Life After Genius (17 page)

Meads shakes his head. “Mathematical thinking is deeply unnatural. It makes things complex where they would at first appear simple. Take, for example, this rock we’re sitting on. Describe it to me.”

“This rock? I don’t know. It’s big. And hard.”

“Exactly. Now if you give me a ledger pad and a pen, I can probably get back to you with a mathematical description of it in about a week.”

“So what you’re telling me is that
math
is stupid, not me.”

“Not stupid, no. It seems impractical when applied to something as simple as a rock but when that same principle is applied to a complex idea —like the theory of relativity —the beauty of mathematical thinking becomes clear. The complex becomes simple.”

A boy jumps off the cliff and screams. Hayley and Mead look up as he falls through the air. When he hits the water, Hayley grabs Mead’s hand and says, “Come on, Theodore, let’s go jump off a cliff.”

He pulls his hand free. “No way. I’m not going up there. Someone got killed once jumping off that ledge.”

“That was before the quarry got filled with water, Theodore.” She grabs his hand. “Come on. Let’s not think about it, let’s just do it.”

A
PREADOLESCENT BOY,
who apparently has not a single working brain cell in his entire head, steps off the cliff. His body drops out of sight, his feet disappearing first, followed quickly by legs, torso, arms, and head, the quarry swallowing him up whole. He screams as he falls through the air and hits the water with a loud splash.

“You’re looking a little pink there, Theodore,” Hayley says and touches her index finger to his right shoulder, leaving behind a white mark. “Did you think to put on any sunscreen?”

“I’m fine, Mother,” he says.

“Sorry,” Hayley says. “I was just commenting.”

“Hey,” some kid behind them yells. “Stop holding up the line and jump already.”

“Why don’t you go next,” Hayley says to Mead.

“No,” he says. “Ladies first.”

She gives him a look that suggests that she suspects he is trying to get out of this altogether, but she steps ahead of him anyway. “There’s really nothing to it, Theodore,” she says as she stands silhouetted against the blue sky, her body a perfect figure eight. Mead squints and she looks naked. He could squint at her all day and maybe work up a mathematical equation to define her body. The sines and cosines of lust. An algebraic equation that sums up the seductive qualities of the female body. The complex made simple. But he really should not be thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Sammons’s daughter in this way. He needs instead to start thinking about what to do next, now that Herman is in High Grove. If, indeed, he actually is.

Hayley bends her knees and jumps. Screams all the way down.

“It’s your turn,” the boy behind Mead says. Some teenager with pimply skin, red hair, and a sunburn that looks as if it’s going to keep him up all night.

“I know,” Mead says and steps to the edge. Hayley bobs to the surface below and looks up. “Come on, Theodore,” she says. “Jump. It’s fun.”

The quarry looks different from up here. Bigger. Rockier. Mead imagines that he is standing exactly where that quarryman was standing eighty years ago. Looking down. Thinking about all those years he spent chipping away at this rock to feed his family. All the holes he drilled to make casings for sticks of dynamite. All the stone he hauled off one chunk at a time. Each year the quarry got deeper, wider. Twenty years he worked here, maybe thirty. Thirty years digging his own grave. So really, Mead got off easy because he only wasted three years of his life. Less, really, because he didn’t even learn about the Riemann Hypothesis until his second year of college. And he didn’t become entwined with Herman until this year. All those long hours of hard work undone by one person. Like the fellow who closed down the quarry.

“Hey, buddy, are you gonna jump or what?”

Mead looks down at the smooth surface of the water but all he sees are hard jagged points of limestone. He begins to tremble. It starts in his knees and works its way up his body. A cloud passes in front of the sun and the air turns cold. Mead tries to step back from the ledge but can’t. He’s frozen. Is this how the quarryman felt? Afraid to go forward, unable to go back? Frozen in time? Someone touches Mead’s shoulder. He turns to see who it is and his heart leaps up into his throat. Because it’s Herman.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Mead says. “Sneak up on people like that.”

“We have unfinished business, Fegley. You walked out on our deal.”

“We didn’t have any deal, Weinstein.”

“Of course we did, Fegley. Don’t be coy. You’re too smart to be coy.”

“I’m not smart, I’m an idiot. Otherwise I wouldn’t have let you trick me.”

“Trick you? I’m hurt, Fegley. I thought we were friends.”

“No. We were never friends, because friends don’t screw each other.”

“Some friends do,” Herman says. “And they enjoy it too.”

“Go away,” Mead says and tries to shrug off Herman’s hand.

“Not until you agree to come back.”

“No,” Mead says. “Never.”

“In that case, Fegley, you leave me no choice.” And Herman grabs Mead with both hands and pushes him off the cliff.

M
EAD OPENS HIS EYES AND SEES
several faces looking down at him. Is he lying in a morgue? He checks out the faces in search of his Uncle Martin. He doesn’t want anyone else to embalm him because Mead knows that before his uncle injects formaldehyde into any body, he always performs the two tests of death. The first involves a saucer of water, placed on the chest of the deceased to detect the shiver of a beating heart or a working set of lungs; the second, a rubber band wrapped around a finger, white means go, red means stop. But Mead does not see his uncle; all he sees is the pimply-faced kid with red hair. And Hayley.

“Theodore,” she says, “are you okay?”

Mead sits up, surprised to find that he is still at the top of the cliff in one piece and not at the bottom in several. “Where’s Herman?”

“Who?” Hayley asks.

“The guy who tried to push me off the cliff just now.” Mead turns to the pimply-faced kid. “You saw him, right? Tall guy? Dark hair?” The pimply kid shakes his head. “But you must have. You were standing right here the whole time.”

The pimply kid looks at Hayley and shrugs.

“No one tried to push you, Theodore. You fainted.”

“But he was here. I saw him.”

Hayley takes hold of Mead’s hand. “Come on, Theodore. Let’s go back to the car. I think you’ve had enough sun.”

He shakes her off. “I don’t have sunstroke, Hayley, I saw him.”

She sets her hands on her hips, like his mother. “Look at yourself, Theodore. You’re red as a cooked lobster.”

And the thing is, he is red. Bright red. Shit. It’s going to keep him up all night.

H
AYLEY DIGS A PAIR OF JEANS
and a baseball jersey out of that duffel bag in the trunk of her car and pulls them on over her bathing suit, but they don’t fit. They’re too big. She has to fold over the waistband and roll up the cuffs. “You stay put and I’ll be right back,” she says and disappears into the five-and-dime, leaving her car to idle in its parking space with Mead in it. Heat is radiating off his arms. He has grown three shades redder in the short amount of time it took to drive back into town. You could fry an egg on his chest. No kidding. This is what happens when you spend twelve years hidden in the stacks of the library followed by three hours in the midday summer sun. Mead redirects the air-conditioning vents and holds his arms in front of them to get the full benefit.

Hayley comes back with a brown paper bag, out of which she takes a jar of Noxzema, a bottle of aloe vera gel, and a six-pack of chilled soda. Mead picks up the six-pack and presses it against his chest.

“You look worse,” Hayley says.

“Thanks.”

Squeezing a blob of green goo into her palm, Hayley slathers it all up and down Mead’s arms and legs. It feels good, cool to the touch. Then she rubs it over his chest, the way his mother once massaged his chest with VapoRub when he had bronchitis.

“Is Herman the one who lied to you?” she asks.

Mead doesn’t answer, just concentrates on her cool hands.

“Turn around so I can do your back.”

He turns around and thinks about another girl he liked and then lost. The one he met after Cynthia. Herman’s fault again.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, that just about does it.” Hayley removes her hand from Mead’s back and closes the lid on the aloe vera bottle. “Give the gel a chance to sink in, then put on some Noxzema. And drink plenty of fluids.” She reaches into the duffel bag and pulls out a red T-shirt. “Here, put this on so you won’t stick to the seat.”

Mead pulls on the cotton tee over his head. It’s a couple of sizes too big for him. Little brother, my foot. No one drives around with a duffel bag full of her brother’s clothes in the trunk of her car. And they certainly don’t fit her. There’s no doubt in Mead’s head: Hayley has got a boyfriend. Or an ex-boyfriend.

“I didn’t graduate,” Mead says. “Commencement ceremonies are set to take place in six days. I just left.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Okay.” Hayley opens one of the cans of soda and takes a sip, then sits back to stare out the front windshield. Is she afraid her boyfriend is going to walk by, see the two of them sitting in her car, and get angry? Mead would rather not get punched in the face. He already knows what it feels like to be on the fist end of that deal and it isn’t very good. Unless, of course, he’s her ex-boyfriend.

“I’m being blackmailed,” Mead says.

Hayley turns around. “By Herman?”

“I thought I saw him in the cemetery this morning, only now I’m not so sure.”

“Have you told the police?”

“No, I haven’t told the police and I’m not going to. It’d be pointless. Herman functions beyond the long arm of the law.”

“My god, Theodore, what happened?”

“He lied to me, Hayley, that’s what happened. He lied.” And for all Mead knows, she’s lying to him right now. About her little brother. About these clothes.

She sits back and gazes out the window. “What does he look like?”

“Herman? A rich boy from Princeton.”

“Well then, he ought to stick out like a sore thumb around here.”

Mead looks over at Hayley, scanning the streets of High Grove for a rich boy from Princeton, and allows himself a smile.

6

SUFFERING OLD FOOLS

Chicago
Two Years Before Graduation

I
T’S BEEN RAINING
for the past twenty-four hours straight. Puddles everywhere. But at least for the moment, it isn’t coming down hard. Which is a good thing because Mead does not have an umbrella. He finds them cumbersome and more trouble than they’re worth. After all, it’s just water. So he pulls the hood of his rain slicker over his head, tucks his books under his arm, and starts off across campus.

Contrary to Dr. Kustrup’s advice —and partially because of it —Mead decided to stay in Chicago for the summer. And when he found out that his new faculty advisor would be returning from his sabbatical to teach during the summer quarter, it sealed the deal. That’s where he is headed right now, to meet with this Dr. Andrew Alexander. Only this time Mead did his homework first: He looked up the professor in
Who’s Who in America.
It seems that the mysterious Dr. Alexander also matriculated at a young age —sixteen to be exact —right here at Chicago University. He had his doctorate in mathematics by the time he was twenty-three and then headed out east to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study before taking a string of teaching jobs at a series of universities —including King’s College in Cambridge, England —before finally ending up back here at CU. Mead wasn’t quite so upset after reading that, especially after he looked up Dr. Kustrup in the same volume. It seems that he didn’t start college until he was nineteen. And it wasn’t Chicago University he attended but some lesser school in the Midwest. And he didn’t get his doctorate until he was twenty-eight. And, oh yeah, he lied. He never attended the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There isn’t one mention of it in his bio at all. And all those papers he claims to have published? Apparently he lied about those, too. Or maybe they just weren’t important enough to get a mention in
Who’s Who.

Mead comes to a crosswalk and has to wait, along with two other students, for the light to change. As they’re waiting, a man comes pedaling up the street on a bicycle, a green Schwinn that looks as if it were purchased at a yard sale. The man riding the bike has a cap pulled down low over his eyes so it’s hard to make out his age. He’s also wearing a lightweight zipper jacket, khaki trousers, and loafers. One of the students says, “Look at that old fool, will you?”

“You know who that is, don’t you?” his buddy says. “I see him around all the time. He’s a professor here on campus. Rides that bicycle all year round. Rain, snow, sleet. Doesn’t matter.”

At that moment a car speeds through the intersection, trying to beat the yellow light, and hits a puddle, sending a geyser of water up over the bicycle and its rider. The professor raises his fist and shakes it at the car. If he curses, Mead does not hear it.

The first student laughs. “Like I said, old fool.”

Mead glances down at his own feet, which are clad in loafers similar to those on the professor. He wonders what the student would say if he noticed. Something derogatory, no doubt. And perhaps he’d be right, seeing as how Mead’s feet are soaking wet, water having already seeped in through the hand-stitched seams. Perhaps Mead is just a young fool. Or maybe a person only notices these things when a friend points them out.

But the student does not notice Mead. The light changes and he crosses the street with his buddy. They turn and head off to the right, Mead goes to the left and heads for the quad.

Yesterday he picked up the class schedule and read through all the course offerings in the math department. One class in particular caught his eye: Introduction to Analytical Mathematics. The class is being taught by the widely traveled Dr. Alexander. Mead figures that if the man is going to be advising him, then he should take at least one of his classes to decide whether or not the professor has anything worthwhile to say. If he still has all his marbles. Because the other thing Mead read about Dr. Andrew Alexander in
Who’s Who in America
is that he was born in 1910. Which makes the man all of seventy-seven years old. Which makes him four years older than Mead’s grandfather Henry Charles was when he died.