Wildalone

  Map

  Contents

  Map

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1: What Hides in the Hills

  Chapter 2: The Room of Breathing Clays

  Chapter 3: Unseen, at Night

  Chapter 4: Captive

  Chapter 5: The Two Deaths of Orpheus

  Chapter 6: The Devil Himself

  Chapter 7: Seven Letters

  Chapter 8: The Theia Hypothesis

  Chapter 9: Noche de Brujas

  Part II

  Chapter 10: The Moon Countdown

  Chapter 11: From Afar

  Chapter 12: Friend of the Estlins

  Chapter 13: Leap from the Rational

  Chapter 14: Ultimatum

  Chapter 15: The Guardian of Secrets

  Chapter 16: Rejecting an Estlin

  Chapter 17: Briefly, Like a Thief

  Chapter 18: We Can Change It

  Chapter 19: A Single Absence

  Chapter 20: The Atrium of Pianos

  Chapter 21: Underworlds

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  IN 1802, AT the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria, the monk Rafail carved the last of six hundred and fifty miniature figures on a wooden cross, allegedly losing his sight after twelve years of work on the piece.

  In the early 1990s, while going through sealed archives marked as “Threat to Ideology” by the former Communist government, researchers found a collection of religious artifacts. Among them was a scroll taken from the monastery library at Rila, dating back to Rafail’s time.

  Based on the following account found on the scroll, it has been suggested that when the monk began work on his masterpiece, he may have been already blind.

  Monastery of St. John of Rila, this fifth day of the month of August, in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, as spoken to our Lord by one of his humbled servants, transcribed it is thus:

  I am told that this is being written at the light of sixteen candles, and I trust the eye of the stranger who counts them, the hand that puts quill to parchment, recording my words—for trust is the only path left to the blind.

  I was blinded for what I saw. But by mercy of the One high above all things, was what I saw worth it!

  Legends are sung of the Samodivi; grim, lush legends. But no legend unfolds these ravenous beauties in words as they unfolded for me in moon-woven flesh, one silver night, outside these monastery walls.

  A woodcarver by craft, I had journeyed to Thrace and back, going from door to door, selling the fruits of my hands—reproduced church relics—to anyone who would pay a trifle for them. A late hour caught me deep inside the forest and I headed to seek shelter with the monks. As my feet neared the end of a long day’s labor, I saw a figure cross my path: a girl still, but already ravishing, her white skin ripe like the skin of a lily cut from the stem just before blooming. A thin dress enveloped her, sewn from moonlight, weightless—a spiderweb—hiding nothing of her body as she stepped toward me.

  I was not a holy man then, and I had tasted beauty on my travels—beauty as rare in the darkness of our world as a man without regrets among the dying. But I had never, not once, laid sight on a creature to rival her. With a luminous smile, she lured me through the trees, onto a lawn where her two sisters already waited. They closed a circle around me and rushed into dance—stunning, flawless—as the moon poured its jeweled envy over them. Their toes barely touched the ground, but it pulsed under them with the distant beat of drums, as if somewhere, far off, the mountain’s heart had been set ablaze. They took me into their fury, into the curve of their locked arms, and I struggled to keep up, fighting the blood that invaded my veins further with each step—until a spasm seized my chest. I saw them smile, saw their eyes flash triumph as my body collapsed at their feet. Slowly, the others dissipated back into the night, but she stayed and held me, spilling her hair like heavy gold all over me . . .

  Woe, they say, shall befall the traveler who happens upon the Samodivi, the one who beholds their dance under the full moon. But blessed be a human of such woeful fate: when she bared her skin for me, when she placed her breast within my hands and her hungered lips opened into mine, there was no woe, no torture left in this entire world—not even death itself—that my soul would not have welcomed. Time vanished when her white legs parted over me, quiet, soft like snow whose touch a man never forgets once he has been drunk on it. I took her with my eyes, my hands, my mouth. Took her desperately, mad with an ache that tore through bones and sinews; an excruciating ache that wouldn’t cease, not even when she had me force my way inside her. If she had asked, I would have begged. Died. Killed. Been damned for her. I would have done anything, and done it many times over.

  But she asked nothing. Her face bent over mine and she kissed my eyelids, closing them before a sudden pain singed the sockets where my eyes had been. I heard her laughter—free, innocent, the laughter of a child—and felt her lips press once more, this time against my chest. Yet before her fingers could dive in to claim my heart, the cry of a rooster echoed over us, announcing the dawn—

  Then silence.

  The monks found my body where she had left it, and I was carried into their holy dwelling whose walls I would never leave again. The sights of the world have since been taken from me, and with them—most of its burdens and its blessings. By divine whim, my skill with the wood was left intact, and my fingers now carve with a new fervor: the last joy and last sorrow left to me from among those I had once known, before I came to know . . . her.

  I shall grow old in darkness and in darkness I shall leave this earth, all its treasures still vivid inside my scarred eyelids. But until then, every night, within that same darkness she dances for me—breathtaking as she was back then—and she abandons her beauty to my madly aching heart, the heart which her fingers failed to reach but which she stole, she stole nonetheless . . .

  The darkness softens. I hear the beat of her steps. Her skin falls on me. Then the rest of her; her quick lips on my mouth. I see her, all of her, as the eyes of a mortal never could. And from then on, for a while at least, death holds no meaning.

  Part I

  CHAPTER 1

  What Hides in the Hills

  I HAVE LEFT everyone I love. For good.

  My mind shoved the thought back into a corner and tried to focus on counting dollar bills, expecting them to decompose any second from the impossible humidity of summer in America. “Good luck here, sweetheart.” The driver of Princeton’s airport shuttle took the money and thanked me with a wink. “You’ll need it.” Then, to prove the point, he drove off through the alleys of an empty campus.

  Deep breath. Ignore the falling dusk. They know you’re coming, somebody will show up soon.

  I sat down on the larger of my two suitcases and waited. The evening was soaked with heat, with an almost liquid smell of grass so vibrantly green that its juice seemed to find a way straight into my lungs. I could reach out and touch it—smooth, thick as a Persian rug, the grass of a university whose name had become legend, even in my tiny country halfway across the world. Princeton was the one school that had always remained elusive. No flashy photos in brochures. No self-advertising. An enigma, tucked into its own pocket of the universe.

  Now all around me, among the lush tree crowns, lay strange gray-stone buildings lifted out of a movie about medieval knights: the sharp corners of walls softened by arched entryways; the roofline punctuated by towers whose zigzag fortresses eavesdropped on the secrets of cloistered courtyards; the iron-barred windows gaping for air, letting out streaks of light saturated to the color of freshly peeled oranges. And over all this—an odd silence. Not of absence, but
of something about to happen. Of a fever about to begin.

  “It must have been a long flight from Bulgaria. Sorry I kept you waiting!”

  The voice had a German accent and belonged to Klaus, the student who had volunteered to pick me up. We shook hands, then he pointed at a golf cart parked nearby.

  “I was going to show you around, but maybe we should head straight over to the dorm. You’ll get a tour tomorrow anyway.”

  Forbes, one of six residential colleges at Princeton, turned out to be far removed from everything else, isolated at the south edge of campus. Annexed to the school in 1970 as an experiment in coed housing, the former inn looked nothing like the neo-Gothic buildings we had passed on the way: a bulk of red brick nestled awkwardly behind a few old trees, with a façade whose slate roof and grid of white-pane windows gave it the air of a sanatorium rather than a college dorm. On the Internet, I had seen open terraces and a large veranda adjacent to a pond—but none of this was now visible from the street. The golf cart swerved into a paved driveway, up to a varnished portico where the U.S. flag and that of Forbes flapped their perky twin greetings.

  We followed several secluded corridors, then Klaus unlocked a door and wheeled my suitcases in. “It’s a bit dark right now. But don’t worry, you’ll get a lot of light during the day. Your room overlooks the golf course.”

  On the wall across from us, a window reached almost to the floor. I opened it and inhaled the dark air—still humid, yet already waking the lungs with the first fresh touches of night. Sounds invaded the room: a faint rustle of wind in leaves, the echo of sticks broken by invisible feet, syncopated calls of a nightbird. And water, whispering things into the black sky.

  Stepping out on the grass took me only a second.

  “Technically, you aren’t supposed to use it as a door.” Klaus showed me a sticker on the glass that warned this was not an egress. “And I would try to stay off the golf course; it’s not school property. You may also want to lock the window latch. Even when you’re home.”

  Home. I looked at the dorm room that had the impossible task of replacing my home: it held nothing but a few pieces of furniture, passed down by the ghosts who inhabited it briefly each year. Mute carpet. Crippled ceiling. Pale cinder blocks, desperate to mimic bricks but doomed to the anonymous vibe of a motel. It was the smallest room I had ever seen.

  “I have to say it’s a bit strange.” Klaus leaned against the chair while I pushed my luggage into a corner. “Lucky for you, but strange.”

  “What, that one can reach everything in this room just by standing in the middle?”

  “No.” He smiled politely, and I realized how spoiled my own joke had made me sound. “That they would let you live all by yourself.”

  “They?”

  “The powers that be in Admissions.”

  I turned around and looked at him. How much did this guy know? Was he testing me? Hinting at things that were supposed to be long forgotten yet still lurked somewhere, in an old Princeton file, pointing to me as the last person who should be left all by herself on this campus?

  I kept searching his face for clues. “Why wouldn’t they let me?”

  “Because most of the first-years have roommates.” He smiled again—a vacant smile that assured me he knew nothing. “The foreign students especially. We are paired up with Americans, to ease the transition.”

  “I think I’d rather transition solo.”

  “You say that now, but the place will get to you, trust me. This isn’t some big European city like the one you come from; it’s the middle of New Jersey. Fields, forests, and factories. You’ll be bored out of your mind.”

  “From what I hear about Princeton, I’ll be too busy to worry if I’m bored or not.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. Too much solo time with the books can drive anyone crazy.”

  “Not someone from the Balkans. We are crazy already.”

  He struggled for what to say next, careful not to risk crossing the line at which ethnic stereotypes stopped being funny. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, that I had lived my entire life around people who said things to your face, no filter needed. But I followed his example and kept my thoughts to myself, trying to imagine four years of this. Of small talk with strangers.

  “Speaking of expatriates, there should be a list in your welcome package.”

  Our eyes met over a large envelope he had given me earlier. It wasn’t hard to guess what would be on that list: names of other Bulgarians who were attending Princeton. Or who already had. The only question was how far back in time the powers that be had decided to go.

  I rummaged through the stack of sheets and found the list, all the way at the bottom.

  “You should be proud; few countries come even close. A Bulgarian or two every year—that’s quite something.”

  I scanned the names while he spoke. Twenty or so, each with an e-mail address and a phone number. Next to them—the class years, starting from 1994 (the first Bulgarian to graduate from Princeton after the fall of Communism). It was an impressive list, yes. But Klaus was wrong about one thing: there hadn’t been a student every year. The number missing in that column was 1996.

  “It makes sense that there are so many of you, actually. The ‘YES’ man is said to have been very impressed with Bulgarians.”

  “The what man?”

  “The ‘YES’ man. Dean Fred.”

  I still had no idea whom he was talking about.

  “Fred Hargadon, Princeton’s dean of admissions. They say he owns the unofficial trademark to that ‘YES’ on the letter.”

  It was the one acceptance letter I would never forget, the only one that didn’t start with “We are pleased to inform you . . .”—just a simple “YES!”

  “I don’t recall seeing his name on it.”

  “Because he left in 2003. Used to handpick each student here for many years, knew everyone by name. Rumor has it his resignation brought the whole school down in mourning.”

  It might have. But for me that resignation had been perfectly timed. If the man who remembered names so well had stayed at his job only four more years, my application to Princeton would have had a very different fate.

  After Klaus finally left, a door clicked shut in the hallway behind him. Then everything settled back into silence: Forbes was deserted. For now, I was probably the only living soul in the place, summoned a week early for preorientation with a few other foreign students elsewhere on campus.

  I pulled a set of sheets out of my suitcase and began to make the bed, trying not to look over at the page whose content was supposed to make me proud. “Don’t hesitate to call any of them; they’ll be more than happy to talk to you,” Klaus had said about the names in that column. But he didn’t know that the only person I wanted to call was not on the list, someone from the class of 1996 who had never made it to graduation but who, just like the others, had been handpicked by the “YES” man—back in 1992.

  Later that year, a tragedy had quietly unfolded on the dark hills of this same college campus, leaving no ripple, no trace, every detail meticulously locked into the safe vaults of things past. Yet the secret had remained hidden, deep inside those hills. Stubborn and unconcerned with time, it had waited patiently—knowing, all along, that one day it would be brought back to life.

  THE DAYS BEGAN TO VANISH into one another with mechanical, hurried precision. Unpack. Settle in. Set up phone account. E-mail account. Bank account. Cafeteria plan. Memorize campus geography. Dash to events. Learn names, link them to faces. Connect. Socialize. Barely checked off, each task fueled the next as if a giant clockwork had been set in motion, requiring every tooth on every wheel to fall, quickly and elegantly, into place.

  I tried to keep up with all this, with each detail that makes a new place feel unmistakably foreign. Nodding for yes and shaking my head for no—the opposite of what I was used to. Waiting for a green light to cross the street and having to remind myself, at the white flash, that it wasn’t the
color but the image that counted. And food, unlimited quantities of food everywhere. It was easy to pile up too much on my plate, or to pick the wrong thing and then feel guilty for wasting it. Not to mention the tricky foods, the ones that only looked familiar but weren’t: feta cheese turning out to be tofu, cilantro disguised as parsley. No matter how odious the taste, I couldn’t just spit it out in front of everyone, now could I?

  But worst of all were the mornings. For a while, I woke up convinced I had heard my mother’s voice from the kitchen. Then one day the sound of the alarm carried nothing except its own voice, and it hit me for the first time: the distance from home and the panic that comes with it.

  When the word America had first dropped from my lips the previous summer, my parents warned me not to even think about it—without an explanation, or a hint that their voices hid much more than fear of sending an only child away from home. We argued for months. But to study abroad had become my dream, and they gave up once I threatened not to apply to college if they forced me to stay in Bulgaria.

  That fall I took exams, wrote essays, filled out financial aid forms—all my friends were doing it. Lucky to have been admitted to the most elite high school in the country, we had spent years studying English, being taught in English, virtually drowned in English from the moment we entered the classroom. And with it came a craving for the real thing, for a life in that magnetic continent across the ocean where not just the language but everything else we saw on TV and read about in books would become ours—real, tangible, natural like breathing.

  Now I was already here. But nothing felt natural about it, and to even catch my breath seemed a luxury. Within a week of arriving at Princeton, I was drained—from lack of sleep, from stress and the incredible speed of everything. Then, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

  “Theodora Slavin, yes? Pleased to meet you, very pleased—our new piano prodigy who is loaded with talent like a machine gun. I don’t envy anyone who stands in your way.”