“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 my mind. Of course they were, where else could they possibly be? But here’s the thing—the images are unimportant. They’re just metaphors, and not very good ones—arrows pointing to something that has neither image nor words, but just is. That thing is—how can I explain this?—the world behind the world. Didn’t you ever feel in childhood that all at once you sort of glimpsed a flash of a great mystery underlying everything, a bright meaning to it all? I know you did because everybody does. Then we grow up and lose that. But it’s still there, bright and shining as solid as … as an end table, or a pig. I saw it and now I know it exists in a way that goes beyond any need to question its existence—the way I know, for instance, that prime numbers are infinite. It’s the world beyond the world, the space filled with shining light, the mystery. Do you see?”
“No!”
“Well, that’s because you didn’t experience it. But if I can find the right mathematics, that’s a better arrow than verbal metaphors can ever be.”
Eliot saw in his father’s eyes the gleam of fanaticism. “Dad!” he cried, in pure anguish, but Dr. Tremling only put his hand on Eliot’s knee, a startlingly rare gesture of affection, and said, “Wait, son. Just wait.”
Eliot couldn’t wait. His English assignment was due by third period, which began, with the logic of high school scheduling, at 10:34 a.m. No late assignments were accepted. His tablet on his knees on the crowded bus, Eliot wrote: Memory is not a room or a bridge or a corn stalk with blight. Memory is not a metaphor because nothing is a metaphor. Metaphors are constructions of a fanciful imagination, not reality. In reality everything is what it is, and that is—or certainly should be!—enough for anybody!
The little boy sitting next to him said, “Hey, man, you hit that thing so hard, you gonna break it.”
“Shut up,” Eliot said.
“Get fucked,” the kid answered.
But Eliot already was.
Dr. Tremling came home three weeks later. He was required to see a therapist three times a week. Aunt Sue bustled over, cooked for two days straight, and stocked the freezer with meals. When Eliot and his father sat down to eat, Dr. Tremling’s eye twitched convulsively. Meals were the only time they met. His father chewed absently and spoke little, but then, that had always been true. The rest of the time he stayed in his study, working. Eliot did not ask on what. He didn’t want to know.