Codex by Lev Grossman Page B

like a piece of looped film run and rerun over and over and over again.
    In the dream he found himself on a fishing trawler, bobbing in a dark, choppy sea studded with whitecaps. His father was there, looking grizzled and irascible. He was dressed as a pirate in a cartoon, with a hat and a pegleg and a blue uniform—or was that the livery of the Wents’ doorman? The clouds were low and dark, seeming to hover only yards above the wavetops. The light was failing.
    They had a fish on the line, but it was so large and strong that it was dragging their boat through the water behind it. Sometimes they caught a glimpse of it when it came near the surface. It was enormous, ten or fifteen feet long, and slender and muscular like an eel.
    After a while the fish got tired, and they managed to winch it up over the side. The ship’s crew now included Zeph’s wife, Caroline, as well as Edward’s secretary Helen from work. The fish was olive green, with a beaked face like a turtle and bright yellow eyes. They laid it out on the deck, but even in the open air it refused to die. In fact, as they slowly made their way home through the mounting seas it gained strength, thrashing around and snapping at them and flaring its blood-red gills. No one knew what kind of fish it was. They weren’t even sure it was edible. The waves were rising, and the ship was becoming dangerously overpopulated. “Don’t be such a child,” the Wents’ housekeeper said, rolling her eyes in disgust. Edward could see the shore now, low green hills above the heaving whitecaps, but as it came closer he felt a sense of impending disaster. They would never reach the land. Somewhere in the distance a warning buoy was tolling and tolling....
    The phone was ringing. He opened his eyes. The answering machine picked up.
    â€œHowdy, playmate.” It was Zeph’s voice. “Re-telephone me, please, at your earliest convenience.”
    Edward lay still for a while, staring blankly at the phone on his night table. The sheet was twisted up into a long rope that had gotten wound around his arms and legs somehow. With an effort he sat up far enough to see the clock radio next to his bed. It was almost one in the afternoon.
    â€œJesus,” he said, suddenly wide awake. “Not again.”
    He looked around at the furniture in his apartment, blinking. How could he have slept for thirteen hours straight? He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Something must be going on deep in his subconscious, he thought, some kind of redecoration, refurbishment, reupholstering that required a lot of system downtime—some shadowy application running in the background, performing unknown operations, consuming huge chunks of psychic RAM.
    The sheets had left a long crease in his skin, running from his crotch up to his collarbone, like the scar from some hideously invasive surgery. He came out into the kitchen dripping, rubbing his face with a towel, feeling the coolness on his face in the heat. He dropped the damp towel on the floor and plucked a pair of clean boxers from his dresser.
    At any rate, he didn’t feel sick. He should have been depressed after yesterday’s disappointment, but instead he felt renewed, replenished, rejuvenated. The world looked crisp and washed, as if reality had been painstakingly restored and digitally remastered overnight for his viewing pleasure. He’d shaken off the feeling of defeat he had after yesterday’s research. He was starting to enjoy his new double life—I-banker by day, book hunter by night—and he wasn’t going to give it up that easily. He decided not to go to the Wents’ apartment today. If he was going to tell the Wents that it was all over, that the book—whatever it was called—was lost forever, or never existed at all, he was going to do it with a full dossier on the subject in hand, complete with charts and tables and appendices and