The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason Page A

high school forcing certain changes on myself: whenever I felt the pain in my leg, I would continue to walk; whenever instinct told me to pass by a door without pausing—the door to the gym, or to a new friend’s car, or to the house of a girl I was beginning to like—I would make myself stop and knock, and sometimes let myself in. But here, in Paul, I saw what I might have been.
    He was small and pale beneath his untended hair, and more of a boy than a man. One of his shoelaces was untied, and he carried a book in his hand as if it were a security blanket. The first time he introduced himself, he quoted the
Hypnerotomachia.
I felt I already knew him better than I wanted to. He’d tracked me down in a coffee shop near campus just as the sun began to set in early September. My first instinct was to ignore him that evening, and avoid him ever after.
    What changed all that was something he said just before I begged off for the night.
    “Somehow,” he said, “I feel like he’s
my
father too.”
    I hadn’t told him about the accident yet, but it was exactly the wrong thing to say.
    “You don’t know anything about him.”
    “I do. I have copies of all of his work.”
    “Listen to me—”
    “I even found his dissertation. . . .”
    “He’s not a book. You can’t just
read
him.”
    But it was as if he couldn’t hear.
    “
The Rome of Raphael,
1974.
Ficino and the Rebirth of Plato,
1979.
The Men of Santa Croce,
1985.”
    He began counting them on his fingers.
    “ ‘The
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
and the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo.’ In
Renaissance Quarterly,
June of ’87. ‘Leonardo’s Doctor.’ In
Journal of Medical History,
1989.”
    Chronological, without a hitch.
    “ ‘The Breeches-Maker.’
Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
1991.”
    “You forgot the
BARS
article,” I said.
    The
Bulletin of the American Renaissance Society
.
    “That was in ’92.”
    “It was in ’91.”
    He frowned. “’Ninety-two was the first year they accepted articles from non-members. It was sophomore year of high school. Remember? That fall.”
    There was silence. For a second he seemed worried. Not that he was wrong, but that I was.
    “Maybe he wrote it in ’91,” Paul said. “They only
published
it in ’92. Is that what you meant?”
    I nodded.
    “Then it was ’91. You were right.” He pulled out the book he’d been carrying with him. “And then there’s this.”
    A first edition of
The Belladonna Document.
    He weighed it deferentially. “His best work so far. You were there when he found it? The letter about Colonna?”
    “Yes.”
    “I wish I could’ve seen it. It must’ve been amazing.”
    I looked over his shoulder, out a window on the far wall. The leaves were red. It had started to rain.
    “It was,” I said.
    Paul shook his head. “You’re very lucky.”
    His fingers fanned the pages of my father’s book, gently.
    “He died two years ago,” I said. “We were in a car accident.”
    “What?”
    “He died right after he wrote that.”
    The window behind him was fogging up at the corners. A man walked by with a newspaper over his head, trying to keep dry.
    “Someone hit you?”
    “No. My father lost control of the car.”
    Paul rubbed his finger against the image on the book’s dust jacket. A single emblem, a dolphin with an anchor. The symbol of the Aldine Press in Venice.
    “I didn’t know . . .” he said.
    “It’s okay.”
    The silence at that moment was the longest there has ever been between us.
    “
My
father died when I was four,” he said. “He had a heart attack.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thanks.”
    “What does your mother do?” I asked.
    He found a crease in the dust jacket and began to smooth it out between his fingers. “She died a year later.”
    I tried to tell him something, but all the words I was used to hearing felt wrong in my mouth.
    Paul tried to smile. “I’m like Oliver,” he continued, forming a bowl with his hands.
“Please, sir, I want some