“Dad says it’s like you got dropped off in a foreign country and only know bits of the language.”
“I wouldn’t know. I only know how I feel. I’ve never felt any other way.”
She assessed me like I was an experiment: “I’d say that’s not exactly true. I’d say you know the language. You just have to speak it your own way.”
“That’s an intriguing interpretation. Maybe.”
She sighed. “I’d do anything for a normal brother.” And then she bounced off her bed and went to watch TV at too loud a volume.
We’ve never understood each other. Haniya is charming, articulate, funny, and socially adept, and at school she made it clear that I should not acknowledge her in the hallways. In February of my freshman year at MIT when I was pulled from the Charles River and my mother and father came to stay with me, I was surprised that Haniya came as well. When our father was diagnosed she decided to transfer closer to home to help take care of him, but I made no offer to return to Michigan myself, for which I knew she resented me. Whatever difficulties my sister and mother experienced during Haniya’s rebellious youth, they were memories by then. The two of them grew close during his illness, while I’d never felt more remote. It was a difficult time.
For over a year, I could sense my mother’s terror at Papa’s impending death. They’d wedded in India as teenagers, and she’d followed him to Michigan, USA, through med school, two children (one of whom was nonverbal for four years), and a cancer diagnosis. Haniya could weep with her and console her, whereas I was no comfort. I simply did not have the capacity to help her grieve. By my father’s deathbed, I’d stood aside while Haniya held our mother’s hand, and I felt as if I shouldn’t be in the room. As cancerous cells destroyed his body’s capacity to maintain brain function, she asked me:
“Ashir, you’ll pray with us?”
“I don’t see the purpose.”
She begged me: “Just try. And Allah will come to you.”
This bored me, and I left. My father’s sickness has been the nadir of our relationship. Many-sided chance makes it outrageous for us to accept the possibility of just one cold life. How to explain to her that those relentless cells in my father’s pancreas were just a matter of math? No intervention, no respite, no miracle would be forthcoming. The universe was written in equations, and so was my father’s adenocarcinoma, a statistical probability infused into the cells of a macroscopic lesion. That was the only Truth. Just as the number 12 exists not because we call it “twelve” but because 12 is actually True and a mystical fairy wizard coming down from the sky to save a sixty-two-year-old doctor because his family is unprepared for his entropy is Bullshit. Haniya later called to berate me: “I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe, Ash, but stop sharing your fucking diagnosis of the human condition with Mumma.”
When I returned to Boston after that trip, Peter invited me over to watch basketball. Rachel was there, curled into him on the couch like the logarithmic spiral of a nautilus shell. As soon as I came through the door her head popped off his chest. She found an excuse to leave, as she often did. I knew I made her uncomfortable, but I was very grateful to be alone with Peter. I realized he was the only person whose presence actually comforted me.
We did not talk about my father’s illness at all. We simply watched the Cleveland Cavaliers play the Boston Celtics while Peter prattled away soothingly. At one point, LeBron James caught a pass on the wing with two seconds left on the shot clock. He spun away from a double team and launched a difficult fadeaway jumper. Yet his arm was a perfect sixty-degree angle with his ear (the real secret to shooting technique), and the ball fell softly through the basket with that sensuous whipping sound. He ambled back on defense. Peter howled:
“Bron-bron! What a freak show. What a fucking cyborg. We should put him in one of those prison cells where they keep Magneto.”
My father died two months later.
Peter and I had been disappointed that the Sports Almanac barely broke even for the 2014–2015 season. It predicted the lines with 51 percent accuracy, which is not worth betting on.
As my father’s illness worsened, I’d spent much of the following year avoiding communication with my family while trying to assess where I’d gone wrong with the model. It was in thinking of LeBron James and the few defenders in the league who could hope to disrupt his offensive potential that provided me with a succession of insights, beginning with the mathematical value of each player based on individual matchups. Though this sounds simple now, I was spending fourteen-hour days at my computers tinkering with the feeder models. By the end of this 2015–2016 season, the almanac had expelled a rather eerie data set. It forecasted nearly 62 percent of that season’s games correctly. That isn’t predicting the future, but it’s quite close, and both Peter and I were eager to make a test run of the Sports Almanac on several playoff series. He also very much wanted to return to the city where he’d experienced so much initial success. Unhappily, I had just landed in Las Vegas when I heard the news. As per custom, my father’s Janazah was supposed to be held within twenty-four hours. When I asked my mother to delay it a day so I could join Peter to go over the Almanac’s initial results, she grew very upset.
“You wish me to break this tradition so that you can watch silly games in Las Vegas?”
“I’ll still be attending. Papa is deceased, yes, but it need not interfere with my work.”
She replied with fury: “Work is a ridiculous word for what you do.”
Ultimately, she agreed to delay the services a day.
Immediately after checking in to the Mirage Hotel and Casino with its shrill, discomfiting window glass, Peter joined me in the lobby, Boston Bruins hat cocked to the side, clopping along in unlaced Nike high-tops. He’d been in Las Vegas for a week, placing bets based on the Sports Almanac, and we went to the sportsbook where he put an additional $10,000 on the Oklahoma City Thunder to break the 2–2 tie with San Antonio and win the series in six games. When Peter received his ticket, I felt a cheap thrill, not because of the bet but because of the work it reminded me of. It was the reason I had not wanted to fly to Michigan that night. The years spent building this model and taking Peter through it step-by-step have been profoundly psychologically satisfying. There are certain activities we pursue to attain a state of concentration, and those states of concentration are often more deeply enjoyable than the activities we’re indoctrinated to view as enjoyable. I cherish this sensation by thinking of my lowest moment: crossing the Harvard Bridge, and the twilight sky had given the water a blue-purple shade. I wonder about this in relation to the Zoloft my father forced me to take after he came to Boston. That chemical crutch took care of some of the worst entropic musings, but I felt fuzzy, brain-dead, and could achieve neither a sense of sadness nor enjoyment. I was forced to see one of the mental health professionals the university makes available, and I admit the young woman gave me many useful ideas: I took up running, traversing Boston’s gray-water bay in warm weather and a treadmill’s running belt during the winter. She also suggested I try writing as a way to work out anxiety, and while at first I found this activity onanistic, I managed to find a format that suited me, and experiments in the alien landscapes of simile and metaphor ensued, difficult yet strangely engaging and diverting. Still, all of this felt ephemeral, and those haunted feelings I always associate with the color mauve remained nearby and perpetually accessible. It was only in the past three years, working with Peter, in the grip of a project I found so fascinating, that the dawn-colored sensation receded nearly beyond my horizon.