The Cipher

by John C. Ford

  Smiles had given up on the nerd-school idea after drawing up one lesson plan (“Acne: Know Your Enemy”), but he was still holding out hope for his ultimate project: getting Ben a girlfriend. Smiles mulled over strategy as he wandered to the card table. On the wall above, Ben had taped an official-looking letter from some big-shot journal called The Annals of Mathematics, which had accepted one of Ben’s math papers for publication. Smiles desperately wanted to make a joke about how it sounded dirty, but he figured Ben wouldn’t appreciate it.

  “So, you nervous about meeting with those spies?” he said.

  Ben had told Smiles that he had to get some kind of government agents to clear his article before it could even get published. All top-secret and everything. That’s why Ben was going to the conference—to meet with the agents about his article.

  “They’re not spies,” Ben said. “They’re just some guys from the NSA.”

  “The NSA,” Smiles repeated, not wanting to ask.

  “The National Security Agency. They do cryptography.”

  “Umm-hm. Cryptography.”

  “Code-breaking,” Ben said, his voice bored now. He hadn’t even looked up from his books.

  “So what do you have in that paper, anyway—state secrets?”

  “It’s nothing special. All high-level work in cryptography has to be screened before it gets published.”

  Ben was playing it off, but Smiles knew the truth: The kid was a mad genius.

  Melanie’s reply buzzed through his cell: “In trig. Hang in there—see you tonight.”

  Tonight. Why she had agreed to come over tonight, Smiles wasn’t exactly sure. Probably to give him the ax—or, knowing Melanie, maybe she was just being nice. Either way he had to make the most of it. Smiles figured he should probably clean up his place, or at least make a dent in his mountain of laundry. Just the thought of tackling it made him tired.

  “Seriously, man, how do you live without a stereo?” he said, flipping through some of Ben’s mail and other papers.

  Ben just grunted.

  “You need some music in your life. It’s healthy.” Smiles was just talking to himself, like he did regularly here. It was nice to have someone there to hear you, though. Ben was like having a cat, Smiles thought as he read a crinkled flier from a place called the Clay Mathematics Institute.

  MILLENNIUM PRIZE PROBLEM CHALLENGE it said at the top, and underneath—

  Holy shit. They had seven math problems there, and they were giving away $1 million if you figured any of them out.

  “Dude,” he barked so that Ben wouldn’t ignore him this time. “Are you trying to solve these?” Smiles waved the flier at him.

  Ben turned around. “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  “I don’t know. They’re hard.”

  “I hope so, for a million bucks.” Smiles read some more. Ben had circled one of the problems in pen. It was called the Riemann Hypothesis, and it appeared to be the granddaddy of them all. Something to do with prime numbers. Smiles was pretty sure his dad’s system—his special encryption technique—was based on prime numbers, too.

  “So come on—are you doing this or not?” Smiles said.

  “Put it away, Smiles. Just leave it.”

  “God, that’d be pretty sweet to make a million dollars off a math problem.”

  “Just leave it.”

  No, he wasn’t always the friendliest dude. He got moody like this, and sometimes he’d just kick Smiles right out of his apartment. Ben had mentioned once that he was a borderline Asperger’s case—which as far as Smiles understood meant you were, like, actually medically diagnosed as a nerd—and he chalked up most of his strange behavior to the mental disease thing. Smiles knew that Ben didn’t mean to be harsh; he was just too wrapped up in his brainy projects. Feisty and wise: He wasn’t a cat, he was like a modern-day Yoda.

  “Don’t get all pissy.” Smiles carried the flier over to the desk and swiveled the notebook toward him. “Are you working on it now?”

  Ben tugged the notebook back. He sighed again, much heavier this time, staring at a blank spot on the desk while he spoke. “If I promise to gamble with you,” he said, “will you let me work?”

  Smiles threw up his hands. “Say no more. Work away. Tomorrow we ride!”

  Smiles went across to his apartment, happy as he’d been all day.

  13

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK on the nose, Melanie appeared at his door holding a huge plastic container filled with water. Something dark was coiled at the bottom. Smiles recognized it immediately.

  “Oh my God, Mel.”

  It was the best birthday gift he had ever gotten.

  Five minutes later, the dragon eel slipped into Smiles’s 120-gallon tank, which had been sitting vacant since Virgil the barracuda bit it two weeks ago. The dragon eel had these fearsome little horns, and black and orange stripes across its body that a tattoo artist couldn’t have drawn any better. The thing was a genuine beast, more than a foot long. It squirmed and settled around some fake coral.

  “He’ll be shy for a while,” Smiles said, “until he gets used to it.”

  Melanie watched, her green eyes transfixed. Smiles understood—sometimes he just stared at his fish for hours before he realized a whole afternoon had passed. But now, he couldn’t help staring at Melanie.

  She didn’t have freckles anymore, but you could still see the tomboy. In a month she would have a tan from cross-country practice. Her face was all elegant lines—sharp cheekbones, defined lips, the long curve of her eyebrows. Melanie was smokin’ and she didn’t even know it.

  “Oh, look,” she whispered. The eel stirred along the bottom, churning the fluorescent pebbles like flakes in a snow globe.

  Smiles watched her watching the eel, and his chest caved a little. They were leaning in so close he could smell her. Clean sheets and spring mornings. Maybe it was just her shampoo. Who cared—the familiar scent lit up his brain receptors like the Fourth of July.

  They made eye contact, and all of a sudden he was just doing it: dipping his head and drawing toward her. Kissing her. Tender but intense, soft but electric.

  After a while, Melanie broke it off. “Umm, wow . . . Look . . . I don’t know—”

  “Oh . . . no, I’m sorry . . . I just . . .”

  Melanie had made it clear that they weren’t together at the moment, and it looked like she was hitting about 9.5 on the freak-o-meter right now.

  “Well, guess I did all right with the present,” Melanie said perkily, trying to laugh it away.

  Then, “Don’t worry about it, it’s okay.”

  And then, after a long minute of staring at the eel together, “What was that text about anyway?”

  His text. About the letter.

  Smiles wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it anymore. Maybe Mr. Hunt was right—the letter was toast, and it might be best to give up on it.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” It was already inching its way out of his mind, carting itself off to the trash heap of failed ventures he’d tossed away over the years (making varsity lacrosse at Kingsley; fronting an alt-metal band; seducing Ms. Callan, his ninth-grade math teacher).

  “Tell me,” Melanie said. She slipped the palm of her hand into his, patting it on top.

  Smiles decided he should probably talk about something before he went on another mad kissing spree. “Well, get this. I went to see your dad this morning.”

  He told her about the message from his mom, and the “package,” and how her dad had destroyed the letter at his dad’s direction. They sat on the couch, with Lake Jägermeister on the carpet between them. Smiles hadn’t been able to get it all out yet.

  The more he talked, the more Smiles missed his mom. This letter thing was stirring up the pain, like the rocks in his tank. There was comfort in the hurt, though. He wanted
that bed of memories; he wanted those bits of her.

  “Smiles . . .” Melanie hesitated.

  “Yeah? What do you think?”

  She gave him a quizzical look. “It’s just that . . .”

  Smiles waited for her to continue, but she just sat there, doing a kind of tilted-head thing. It reminded him of his frustrating conversation with Mr. Hunt earlier in the day. Was this something genetic? Were the Hunts programmed to turn gooey and useless at critical moments in Smiles’s life?

  “C’mon, Mel, just say it.”

  “Well, don’t you think . . . don’t you think that it . . .”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you think the message could be from your birth mother?”

  17

  WAS IT POSSIBLE?

  Could he really not see it?

  Could he really not see the blazingly obvious truth?

  “Oh,” Smiles said. “I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought.”

  Of course it was from his birth mother.

  His stepmom, Rose, had had no reason to leave Smiles some kind of weird letter/time bomb, set to explode on his eighteenth birthday. You’d only arrange that kind of thing if you knew you weren’t going to be around. Rose didn’t know that—she hadn’t known she was going to die in that accident.

  She wasn’t a coward who couldn’t face up to something she’d done. The letter was probably an apology his birth mother was too scared to make in person.

  Smiles stared absently at the aquarium. In all their years together, he had brought up his birth mother only once. They were still small, ten or eleven, and Smiles had told her he’d tracked down her address. Her name was Alice. She was a mathematician like his father, and Smiles had discovered she was working at a think tank on the West Coast. They were up in Smiles’s room when he showed her an envelope containing a letter he’d written to her. Melanie still had a sharp memory of her young self in Smiles’s room, sitting cross-legged on his Patriots comforter, wondering how awkward it would be to write a letter to a mother who had discarded you.

  Through the envelope, she could see the messy scrawl of his handwriting. The square dark blot in the middle was a school picture he’d included for her. He’d sent the letter more than a week earlier. It had already been postmarked, sent to California, and come back. A handwritten note near the stamp said Return to Sender.

  Melanie hadn’t understood at first. “She’s not there anymore?”

  Smiles had shaken his head. “It’s her handwriting,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”

  He’d never brought up Alice again.

  “Do you have a number for her?” Melanie asked now. She grabbed his phone from a pile of Xbox games just in case.

  Smiles only shrugged. “I never looked for her again, after she returned that letter. I didn’t even try to find her when my dad got sick.” He seemed disappointed with himself, and Melanie felt another surge of anger at the woman who had made him feel this way.

  “C’mon,” she said, “we’ll hop on your computer. Maybe she’s still at the same place. And California is three hours behind, so—”

  Melanie stopped. She had triggered something in Smiles.

  “What is it?”

  “Probably nothing,” he said, “but . . . where is area code 510?”

  He brought out his cell phone and showed her a record of two missed calls from a 510 number. “They came in this morning.”

  Melanie had no clue where 510 was, but it couldn’t hurt to try. “Call it.”

  She pinched her lip between her teeth as he contemplated the screen. And then he pressed the “call back” button. The tinny sound of a ringing line came through as Smiles drifted to his bedroom, the cell to his ear. Melanie followed on light feet to the doorway.

  Smiles sunk to his bed, just a box spring and mattress lying on the floor. The sheets lay across it in a great swirl, a radar image of a hurricane. Even from the doorway, Melanie could hear the voice answering the call. She couldn’t make out words, but there was something sharp in the delivery. It sounded female enough.

  Smiles paused a moment. Melanie thought he might lose his nerve and hang up. She gripped the doorjamb with an unconscious intensity.

  “Hello?” Smiles said. “Is this Alice Smylie?”

  Silence for a moment, and then a muted reply. Smiles continued: “This is Rob Smylie. Your son, I think.”

  I think. It was heartbreaking. Melanie realized she’d cracked a nail and forced her hand away from the door frame.

  Smiles nodded and then started again. “I, uh, well, you know Mr. Hunt? I was talking to him today and he told me there was a letter that you’d left for me. And a notebook of some kind. I’m not sure I really understood, but anyway I was wondering—”

  A longer burst of sound, but now the voice had a note of finality in it.

  “Well, okay, but I mean the whole thing was just a little confusing. You did write the letter, then?”

  Silence, and then another clipped sentence from the other end.

  “Maybe you could just tell me about it then? ’Cause it turns out Mr. Hunt actually threw away the letter. It’s sort of a long story, but my dad’s kinda sick and—”

  A louder, longer response. Smiles’s head made a slow bow of defeat to the carpet. Melanie wanted to throttle this woman. She couldn’t take it anymore, and worse, she felt like she was invading Smiles’s privacy. If she could pick up the line and demand some answers, she would. But she couldn’t, so she did the only decent thing she could think of and retreated to the living room.

  Melanie waited for five minutes there, looking beyond the gurgling fish tanks to the low clouds turning to Creamsicles in the sunset. The murmured pleadings she heard in Smiles’s voice pained her ears.

  Since she had last been to his place, a number of golf ball–sized pocks had appeared in the living room drywall. Her shoes rested on a gigantic purple stain in the carpet with dried chunks of paper towel all over the place. Smiles had parties during the week, attended, she imagined, by people he met out at the bars who liked the idea of hanging out with Robert Smylie’s son for a night. It worried her. She wondered what happened here at night during the week but never asked. Chalk up another thing she wanted to change about herself.

  She was sitting on the battered blue sofa that Smiles had found in the trash area on the day he got his keys. On the wall facing her was the seventy-two-inch plasma.

  The obscene hunk of black plastic was shrieking everything she didn’t like about Smiles. She wasn’t comfortable here. And still she knew why she had come tonight. She knew why she had confused him with her birthday gift, and why she’d kissed him back by the aquarium. If she had the list right now, she would have written: Pro: I glow for him. Ridiculous, but I do.

  The bedroom door opened. Smiles pocketed his cell on the way out, looking haunted.

  “Smiles . . . what did she say?”

  “Do you want to eat?”

  He was avoiding it, of course, but she hated seeing him like this.

  “Kabobs?” she said. Smiles loved the smelly kabob joint across the street.

  He took her hand on the way out. He almost never did it, and she could have cried at the tender offering.

  The kabob place was the size of a matchbox. It had two tiny booths, and the air was thick with a smell of lamb that stuck to your clothes for days afterward. The grease had yellowed the walls and penetrated a picture frame above them, warping a poster of Cyprus. They ate in silence, scrunched side by side in the booth. Melanie was thankful when Smiles prepared to speak.

  “It was her, you were right.” He was a fast eater and had finished already. He wiped his hands on tissue-thin napkins.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She said it was for the best that I didn’t read the letter.”

  Melanie groaned.

 
“What?” Smiles said.

  His harsh tone took her aback. He hardly ever spoke like that.

  “I just . . . I think you deserve to know what it said.”

  Smiles shrugged. “What could she say that’s important now? Whatever—it’s over.”

  Melanie chewed, savoring the extra time to think of how to advance this conversation. It suddenly felt like a minefield. “But after what she did to you—”

  “I don’t care what she did to me. I had the best mom I could want.”

  “I know. It’s just, like, accountability or something.”

  “I’m not gonna play judge. I’m not gonna force anybody to deal with me if they don’t want to.” After a while he added, “Anyway, she said my mom knew about the letter.”

  “Rose?”

  “Yeah, Rose. You know—my mom.” He was angry now, like Melanie had been insulting the memory of the woman who raised him.

  “Right, sorry.” Melanie felt like she couldn’t win here. What was she supposed to do, call them Mom One and Mom Two? “But I mean, what does it matter that Rose knew about it?”