Life After Genius (21 page)

Mead chews faster.

“Whatever setback has fallen upon you, I’m sure it isn’t insurmountable. It’s the one thing you didn’t learn in my school: how to handle a setback and move on. The situation just never presented itself.”

And faster.

“I suppose it’s harder now than it would’ve been had it happened to you at an earlier age, if you’d already developed the skill to rebound. But it’s not too late, Mead, it’s never too late. If you’d like someone to talk to, someone to help you through this, I’d like to be that person.”

Mead slams down his fork. “All right,” he says, “I’ve heard quite enough. I’m leaving now.” And he stands up.

His mother stands up too, and grabs his sunburned arm. Mead cringes in pain.

“Teddy, please, if you won’t talk to me or your father, at least talk to Principal Jeavons. Let someone help you.”

“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want his help or your help or anyone else’s help. That’s what got me into this mess in the first place. Too much help.”

“What mess, Teddy? Tell me.”

He pulls free of her grip. “I don’t want to be me anymore. I’m tired of being a genius. I quit.”

“You can’t quit, Teddy, that’s who you are.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s what you turned me into. I just want to be normal, another overlooked face in the crowd.”

“You don’t mean that, Teddy.”

“You know what your problem is, Mother? You’re a lousy listener. You have no idea who I am or what I want because you’re too busy telling me what
you
want. Always dispensing unwanted advice. Well, I’ve got some advice for you: Leave me alone.” And he stomps down the hall to his bedroom and slams the door.

F
LOORBOARDS CREAK, WAKING MEAD UP
. He rolls over and the six-legged creature is sitting there in the dark, staring at him. “Go away,” he says.

“Look at you,” it answers. “You’re pathetic.” But its voice has changed. It no longer belongs to his mother. It’s deeper. Male. The creature leans forward, causing a shaft of moonlight to fall across its face. A bearded face. Mead sits up in bed and rubs his eyes. He must be dreaming, or maybe he is suffering from sunstroke, because sitting there in the straight-backed chair next to his bed is none other than Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann.

“Have you read my dissertation on complex function theory?” he asks.

“Yes,” Mead answers, his heart suddenly racing. “Several times. It’s brilliant.”

“Sure. You say that now. Everyone says that now. But it received very little attention back when I first wrote it. Gauss was the only one who got excited about it. A brilliant man, Gauss. You do know who he is, don’t you?”

“Carl Friedrich Gauss. Of course. He’s only the greatest mathematician to have ever lived. I mean, aside from you, sir.”

“The man was a fool.”

Mead sits up straighter. “A fool? How can you say that? Why, he discovered the Prime Number Theorem, not to mention the Method of Least Squares.”

“Neither of which he published, leaving other men to take the credit.”

“What’s your point?” Mead says, suddenly feeling defensive.

“I think you know what my point is, Mead.”

“No, I don’t. It’s not the same, not even close. Gauss didn’t care whether or not he got published, he didn’t care about getting credit. All he cared about was the work.”

“And what do you care about, Mead?”

Bernhard Riemann is starting to get on Mead’s nerves, annoying him as much as his mother. Is there no limit to the reach of that woman’s influence? The junior high principal, that’s one thing, but how she managed to dredge a man up from the grave and convince him to hassle her son is beyond comprehension. “Go away,” Mead says, and rolls over so his back is to the nineteenth-century mathematician. How dare he come in here with all his holier-than-thou crap. As if he knows the first thing about the way life is nowadays. It’s a different time. A new century. Everything is much more cutthroat now. The man doesn’t know shit. He publishes an outrageous theory and then leaves it to his fellow mathematicians to test its veracity. Talk about your big ego. Bernhard Riemann has been laughing at them all for a hundred and thirty years, watching an endless procession of men squirm as they attempt to prove or disprove his theory. Except that Mead almost has. Or at least thinks he has. Maybe that’s why the dead man is here. Not to hassle Mead but to tell him that he is on the right path. That he has all but solved the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of the twentieth century. To congratulate him. After all, who would know better than the man himself? It would make all the difference in the world, just to know, to get confirmation directly from the source. To hell with the dean and Dr. Kustrup and especially to hell with Herman. Mead doesn’t need to get published. The only person from whom he really needs to get recognition is the man who wrote the theorem in the first place: Bernhard Riemann.

With chills running up and down his spine, Mead rolls back over to face the great mathematician. To ask Bernhard Riemann if he is on the right track. To get the validation he so desperately needs. But it’s too late; the man is gone.

H
EADLIGHTS SWEEP ACROSS THE FRONT LAWN
as a pickup truck turns the corner and pulls to a stop at the curb. The passenger door swings open and Mead crawls in next to Lenny. “What happened to you?” he says and offers Mead a cup of take-out coffee. “Looks like someone stuck you under the broiler and then headed off to bed.”

“It was something like that,” Mead says and pushes the cup away, unable to bear the heat of it. Unable to bear his clothes that feel like sandpaper against his skin.

From his perch behind the steering wheel, Uncle Martin glances past Lenny at his nephew, then puts the truck into gear and pulls away from the curb. Third-degree burns from head to toe and Mead barely gets a nod of recognition.

The streets of High Grove are deserted in the predawn hours, streetlamps twinkling like stars through the branches of the trees. But already the air is warm, a precursor to a hot day. The mere thought of the sun makes Mead wince with pain. At least he’ll be sitting in the shade all day.

They exit High Grove and head north on the state road. Houses and trees drop away like a curtain to expose the surrounding landscape. Flat as a pancake. Mead cannot see it but he can feel it. The openness. The lights more distant now. Stars no bigger than pin-dots in the black sky. It’s one of the few things he missed about High Grove when he was in Chicago: the stars. Sometimes, walking back to the dorm after dark, he would look up at the pattern of lit windows on the skyscrapers and pretend they were stars. He even fashioned a name for the constellation glowing from the Sears Tower.
Nachlass.
A German word used to connote unpublished papers found among a scholar’s personal effects after his death. Like the ones now lying under glass in the Göttingen Library that had been found in Bernhard Riemann’s home. Like the ones in the green-and-blue plaid suitcase shoved under Mead’s bed.
Nachlass.

A pair of green eyes looms up from the middle of the road and Martin brakes hard. Mead has to brace his arms against the dashboard to keep from sailing through the front windshield and it sends a jolt of pain through his entire crisped body. God forbid his uncle should drive a truck with working seat belts, his son barely three months in the ground after passing through a windshield to his own untimely death. If this truck ever had any belts, they’ve been decades lost beneath the seat cushions along with who knows how many other things Mead would rather not touch with his bare fingers. Lenny grabs the dashboard too, while trying to hold on to two cups of coffee. One of the lids pops off and the contents of the cup spill all over the front of Mead’s slacks.

“Shit,” Mead says, thankful that the coffee isn’t piping hot. “Jesus, Uncle Martin, why didn’t you just run over it? Then we could’ve just skipped the hunt, called it a day, and gone back home.”

The engine goes dead and the headlights shut off. Martin turns in his seat and really looks at Mead for the first time all morning. “Hunting is not about killing,” he says. “So if that’s the reason you came along, you best open that door and get out.”

Mead thinks about it. He thinks about opening the passenger door, getting out, and walking back to town in the pitch dark in his coffee-stained pants. He thinks about crawling back into bed and burying his head under the sheets. Then he thinks about the six-legged creature, breathing down his neck all day.

“Death is the goal of the hunt,” Mead says, “not the hunter. I know, Uncle Martin. I haven’t forgotten.”

They remain in the dark. The three of them inside the truck like sitting ducks in the middle of the road. Mead almost wishes an eighteen-wheeler would come barreling around the corner and run the lot of them over. Put them out of their communal misery. But there’s no speeding truck, just the sound of a songbird singing in a new day. It’s a happy song, like a movement in an opera that presages a change for the better. A hint that something good is about to happen onstage, the tides about to turn, the worst behind us. Hope on the horizon and all that crap. Only this isn’t an opera, it’s real life.

Uncle Martin restarts the truck, which drowns out the songbird. He turns on the headlights and proceeds up the road.

T
WELVE. THAT’S HOW OLD MEAD WAS
the fall his uncle got it in his head to turn his nephew into a man by teaching him how to hunt. The year he went out and bought the young genius a shotgun for his birthday.

“A hunt is not a fight.” And so began Uncle Martin’s lecture on the philosophy of hunting, one that he would repeat over and over again like a sermon in church. “It assumes an inequality. A predator and his prey. One having a distinct advantage over the other. But it isn’t a slaughter either. A hunt also assumes the prey has one distinct advantage over his opponent and that is his instinct, the very aspect of the hunt that draws man to it. A chance to return to his atavistic roots, to throw off all the stresses of his modern-day life. To banish reason in favor of instinct. To act instead of think.” And like so many of the sermons in church, it bore little significance to Mead’s young life.

“The best hunters learn from their prey,” Martin said, “by mimicking them. To successfully hunt a rabbit, you will first have to learn how to think like one. To be quiet. To make no assumptions. And to look everywhere always. These are the three dictums of hunting.”

And as if enduring the lecture wasn’t bad enough, putting it into play was even worse. Boring beyond belief. Sitting in one spot for hours upon hours with no end in sight and yet remaining alert the whole time. Trying not to let his mind wander. Trying not to become so distracted by his thoughts that he could no longer see what was directly in front of him. But the young Mead failed. Over and over again. Got lost in his own thoughts until he was startled back into his surroundings when his uncle’s shotgun went off. The only reason Mead even put on the bright orange vest, the double-twill pants, and the steel-toed boots was to see the look of horror on his mother’s face. Her genius son suddenly transformed into a country hick. It was the best part of his uncle’s present, that look on her face. Worth every chigger bite, bee sting, and poison ivy rash Mead had to endure as a result of tromping through cornfields after his uncle just so they could sit under a copse of trees for hours on end and wait.

That, plus the time he got to spend with his cousin.

M
ARTIN TURNS OFF THE STATE ROAD ONTO
a rutted lane that runs between two cornfields that are chock full of rabbits multiplying faster than the corn can grow. The farmer who owns this land is more than happy to have as many as possible of them taken off his hands. Martin follows the lane to the end and parks under an oak tree. Then gets out of the truck, hops up onto the flatbed, and unlocks a metal box. After pulling on a neon-orange hunting vest, he tosses one at Mead. “God knows if you even need to wear it, looking as red as you do,” he says, then lifts out a Remington 870 Special Field. A twenty-gauge single-shot. “You do remember how to load one of these, don’t you?”

Mead takes the shotgun from his uncle and breaks it open with a flick of his wrist. He used to love doing that in front of his mother: breaking the shotgun open and then snapping it shut again in the middle of her kitchen. Like John Wayne. Like a wild-west hero. Just so he could hear her say, “Get that damned thing out of here before you kill somebody.” Which wasn’t going to happen because it wasn’t loaded. Shot shells were like gold and Uncle Martin was the gold keeper, parceling out nuggets of it on a need-only basis. As he does now. Martin hands Mead a No. 6 shot shell loaded with 280 pellets, only three of which are necessary to kill a rabbit. Death might not be the goal of the hunter, but the odds weigh pretty heavily against any other outcome.

P
ERCY WAS FIFTEEN THAT FALL
, when he tapped Mead on the shoulder and gestured with his hand for his cousin to follow him. Mead glanced across the cornfield to where his uncle and Lenny had hunkered down with their rifles and coolers: two bright spots of orange in a sea of dying cornstalks. Proof that rabbits are color-blind. Mead made a mental note of it, thinking that perhaps he would pursue the idea further in his next science project, then stood up and followed his cousin.

Percy lead him through a copse of trees to a neighboring field, set down his shotgun, and started doing push-ups. Mead glanced around to make sure his uncle and Lenny were completely out of sight, then set down his own shotgun and dug an algebra book out of his backpack as his cousin flipped over and started doing sit-ups.

“I have ten hats that cost $47.50 for all of them,” Mead said. “How much will I have to sell each hat for to make a profit of a dollar on each?”

“I don’t know,” Percy answered as he pulled his elbows to his knees and then laid back down again. “How much?”

“Set it up in an algebraic expression letting
y
represent the answer and then solve for
y.
”

Percy got up and started running in place, lifting his knees as high as they would go with each step. “I gotta tell you, cousin, I don’t really give a damn how much you charge for your goddamned hats, I don’t even wear one.”