Lightspeed: Year One

Eliot’s mind was so much like his father’s. Everybody said so.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, which caused a man to glare at him across the bus aisle and a woman to change her seat. Embarrassed, Eliot pulled out his school tablet.

Memory, he wrote, is a bridge between what you are today and what you were for all the days before that. All your life you go back and forth across that bridge, extending and reinforcing it. You add a new strut. You hang flower pots on the railing. You lay down kitty litter during icy weather. You chase away the kids who are smoking pot on top of the pilings and under the roadway. Then one day, a section of the bridge gives way. When that happens, it is criminal to not repair it. An unrepaired bridge is like a deep pothole on a dark road and—

Two metaphors. This was not working. And it was due Tuesday.

The man across the aisle was still watching him. Probably thought that Eliot was some sort of gang-affiliated punk. Well, no, not that, not with his build and clothing. A crazy, then. The man thought Eliot might be a gun-toting, cheerleader-loathing shooter who would court death to kill everybody on the bus, perhaps because school shooting was now such a risk, what with all the metal detectors and guards and lock-down protocols.

I am not a shooter, Eliot silently told the man. He was a rationalist and an intellectual, and he just wanted his father back, whole, the way he had been before.

He got off the bus at his Aunt Sue’s building.

The building was depressing because it was so smug. It looked as if nothing bad could ever happen here as long as the stoop was swept clean and the curtains were a bright color and the flower boxes were watered. Nothing bad! Wanna bet? Inside, his aunt’s apartment was even worse. Her decorating style was country-mystic, with wreaths of dried flowers and tapestries of unicorns and small ceramic plaques that said things like “LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA.”

“Aunt Sue, I have to tell you things I didn’t get a chance to say at the hospital. Please listen to me.”

“Of course, Eliot. Don’t I always?”

Almost never. But he composed himself and arranged his arguments. “I was online last night, too. Those two cases you mentioned, the man who couldn’t read again and the woman who didn’t recognize her kids, were anomalies. Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing is new, yes, but it passed clinical trials and FDA approval and it has an eighty-nine percent success rate, with a one percent confidence level. Of the remaining eleven percent, two-thirds were neither better nor worse after the operation. That leaves only three-point-eight percent and when you take into account those with only minor—”

“No.”

“You’re not listening!”

“I am listening. Nobody is going to cut into Carl’s brain.”

“But he believes he saw a defunct Greek god in a toaster pastry!”

“Eliot, is that so bad?”

“It’s not true!”

“Well, it’s true that Carl saw it, anyway, or he wouldn’t be so upset. He’ll come out of whatever spell he’s having about it, he always does. And anyway, I don’t understand Carl’s reaction. Would it be so bad to believe this Zeus-god is around?”

“That’s the part that’s not true!”

She shrugged. “Are you so sure you know what’s true?”

“Yes!” Eliot shouted. “Mathematics is true! Physics is true! Memory can play us false, there’s a ton of research on that, nobody can be sure if their memories are accurate—” He stopped, no longer sure what he was saying.

Aunt Sue said calmly, “Well, if memory is playing Carl false, then he’s all the more likely to get over it, isn’t he?”

“No! It isn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“Wouldn’t you like some walnut cake, Eliot? I baked it fresh this morning.”

Hopeless. They came from two different planets. And she—this kind, stupid woman who inexplicably shared one-quarter of his genes—held the power. In a truly rational world, that couldn’t have been true.

“Cream-cheese icing,” she said brightly, and caressed his cheek.

Eliot wrote: Memory is like a corn stalk. Corn blight can wreck any entire economy, starve an entire nation, but it responds to science. Find the bad gene, cut it out, replace it with a genetically engineered Bt gene that fights blight because it allows the use of strong pesticides and voila! Memory functions again! Science triumphs!

Possibly the worst writing he had ever done. He hit DELETE.

His father’s liquor cabinet still held three inches of Scotch. Eliot poured himself two fingers’ worth, so he could sleep.

The next morning, just as he was leaving to catch the bus for school, the hospital called.

“The answer,” his father said, “is obvious.”

It wasn’t obvious to Eliot. His father sat in the day room, out of his bathrobe and dressed in his ordinary baggy khakis and badly-pilled sweater. Dr. Tremling had shaved. He looked just as he once did, and Eliot would have felt hopeful if he hadn’t felt so bewildered, or if the new twitch at the corner of his father’s left eye wasn’t beating madly and irregularly as a malfunctioning metronome.

“I did see what I thought I saw,” his father said carefully. “I know so, in a way that, although it defies explanation, is so incontrovertible that—”

“Dad,” Eliot said, equally carefully—if only that twitch would stop! “You can’t actually ‘know’ that for certain. Surely you’re aware that all our minds can play tricks on us that—”

“Not this time,” Dr. Tremling said simply. “I saw it. And I know it was true, not just an aberration of pastry. I know, too, that mathematics, the whole rational underpinning of the universe, is also true. The dichotomy was . . . upsetting me.”

Upsetting him. Eliot glanced around at the mental hospital, the orderlies watchful in the corners of the room, the barred window. His father had always had a gift for understatement, which was in part what had made this whole thing so . . . so upsetting.

“What I failed to see,” Dr. Tremling said, “was that this is a gift. I have just been handed my life’s work.”

“I thought the topography of knots was your life’s work?”

“It was, yes. But now my life’s work is to find the rational and mathematical underpinnings for this new phenomenon.”

“For Zeus? In a toaster pastry?”

The twitch beat faster, even more irregularly. “I concede that it is a big job.”

“Dad—”

“There must be a larger consciousness, Eliot. If so, it is a physical entity, made up of energy and matter, must be a physical entity. And a physical entity can be described mathematically, possibly through a system that does not yet exist, possibly based on non-local quantum physics.”

Eliot managed to say, “You aren’t a quantum physicist.”

“I can learn.” Twitch twitch TWITCH. “Do you remember what Werner Heisenberg said about belief systems? ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ I need a new method of questioning to lead toward a new mathematics.”

“Well, that’s a—”

“They’re letting me have my laptop back, with controlled wifi access, until I go home.”

“Have they said when that might be?”

“Possibly in a few more weeks.”

Dr. Tremling beamed, twitching. Eliot tried to beam, too. He was getting what he’d wanted—his father back home, working on mathematics. Only—”a new mathematics”? His father was not Godel or Einstein or Heisenberg. He wasn’t even an endowed chair.

Eliot burst out, before he knew he was going to say anything, “There’s no evidence for any larger consciousness! It’s mystical wish-fulfillment, a non-rational delusion! There’s just no evidence!”

“I’m the evidence. Son, I don’t think I actually told you what I experienced.” He leaned closer; involuntarily Eliot leaned back. “It was Zeus, but it was also Odin, was Christ, was . . . oh, let me think . . . was Isis and Sedna and Bumba and Quetzalcoatl. It was all of them and none of them because the images were in