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both of us fall onto the rows of shoes, high heels in all the wrong places. It takes a second to untangle ourselves, and I stand up expecting moans from Paul and Gil. But their focus is elsewhere. Paul is in the corner, whispering into the phone, while Gil peers out the window. At first I think Gil’s looking for Charlie. Then I see the proctor in his line of sight, speaking into his radio as he approaches.
    “Hey, Katie,” Gil says, “we don’t need matching outfits here. Anything works.”
    “Relax,” she says, coming back with handfuls of clothing on hangers. She lays out three pairs of sweatpants, two T-shirts, and a blue dress shirt I’ve been missing since March. “It’s the best I can do on short notice.”
    We throw ourselves into them. Suddenly, from the entryway downstairs, the hiss of a hand radio cuts the air. The outside door to the building thuds shut.
    Paul hangs up the phone. “I have to get to the library.”
    “You guys go out the back,” Katie says, voice quickening. “I’ll deal with it.”
    I take her hand as Gil thanks her for the clothes.
    “I’ll see you later?” she says to me, conjuring something in her eyes. It’s a look that always comes with a smile now, because she can’t believe I still fall for it.
    Gil groans and drags me out the door by my arm. As we duck out of the building, I can hear Katie’s voice calling down to the proctor.
    “Officer! Officer! I need your help. . . .”
    Gil turns back, eyes trained on her room. When he sees the proctor arrive in the crosshairs of Katie’s leaded window, his expression lightens. Before long, as we head into the piercing wind, Holder vanishes behind a curtain of snow. Campus is nearly empty as we descend toward Dod, and any residue of the tunnels’ heat seems to radiate away, washed off in tiny beads of snow that roll from my cheeks. Paul walks slightly ahead of us, keeping a more purposeful pace. The entire time, he doesn’t speak a word.

Chapter 4
                           
     
    It was through a book that I met Paul. We probably would’ve met anyway at Firestone Library, or in a study group, or in one of the literature classes we both took freshman year, so maybe there’s nothing special about a book. But when you consider that the one in question was five hundred years old, and that it was the same one my father had been studying before he died, the occasion somehow seems more momentous.
    The
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,
which in Latin means “Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream,” was published around 1499 by a Venetian man named Aldus Manutius. The
Hypnerotomachia
is an encyclopedia masquerading as a novel, a dissertation on everything from architecture to zoology, written in a style that even a tortoise would find slow. It is the world’s longest book about a man having a dream, and it makes Marcel Proust, who wrote the world’s longest book about a man eating a piece of cake, look like Ernest Hemingway. I would venture to guess that Renaissance readers felt the same way. The
Hypnerotomachia
was a dinosaur in its own time. Though Aldus was the greatest printer of his day, the
Hypnerotomachia
is a tangle of plots and characters connected by nothing but its protagonist, an allegorical everyman named Poliphilo. The gist is simple: Poliphilo has a strange dream in which he searches for the woman he loves. But the way it’s told is so complicated that even most Renaissance scholars—the same people who read Plotinus while waiting for the bus—consider the
Hypnerotomachia
painfully, tediously difficult.
    Most, that is, except my father. He marched through Renaissance historical studies to the beat of his own drum, and when the majority of his colleagues turned their backs on the
Hypnerotomachia,
he squared it in his sights. He’d been converted to the cause by a professor named Dr. McBee, who taught European history at Princeton. McBee, who died the year before I was born, was a mousy