Read Online Warp by Lev Grossman - Free Book Online Page A

started.
    There once was a man named McGee
    Who lived almost entirely on tea
    When they said, “You’ll get fat.”
    He replied, “What of that?”
    That insalubrious old man from
    â€œThere’s a monster GSAS party tonight,” said Blake. “Free beer. It’s over in Lehman Hall.”
    â€œCan you get us in?” said Basil.
    He shrugged.
    â€œIt’d be dicey. The Law School isn’t a graduate school, strictly speaking, it’s professional.”
    â€œWise man,” said Hollis. “Learn a profession.”
    â€œForget it,” said Peters. “It’s too late. By God, we’ll stand here, and we’ll die here.”
    â€œYou think she’s seen me?” Basil said, fingering a button on his pinstriped vest.
    â€œWho?” Peters asked.
    â€œFay.”
    He gestured at the bar with his chin. They looked, but she wasn’t there anymore. They found her sitting at a table with her woman friend in another part of the restaurant. The man she’d been talking to was gone.
    â€œSigns would point to no,” Hollis said.
    A waiter came over to announce last call.
    â€œMy cousin’s coming to stay with me tomorrow,” Rob said. “He went to MIT. He stayed around here for a little while after he graduated, but he couldn’t get a job—it was weird. He just lived off some kind of trust fund, till it ran out.”
    A glass fell and smashed behind the bar, and everybody in the room stopped talking for a second.
    â€œAfter that,” Rob went on, “I remember he started buying these surplus bulk food consignments because they were cheaper: crates of yams and stuff like that. Star melons. The weirdest possible stuff—all these Southeast Asian vegetables nobody’d ever even heard of. He used to go down to the docks to find them. Our whole family was just totally baffled.
    Malo stayed awake until his parents were asleep, then slipped out the window and down to the docks where the fishing boats were kept.
    â€œAfter a while he moved out to some town in upstate New York, with some friends of his from school. I guess it was cheaper. Now he spends all his time playing role-playing games—last I heard he was running a play-by-mail simulation of the Napoleonic Wars. In real time.”
    As for that, mon vieux—je n’en ai rien .
    â€œLook,” said Blake. He was carefully folding up a dollar bill into sections. He held it up. “It says, ‘Tits of America’!”
    Hollis picked up a salt shaker and poured out some salt onto the table. He started pushing it into a crack in the tabletop with a steak knife. Somewhere somebody was making a tone by running a finger around the rim of a wineglass.
    He glanced down at his watch. Peters noticed and leaned over to him.
    â€œDon’t fall asleep,” he whispered.
    â€œThat’s when they get you!” he shouted. “When you sleep!”
    Blake slid out of the booth, followed by Peters, who heaved himself out and staggered a few steps away. The café was mostly empty, except for a few people at the bar.
    â€œJesus!” Peters said, stretching. “I feel like I have polio.”
    They worked out the money and started getting ready to go. Rob had his coat on already. He poured what was left of all their drinks into one single glass, which was already cloudy with the dregs of Basil’s margarita.
    He held it up, saying solemnly:
    â€œI have created life.”
    They threaded their way single file through the tables and out the door. Hollis’s ears rang in the sudden quietness as he put on his scarf and gloves. A dark figure on a ten-speed bicycle flew by in the darkness, gears ticking, bundled up against the cold. A half-full moon shone in the clear black sky. They stood around for a minute, just taking in deep lungfuls of the clean night air.
    â€œI’ve been turning into kind of a pedophile lately,” Peters said.