A World Elsewhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

Van’s essays, mimicking his style. That is, he underwrote them, for he knew it wouldn’t do for a C student to suddenly start getting A grades. Landish wrote them. Van copied them out in his handwriting and submitted them.
    Van returned to Lotus Land frantic one afternoon, saying that he had made a dreadful mistake, submitting the wrong essay, one that bore his name but was, as his professor noticed, in the handwriting of Landish.
    So they were caught, Van and Landish.
    But Van would be allowed to graduate and his cheating would be kept a secret—whereas Landish, for whose comeuppance his professors had long hoped and prayed, would be expelled.
    “Come to Vanderland with me, Landish,” Van said. “You need never go home. You can be my lifelong guest. A couple of years in New York and then you can help me finish overseeing the building of Vanderland. You can write your books and we’ll raise our families there. No one will know what took place at Princeton. Anyone whodoes know won’t dare say a word. This house, this world that I’m constructing, could be yours as much as mine. As soon as you set eyes on it, you’ll understand.”
    But Landish told him that he couldn’t conceive of living anywhere but among the only people he knew well enough to write about.
    Landish walked the length of Dark Marsh Road. He didn’t turn back where the path met the woods. He ran until the path so narrowed that branches lashed his face and brought to his eyes tears that wouldn’t stop. He looked up at the sky in which there was so bright a moon he couldn’t see the stars.
    Landish had only to gather his things from Vanderland and catch the Vanderluyden-owned train to New York, from which he would sail on a Vanderluyden ship to Newfoundland.
    He lingered for a few days, throughout which Van apologized and refused to go to class. Van said it was unfair that Landish be expelled. “But I must warn you not to publicize the truth, or you and yours will be sued penniless, or worse, by my brothers.”
    “It had never crossed my mind to ask you to do anything but stay silent on the matter,” Landish said.
    “Isn’t it better that one of us survives than that both of us be destroyed?” Van said.
    “I don’t think of myself as having been destroyed.”
    “I didn’t mean destroyed,” Van said. “Of course you haven’t been destroyed. It’s just that you have nothing to return to. Unless you agree to captain the Gilbert for the rest of your life. Which I know how loath you are to do.”
    “What would you do in my circumstances?” Landish said.
    “I would go with my friend to Vanderland. Please reconsider.”
    “I can’t simply enlist in someone else’s dreams and discard my own. Nor can I put into words how much I will miss you.”
    “I refuse to say goodbye to you. I will write to you every day asking you, begging you to change your mind. It will never be too late for you to change it. We will one day be reunited at Vanderland. I am certain of it.”
    “You make Vanderland sound like some sort of afterlife.”
    “As you know,” Van said, “I as yet have no real money of my own. But I will see to it soon that you are fully compensated should you incur any losses because of your expulsion from Princeton from now until you accept my invitation, which I predict you will do once you are back in Newfoundland and see what not accepting it would mean.”
    Landish told him he needed no compensation for helping a friend, but Van insisted.
    “I’ll never forget, Landish,” he said. “Never, as long as I live, will I forget the sacrifice that you made for me.”
    “I’ll never forget you, either,” Landish told him. “Nor the day we met, the day that you approached me on the quad.”
    On the day before Landish left Princeton, he met on the street a student who had applied for admission to Lotus Land and been rejected.
    “You have Vanderluyden to thank for what’s been done to you,” the fellow said. “He approached