But when you do what I do, you have to drop everything else — your time off, your family, your friends, even baseball — and you take the call. Kind of like the Bat-Signal. You can’t just blow it off.
So I answered the call.
It was my boss, Mr. Church.
“Captain Ledger,” he said, “I need you on the next thing smoking. Dress warm, it’s going to be cold.”
I looked out the window. This was August and the Southern California summer was cooking. Temperature was eighty-eight in the shade. I was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt with surfing pelicans on it.
“How cold?” I asked.
“This morning it was minus fifty-eight.”
I closed my eyes.
“I hate you,” I said.
“I’ll manage to live with your contempt.”
“Okay,” I said, “tell me.”
INTERLUDE ONE
“Are you going to talk today?” asked the psychiatrist. “Or are you still mad at me?”
The boy sat in the exact middle of the couch even though it was not the most comfortable place. He was like that, preferring precision over comfort. It was reflected in the number of pieces of food he would allow on his dinner plate, the number of tissues he would use no matter how many times he sneezed. Numbers mattered in ways that Dr. Greene was still discovering. So far the psychiatrist had been able to determine that Prospero Bell believed that math, in all its forms, was not merely a way to calculate sums, but was in fact tied to the very structure of physical reality. He’d even made himself a hand-drawn T-shirt last year that had a quote from mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: “God arithmetizes,” itself a variation of a quote Plutarch famously attributed to Plato: “God geometrizes continually.”
Prospero was very tall for his age, but thin as a stick. As he perched on the couch, his long body seemed to be temporarily suspended, as if he was about to slide down between the two big leather cushions but chose not to fall. Always awkward and always strange, and he did not seem to ever fit into the world as it was. Dr. Greene knew that this reflected the boy’s inner life. After four years of therapy, the doctor was quite convinced that this boy lived in two entirely separate worlds. The one inside, where Prospero clearly felt he belonged, and the one outside that he loathed and resented. That discomfort, and the resulting disconnect from ordinary social interactions, was the basis of their frequent sessions.
“I never said I was mad at you,” said the boy. He was eleven and his voice was beginning to deepen. No cracks or squeaks, just a timbre that hinted at the baritone to come.
“You threw an apple at me last Thursday,” said Greene.
“It was handy.”
“That’s not my point.”
Prospero gave him a microsecond of a sly grin. “I know.”
“Then—”
“I didn’t want to talk about my father anymore and you wouldn’t shut up. I didn’t hit you with the apple.”
“You tried. I ducked.”
“No,” said Prospero, “I missed. The fact that you ducked says more about you than my ‘missing’ says about my aim. I wanted to miss. You didn’t want to duck, but you did anyway because you didn’t know that I wouldn’t have hit you.”
Today the boy wore a green cloth jacket that he had systematically covered with symbols from cabalism, magic, and alchemy. Greene knew this because there had been three full sessions about those designs. Now there was a gray hoodie under the jacket, the top pulled up to throw shadows down over Prospero’s thin, ascetic face. The boy had painstakingly drawn an elaborate and technically excellent monster on the hood. The thing had a bulbous, flabby body, stubby wings, and a beard made from writhing tentacles that trailed from the gray hood onto the green material of the jacket.
Greene met with Prospero three times a week, down from the five talks per week that marked the boy’s most extreme phases, up from the twice weekly of last year when Prospero seemed to be balancing out. Greene was therapist for the whole Bell family, including the father, Oscar Bell, a major defense contractor; Oscar’s current wives; and his long line of ex-wives. Greene also did occasional check-ins with Prospero’s older brother from Oscar’s first marriage. Greene’s sessions with the rest of the family were routine, sparse, and almost pointless. They didn’t need him and he privately found them intensely dull. The older boy was a clone of his father and would doubtless become fabulously wealthy building secret, terrible things for the American military. As the Bell family had since the Civil War.
Of all the Bells, Prospero was the one who logged frequent-flyer miles on Greene’s therapy couch.
Greene asked, “What would you have done if I wanted to keep talking about your father after you threw that apple?”
Prospero shrugged.
“No,” said Greene, “tell me.”
The boy nodded to the coffee table. “There were five other apples in the bowl. I can throw pretty good.” He shrugged again, point made.
There was no bowl on the table now. There was nothing there, not even magazines. Greene was moderately sure the boy wouldn’t throw the table itself.
“Is it your opinion that hitting me with an apple is the best way for us to proceed?”
“We didn’t have that conversation, did we?”
Even after all these years and all these sessions it still unnerved Greene that Prospero never spoke in an age-appropriate way. He never had. Even when he was five years old his intellect and self-possession were remarkable. Or maybe “freakish” was a more accurate term, though Greene would never put that in any report. Freak. It was the best word, then and now.
Prospero Bell was a freak.
None of the tests Greene or his colleagues had administered had been able to accurately gauge the boy’s intelligence. Best guess was that it was above 200. Perhaps considerably above that, which lifted him above the level of any reliable process of quantification. Prospero had completed all of his high school requirements last year at age ten, and passed each test with the highest marks. The boy’s aptitude was odd, though. Savantism is generally limited to a few specific areas — math, say, or art. Occasionally a cluster. But Prospero seemed to excel at everything that interested him, and his interests were varied. World religions, folklore, anthropology relative to belief systems, art, music, mathematics in all its aspects, science, with a bias toward quantum and particle physics.
He was now eleven.
But he was also deeply read in areas that were built on less stable scientific ground — cryptozoology, metaphysics, alchemy, surrealist art, pulp horror fiction. The boy was all over the place. The rate at which Prospero was able to absorb information was only surpassed by his ability to both retain and process it. He had a perfect eidetic memory, and it seemed genuine, without any of the mnemonics of someone who uses tricks or triggers to recall data. Prospero never forgot a thing he learned, and because he was so observant that meant that he possessed an astounding body of personal knowledge. Greene had given Prospero tests to determine what kind of intellect the boy had, but the results had been confounding. Prospero had marked fluid intelligence — indicating that he was able to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures — but he scored equally high in crystallized intelligence, which meant that he possessed the ability to communicate his knowledge, and had the ability to reason using previously learned experiences or procedures. People seldom scored that high in both aspects. And he did just as well with long- and short-term memory, memory storage and retrieval, quantitative reasoning, auditory and visual processing, and others.