by David Beers
He changed the parameters of the class on the first day. There would be no papers. There would be no tests. The only grade one received would be based on one's contribution to the class. Basically, class participation would make up the entire grade. That meant for three hours a week, Matthew would need to be actively engaged in the world around him. Not lost in his computer, not in his own head, but actually contributing to the university in some form. Or else he would fail. If he failed, Yale might keep him, but most likely not. Most likely he would get the boot the same as any other PhD candidate after failing a required course.
Matthew looked up from his computer when he heard this.
"He smiled," Dr. Watson said. "It was as if he was saying, okay, challenge accepted. I'm over eighty years old now and I've seen what this guy ended up doing and the myth is that I'm the one that got his brain to actually start moving. I don't know about that and I don't really care what anyone thinks. I was just pissed that he was going to take my class and not put in the same effort everyone else was. That's what I cared about. Effort. When he looked up from that computer though, I wouldn't have said it then and I wouldn't have said it for years after, but I guess at eighty-plus I can. I was scared. It looked like someone had turned on a nuclear reactor inside his head, like the heat of the sun was coming through his eyes. He wasn't going to fail out of college, as lazy as people said he was, I didn't think he'd simply sit there on his computer knowing he would be front page news when they kicked him out of Yale. No, I thought he would participate, I just didn't know what it meant."
The class was eighteen weeks long, an hour and a half on Tuesday and Thursday.
Matthew Brand left his computer at home for only that class, showing up with his hands swinging, not holding pencil or paper. Apparently he didn't need them.
"I started the class as I did every time I had taught it before. I didn't understand then that I would never teach it again."
It was an eighteen-week class in which Matthew began as meekly as a single wave against a vast beach. He asked if he could come to the board.
"Said he had a question about the previous class' assignment."
He built out the problem across the large board while everyone watched. Ten years younger than anyone else in the class, and mentally remembering every number, letter, and symbol used for a problem that contained over one hundred steps. When he got to the answer, he asked Dr. Watson if it was correct.
"I told him it was. I was pretty amazed at what he did. No one else in that room could have laid out the problem as quickly and simply as he did."
Matthew told him no, the answer was incorrect, and he hoped by the end of the semester, Dr. Watson would see it.
"I laughed right out loud at him. I understood he was smart and I had just seen what he was capable of, but to say that basically an entire field of mathematics was wrong? That would be like me telling you that your belief in the earth revolving around the sun was misplaced."
It was eighteen weeks of the most intense brain power anyone in the class had ever seen. All of them, including Dr. Watson, struggled to keep up. Every class period Watson would send them away with work and so would Brand. Brand's became necessary because in discussing Watson's homework, they always had to bring in the antithesis that was Brand's work.
A classmate of Brand's told me "it was like unlearning English and then learning it again, except instead of the alphabet we were using grains of sand."
He tore down the field Dr. Watson loved, right in front of his face.
"There wasn't anything I could do. I'd stare at the work he put on the board, and I'd study it, and then I'd tell him I'd get back to him at the next class. I studied it for hours over the next few days, searching every database I could, consulting other professors. I mean literally not sleeping. And in the end, I'd show back up at class and say let's continue. He was morphing mathematics in front of my eyes. Changing it from what I believed to be true, what I was taught for thirty years, into something similar but with stark differences that mattered. With differences that were supposed to be there and somehow the rest of the world had missed them. It was, it is, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
Jerome Watson was dry eyed when he said those words to me but he looked out into some space that existed beyond his wall, talking to himself as well as me, and remembering all those years back when he watched an eighteen year old kid stand up from his seat and change the course of mathematics in a few hours. Dr. Watson never taught the class again, and within three years, no one else ever taught that class either because it no longer existed. The whole field of Complex Function Theory had been dramatically altered, whole textbooks being rewritten because of those eighteen weeks.
Matthew Brand quit school after that semester. Everything that came next rested on Dr. Watson's class. The eight years prior were a warm up, Brand trying to figure out how to get the things in his head out into the world. What came next, no one expected.
Chapter Ten
What had he thought once? That life was beautiful? Had he been so young as to think something so incredibly false? He had and he understood differently now. He no longer looked out of a twenty-eight year old's eyes. He no longer saw his wife and their son. No longer held any of them. Instead he gripped the steering wheel of the paint-peeling car he'd picked up miles down the road and looked at the beach in front of him. People walked back and forth in front of his car, wearing almost nothing and smiling as they did it. Adam and Eve hid from Christ when they realized they were naked, these people rejoiced in it. He looked at the different body shapes: thin, fat, and looking like they had just stepped out of a fitness magazine. It had been years since he was able to look at people like this, been able to admire the human body.
Matthew stepped from his stolen car and walked out onto Daytona Beach, his shoes left behind and his toes in the sand. No one looked at him. Here, he was just another person on vacation trying to tan his pale skin. Here, he was just another person trying to enjoy life. There was some truth to that, too. He did want to enjoy this, for the first time in years, to enjoy something besides murder.
He had no towel with him, nothing to lay across the sand, but that was okay. He had his shirt, and he'd ball that up and put it under his head and he would be fine.
He found a spot that gave him a little room, but not much. Summer season at Daytona was no joke and people packed the beach. Matthew Brand took his shirt off in front of anyone looking, probably having seen him on the news the night before but not realizing it. His white skin and protruding ribs made him resemble an AIDS patient in the last few months. Only his eyes showed something that resembled life, completely taking in everything around him, thirsting, trying to drink in all of the vitality. His home of ice was sinking away, allowing him to remember what life was like before they put him in that endless cage. Remembering what it all meant. What he had fought so fucking hard to give his son again. These people here, greased up and smiling, drinking booze and talking about where they would eat tonight. It was a waste of life and at the same time was life. All of these people could be producing, could be making the world better in some small way, but instead they sat here fulfilling themselves. Was he any different?
No. He was only after his own fulfillment as well.
He sat down on the beach before reclining all the way, feeling the hot sand beneath his fish-scale white skin. He didn't close his eyes but stared up into the cloudless, blue sky not wanting to miss a bit of the world. He knew he'd burn soon, within thirty minutes of sitting under these rays his skin would turn a bright red and within an hour he would be in danger of sun poisoning. The Silo they kept him in had delivered all the vitamin D he needed, but not a speck of sunlight.
Matthew wanted to think, though. Wanted to think and feel alive once again. He'd been thinking for the past ten years, but it had been dead thoughts. The closest thing to being a zombie any human being would ever know. Here though, his thoughts danced instead of crawled.
The man he wanted lived in Daytona, the son of Don Welch. His name was Joseph Welch and Matthew imagined he went by Joe. Twenty years ago the boy had been five. When they murdered Hilman, Joe Welch had only started kindergarten, probably knowing his father as a police officer but not knowing what his father had done or how he would be given a not-guilty verdict. The child knew nothing of it. At fifteen, Joe's father had been ripped from him from him, the elder Welch murdered by Brand. Now Joe was twenty-five and living just a few miles from where Matthew lay. He lived there with his wife and his child, a three-year old boy whose name Matthew could not find in his searches. His mother, Don Welch's widow, was still alive, still living off the money that came to her through the pension and death pay. If anything, that should be Hilman's money, and thus Matthew's. She wouldn't be receiving any of it if her husband had left Matthew's son alone.
No matter. What he needed to figure out was who he would take. Four options. Mother, grandmother, father, or child? There were two goals, and after those ten years spent with his brain full of icicles, the second one seemed a bit more important this go-around. The families needed to feel pain, just as he had. They needed to understand what he had gone through, what Rally had gone through, what it felt like to not just lose someone close, but to lose your world. To lose your future. To lose what gave your life meaning.
The child was three and that meant small. How much power could a child of three generate? How much life could it sustain? Twenty years ago he worked out the formulas for grown men, intent on taking the lives that had taken his son. Now, he might need to redo those formulas a bit. He might need to see if a child could perform the same tasks.
Because if he could use the little boy, the whole endeavor became just a bit more satisfying. Self-fulfillment, that's what this was about, at least partly. Losing a child that young, the boy's parents would never recover.
Sand scattered across his chest and Matthew looked to his right, the direction of the sand, ready to bolt.
"Sorry, sir," a young teenager said. He was a black kid, with long, smooth muscles and light skin. He picked up the football that landed a few feet from Matthew. He turned around ready to run back to his friends, but paused and looked back at Matthew. "Sir, sorry to bother you, but you're getting really red. Need some sunscreen?"
Matthew smiled, glad that no one here needed to die. "I appreciate it, but I'm actually leaving."
Part II
Appropriate Measures
Chapter Eleven
"How serious is this?" Patricia Welch asked.
The thing was, Joe didn't have any idea. He knew of the man, knew what he had done to his father, had attended the funeral and then, somehow, moved on with his life. He left Matthew Brand in a horrible past, mourned his father, but eventually the pain had...dulled? Not disappeared, that wasn't possible, but it had certainly become something manageable. Something he thought about more on certain days than others, and could he expect anything else? He wasn't the same person he had been when his father died. He was a father himself and a grown man now. He never thought of Brand any longer. The man had been taken from the world and put in a suspended hibernation, and the world—as it always did—kept rotating.
Now, the same man was walking around somewhere and Joe had a police car sitting at the end of his driveway.
"I don't know," Joe answered. "I don't have any idea what he could be thinking."
"What if he's thinking that he wants you?"
Joe picked up both their plates and took them to the sink. He turned around and looked at Jason, sitting in his high chair, making a mess with his food. "I don't know," he said, unable to grasp the type of man that would break out of jail just to start another murder spree. They caught him once and without a doubt would catch him again, especially if he tried to restart everything. His face was everywhere, on every channel, on every news program and morning show. "He can't be thinking about that. He'd be an idiot. If he shows his face anywhere, someone is going to recognize him."
Patricia turned her chair so that she could see him at the sink. "Maybe, but maybe he's just fucking nuts. Your mom hasn't stopped calling all day, and she doesn't think he's done."
"I know. She's calling me too."
"She's terrified. She said none of your dad's old buddies have come by and they have just one police car outside of the house, just like here. She told me there wasn't any way two cops could stop Brand if he wanted in somewhere."
"She's old and scared, Patricia," Joe said. "She's under twenty-four hour surveillance and this guy isn't going to be able to get her out of her house any more than he's going to be able to get us out of this one. I asked her if she wanted us to come up there, but she said no way, that Jason shouldn't be anywhere near her right now. I'm trying to get her to come down here instead."
Patricia looked over at their son, whose finger was painting ketchup across his plastic plate. "Mama," he said absently, not looking up.
"Yeah, I'm not sure I want him near her right now, just in case. You really think one car is enough for us?"
"Yes. He's not Michael Meyers, bullets will put him down the same as anyone else."
* * *
Allison looked at the wall before her, staring at a taped up map of the country. Eight red tacks littered it, pinned in different cities across the tiny veins of roads that made up the country's arteries.
"Hand me that tack, doc," she said.
Riley stood just inside the door.
"Here," he said.
She reached behind without turning around and felt the small, but slightly dangerous object drop into her palm. She rolled it around, feeling the tiny needle ready to prick her the moment she wasn't careful.
"Where's it going?" Dr. Riley asked.
"Florida. I think it's the last person we need to be looking out for." She took a step closer to the board and put a pin on the state. "Everyone connected with the case, from the sentencing judges to grandchildren are marked up here."
"You don't think there might be other people he's looking at?"
Allison stepped back and looked over the map again. There was one red tack out in California. One in Oregon, but from Brand's contact with his wife, that wasn't the way he was headed. East coast bound. That left Massachusetts, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. At least. There were two mid-western states he could venture off into as well, but every single one of the states stood on alert. They were pushing out as many Public Service Announcements and news stories as they could; everyone inside any of those states should know about Brand. That was Allison's hope anyway.
"I don't think so. We have two children out in California and Oregon. A wife in Boston. A wife in Durham. A wife, a daughter, and a grandchild in Kentucky. In South Dakota and Kansas there are some brother's still alive. We think that's pretty much the immediate family of all the police officer's he killed. Then add in two retired justices out in California, and that should be everyone. If we're missing someone, we're going to look profoundly stupid." She turned around to look at Riley. "What can I do for you, doctor?"
The Wall had become her temporary base. The two prisoners still floated outside her office in their Silos, and from time to time she saw people working on them, but for the most part, Allison and her people had commandeered everything. They would move as soon as they needed to, but as of right now, there was nowhere to go. They were waiting for Brand to give them a scent, to give them something to chase. So far, Brand hadn't surfaced to even breathe.
"We made some progress today and we're beginning to see what he did while under. I still haven't been able to dig into his own head, he was able to block that off over the two years he spent engineering this, but he wasn't able to wipe away the trails he made into our systems." Dr. Riley sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk. "I'm pretty sure he knows that map you're looking at as well as you do. If there are any tacks up there you're missing, he knows where to put them."
"What are you saying?"
"Our systems, all o
f them, are connected to national security databases, which are connected to local law enforcement databases across the country. Basically cops can search for warrants across state lines because we don't compartmentalize that information. Our systems are also connected to the Internet. You know all that, obviously, but The Silos are part of the system. They're connected. We can feed them information and they can even search for things they might need to know. Is the criminal they hold a diabetic? If body temperature drops, they can scan any number of medical journals to understand exactly what might be happening. They are doctor, jailer, and nurse. The Wall couldn't exist without that access. It would take constant, twenty-four hour supervision, and even then we might kill the people we're trying to keep alive."
"He had access to everything?" Allison asked.
"All of it, and the time to utilize the systems. The time to search and create a plan. He probably didn't even release himself until he had everything he needed."
* * *
Joe pulled the drapes back a bit and looked out on the street.
The black car was still there, a Chevrolet Impala, relatively new, still sitting at the end of his driveway. He could see two men in it, and one of them gave him a thumps up from the driver's side. Joe returned the salute.
He let the drape fall back into place and turned around to look at his living room. Everything was as it should be. No one in the house. All the windows and doors locked. The police parked outside. Everything as it should be.