was as if they were playing parts in some theater production. This, students, was the Procedure.”
“And these parts,” said Hayden, his gaze leveled directly at the screen. “You were supposed to respond to them accordingly. To pick up the loose threads of these scenes and become a character from Fallows.”
“That’s right. It seems silly, yes—but trust me, when the Procedure reaches the highest levels there is nothing silly about it. I will always remember: we were at a campus coffee shop one day, and someone looked at me and started speaking lines right out of The Golden Silence. For a moment I didn’t know what was happening. I was lost. I panicked. Finally this person just got up and left. Another message appeared in one of my books the next week, this time in a copy of Derrida: WE’RE DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, RICHARD.”
“You lost,” said Keller.
“That first time, yes. But I got my next chance a couple of weeks later. We were walking down a campus street, the five of us who called ourselves the Iowans, and someone started saying lines. I recognized the passage—it was from deep inside the novel, when Ann Marie has moved into the mansion with her uncle. I fell into my own role, saying the lines and using the gestures exactly from the text. It has to be exact; the player has to show a mastery of Fallows, down to the very last detail. And that second time I knew from the others’ faces—I had won.”
“And what happens if you win?” Mitchell asked quietly.
Aldiss turned his gaze up. Something had changed in his face, eclipsed the hard-set tension from before. His eyes flashed. “You are accepted,” he said. “The Procedure ends and you become one of the elite.”
“And if you lose?” asked Alex. “What then?”
Aldiss’s eyes dropped again. The faceless guards rocked.
“Then you are shunned. And as a Fallows scholar, to not be inside, to not be one of them—that is a fate worse than death.”
The professor said nothing else. Seconds later the feed was cut.