“Radicalized by rich girls in a Swiss boarding school?”
“Definitely. I hated them so much. Racist assholes, that’s what they were. There’s an age where you shouldn’t put a bunch of girls by themselves. The mean girls’ club is a real thing. They’re worse than any boys I ever saw.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club. I think you probably need boys and girls together at that age more than any other. Anyway I hated them.”
“What did they do?”
“Oh, just the usual shit. I don’t want to tell you. It’s always the same kind of stuff. Just saying it repeats it, somehow.”
“Okay.”
“Like one time I came in on them and they were wearing some of my clothes and pulling their eyes to the side and singing ‘We are Siamese, if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please.’”
“Siamese?”
“Whatever! It was a cartoon song. I looked it up. About Siamese cats, it turns out. Pretty funny in fact. But to them I was a gook, a slant, a chink!”
Just saying it repeats it, Fred knew not to say; although it was painful to hear that grating sound in her voice. He said, “I’m surprised the school’s administrators let that kind of thing happen.”
“They never know what really goes on in the dorms.”
“I guess not. And so…”
“So that’s when I started making my escapes. You don’t just run away from those places, you’re locked in. You have to escape. So that took some work, because that place was a real prison. Part of the deal is if you pay a ton of money to put your daughter in a place like that, they stay there.”
“They’re safe.”
“Safe! Safe to live with horrible racist bitches! That’s right. So, I got away three times, got caught three times. The Swiss have way better surveillance than China, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had no friends or money. Once I just walked into the forest and got lost out there. But the Swiss even have their forests surveilled. So the third time they caught me, I begged my father to send me back to my first school. The École was looking like utopia at that point. And he let me do it. After that I was fine.”
“So he was…”
“My dad was okay. He is okay. He tries. In fact I think of myself as complementing his efforts from below. As a family we are a pincer attack, you might say. Not that he would agree with that. But I’ll convince him of it by the time it’s all over. I’ll make him see it. If he doesn’t die first of a heart attack at how bad I am.”
Another time she put her head back onto her chair back and sighed heavily. “But what about you?” she said again. “And don’t answer with a question.”
Fred shrugged.
“What brought you to the moon?”
“Just my job.”
“I know that. You are a quantum mechanic.” She laughed briefly. “But what brought you to your job?”
“Oh I don’t know.”
“You must like quantum mechanics?”
Fred tilted his head and thought about it. “Yes. I do.”
“So go on. Go backward from that. What brought you to quantum mechanics?”
“Oh I don’t know.”
Fred was not comfortable. He didn’t know what he could say about his past. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain it to someone else?
She waited him out, watched him think it over. Not a warm look, but not a sharp look. Not irritated or annoyed or suddenly furious. Just watching. Curious. They had a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be able to outwait her. This was unusual; almost everyone else he had ever met in his life would get uncomfortable with his silences and then fill them, and he would be off the hook. Not this time.
“I didn’t fit in,” Fred finally said, surprising himself. “I never could quite get why people did what they did. I didn’t understand them. Or, I just couldn’t think fast enough. So everything was kind of mysterious. And, and, and… disturbing. So then, in my math classes, I could understand things. Things were clear. Like algebra. I liked algebra. Everything balanced out. And I could see things in geometry. Trig was geometry as processed by algebra, so I liked that too. Calculus was easy.”
She laughed. “That’s not a sentence you hear very often.”
“No, it’s easy. And then there was a little introductory unit on quantum mechanics, kind of to dispense with it and move on. And what the professor said about it was so weird and, and—and unlikely, that I got into it. It was interesting.”
“So that’s your biography? A list of your math classes?”
“I guess so.”
“What else did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what else did you do! In your life! Sports? Music? Theater? Dance? Travel? Friends? Romances?”
“No,” Fred said. That sounded a little extreme, all by itself, and so he added: “I mean, I had some friends.”
“Okay, good. That’s a start. Are you still in touch with them?”
“No.”
“Wow.” She stared at him. “You were a real geek.”
Fred sighed. “That’s one name people use.”
“What, there are others?”
Fred glanced at her, looked back at the floor. “You know there are.”
“What, like what?”
“Just saying it repeats it,” he said, swallowing hard.
“Really? That bad?”
He shrugged. “To think you’re a person, and then be told you’re a symptom? A diagnosis?”
She considered him. “Welcome to the world,” she suggested.
“Well I don’t like it,” he muttered. Then he added, more bitterly: “As if anyone knows. As if they know anything about it.”
She stared at him for a while. “I think I know what you mean. So, you suffered the slings and arrows of youthful geekdom.”
Fred nodded. Trying to remember: but in fact he was better at not remembering. “I guess so. But quantum mechanics gave me a way to—to do something. I could do the equations, I mean it’s a math, just like any other math, not that hard compared to some maths, but the results—or what the equations suggest about reality, because they work—it’s so counterintuitive. So bizarre compared to what we see in our sensory world, that, I don’t know. I found it interesting. And not everyone gets it. It’s not that hard as a math, but it is hard as a thing to understand. Like impossible. So I pursued it, and now, there’s more and more technology that is quantum mechanical. Including secure communications tech, which a lot of people want. So it’s a… it’s a way.”
“A way? To make a living?”
“A way.”
“A way?”
“Just a way. A way to be.”
“Like Daoism.”