The Room Convenes

The room is a bar, or it has been lately. Dark wood and darker corners, low amber light pooling under green-shaded lamps, the air thick with smoke that no one is smoking and something herbal and green poured from a fountain against the far wall. There is no far wall, quite. The edges of the place don’t hold — the booths soften into shadow where you stop looking at them, a row of leather wingbacks becomes a zinc bar becomes a cluster of café chairs around a marble table, and the ceiling goes up into a haze that might be rafters or might be weather. Comfortable seating everywhere, arranged in little islands: deep chairs by a fire, a long settle under a window with the wrong night behind it, stools at a counter that reflects more bottles than it holds. Nothing is fixed. Everything is comfortable. If you watch any one detail long enough it will, gently and without apology, become something else.

WODEHOUSE: —and I maintain that a man who opens with a shipwreck has simply run out of better ideas and is hoping the weather will distract us.

HEMINGWAY: It worked.

WODEHOUSE: It worked for you, Ernest, which I’m afraid proves my point rather than yours.

Conversations drift across the room without much regard for who’s sitting where. Poe is leaning over the back of someone’s chair to argue a point with Butler, who is winning. Shelley has wandered from the fire to the counter and back. No one stays put, and no one keeps to their own kind — a century in a room with someone tends to wear the edges off whatever kept you apart. Adams sits a little apart from all of it, not in any seat of honor — there isn’t one — turning a teaspoon over in his fingers and watching the room the way a man watches weather he’s seen before.

LOVECRAFT: (to no one, uneasily) The window’s gone over to rain again. It was snow not a moment ago.

BUTLER: It’s always doing that, Howard. Leave it be.

LOVECRAFT: I don’t say it’s wrong. I say it bears watching.

BUTLER: You’d say that about a sunrise.

LOVECRAFT: (after a beat, quietly) Sunrises also bear watching.

An arm reaches over ADAMS’s shoulder and sets a conch shell on the marble in front of him — a writer’s arm, ink at the cuff, the sleeve of someone who’s been at this a while. Whoever it belongs to sets the shell down with the ease of long practice and drifts off again into the room without a word. No one turns to see which of them it was; they all know. The shell is pale, ridged, entirely solid in a room where nothing else quite is. ADAMS looks at it with the mild resignation of a man who has been volunteered.

ADAMS: Ah. Me again.

THOMPSON: You’ve got the hands for it.

ADAMS: I have the hands of everyone, apparently. Very well. We need a book.

This is when Andy Weir, who has been bouncing slightly in a chair too near the fire, sees a thing happen — a shell, a decision, a room turning toward a single point — and reasonably concludes it is his moment.

WEIR: Oh — oh, okay, I’ve got one. Do mine. Seriously, the math in it is airtight, I worked the whole orbital—

PALAHNIUK: (not even looking up) First rule of Book Club, man.

A ripple of groans around the room, followed with a few chuckles. Someone by the fire mutters “every time.” Hemingway exhales through his nose, which is as close as Hemingway comes to laughing. Weir looks from face to face, getting none of it.

WEIR: …What’s the first rule?

PALAHNIUK: (finally looking up, almost kind) If you have to ask, it’s not your turn yet.

WEIR: But I don’t even know what the second—

WODEHOUSE: No one does, dear boy. That’s rather the charm.

Weir subsides, baffled but game, filing it away. He’ll get there. They all did.

ADAMS: (tapping the conch, moving them along) A book. Someone who isn’t Howard, because Howard will pick something that ends with everyone dead and the furniture weeping.

LOVECRAFT: That happened once.

ADAMS: It happened the last four times, Howard.

SHELLEY: (from the fire, not unkindly) I’d let him have one eventually. He’s grown. We’ve all had the centuries for it.

A small thing passes through the room at that — not solemn, just understood. These are not quite the people the world remembers. Whatever they were when they were alive and certain and of their time, they have been here, together, long enough to have argued it out of each other over a great many cups of something green. The room does not relitigate the past. It simply doesn’t do that here anymore.

ADAMS: Noted, Mary. Eventually. Today I want something with a desert in it. I’m in a mood for sand and bad religion and a boy who takes it all far too seriously.

TOM ROBBINS: Now you’re talking. There’s a worm—

BUTLER: There’s a great deal more than a worm.

THOMPSON: (sitting up, suddenly very awake) Wait. The desert one. The kid, the old witch, the box with the hand in it.

ADAMS: That’s the one I had in mind, yes.

THOMPSON: Give me the opener. The box scene. (jabbing a finger at the conch as though it owes him money) I had a mescaline dream about that exact scene in a bathtub in ’seventy-one and I have been waiting fifty years for someone to hand me the excuse.

ADAMS: (spreading his hands — the chair allowing it more than granting it) I wasn’t going to give it to anyone else. You’d have made it weird regardless.

THOMPSON: (already reaching for paper that wasn’t there until he reached) Damn right I would have.

ADAMS: Then it’s Dune. Heaven help us. (to the room, drier) Hunter has the box. Everyone else, behave — or don’t, it’s never once helped.

The lamps dim by a degree no one calls attention to. The window has gone to desert dark. THOMPSON is already writing.