“I’ve no need to prove myself,” I replied, “and neither do you.”
“How about dinner?” he asked, unabashed. “I can get a table at the Inn Uendo. The maîtred’ is missing a space, and I promised to give her one.”
“Not really my thing.”
“Then what about the Bar Humbug? The atmosphere is wonderfully dreary.”
It was over in Classics, but we could take a cab.
“I’ll need an understudy to take over my book.”
“What happened to Stacy?”
“The same as happened to Doris and Enid.”
“Trouble with Pickwick again?”
“As if you need to ask.”
And that was when the doorbell rang. This was unusual, as random things rarely occur in the mostly predetermined BookWorld. I opened the door to find three Dostoyevskivites staring at me from within a dense cloud of moral relativism.
“May we come in?” said the first, who had the look of someone weighed heavily down with the burden of conscience. “We were on our way home from a redemption-through-suffering training course. Something big’s going down at Text Grand Central, and everyone’s been grounded until further notice.”
A grounding was rare, but not unheard of. In an emergency all citizens of the BookWorld were expected to offer hospitality to those stranded outside their books.
I might have minded, but these guys were from Crime and Punishment and, better still, celebrities. We hadn’t seen anyone famous this end of Fantasy since Pamela from Pamela stopped outside with a flat tire. She could have been gone in an hour but insisted on using an epistolary breakdown service, and we had to put her up in the spare room while a complex series of letters went backwards and forwards.
“Welcome to my home, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.”
“Oh!” said Raskolnikov, impressed that I knew who he was. “How did you know it was me? Could it have been the subtle way in which I project the dubious moral notion that murder might somehow be rationalized, or was it the way in which I move from denying my guilt to eventually coming to terms with an absolute sense of justice and submitting myself to the rule of law?”