When I got out of the car, the haze clung to my face and stung like ice. That particular night, it was raining lightly, and the streetlights caught the drops in a mist of silver. When I think of Oxford, I think of the still peace of the summer air here, the air is never still, and rarely peaceful. Most of its office blocks started life as a settler’s house, and even its grandest buildings are infused with the labor of Victorian colonials re‑creating England in basic scaffolding. The Prince Albert campus, just over a hundred years old, still feels as if it was built by people. It felt too much as though it had come from the pages of a book. I’d been there on a family visit once, and had felt the dust-stifled weight that comes from centuries of scholarship and ancient stone. Until three years ago, he’d been at Oxford, where referring to a building as old meant someone was studying in it a thousand years ago.

They’re old buildings, by New Zealand standards, but they probably don’t seem that way to Charley. The campus is perched halfway up the Kelburn hills, a tumbling assortment of buildings on either side of the road connected by an overpass. It’s not a good place for my brother, whose relationship with “too far” has never been a healthy one. The city itself is nestled between the harbor and the hills: too far one way, and you hit the ocean too far the other, and you’re facing a wall of impenetrable forest sloping up into the clouds. I missed a turn, and found myself on the wrong side of the botanic gardens. It’s a tricky road in the dark, skirting the central city and winding up into the foothills of Kelburn. My brother works as a lecturer at Prince Albert University of Wellington, which I can, as I promised, drive to from my house in about ten minutes, provided I stop only to pull on a pair of shoes and shrug on a coat over my pajamas. I’d never read Dickens myself, but I’d learned to have an instinct for the names, and that one didn’t sound promising. “I know.” She was right he did need to learn to deal with these things himself. “You’ve got a trial this morning,” she reminded me. I had no idea who used to help him while he was living in England, but since he’d come to Wellington, I seemed to be on speed dial. It wasn’t even the first time in the middle of the night. “He’ll be fine.” Lydia didn’t know the form my brother’s crises took, but it wasn’t the first time he’d phoned me with one.

“It’s my brother,” I said to Lydia, whom I could sense watching me with sleepy concern from the other side of the bed. I sighed myself, heard it go out into the darkness, and ran my hand through my hair. Oh God, I really am sorry, it was only for a second. Just try to keep an eye on him, and be down to let me in the building in ten minutes.” There were times when he needed to hear it, and times when it would only tip him over the edge, and right now he sounded dangerously close to the edge. “All right, all right, calm down.” I forced exasperation out of my voice. “But please, please, Rob, I know it’s late and you have work tomorrow, but if they find him here in the morning-” You promised it wouldn’t happen again.” “I know, and I meant it, and I’m sorry.” He was whispering, presumably trying not to alert the security guards roaming the university campus-or perhaps not to alert Uriah Heep. “There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make any sense to anyone.”Įven half-asleep, I could recognize an evasion when I heard it. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.” I thought you were sticking to poetry lately. mix too well, or whatever it is the two of you do. “That’s Dickens, isn’t it? You know you and Dickens don’t mix-or. I had a sense then of being suspended between two worlds: the sane one in which I had fallen asleep, and Charley’s, reaching to pull me awake through the speaker of my phone. Next to me, I heard Lydia stir and turn over in a rustle of sheets. The bedroom was pitch black and cold, the glow of the digital clock the only fuzzy source of light. “True, but-you know what I mean.” I rubbed my eyes, trying to focus. “Seriously, Charley?” I said when they did. My brain was fogged with sleep it took a moment for his words to filter through. “Uriah Heep’s loose on the ninth floor,” he said. He sounded breathless, panicked, with the particular catch in his voice I knew all too well. At four in the morning, I was woken by a phone call from my younger brother.

Uriah heep dickens