by Ted Kosmatka
“Just the way it is.” From her weighty tone, she might have been addressing one of the deeper mysteries of the universe. How are two particles entangled? That’s just the way it is.
“The point of a hospital is to arrive sick and leave well,” I said. “From a marketing standpoint, wheeling patients out doesn’t inspire confidence.”
The nurse mumbled something under her breath and left me in the wheelchair near the front doors. I checked my phone and saw a half dozen voice messages that I wasn’t in the mood to listen to. I turned the phone off.
Jeremy’s car pulled up a few minutes later.
“Jesus, Eric” were his first words. His face a dull red. I’d never seen him so worked up. “We’re gonna find out who did this.”
I climbed into his car and shut the door. He spoke quickly, filling me in on everything that had been happening. His words came in a steady stream—he’d already talked to the cops, already been on the phone with the insurance and the fire marshal and had been in meetings with the big bosses. “We’re hiring a new security contractor for the lab,” he said. “Twenty-four seven. This shouldn’t have happened. We should have had better security after that first threat came in.”
He had already connected the two events in his mind. The threatening letters and the fire. And why wouldn’t he? It seemed an easy leap to make.
He asked about the call from the lab, so I told him the whole story from front to back.
“You actually jumped from the roof?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.” He shook his head. “The police report had said that, but I thought maybe there’d been some confusion. That’s two stories up.”
“Only one story to the roof of the shed.”
“And this woman, the one who pulled you away from the fire, you’d never seen her before?”
For some reason, my mind flashed to the rain slicker and another night a few months back. A shape in the parking lot outside my motel. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“And you never actually saw Satvik? Just his car?” Same questions as the cops. I felt my heart sink.
“Just his car,” I said. “So I take it that means he hasn’t shown up?” I’d been hoping Jeremy was holding out on me, saving the good news for last. But even before he answered, I realized there was no good news.
“I haven’t heard from him,” he said.
“What about his wife?”
“As far as I know, no one has heard from him.”
Jeremy drove in silence after that. His last words sank in slowly. If Jeremy hadn’t been worried about Satvik before, he was worried now.
* * *
As we neared the city, Jeremy asked, “So where am I taking you? I forgot to even ask.”
“Homeward,” I said, and then I gave him directions.
Several miles ticked by in silence. As the car neared the turn-in, I saw the flamingos.
“You’re still living in this shithole?”
“I like it.”
“You like this place.” He didn’t look convinced. “The rats don’t like this place.”
“I keep my costs low.”
“Why the hell am I paying you so much then?”
“I wondered that myself.”
Jeremy pulled into the half-empty lot and parked.
I looked up at the door of my room—second story at the far end, near the stairs, but when I reached for the handle of the car door, I hesitated. I didn’t feel like getting out, facing that room alone.
Jeremy seemed to sense this. “And what about you?” he said.
“What about me?”
“The fire. How are you dealing with all this?”
“I’m fine.” I knew what he meant, though. What he was asking underneath it all. Would I snap like in Indianapolis, drink too much, do something crazy?
“You know, it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. He stared out through the windshield. “It was supposed to be easy, like old times. Instead, they burned a building down.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I meant it. I’d brought it all down on him. The questions. The attention. I thought of snowy roads. The feel of ice under spinning wheels.
He looked over at me. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve nothing to be sorry about. You should take some time off. As much as you want.”
“I don’t need—”
“Paid leave,” he interrupted me. “At least a week or two. Maybe longer. That reminds me.” He reached in the backseat and grabbed a small stack of papers and envelopes. “I took the liberty of cleaning your mail slot for you.” He handed me the stack of mail.
I looked down at the stack of papers in my hands. Junk mail. Newsletters. Various envelopes.
“That paid leave is an order, by the way. Came from the top down. Just a few weeks, until we can get our hands around this.”
I nodded. A few weeks. That could mean a couple of different things. I wondered if he regretted hiring me yet.
“What did your sister say when you called her?” he asked.
“Not much,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie. Suddenly, the car was too confining. I reached for the handle and pushed the door open. “Thanks for the ride.”
He gave me a look. “You didn’t call her, did you?”
“I didn’t want to worry her.”
“You should call her,” he said. He turned the ignition and started the car. “She already worries.”
25
My sister. So like me, yet not like me.
It’s amazing sometimes the things you lose. Other memories stay, like a burr caught in your mind. The sound the furnace makes when it kicks on in a darkened house. It’s a feeling you get—like a trance, family sleeping down the hall—and it’s like everything at that moment is right, and always will be—one random moment when everything is good.
And other memories, too. The mirror in your parent’s bedroom, constructed of foot-wide rectangles glued to the wall, and when you look it is a broken boy looking back. A child of edges, a dozen discrete boxes, all slightly out of alignment, and you can move your feet slightly to adjust the angle at which you’re viewed, so that your face is neatly in one mirror and your shoulder in another and your arms another, a complete compartmentalization of your being.
And another memory: Sitting up at night by the window, waiting for your father to walk through the door. Your mother coming in. “What’s wrong?”
And having no words to explain it. Just inarticulate fear. The worry that someday your father might not return.
But Mother never worried. Never remembered the bad times.
Her memory was of her own making. Like a superpower. A flex. And she could believe whatever she needed. Like an eye dilating the shape of reality—controlling her memories the way that some Tibetan monks could control their heartbeats. Yet she could say things that would stop you in your tracks—startle with their insight. “Osteoporosis is adaptive,” she declared one afternoon. “Life expectancy drops for each inch above six feet. As you age, osteoporosis shortens the distance that your circulatory system travels and thus helps the ailing heart.”
Years later I’d look that up and find nothing in the literature. Her own idea.
She invented words. They spilled off her tongue like golden coinage. Words that should be. Words like circulous. Sarcasmic. Englatiate.
“Englatiate?” I asked.
“To encase your enemies in ice,” she explained.
And I could only nod. Of course.
And another one, after the teachers gave her my test results. She reached out and touched my hair. “My smart boy. My mathemagician.”
My sister would only shake her head. The good one. The sane one.
In the motel room, I picked up the phone. Dialed the numbers—all but the last one. My finger hovered over the button.
It’s late, I told myself. Marie was probably already in bed. And what would I tell her? After everything that had happened in Indy, would she ev
en believe it?
I could hear her question—her voice rising higher, “What do you mean a building burned? Eric, what did you do?”
What did I do?
I tried imagining what I might say to that. I put the phone down.
* * *
The file was hidden midway through the stack of papers and envelopes that Jeremy had brought me. He probably hadn’t even noticed it—just grabbed it with the rest of the mail in my box.
The file was thin. A beige folder. I recognized the sloppy handwriting scrawled across the face of the folder: That info you asked for on Brighton.
It was from Point Machine. I’d actually forgotten. Had it only been days ago that I’d asked him to find out what he could?
Inside was a note, along with a few pages of photocopy.
—Eric
I couldn’t find much, but I made some calls and pulled some favors, and this is all I could pin down.
The short answer: Brighton’s a ghost. No d.o.b. No last known address. The name doesn’t start showing up in databases until ’92, and that’s only in regard to incorporation documents. A consulting company called Ingram. Buy and sell, a corporate investment group, just like he said. But a lot more funded than you might expect. Nothing particularly interesting, other than one thing, and this I had to dig for. They’re the controlling officers of the Discovery Prize. You might have heard of it? Sorry I couldn’t find more.
I’d heard of it all right. Ingram was one of several groups that offered prize money to researchers who answered long-standing problems in math and science. Like the XPRIZE in aeronautics and the Millennium Prize in math, the Discovery Prize and its ilk were considered a way to drive innovation.
I turned the page, and there was a list of rules and criteria. A hundred thousand dollars paid out to a wide variety of research subjects. Mostly physics and computer science. Three winners in the last seven years. On the next page was a tally of names who had won. Below that was a census of research subjects that had been under consideration. Unease crept up my spine.
* * *
Sometimes after returning from a day sailing with my father, I’d find my mother in the dining room, writing on her paper. Her paper, she called it, like a singular thing, though it seemed always to grow, and the subject to change.
“Did you see any whales?”
“No,” I said. “We watched the coastline.”
And she nodded and went back to writing—that time on the subject of lipid systems.
Measuring a coastline is a cartological impossibility. All the ins and outs and incongruities. But you can measure its roughness—its specific frequency of irregularity. That was my mother. A wavy line. Understandable only in approximation. Her name was Gillian, but that never seemed quite right. When I thought of my mother, it was the name Julia that would, more and more, come to be her name. The Julia sets. Her appellation that even she didn’t know.
Mother wasn’t disappointed that I hadn’t wanted to follow her into immunology. “It’s an incursive field,” she once told me, by way of explanation. “And besides,” she added, “natural science and physics are both the same thing, aren’t they?”
“What do you mean?” I was twelve at the time, already enraptured with physics and numbers. Turning my back on her madness.
“One has Darwin, the other, Einstein. But when it comes down to it, it’s all just religion.”
“It’s the opposite of religion.” I said, a little too brusquely.
She shook her head. “It comes from the same drive. The need to understand.” Her eyes gave back nothing. “The only question becomes, how bad do you need to know?”
* * *
I picked up the phone. How bad did I need to know?
I dialed Point Machine’s number. The phone rang twice. “Hello.”
“I got your report,” I said. “Where did you get the research list?”
There was a pause on the line, followed by an explosion of words. “Jesus, Eric, are you okay? I heard about what happened. I called and left messages, and I—”
“The research,” I pressed him.
“Uh…” He seemed to flounder, trying to catch up. “The research? So you got the file then. A contact at the university put it together. But how are you doing? I heard about the fire.”
“And this is all public record?”
“Yeah, it’s all public, if you know where to dig.”
“There are no dates attached.”
“I’m not sure of the dates. Why are you calling about this?”
I scanned the paper. The research I was interested in was listed halfway down. “How far back does this go?”
“Seven years.”
“And it’s up-to-date?”
“Yeah, probably. I’m not sure. Listen, what’s this about?”
“There’s a term on the list that’s very specific.”
“What do you mean, specific?”
“Branching transforms—the meaning’s not important. It’s just a mathematical function.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I made it up,” I said. “I coined the term just after college. There were only a few of us working on it.”
There was a pause on the line. “And that term is on the index of research that’s been looked into for this prize.”
“Yeah.”
“When were you working on it?”
“With my old partner. Before Hansen.”
“But that was…” His voice trailed off.
“Way before we met Brighton,” I said.
There were a few more seconds of silence. “Why were they interested in this work?”
“That’s a very good question.”
* * *
Before Einstein there was Gaston Julia.
The dictionary describes a mathematical function as a kind of system. In truth, functions are transformative—they are the if/then at the heart of computation.
I hung up the phone and placed it down on the table in front of me. The silence of the room was complete. I walked to the mirror.
The first time my mother described a ribosome to me, I’d recognized the principle. A nucleotide sequence enters one side of a ribosome, and a polypeptide chain comes out the other—a simple and ordered transformation of data. A mathematical function if ever there was one.
At the end of World War I, a French mathematician named Gaston Julia was the first to map the behavior of complex numbers under multiple iterations of a function f. Apply any number z to function f to obtain an output. Then apply function f to the output, resulting in a secondary output. Then apply function f to the secondary output, resulting in a tertiary output, and on and on in endless procession. Like a ribosome that ate its own product in a never-ending loop.
Graphed in three-dimensional space, these Julia sets produce complex, beautiful structures. The Julia sets. Mandelbrot fractals. Pathological curves. And stranger things, too. Things that mathematicians call monsters.
Thoughts can be monsters, too.
“I’m not going back,” I said to the darkness in the room.
I looked in the mirror and tried to believe it.
26
The flight to Indiana took off at 8:00 a.m. I ate bad airport food while I waited to board. Hours later I landed, rented a car, and was on the highway by midday.
The city traffic, I found, was a sieve through which some cars flowed, and others were caught. I didn’t have the knack for the local grid. Progress was slow.
I thought about Satvik’s gate arrays—evolution dictating the most efficient designs. If only city planners could have modeled the roads with the same technique.
Once off the highway, I navigated through the sprawl of an old residential neighborhood. One of the oldest parts of the city.
The homes were low and powerfully built, like short, stocky wrestlers. They looked well-nigh indestructible—row upon row of squat tract houses, brick and stone. Front fences crowded the sidewalk. The people on the street
here were monochrome, a sign that something was working against diffusion.
Farther out, the neighborhood changed abruptly, as if I had crossed a line in the sand. Shopping malls and pharmacies and gas stations and hotels. There must be a word for this kind of neighborhood. A special zoning ordinance known only to those public officials who gerrymander these things. Then another transformation, like a final phase shift. Large box structures. Open space. Tall buildings. Small, neat office complexes built at some distinguished remove from the roadway and moated all around by a lake of parking. I checked the GPS on my phone one last time and turned left at the sign.
It was just before 2:00 p.m. when I put the car in park and turned off the engine.
I’d arrived.
The office complex itself was shorter and wider than the others. Aside from that, there was nothing about the structure that stood out. A typical commercial building that might house dozens of companies. Gold-tinged windows, lots of concrete. It’s the parking that strikes you, when you’ve been away from the Midwest for any length of time. The luxury of open lots. Asphalt pads like salt flats—an embarrassment of parking. The coasts don’t understand. In the Midwest, it can sometimes be considered rude to park next to another car. Like sitting next to the only other person in a midday matinee.
But even by Midwest standards, this lot was unusually bare. A dozen cars occupied a space that could have accommodated a high school football game. Near the front I saw a BMW parked in one of the reserved spots. Green. Stuart’s favorite color, I remembered, though the car I’d last seen him drive had cost less by an order of magnitude.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, remembering his letter, which I’d thrown away: We need to talk.
I climbed out and walked up to the building.
Stuart hadn’t started out wanting to run a company. For him, it was always about the tech. Building the better mousetrap. Pushing the polygons. And the company was just how you funded that. He’d been good at the tech, but his heart was never in the corporate side of things. At least not back then. He’d never aspired to run an empire. I looked up at the squat building in the heart of the corporate bramble and wondered if he’d gotten what he’d really wanted.