Just the same, she was worried to see hints of a certain part of Andy become fully blown tendencies now. He’d always been neat, but now he feared germs. He smelled his food before he ate it. He could not sit and have a simple conversation unless he was also somehow marshaling what he perceived to be the burgeoning chaos around them. He would eat dinner while poring over bank statements, color-coding debits according to household, automotive, food, and so on, and checking off the amounts against check stubs or receipts or ATM slips. Catherine tried to think of this behavior in a humorous light—a friend had once called it nonbenign thoroughness—but she worried that he was sucking Daniel into its vortex. She’d sit at their table, her son at one end with his removable tabletop covered in glistening smears, her husband at the other, a napkin stuck in his shirt collar, five individual decks of Post-it notes arrayed in front of him like a child’s toy. (She once fantasized about taking a check still attached to its stub and burning it. A check gone awry in a world of unconsummated commerce—how it would have driven him crazy.)
Perhaps the hardest thing to do was to accept how all of this made her feel toward Andy physically. The deeper his fascination with the baby’s mind, the more he repelled her. He seemed more and more an ethereal being to her, drawn by pure rationality. She could live through anything but this. She communicated through her body. She was not a discusser, she was not good at it. If things got bad, she preferred to fuck. It seemed now as though a long time separated her from when she’d been someone’s lover.
Over time, this state of affairs had led to fighting. The last recourse of passion. They would fight after supper, over the rushing water, when they thought Daniel could not hear them. But the sound of their voices swirled up from the kitchen, through all the noises of the house, like an electrical current in a twisted wire, directly to his ear.
WHEN HIS parents fought, it was like shaking a jar with oil and vinegar in it. It would mix in a frenzy of bubbling, but as soon as you put it down somewhere, the oil would slink back up to the top, and the vinegar, as white and peaceful as a tub full of water, would settle as well. He knew his parents tried to regulate themselves, but these sudden and brief bursts of temper were the result of their caution.
Daniel believed he understood unhappiness: it was as simple a thing as pain, which ran along nerve endings inside the body. He’d found a picture of nerves on the Internet—a red branching throughout the body that was filled with signals. Unhappiness had a web like that, except it went inside and out. All feelings worked this way, he’d come to realize. Although you could not make someone feel the heat on your palm, or a pain in your tooth, feelings traveled in longer channels. It was possible that his own unhappiness, therefore, had made his parents unhappy. He strived to be happier, but he could not. He had troubles and he had fears; happiness would come later if he was lucky. He listened to the bits and pieces of conversation that reached him in his room. Sometimes he tapped the things he heard into a search engine, to see where the mysteries of his parents’ marriage might be rooted.
You can’t second-guess every last thing returned “a high-five between people who have correctly handicapped a race together can sprain a wrist.”
His mother said, He needs to be a child, too. That got him “in the unlikely event an intruder enters his bedroom, with the night-light on, he’ll be able to see and alert you by blowing the whistle.”
You could connect and reconnect in so many directions. There was no center in the world.
SCHOOL WAS his life, it delighted him. He brought home the disciplines of learning to his house and studied his parents with it. The scientific method said you drew conclusions by first observing nature, classifying the data you found there, conducting rational experimentation, proposing an explanation for phenomena, and then expressing your findings mathematically.
Mornings provided plenty of data; breakfast production gave coordinates that correlated to his parents’ marriage. If his mother cooked, there would be hot food: eggs, waffles, sometimes porridge. If his father made breakfast, it was cold cereal. Hot food meant his mother had come downstairs before his father. His father would join them, and the three of them would eat together if it was an especially lucky morning, or at least Daniel would eat with his father, his mother having already taken her tea and toast.
However, if his father made breakfast, it meant that his mother had already left, which was bad, or was still in bed, which was much worse because it meant either that she did not want to see them in the morning, or she had not slept well.
Giving each of these four possibilities a weight, Daniel classified this data on a graph:
He weighted “hot food, mother eats with us” (the most desirable condition) four times more than “cold food, mother in bed” (the least desirable) and calculated the Marriage Correlative as the weekly mean given those weights. And if the monthly average of the MC fell below 4, he considered the safety of his family life at risk.
He could see from this that things were falling apart.
One morning, a good morning, his mother was stirring eggs in the frying pan. She put a plate down in front of him and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. His father was still shaving; Daniel could hear the frenzied buzz of the electric shaver eating the stubble off his father’s cheeks.
“I want to tell you something,” she said, standing on the other side of the table with the wooden spoon still in her hand. “Okay? Listen: people fight. It’s okay. It’s normal.”
“I know. Tigers pretend-fight when they’re babies. That way they can catch food when they’re older.”
“Mm,” she said, nodding. His hair was black, and thick like dog hair. “You should eat up.”
He squeezed a thin, straight line of ketchup onto his eggs. “What’s the difference between eternity and infinity?” he asked.
“Danny,” she said, her voice tightening. “Your daddy and I love each other. You know that, right?”
“And you love me, and Daddy loves me.”
“We both love you,” she said.
“I know.” Hot breakfast, he thought. His father came into the room in his suit.
“Infinity and eternity are similar concepts,” he said, pulling his chair out. “They describe things that go on forever. Infinity applies to numbers, and eternity to time.”
“Infinity is how much we love you,” said his mother, glancing at his father, “and eternity is how long.”
“Some people think zero divided by zero is infinity,” said Daniel, and they looked at him. “It isn’t, though.”
“What is it then?” his father asked.
“It isn’t anything,” replied Daniel. “In math, you can’t even ask the question.”
IT WAS an evening in late October when Catherine saw her glimmer of hope. She’d come up the stairs after doing the dishes alone; Andy had gone for a drive. When she clammed up the way she often did these days, he got into the car and drove off his exasperation. Daniel was on his computer; she watched him from the doorway. The screen threw a complex of light over the boy’s face, it was reversed in blue squares in each of his eyes. He looked down from the screen to some paper on the desk beside him, and then back up. He tapped on his keyboard, and wrote something on the paper. He did this at regular intervals until he reached the bottom of the page. She pushed the door open and stood there. In his silence, when he presented the image of a quiet little boy with mussed hair, he took her breath away.
“Dad left,” he said, still looking at his screen. “Maybe he went back to his office?”
“We had a fight. We’re fighting a lot.”
“I know,” he said. “I can predict when you’re going to fight.”
“How?”
He clicked on the side of his screen, and the program changed; there was a burst of color, lines and circles. She stepped into the room to look more closely, but as she approached the desk, he hid the program. “I can’t explain it to you,” he said.
“Do you think I won�
��t understand?”
“I mean it’s not finished. The model.” She nodded, still smiling, but her pulse had quickened. He returned to what he was looking at when she first stopped in the hallway. She saw now that it was a calculator, but on the Internet. Below the calculator, sums and formulae scrolled up and disappeared behind it. “It’s all the things people are calculating—on this page, right now, all over the world,” he told her.
He’d been using it to complete his own homework. That was the paper on the desk beside him. She saw the problems were filled in neatly. “Did you do all this with the calculator?”
“Yeah,” he said. “If I push my own icon here, it takes me to a page where people can give me problems to solve based on the ones I punch in. A guy from Russia gave me some.”
“But you’re using a calculator. How can you learn anything that way?” He turned his eyes to her. He was frowning, but he looked tired. He always looked tired, she thought. Maybe they should move the computer into another room and limit his time. She knew what Andy would say to that. “Do you ever look at anything else on the Internet?” she asked him. “Apart from math? Do you ever, you know, look at girls?”
“Do you know when one plus one equals three?” he asked.
“No, I don’t, Daniel.”
“When you make a baby.” He was looking at her mildly now. Why had she asked him that question? It occurred to her momentarily that she would gladly have taken his looking at naked women on the net over doing math with anonymous Russians. This is how desperate I’m becoming? “One boy and one girl make one baby and that’s three. It’s a joke,” he said.
“A funny math joke,” Catherine replied quietly. “Are you allowed to use a calculator to do your homework, Daniel?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Are you?” He didn’t answer this time. She looked down at the paper again. The questions swarmed like Sanskrit before her eyes. This was accelerated math, but Christ, was it possible that it was too hard for him? Was he using the calculator to figure out these questions? Was he floundering? She asked him again, “Daniel, is it true? Your teacher told you you can use a calculator to do your math homework?”
He kept his face from her and replied with a breathy silence.
“Daniel, I asked you a question.”
“I want you to leave now,” he said.
“School is supposed to be giving you the skills to think things out on your own.”
“Get out of my bedroom.”
She leaned on his desk, so he would have to look at her. “If I ask Mr. Melvin, he’s going to tell me you’re allowed to use a calculator, right?”
He looked at her now, and it seemed as though the whites of his eyes were glowing. He tried to speak, but instead his mouth trembled. Catherine straightened, too surprised to comfort him. He’d lied to her! He’d calmly, willfully, lied to her. “Go,” he sobbed, and she backed out of the room. Andy was standing at the bottom of the stairs, the car keys dangling from his finger. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Daniel told me a lie.” She came down the stairs and passed him on her way back to the kitchen without another word.
IN THE morning, Daniel came down to find his father alone in the kitchen, and a bowl of corn flakes on a placemat. This brought the Marriage Correlative down to 1.8, a very bad sign. He sat quietly and poured the milk from a glass jug, and put nine blueberries on top of the corn flakes in a square. It was child’s play to connect them with four lines and he didn’t even bother.
He ate silently.
His father sat down across from him, the steam from his coffee rising straight up and then suddenly flattening out, left and right. Daniel stared at it, trying to figure it out.
“What are you looking at?”
“The steam,” said Daniel. “It stops going straight up.”
His father looked down into his coffee, and then nodded to himself. “It’s the air from my nose, sweetie. It pushes the steam off to the side.”
“Move your face.”
His father did, and both of them watched the steam go up higher before dispersing into the cool air. It was a satisfying experiment. “Tell me something,” his father said. “Did you tell your mother a lie last night?”
“No.”
“Are you lying right now?”
Daniel breathed out heavily. “No.”
His father laughed softly. “How about now?”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “And before you ask again, this time I really lied.”
“What’s I always lie?”
“A logical fallacy,” said Daniel, repeating something. “It can’t be true.”
“Good, hon.”
HE GOT dropped off at school and waved goodbye to his father. Most of the day, school was his haven and refuge. When he went through the doors and the bell rang, Daniel knew that the hours from the beginning to the end of the school day would be like getting on a train, and that train would go on down the track and let him off at lunch and then wait there to take him on again to three o’clock. The recesses he could handle, even though it meant being around kids who spent their time loudly comparing skills and possessions. He scared the other kids, and they didn’t even make fun of him. There was something about him they didn’t get, and that made it hard to put him down. He gave no reactions, and reactions were the stock-in-trade of the playground. So he was left to wander around and look at the school and the street, and take math out into the world with him. Sometimes he spent time with the ugly kids and the ones who played fantasy games, but mostly he stood out on the sidewalk in front of the school and made the world collapse into formulae.
Lunch was the longest break, and often Daniel would spend it in the library. If the weather was particularly good, he’d be forced out into the world of play and have to make the best of it. This October afternoon was almost warm, and Daniel went to the edge of the school grounds and looked around in the grass for coins and sat and watched the groups of kids moving from one area to another. Then the bell rang and he waited for all the other kids to go inside before he ambled in himself, careful to head up the stairs to the math room with at least thirty seconds to spare. He had synchronized his watch to the official clock in the office and knew he could take the two flights of stairs from the exterior doorway to the heavy door on the second level with about forty seconds to make it to the room before the buzzer went.
He came through the door to see the hallway empty, as he expected, but then he noticed the figure beside Mr. Melvin’s classroom. It was his mother. She turned to him with a look of relief on her face, but that expression vanished and became worry. He crept up to her and the buzzer went off, signaling the beginning of the afternoon classes. Mr. Melvin went to close his door and saw the two of them standing there.
“Daniel?” he said, and looked back and forth between them. “Is there a problem, Mrs. Nilson?” Catherine suddenly felt she had no business being there, none at all. Didn’t all kids cut corners in order to get on to the things they liked better? The disdain she’d sensed in the hallway before Daniel’s arrival was just what she deserved. “Mrs. Nilson,” his teacher repeated, “is there something wrong?”
“It’s just a little problem,” she said. But maybe this was the cost of doing the right thing. She could not expect to be loved and also parent this remarkable child the best way possible, and Andy had abdicated this responsibility, hadn’t he?
Mr. Melvin was waiting, a look of tired expectation on his face. Disappointment was not an unusual thing in his field, she could tell, it was just a matter of what form it would take. Daniel’s classmates, those in the front row, were craning their necks to see out into the hallway. Mr. Melvin shut the door. “I think we’re waiting for you,” he said to Daniel.
“No. She can tell you,” he said.
Catherine straightened her back and exhaled loudly. In the little window in the door she could see a gathering of heads coming slowly into the front of the classroom. She made praying hands in front of he
rself and leaned toward Mr. Melvin. “Well,” she said, “I felt you should know that last night I caught Daniel using a calculator to do his math homework.” She waited a moment. “I thought it was something he should tell you, but maybe I’m partly responsible, too.” She lowered her hands. Both her son and his teacher were waiting to see if she was finished, so she said, “Maybe I’m not supervising him closely enough, I mean. That’s all.”
Mr. Melvin nodded thoughtfully. “Thank you, Mrs. Nilson,” he said. “But he is allowed to use his calculator. It’s part of the grade three curriculum.” He looked down at Daniel. “He should have told you that.”
Mr. Melvin opened the door and the crowd inside scattered to its places. Daniel went to his seat.
“He’s very talented,” said his teacher. “But I suppose he’s a little forgetful about the details.”
IN THE rear view mirror, Catherine watched Daniel get into the back seat, dragging his plain blue knapsack behind him. She couldn’t find anything to say to him, and his attention was screwed to the quiet scenes outside the window: the children waiting for their lifts, the school buses making their final on-board counts before heading off into the suburbs. She checked her mirror and, in silence, pulled out and turned left up the hill.
On the seat beside her she had his favorite take-out, roasted chicken from a franchise owned by a country singer. She’d splurged and bought all the sides: country biscuits, garlic mashed potatoes, roasted corn, even sawmill gravy, which she despised. The scent of the dinner filled the car with a lemony, garlicky smell.
She stole little looks at him, but Daniel seemed settled, lost in his thoughts, and he made no effort to acknowledge her. She didn’t remember the last time she’d seen him angry. Upset, yes, as he had been the previous night, but not angry. Was this silence anger? If so, maybe he had something in common with her after all. She could respect that. She could learn to respect that.
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