“Dad?”
That’s when his gaze abruptly dropped. His presence — whatever presence defines a human being — just disappeared. A moment later, the room stank of urine.
“Fuck you, Dad.”
He didn’t seem to hear me.
At the start, there was just a high-pitched grunt, then a single fierce jerk that flipped him over onto his side, as though someone had violently upended the bed. For a moment, he was still; then suddenly his arms were yanked behind him. It looked like a policeman was trying to force him into handcuffs but that Dad was resisting. His shoulders were pinned back, but he jutted his chest and then began ratcheting in a circle, driving forward his hips and wrenching himself around the mattress like a gearwheel. His teeth were clenched, and his legs caught in the sheets, then ripped through them. Now he was jerking all over. His head was at the bottom of the bed, and when it hit the footboards I reached over and cradled it in my hands. The skin was on fire. I tried to hold him steady, but his feet kicked everything off the table, then kept kicking the table until it fell over, then kicked at the air. The lamp smashed against the wall, and his shins were smeared with blood.
Then, just as suddenly, he was still. He curled up on his side, blinking.
I pushed a pillow under his head. “Dad?”
His color was returning, but still he made no sound. At last came a low gasp, then a short, ugly bark as he vomited. A moment later, I smelled the stench of his bowels.
It was only then that I shouted for my mother.
—
MOM HAD PILLS. Pills she’d kept on hand for some time, apparently. That evening, she gave him the first of them. She was a kind woman, my mother, forgiving to a fault; but she was also vexed for a good part of her life by a loyalty and a hampering self-consciousness that could seem like a prison. It was this self-consciousness, I think, that stopped her from calling the doctor. I’m fairly sure she understood what had happened, but instead of sending him for treatment, she treated him herself. With an old bottle of tranquilizers that she told me she’d found in his drawer. Before sleep that night, she gave him another.
I believe she was ashamed.
The medicine took him through until morning, and when I woke the next day I went in directly to see him. He was still alive. In fact, he appeared to have been restored almost to normal, sitting upright against the headboard reading his copy of The Nation. The agreeable smell of his cologne once again filled the room.
“Hans,” he said without looking up, “your mother tells me you helped me out yesterday.” He flipped a page. “Thank you.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I’m fine. A little slow, maybe.” He rubbed his neck. “A little sore, too. But I’ve taken something for it.”
I stood next to the bed. I could hear my mother downstairs, speaking in a low voice with Paulette.
When I pulled the bag from behind my back and placed it on the mattress, he set aside his reading. A tentative, quivering crease appeared on his face. He touched the brown paper, and the crease spread across his features until it ran all the way from his darkly scabbed lips to the haggard-looking corners of his eyes. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”
“I did, Dad.”
He pulled out the neck of one of the bottles and turned it to read the label. “Hennessy?” He set it back in and pulled out the next one. “All of these are Cognac?”
“The woman at the store must have misheard me.”
A look of puzzlement, then of what I might call a thoughtfully considered determination, crossed his features. “That’s fine, Hans,” he whispered. “It’ll do.”
He shifted his features into a full-out smile then that twitched just faintly at the ends. I don’t think my father had ever looked upon me — or has looked upon me since — with such thoroughly felt gratitude. “Oh, Hans,” he said. “This is perfect. Thank you.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “I knew I could count on you to understand.”
—
WHEN I LOOK at my own children now, by the way, it would be Niels who would have understood. Niels who would have gotten me what I needed. This in itself is an intelligence, as poorly explained as any other.
What is brilliance, anyway? The great Indian autodidact Srinivasa Ramanujan derived many of the foundational theorems of mathematics while lounging on the steps of a dilapidated hut in Tamil Nadu. As a boy, he mastered Bernoulli numbers and Euler’s natural logs. Then, when he finally found his way to university, he failed miserably at every single course that wasn’t mathematics. What can one say about this? That brilliance is just an obsessive kind of love?
A man like Ramanujan looked only at what it pleased him to look at. As do most of us, I think. Einstein once said that God is subtle but not malicious, and I have to agree: success in mathematics is in good part a question of merely wanting badly enough to look. To look inside the mind, I should add — for that is where the field, like a pinhole camera, has thrown the universe, perhaps even backward and upside down. The actual sharpness of one’s vision might even be secondary to the mere love of looking. Ramanujan’s ardor, coupled with a faith in the absolute knowability of it alclass="underline" those are the keys. Dawkins once said that he opposed religion mainly because it taught us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Faith and love — that’s what it comes down to.
And what of life’s other brilliances? I believe that my daughter is a good deal more talented in mathematics than my son, for example. It’s Emmy’s name that we might one day read in textbooks, the way we’ve already read my father’s. The thing is, Emmy would never know what anyone secretly needed. Niels, on the other hand, would know it deeply, without ever having to be asked.
—
ON THE WAY home that week from OSU, where my mother and I had both taken midterms, she turned to me in the passenger seat and said, “Are you worried about your father?”
“Not really.”
She kept her gaze on me. “Good,” she said. “You just focus your mind on your studies.” Then she looked back out at the road.
We were in the long stretch of empty land about three-quarters of the way back from Columbus. Whenever a car neared from the other direction, I could see her peering forward into the lights. My midterm had been on eigenfunctions, and hers had been on the circulatory system. “How’d you do on your test?” I said.
“Not bad. How about you?”
“Not bad, either.”
She smiled and lifted the milkshake to me from the carton between us on the dashboard. We always shared one on the way home, but tonight she hadn’t taken any. It was my favorite: strawberry.
“What do you think’s the matter with him?” I asked.
On the outskirts of Tapington, the traffic was thickening from a shift change at the appliance plant, and the cars turning in and out of the parking lot were lifting opals of light across her cheeks. “I really don’t know,” she said. “But I do know that you and your sister shouldn’t be worrying about it.”
—
“HANS,” SAID MY father. “Tell me how old you are.”
I glanced at him. “Is this a real question?”
“Absolutely. It’s not easy when you have more than one kid, not to mention a wife. The figures change at irregular intervals.”
“Let’s see — I’ve lived three hundred ninety-four million one hundred eighty-three thousand six hundred eighty-”—I glanced at my wrist for show—“eight seconds, Dad.”
“That’s what I thought.”
We were in his room again. He’d returned to the world now in most of his previous capacities, but whenever he came back from teaching he still went upstairs for a nap. I had the feeling that it had become a permanent habit. Every day, a little before four o’clock, just about the time Paulie and I returned from school, he retired to bed. While he slept, the rest of us went about the house quietly, and after I’d finished my homework and read a few pages from one of the science fiction novels that I’d started to enjoy in those days, it would be time to go upstairs to say hello. I would tiptoe along the carpeted hallway, then stand at the door to his room. After a moment, he would blink open his eyes, without turning his head, like a lizard.