Life After Genius (20 page)

Forsbeck makes a snorting noise through his nose. Half-laugh, half-derision. Or so Mead imagines. Then flops back on his bed. “You math majors are all the same,” he says. “You’re all nuts. My last roommate, he was a math major too. Used to study all the time. Around the clock. Then one night, toward the end of the year, he just burned out. Decided to spend the weekend partying for a change. Man, I’ve never seen anyone put away more beer than that little dude. He was about your size. Average height. Thin build. How much do you weigh, anyway? I’m guessing around one forty.”

“Does your story have a point?” Mead says.

“What? Yeah, it sure does. That little math major drank himself straight into a coma. I couldn’t wake him up for nothing. And I tried. Twice. Once in the morning before I headed off to class and again that evening. The paramedics couldn’t wake him either.”

Shit. So maybe Forsbeck isn’t quite as boorish and insensitive as Mead first thought. At least now he knows why the guy might have wanted to transfer schools. “I’m not going to burn out, Forsbeck, okay? You have my word.”

Forsbeck gets up off the bed and slaps Mead on the back. “Do me a favor, Fegley. If you should decide to flip, please do it in somebody else’s room.”

H
E COMES OUT OF THE MEN’S ROOM
in Epps Hall and walks past Mead, nodding at him the way one might nod to a stranger on the sidewalk or to someone one knows by sight but not name, then drops out of sight around the corner. Herman Weinstein. Shit.

Mead hasn’t thought about the guy in ages. Forgot all about him, in fact. He hasn’t even seen Herman since Dr. Stuckup Kustrup gave Mead the old heave-ho well over a year ago. And he realizes that any anger he might have felt toward the guy when the professor-turned-chairman first picked him over Mead is gone. He doesn’t care anymore. He has Dr. Alexander now. And the Riemann Hypothesis. He has everything he could possibly need. He’s happy. Mead almost turns around and goes after Herman. To thank him. “If it weren’t for you,” he’d say, “I might never have taken Dr. Alexander’s class, might never have discovered Bernhard Riemann. Thank you for taking Dr. Kustrup away from me. Thank you very much.” Instead, Mead trots up to the second floor to find Dr. Alexander’s door open, his chair empty. Mead stands in the doorway and studies the man’s chalkboard. “I see you have drawn a graph of the function J(x),” Mead says, “and filled it with a series of dots and dashes that resemble a sort of a staircase.”

“Yes, I have,” the professor’s voice answers.

Mead steps inside and around the desk. Dr. Alexander is sitting cross-legged on his yoga mat on the floor, an amazing feat for a man his age. He pats the floor next to him and Mead sits down, crosses his legs, and says, “Why? What’re we doing?”

“You tell me,” the professor says.

Mead studies the chalkboard again. “You’re preparing to turn the Golden Key.”

“That is correct, Mead. It is the first equation in Riemann’s 1859 paper. And what does it make possible?”

“It bridges the gap between counting and measuring. It gives us an expression of the zeta function in terms of calculus, which is π (x).”

“The central result in Riemann’s paper. A powerful result.”

A minute or two goes by in silence as the two men stare at the chalkboard.

“And what’re we doing now?” Mead asks.

“Waiting for the final result to come to us.”

“We could be waiting a long time.”

Dr. Alexander puts his finger to his lips. “Don’t talk, Mead, think.”

H
E PULLS OUT
his ruled legal pad and computes a few zeta zeros while sitting on the hardwood bench outside the dean’s office. One thousand, four hundred, and seventy-nine. That’s how many zeros Mead has calculated so far. The chances of his disproving the Riemann Hypothesis in this manner —generating them one-by-one, in longhand —are nil. Mead knows that but he keeps doing it anyway because he wants it to become as natural as breathing. To train his mind to think the way Bernhard Riemann thought in hopes of having a spontaneous insight. Of making a mental leap to the next step. Dr. Alexander has his yoga; Mead has his zeros. But neither of their methods seems to be getting them anywhere. Perhaps they are going about it all wrong. They must be. What Mead needs to do is shake things up. Stop being so linear in his thought process. He knows that too, he just doesn’t know how. So he picks up his ledger pad, generates another zeta zero, and waits for inspiration to come.

The door to Dean Falconia’s office opens and Herman Weinstein steps through it. Mead doesn’t lay eyes on the guy for over a year and now runs into him twice in one week. Or maybe he’s just been studying too hard to take notice. Herman nods and says, “Congratulations, Fegley.”

“For what?” Mead says, surprised that Herman remembers him, that he would care to remember the name of his roadkill.

“I’ll let the dean tell you. I don’t want to steal his thunder.” Then he leans in real close. Close enough for Mead to smell his cologne. It’s the same shit he was wearing the first time Mead met him. “I owe you an apology,” Herman says. “I’ve always felt bad about the whole Kustrup thing, about his choosing me over you, but it seems you’ve done all right on your own.”

Mead takes it back. He doesn’t feel like thanking the guy. Apology, my foot. Herman doesn’t feel the slightest bit bad about that. He thinks he’s lording something over on Mead. He thinks Mead is still pissed off at Dr. Kustrup for dumping him. He apparently thinks he got the better end of that deal, which he most certainly did not, but it ticks Mead off that the guy thinks he did. And so he says, “I’m not on my own, I’ve got Dr. Alexander.”

“Oh. Right. The old guy. I took his class on the Riemann Zeta Function last quarter. Interesting stuff. But I found the professor to be a bit too flaky for my taste, always sitting on the floor of his office and meditating. That’s not my style.”

“Dean Falconia is ready to see you, Theodore,” the dean’s secretary says. “You can go in now.”

Thankful for the rescue, Mead says, “If you’ll excuse me,” and gets up off the bench. But Herman doesn’t step out of the way so Mead has to go around him.

“Hey,” Herman says. “We should get together some evening and hang out. I’m living in your dorm this year. On the fourth floor. Room 48. Drop up some time and say hi.” Then he walks off without waiting for a response.

Yeah, right, like Mead wants to hang out with
that
guy.

D
EAN FALCONIA SHAKES MEAD’S HAND
and then motions for him to sit down. He tells Mead how impressed he is with his academic accomplishments, especially for such a young scholar, and Mead thanks him. It is a conversation they have had many times. Then the dean says, “I am also proud to tell you, Mead, that you have been elected to become a member of Phi Beta Kappa.”

“I have? By whom?”

“By the chairman of the math department.”

“Stuckup Kustrup? I mean, Dr. Kustrup?”

“As I’m sure you are aware, membership is extended only to the most elite scholars of higher education. It’s quite an honor. Congratulations.”

This must be why Herman congratulated Mead. He knows. But how did he find out?

“The guy who was in here before me,” Mead says. “Did Dr. Kustrup elect him too?”

“Herman Weinstein? Yes. I’m lucky to have two such promising and talented young mathematicians studying here at once. Very lucky indeed.”

Talented? Herman is talented at math? It’s one thing to hear Dr. Stuckup Kustrup make this claim, another entirely to hear it from the dean.

“There is one additional reason I called you in here, Mead,” the dean says and leans forward over his desk, a gesture that implies that what he is about to say is of grave importance. “It has come to my attention that you and Dr. Alexander have been spending a lot of time working on the Riemann Hypothesis. As I’m sure you are aware, Mead, it is a subject of great interest in the field of mathematics, one with which we here at the university would like to be actively involved. You understand, of course, that the person who proves or disproves the Riemann Hypothesis will achieve great fame, as will the institution where it happens. It is for this reason, Mead, that I would like to extend to you the following offer. Starting next quarter, I would like you to fill your curriculum exclusively with classes related to the Riemann Hypothesis and submit a paper on your findings at the end of the spring quarter. As your senior thesis.”

“But I haven’t yet made any findings, Dean Falconia.”

“Don’t worry, Mead, you don’t have to prove or disprove the hypothesis, I just want you to work on it. Have we got a deal?”

Shit.

7

SCRUPLES AND PRINCIPALS

High Grove
Five Days Before Graduation

H
UNGER WILL MAKE A PERSON
do the damnedest things, like go home for supper when one knows good and well that one should stay as far away from the six-legged creature as possible. But there you have it, instinct winning out over reason. Mead peers through the windowpane in the back door. His mother is wearing an apron over a tailor-fit dress. She must be entertaining company. Good. That ought to keep her out of his hair. Mead just hopes it’s somebody he doesn’t know. That way he won’t feel obligated to participate in the conversation. He can just eat and split.

She picks up a basket of rolls and heads into the dining room. As soon as the door swings closed behind her, Mead slips into the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom. Pulling the borrowed T-shirt off over his head, he stares at his reflection in the mirror. Shit. He’s now three shades redder than he was sitting in Hayley’s car. Mead steps out of the swimming trunks. Double shit. His ass looks like a goddamned snowcap on a mountaintop. Glistening white. He turns on the shower, making it as cold as he possibly can, then steps under the spray and lets the water beat down on his face. And shivers. Not because the water is cold, but because of what happened to him up there on that cliff. Nothing like that has ever happened to him before. Mead does not have hallucinations. He is the most rational person he has ever met. But that must be what he had —a hallucination —because nobody else saw Herman. It must be the sun. Mead just got too much sun. He grabs the faucet and tries to make the water even colder.

Fifteen minutes later, he enters the dining room and watches his plan to eat and split flush right down the toilet because sitting at the table with his parents is none other than his junior high school principal, Mr. Jeavons. Could this day get any worse?

Mr. Jeavons stands up and extends his hand. “Teddy,” he says, “it’s so good to see you. You’re looking well. All grown up.”

Which just goes to show how obtuse the man is, because Mead does not look well. He looks burnt to a crisp. But instead of pointing this out, Mead shakes the man’s hand and makes up a lie of his own. “Thanks, Principal Jeavons,” he says. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” Mead doesn’t have anything against the man. It just makes him nervous that his old principal is here in his living room. A place that, as far as Mead knows, he has never before been.

“Please,” he says, “we’re all adults here, Teddy. You can call me Sandy.”

“Well, in that case,” Mead says, “you can call me Mead.”

The principal glances over at Mead’s mother, as if to ask if that’s okay. The poor bastard. He probably wishes he were at home right now, sitting down to supper with his own family. If, in fact, he has one. Mead wouldn’t know. He has never thought of the principal as a regular person, a person with a life that extends beyond the four brick walls of the school. Even now it’s hard to imagine. Principal Jeavons leaving his pants on the bedroom floor. Mrs. Jeavons yelling at him for always expecting her to pick them up. Mead prefers to picture the man seated in front of the television, a TV dinner on his lap, watching an educational show on the Discovery channel and taking notes. The ringing phone must have come as a surprise. And even more surprising was the voice at the other end: Mrs. Fegley’s voice. Did she say it was an emergency? Drop everything and come right away? And what does she think is going to happen now that he is here? Mead is too old for detention. Has she told Mr. Jeavons what she wants him to say? Did she write the man a script? Or is he supposed to try and wing this one on his own?

“So I guess my mother told you,” Mead says, “that I have dropped out of college. I mean that is why you’re here, isn’t it? To try and convince the young genius to go back? To pursue his life’s calling? In which case I’d like to save you the trouble and tell you up front that this little meeting of the minds, or whatever it is, is a waste of time. Both yours and mine. I’m not going back so save your breath.” Then he pulls out his chair, takes a seat, and helps himself to a generous portion of his mother’s beef stew.

Head down, he imagines the conversation taking place between Principal Jeavons —sorry,
Sandy
—and his mother right now. A shouting match of the eyes. To drown it out, Mead makes as much noise as he can with his knife and fork. He slurps his Coke and belches. Anything to cut through the suffocating onslaught of silence.

“Teddy, er, Mead,” the principal says, “your mother and I were talking before you came in. About the science fair you entered in seventh grade. I was remembering that elaborate maze you built, the one through which you ran your pet mouse. What was his name, Mr. Cheddar?”

“Cheese,” Mead says. “His name was Mr. Cheese.”

“Right. Mr. Cheese. He was such a big hit that Mr. Belknap now incorporates a mouse-and-maze section into his curriculum every year.”

Mead chews fast, eager to finish his supper and get the hell out of here before his mother, by way of the principal, gets under his sunburned skin and starts irritating him all over again.

“It was such an honor having you as a pupil in my school, Teddy,” the principal says, sounding as if he rehearsed the line in front of his mirror before heading across town. “You have no idea what a thrill it is for a small-town principal such as myself to cross paths with such a brilliant and promising young man as yourself. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”