Lightspeed: Year One

He let go. “I’m sorry. But—you are going to let them operate, aren’t you?”

Aunt Sue looked at him. She had small eyes of no particular color, and a little mouth that was pursing and unpursing in distress. But she was a Tremling. Into those small eyes came stubbornness, an unthinking but resolute stubbornness and yet somehow murky, like a muddy pool over bedrock. She said gently, “I couldn’t do that.”

“Aunt Sue—”

“Carl will come to himself eventually, Eliot. He’s had spells before, you know—why, just consider that time he shut himself up in my spare room for six days and wouldn’t even come out to eat! I had to bring him meals on a tray!”

“He was working on his big breakthrough on the topography of knots!”

“Not only would he not eat, he wouldn’t even wash. I had to air that room out for two days afterward, and in February. But Carl came out of that spell and he’ll come out of this one, too. You just wait and see.”

“It’s not the same! Don’t you understand, his whole mental construct has been turned upside down!”

“That’s exactly what he said when he came out of my spare room with those knot numbers,” she said triumphantly. “Knots! But even as a boy Carl took fits, why I remember when he was just eight years old and he found out that somebody named Girdle proved there were things you couldn’t prove, why that doesn’t even make common sense to—”

“Aunt Sue! You have to sign the papers allowing this operation!”

“No. I won’t. Eliot, you listen to me. I went online last night and read about this Memory Obligation Whatever. It’s new and it’s dangerous because the doctors don’t really know what they’re doing yet. In one case, after the operation a woman didn’t even remember who she was, or recognize her own children, or anything! In another case, a man could no longer read and—get this!—he couldn’t relearn how to do it, either! Something had just gone missing in his brain as a result of the operation. Imagine Carl unable to read! We can’t risk—”

Eliot was no longer listening. He’d known Aunt Sue all his life; she wasn’t going to budge. He barreled down the hall and rattled the door to the ward, which was of course locked. An orderly wielding a mop peered at him through the reinforced glass and pantomimed pressing the call button.

“Yes?” said the disembodied voice of a nurse. Eliot recognized it.

“Mary, I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“Oh, Eliot, I’m glad you came just now, your father is quiet and—”

“I don’t want to see my father! I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“He’s not here, dear. I’ll just buzz you in.”

Mary came out of the nurse’s station to meet him. Middle-aged, kind, motherly, she radiated the kind of brisk competence that Eliot admired, and had seen so little of in his own disordered household. Or at least he would have admired it if it weren’t for the motherliness. She saw him not as the intellectual he knew himself to be, but rather as the skinny, short, floppy-haired kid he seemed to be. He was smarter than Mary, smarter than Aunt Sue, smarter than most of the world, so why the hell couldn’t the world notice that?

“I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“He’s not on the ward, dear.”

“Call him!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. Eliot, you seem upset.”

“I am upset! Isn’t my father going to have SMON-R? Because my aunt wouldn’t sign the papers?”

Motherliness gave way to professionalism. “You know I can’t discuss this with you.”

No one would discuss anything with Eliot. He didn’t count. The rational world didn’t count, not in here. Eliot glared at Mary, who gazed calmly back. He said, “I’ll sign them! I will!”

“You’re underage, Eliot. And your father is non compos mentis. Did you come to visit? He’s in the day room. But if you’re going to upset him, it might be better if you chose another time to visit.”

Eliot bolted past her and ran into the day room.

His father was not flinging furniture. He slumped inert in a chair, staring at the TV, which showed a rerun of Jeopardy. Eliot groaned. His father had published papers in scientific journals, developed algorithms for high-resolution space imagery, had a promising lead on actually solving the Riemann Hypothesis. He did not watch Jeopardy. This was the anti-psychotic drugs, not the real Carl Tremling. Everything the hospital was doing was just making the situation worse.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, Eliot.”

Alex Trebek said, “The tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.”

“How are you doing?”

“Just fine.” But he frowned. “Only I can’t quite . . . there was something . . . ”

Something. There were a lot of somethings. There was rational thought, and logical progressions, and the need to restore a man’s proper intellect.

Someone on the TV said, “What is ‘inertia’?”

“Zeus,” Dr. Tremling brought out triumphantly. “Who would have believed—” All at once his face sagged from underneath, like a pie crust cooling. “Who would have believed . . . ” His face crumpled and he clutched Eliot’s sleeve. “It’s real, Eliot! It’s loose in the world and nothing that I thought was true—”

“It was a toaster pastry, Dad!”

Three patients slowly swiveled their heads at Eliot’s raised voice. He lowered it. “Listen to me. Please listen to me. The doctors want to do a procedure on you called Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing. It will remove the memory of the . . . the incident from your mind. Only Aunt Sue—”

“Where’s the pig?” Dr. Tremling said.

Eliot rocked back and forth with frustration. “Even if Aunt Sue won’t sign the papers, if you can seem reasonably lucid—in compos mentis—then—”

“I asked you to bring the pig!”

“It’s broken!”

Dr. Tremling stared at Eliot. Then he threw back his head and howled at the ceiling. Two orderlies, a nurse, and four patients sprang to attention. Dr. Tremling rose, overcoming the inertia of his drugs, and picked up his chair. His face was a mask of grief. “It isn’t true. Nothing I believed is true! The universe—Zeus—dice—”

Eliot shouted, “It was just a fucking toaster pastry!”

“I needed that pig!” He flung the chair at the wall. Orderlies rushed forward.

Nurse Mary grabbed Eliot and hustled him out of the room. “I told you not to upset him!”

“I didn’t upset him, you did, by not giving him what he needs! Do you know how finely balanced a mathematician’s brain is, how prone to obsessions already, and it needs to be clear to—you’re refusing to remove a tumor from his brain!”

“Your father does not have a brain tumor, and you need to leave now,” Mary said, hustling him down the hallway.

A male voice said, “I’ll take scientific terms for 400, Alex.”

“It’s his brain!” Eliot shouted. He meant: My brain, and he knew it, and the knowledge made him even angrier.

Mary got him to the door of the ward, keyed in a code to unlock it, and waved him through. As he stalked off, she called after him, “Eliot? Dear? Do you have enough money for the bus home?”

Eliot’s parents had met at college, where both studied mathematics. Even though Eliot’s mother was not beautiful, there were few girls in the graduate math program, and she was sought after by every mathematician with enough social skills to approach her, including two of the professors. Her own social skills lacked coherence, but something in Carl Tremling appealed to her. She emailed her bewildered mother, “There is a boy here I think I like. He’s interested in nothing but algorithms and pigs.” Carl, who had grown up in farm country, had a theory that pigs were much smarter than other animals and deserved respect.

Fuming on the bus, Eliot wondered why his father had wanted the ceramic pig. Did he have a premonition that in its artificial pink wrinkles he might see Hermes, god of mathematics? Aphrodite? His dead wife? How could his mind have so betrayed Carl Tremling? Eliot wanted his father back, and in his own mind.