Katarina walked in and tossed her backpack to the bottom of the stairs, took the TV remote from Ryan, switched it to MTV2, and sat down. Ryan stared out the window and pondered his next move. There weren’t many available. Waiting for a federal agent would be stupid. It would be much better to get busted trying to solve his problems than hiding. He laughed at himself—so this is how martyrs are made.
“What’s so funny?” Katarina asked.
He looked at the TV, a heavy-metal video that, for no discernible reason, was on MTV2’s heavy rotation. “How does a song this bad ever get on TV?”
“Trivium kicks ass,” she said, but she turned off the TV. “Doesn’t matter, though. I’m late for mentor torture.” She picked up her backpack again and headed for the door but stopped and looked back at Ryan. “Why do I have to go to a mentor? All she does is bitch at me about my clothes.”
Still staring out the window, Ryan said, “Being bitched at by adults is an important part of your childhood.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Sorry, I meant, adolescent-hood.”
“You should be my mentor.”
“What?” He looked at her. “I’m not qualified. I don’t like to bitch at people.”
“You already are my mentor.”
“What mentoring have I done?”
“You delivered the helmet and wrist guards.”
“You don’t wear them.”
She stepped away from the door and climbed back out from under her backpack. “You can do this, Ryan O’you-think-you-can-ahan. Mentoring is one part fake homework help; two parts complaining about my clothes, friends, the music I listen to, the amount of TV I watch; and one generous helping of philosophical criticism about my being ‘obsessed with death’—she even said I was spiritually empty. Deliver me, Ryan, deliver me from that bitch.”
“That bitch? Isn’t your mentor the lady who does yoga with homeless people?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Katarina, that woman would never criticize a child—”
“I’m not a child.”
“—the yoga lady is the most tolerant person on Earth, how could she possibly annoy you?”
“Hearing how wonderful the world is, how lucky we are to be alive, how she doesn’t want me to make the mistakes she made with drugs and sex—she’s beyond freakishly annoying.” Dragging her backpack into the living room, she flopped down hard on the couch. “I could actually benefit from some homework aid…”
“You need more than that.” His tone was flippant.
“Please?” She opened her backpack and pulled out a binder.
He’d known Katarina for a year but still didn’t know how her mind worked. She wasn’t any more or less “obsessed with death” than any other kid who’d watched her father die. Ryan considered it. He did have flexible hours, after all. “If I were your mentor, you’d have to agree to a few things. First, you have to wear your helmet; second, no late homework—”
“Never mind.” She started up the stairs. “And don’t try to be my fucking father—he’s dead.”
Ryan called after her, “Third, don’t say fuck.”
An upstairs door slammed her response, and as it did, Ryan realized the magnitude of this moment. Katarina had just peeled back her obnoxious-kid veneer, and as she laid herself bare, he’d maintained the same banter they used to discuss bad music videos. He groaned, mentally kicked himself, and then scrambled to recover.
Her backpack was still next to the couch, and a binder was sticking out. He grabbed it and flipped through: one half-completed math assignment after another. She was doing algebra in eighth grade, already starting analytic geometry—she must have aced the placement exam. A sheet of paper was folded into her math textbook, an old homework assignment that she obviously hadn’t turned in. The chapter’s exercises were all word problems, the hard part of algebra. She’d drawn little curlicues and dragons in the margins. He noticed that she had set up most of the problems but hadn’t bothered to finish them.
Except for one that was worked out in detail.
He found the problem in her textbook. It was marked with three red stars, extra difficult. And it was.
Since Ryan’s college degree was in applied math, he should have been able to figure out how she’d solved it, but he didn’t recognize her notation, much less her technique. He glanced through the text; it used standard notation.
He took a blank sheet of paper and tried to solve it. It was hard, even when he used calculus. Without calculus, it looked impossible. He looked at the cover of the book—yep, algebra. He went back to Katarina’s solution and followed it step by step. Her solution was shorter than his—half a page to his two pages. Then he recognized it. She had set up the problem as a differential equation: an elegant linear nonhomogeneous differential equation with nonconstant coefficients. She used neither Newton’s nor Leibniz’s notation; she’d invented her own.
He stared at the ceiling, as though he could see through it to Katarina’s apartment. That kid had intuited calculus. Invented it for herself. It’s one thing to write down a DE, altogether another to solve it.
Brilliant wasn’t a strong enough word.
Ryan grabbed her binder and the textbook and went upstairs. He knocked on her apartment door.
Katarina said, “What do you want?”
The sound came from behind him, down the hall a dozen steps. She was in Ryan’s apartment. He walked over and opened his door. She was sitting on the kitchen counter with Sean’s football in her lap.
Ryan held the book and binder out like a waiter with trays of food, turned on a big fake grin, and said, “I’m your guy. BS applied math, UMass.” He set the books on his desk and pulled the beach chair out like a maître d’ seating a debutante.
She slumped off the counter, said “Whatever,” and sat at the desk. She opened her binder and pointed at a pencil scrawl. “How can this one equation describe every one of those things?”
He looked over her shoulder. It was the expression for conic sections, not easy stuff but should be trivial for someone who could invent calculus. He looked at Katarina from the corner of his eye as though expecting her to have transformed into some sort of math-breathing dragon. It was just Katarina being lazy, though. “You mean the bowl-ofs?”
“What?”
“You don’t know about bowl-ofs?” He knelt next to her and opened the textbook. “You know, hyper-bowl-ofs, para-bowl-ofs…”
Katarina elbowed him. “Ryan van Dweeben, they’re called parabolas and hyperbolas.”
Ryan elbowed her back. “No, you’re saying it wrong. They’re bowl-ofs.”
“Never mind, you don’t even know.”
He took a mechanical pencil from a tray and demonstrated the algebraic steps to convert the expressions for each shape into the common form. Then he asked, “Did you read the book?”
She curled her lip. “The math book?”
“Yeah, the math book. Math books make great reading.” He picked up the text and took it to a tired couch he’d pilfered from Skate-n-Shred. “It’s story time, children!”
She rolled her eyes and stayed at the desk, but the corners of her lips sneaked up into a smile.
Ryan held it out like a picture book, pointing to the equations as he read the text, emphasizing the if-thens and if-and-only-ifs, the way kindergarten teachers emphasize the morals of fables.
Katarina said, “That’s not human speech.” There was ridicule in her voice, but he noticed that those bright green eyes didn’t leave the book. A few seconds later, she reached over and turned the page.
It took a couple of weeks of self-pity, but Ryan’s goodwill reasserted itself, and he pushed forward. He added more off-the-books work, safe from the OCSE. He got a job watering the potted plants that decorated Petaluma’s sidewalks. Most days, he also joined the Central American migrant laborers who stood in front of the mini-mart hoping for an honest day of work at a decent off-the-books wage. At first his freckled arms, auburn hair
, and inability to speak Spanish kept him on the fringe of the day-labor subculture, but soon his easy wisecracks and disarming smile were welcomed by his comrades. He kept pushing—picking grapes, fixing fences, and laying concrete—kept stashing his pay, kept his confidence that the money would accumulate. He made sure he was home twice a week for Katarina after school. Watching Katarina reformulate algebra and geometry and helping her address questions in set theory and topology provided the intellectual stimulation that Ryan had always gotten from solving high-tech puzzles.
Then the rains came and drowned the day-labor work. It rained through December and January. He had to dip into his savings to make rent. He made some money during a rain-free week in February clearing vineyards of brush, but that was it. The storms blew through the rest of February and into March. His funds deteriorated, and reality clashed with his drive to succeed. He had too much time to himself, too much time to think.
On the first day of spring, he got an e-mail from his old neighbor, Ward. It included a link to a newspaper story. Sean, who was in his first year of high school, had hit the game-winning home run on opening day.
Wind-driven rain pummeled the copper turret, and Ryan stared into the storm. As the hours passed, any joy he’d felt for his son’s accomplishment faded behind a great screaming message: your boy doesn’t need you!
He stood and his bones felt heavy. There was no bounce left in him. He slumped under his coat and trudged out the door. He was halfway downstairs when he realized what he was doing. That same old desire—would it ever go away?
He was going to score some meth.
He stopped and shook like a wet dog, turned around, went back to his apartment, and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. As he took a swig, beer for breakfast, he smiled at the irony. He looked around the apartment, from the frumpy couch to the pile of foam he called a bed. It sure didn’t look as though he’d made any progress. Time was wasting. As long as his child support was pegged to an executive income, it would be impossible to get forward on the wages of a working man. As frustration engulfed him, he felt something in his spine. Gently, from deep inside, Grandma spoke to him: “What sort of man would you be then?”
“Not the kind who sits around waiting to win the lottery,” he said to himself.
He paced back and forth in front of the rain-streaked window. The valley was fogged in. He could barely see across the street.
There were only two ways that he could reclaim his life, and they both sucked. He trotted out the idea of suing Creation Energy. Fighting had tremendous appeal, but fighting Foster—well, Foster wasn’t his enemy. He finished the beer and tossed the bottle across the apartment to the recycling bin. He missed, but it didn’t break; it just rolled around the kitchen floor.
The second option was no better. Dodge was right: if he took a real job, he’d be arrested. In California, he’d be arrested for a federal crime, leaving Texas to avoid paying child support. At least if he got a job in Texas it would come with one less count against him.
He leaned his head against the window. It was cool against his skin. Listening to the rain, a thought came to him. It came to him in his father’s voice: “Do you want to do it on their terms or yours?”
No matter what he did, he would eventually have to face a judge in Texas.
It took almost ten minutes to boot up his computer. He sent an e-mail to Foster, phrasing it as though they were in adjacent cubicles. “Have you got funding for that project? I might have some breathing room next month.” He didn’t even sign his name at the bottom. There was something ecstatically normal about that note.
A few seconds later, his phone rang. It was Foster. “Ryan, I got your note.” The phone made a series of clicking noises, probably caused by the weather. It cleared up as Foster said, “Are you really interested? If you are, I won’t interview anyone else.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, “I’m interested.”
“It’s the software director position,” Foster said. “The pay is pretty good, about what you were making at GoldCon before we got laid off.”
If Ryan were making that kind of money, it would only take a couple of months to accumulate enough cash to put a dent in his child support. He might even be able to appear in court before the payroll information made it to the deadbeat-dad office. The charges would at least be suspended. Like Constable Holcomb had said, “Can’t pay child support from jail.” A few months after that, there had to be a way to repeal the legal mess that kept him away from Sean.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m interested,” Ryan said. “When can you put together an offer?”
“We’re really close to having funding—a couple of months? Two or three? Three max.”
When Ryan hung up the phone, he didn’t feel the relief that he thought he should. Foster had changed. Everything had changed. Going back to Texas felt off balance, like going backward when the solutions to his problem should be forward. It all nagged at him. What had led him to Petaluma in the first place? It sure had seemed like he was here for a reason.
Something nagged at Dodge when he hung up the phone too. Why would Ryan choose to be arrested when he could just sue the bastard? This one was getting away from him. He had to play a card.
Dodge picked up the phone and called his sister, Emmy, or, more properly, Professor Amolie Nutter, Department of Physics, UC Berkeley.
Upstairs, Ryan dug up the book Foster had sent him months before, The Cosmology of Creation. As he read, the mix of religion and science both tugged his curiosity and ticked his bullshit meter. Ryan couldn’t tell where the science ended and the religion began, but he knew that Foster wouldn’t budge on biblical literalism. Was it just a big scientific-seeming rationalization of religion or a genuine treatise of discovery? By midnight, barely halfway through, the math and physics were completely over his head. Still, it convinced him of one thing for certain: Foster believed that he’d discovered a link between science and spirituality.
As he went to sleep, a question kept ringing in his head: which came first, matter or consciousness?
Five hours later he awoke to someone pounding on his door. He jerked up from a nightmare, the same nightmare he always had, another view of his past, the part that had led to the restraining order that kept him away from Sean. Tammi. Damn Tammi. You’d think that, at least in his dreams, she’d have found her way to hell. He looked around, not sure where he was.
Katarina yelled through the door, “I need a ride to school. It’s raining.”
Ryan grabbed his trousers, glad to be among the awake.
“Come on! I’ll miss a test, fail eighth grade, never recover, and become a junkie. Do you want that on your head?”
Katarina was sitting in the hallway opposite his room when Ryan stepped out the door.
Ryan said, “Are we late?”
“A smidge.” She stood and handed Ryan her backpack.
Ryan ran down the stairs and Katarina launched down the banister—a slope of polished oak. The two of them reached the bottom at the same time. Ryan caught her around the waist, kept going, and pretended like he was going to ram her head in the door. Katarina let out a high-pitched shriek. Ryan set her on her feet and pretended to dust off her shoulders.
Once they were in the car, Ryan told Katarina that he might be going to Texas for business.
She said, “Business? Is there a city there that needs you to water their plants?”
“Yeah, watering plants is the next big thing, sort of like the Internet.” The old Probe stuttered and threatened to stall in the long, slow procession of minivans depositing eighth graders at the school entrance.
Katarina stared straight ahead.
“It seems like the only way I can get my shit together and see my son again.”
“You don’t even know your son.”
“Thanks for reminding me of that.” He elbowed her. “Too bad I know you.”
“You wish.”
Emmy was finally visiting her brother in Petaluma. This time, at lea
st he’d pretended that he wanted to see her. She would reward any positive step, no matter how small—sort of like domesticating a dingo. Besides, she was curious.
As her car climbed the hill to the black-and-red Victorian, she caught herself laughing. Dodge must have blackmailed one of the ladies on the Heritage Homes Committee into allowing those colors. She could picture him hiring a private investigator to turn up some ancient dirt and then threatening to “go public.” Dodge, please. Why did he work so hard to suppress his innate decency?
She parked, and when she was halfway up the porch stairs, the door opened. Dodge waited at the threshold in a ratty beige sweater, the frown lines etched into his cheeks cracked into a smile, and all at once she felt like a five-year-old.
“You’re going to love McNear. He’s like an overgrown leprechaun. You’ll want to pack him up and take him home.”
“Dodge, I’m here to see you.” Walking through the living room and down the hall, Emmy looked back. He was older and fatter and balder than the last time she’d seen him. At least he’d quit smoking.
In the kitchen, Emmy turned on a burner under an old iron kettle, and Dodge assembled an antique bone china tea set—the very tea set their grandmother had given the two of them when Emmy was three and Dodge was eighteen.
They talked about their parents, still living in Los Angeles, still in need of help around the house and too proud to admit it, and still sending Emmy a card every month telling her how proud they were. Maybe that was it. Maybe she worshipped her mean old brother out of guilt. The second she was born, all attention had focused on the brilliant baby girl. Dodge must have been jealous, but then, Dodge had lavished more attention on her than either of their parents.
Dodge snickered. “I have a brilliant plan to make a ton of money. Are you in?”
“Dodge, please be nice to the other children.”
“You’ll love this caper. It’s right up your alley.” The kettle whistled, and Dodge hopped out of his chair cackling like a yenta with fresh gossip. “We’re going to screw a bunch of fundamentalist right-wing Bible-thumpers and help a really decent guy put his life together.” He poured tea into their cups. “Creation Energy is about to get major corporate funding. They’ll have the resources to sell the public on bogus science. You think it’s tough to get intelligent design out of the schools? Wait until the Department of Energy starts investing in Creation and the soul.”
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