To my horror, the movement suddenly shifted, and I could tell that whatever was right on the other side of that dense foliage was coming straight through toward me. I backed away, nearly senseless with terror. Something was coming to get me. I wasn’t typically given to childish terror, and yet I found my fingers in my mouth stopping a scream.
“Hello?” I called, my voice shaking, but there was only silence. “Charles?”
The bushes shook violently, and a figure stepped through.
It was Dorian, leaves in his hair, a fun-house horror smile on his lips. For an instant, I thought he was going to reveal a butcher knife and stab it directly into my heart.
“Hi,” he said, and for the first time, I noticed something vaguely unhinged in his eyes.
“What are you doing out here?” I took a step away, but immediately he closed the gap.
“Just walking. You?”
“Same,” I said. “Just walking.”
I desperately wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to turn my back on him.
“Do you want to walk together?” I tried to make it seem like a casual suggestion, like I didn’t think it was even remotely strange that he was in an expensive suit in the middle of the woods, smiling at me like a goddamn serial killer.
“No, that’s okay,” he said. “I have some things to do out here.”
“Right.” I kept my eyes locked on his.
“Right.” He smiled, and suddenly he was himself again. Nothing dangerous there. Nothing to fear.
“I’ll be seeing you around, then,” I said, turning to go.
I took only a few steps, but when I turned back around again, he was gone.
As I walked back, I couldn’t shake the anxious sense that I was somehow in danger. When I’d thought Isabelle was someone else, her life and work had sounded vaguely romantic, but now that I was Isabelle, it didn’t feel that way at all. I longed for Robin Quain’s boring life, with her concerns about tenure and dumb publications.
As I walked, I mulled over the name Quain, rolling it around on my tongue like a lozenge. Why was my name Quain? Had it been given to me by whoever did this, or had I chosen it for myself after the fact? Either way, it was a strange name, one that stood out for sure, and therefore not necessarily great for anonymity.
And then I stopped on the path, the woods suddenly feeling so large, I thought they might envelop me. I knew the name Quain, recognized it. It was in fact someone else’s name. Jorge Luis Borges had written a story called “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain.” The story takes the form of a critical review of the work of a fictional writer named Herbert Quain. That must have been where the name came from. But what did it mean?
Suddenly I understood. The dreams of the blazing orange sun, Isabelle pointing to the book. There was a clue for me in that book, wasn’t there? I’d barely looked at it when I’d first found it. There had to be something I missed in there. I needed to get to the library.
Rushing back along the main path, I passed by my cabana and went straight to the house. Up there, it was dimly lit and silent. The sound of my shoes echoed off the tiles as I walked across the main room, past the entryway with that big golden heart and the vase of fresh flowers—birds-of-paradise—and over to the exterior passage that led to the library. As I walked, it was like seeing everything with fresh eyes. Each brick, each window I passed, I wondered if it had a special meaning to me. I wondered precisely what memories had been born within these walls.
When I stepped into the nave, I felt a shift in the air. It was always so much colder and damper than in the rest of themonastery. Slowly, feeling almost as if I were approaching a dangerous beast, I made my way to the corner where the Borges book was. Carefully I pulledFiccionesoff the shelf and held it in my hand, staring for just a moment at the blazing sun on the cover, before opening it up to the story in question. But when I paged through, I found no clues.
Crestfallen, I let the book drop between my knees. I’d been so certain. No, I told myself. There had to be something more. And then I had a thought. Borges’s stories were often self-referential and metafictional, and in “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain,” Borges credits Quain’s work as providing the source material for another one of his stories, one called “The Circular Ruins.”
I opened the book up again and found “The Circular Ruins.” There it was, the clue I was looking for. Right beneath the title was a handwritten set of numbers:
(39.2525233,-107.48774090)
My heart leapt. They were coordinates. Finally, something concrete. No puzzles or anagrams or word games, just some solid information that I could actually use. But why had I left them here instead of in the Quain story? It was true that “The Circular Ruins” was my favorite story. I even had a quote from it in my office back in New York. Flipping farther on, I located that quote and found that someone had underlined it:With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
Written beside it were the words:Uta Hopper Symon.Was that a person? I wondered. Another anagram? Or was it just an unrelated note some long-ago reader had left in the margin?
And then a rush of understanding washed over me. There was something about the content of the story, wasn’t there? Something I was trying to communicate with myself. A cold shock gripped me as I saw the truth unfold before me. “The Circular Ruins” told the story of a wizard who made a man simply by dreaming him into existence. After the wizard created this man, he destroyed his memory so that in the end, the creation had no idea who he really was. In the end, the wizard burned himself alive after realizing that he, too, was simply someone else’s dream.
Aspen and Lexi said they didn’t know who did this to me. They said they thought it was someone who wanted to steal my research. I was told repeatedly that the work I did here was unmatched, that I was a singular genius. Clearly the man in the story was meant to represent me, but what if I was also the wizard? Had I done this to myself—played with memory and destroyed myself in the process?
But there was another possibility still. Maybe this clue wasn’t meant to be an answer; maybe it was meant to be a warning. Because it was possible that the wizard was someone else, someone still out there, someone who still posed a threat.
Around me, the heavy quiet of the library began to feel oppressive, and I found myself wondering what exactly Hildegard College was. Aspen and Lexi had spoken of a barrier, but what kind of barrier, and what was it keeping out?
