The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [0]
MICHAEL GRUBER
For E.W.N.
Our Revels now are ended: These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and
Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre,
And like the baselesse fabricke of this vision
The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces,
The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial Pageant faded
Leave not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe
As dreames are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleepe…
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
The Tempest, act IV, scene i,
The First Folio, 1623
Contents
Epigraph
1
Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this…
2
On the evening of the little fire, the revelatory fire…
3
I'm back from a tour of the grounds, nothing visible…
4
The crying lasted for approximately five minutes and ended in…
5
To my credit, I suppose, I did not immediately race…
6
Crosetti, bearing the rolled and wrapped maybe-invaluable manuscript under his…
7
Yes, ridiculous. Did I give the impression that I am…
8
Crosetti’s mother, Mary Margaret Crosetti (Mary Peg as she was…
9
Gosh, I’m sorry,” she gasped, pulling away from me in…
10
Crosetti sat in his father’s car, a black 1968 Plymouth…
11
Someone once said, Paul Goodman I think, that stupidity was…
12
Crosetti had been questioned by the police hundreds of times…
13
I am reading a little Shakespeare now, in the intervals…
14
Being armed, Crosetti found, felt a lot like having a…
15
After Shvanov left I used the cell phone to call…
16
Crosetti’s doubts about the rationality of the present voyage were…
17
In the days following the Evening of Death I arranged…
18
Tap.
19
We were expected at the prison, welcomed even, by the…
20
Carolyn Rolly wept for what seemed like a long time…
21
It's snowing now, a heavy wet snow such as they…
22
On the subway, Crosetti could hardly stop laughing to himself,…
23
I found this document while I was transferring files to…
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Other Books by Michael Gruber
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually sees this, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives? It sort of does, I think. If you read something by a living writer, you could, at least in theory, dash off a letter, establish a relationship maybe. I think a lot of readers feel this way. Some readers write to fictional characters as well, which is a little spookier.
But clearly I am not dead yet, although this could change at any moment, one reason why I'm writing this down. It's a fact of writing that the writer never knows the fate of the text he's grinding out, paper being good for so many uses other than displaying words in ordered array, nor are the tiny electromagnetic charges I am creating on this laptop machine immune to the insults of time. Bracegirdle is definitely dead, having succumbed to wounds received at the battle of Edgehill in the English Civil War, sometime in late October of 1642. We think. But dead nevertheless, although before dying he composed the fifty-two-page manuscript that has more or less screwed up my life, or killed me, I don’t know which yet. Or maybe the little professor was more to blame, Andrew Bulstrode, because he dropped the thing in my lap and then got himself murdered, or I could blame Mickey Haas, my old college roomie, who turned Bulstrode on to me. Mickey’s still alive as far as I know, or the girl, the woman I should say, she has to carry some freight for this, because I seriously doubt I would have plunged as I did if I had not spied her long white neck rising from her collar there in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room of the New York Public Library, and wanted to kiss it so much it made my jaw hurt.
And Albert Crosetti and his unusual mom and his even more remarkable