Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  Then he left the apartment and caught the bus to the hospital.

  Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry.

  Ononeida, named for an Indian tribe that had once occupied Marthorn City, was accustomed to religious visions, and Carl Tremling was a mathematician, a group known for being eccentric. Ordinarily the hospital would not have admitted him at all. But Dr. Tremling had reacted to the toaster pastry with some violence, flinging furniture out of the apartment window and sobbing that there was dice being played with the universe after all, and that the center would not hold. A flung end-table, imitation Queen Anne, had hit the mailman, who was not seriously injured but was considerably perturbed. Carl Tremling was deemed a danger to others and possibly himself.

  A brain scan had failed to find temporal lobe epilepsy, the usual cause of religious visions. Dr. Tremling had continued to sob and to fling whatever furniture the orderlies were not quick enough to defend. Also, the psychiatrist on intake duty, who had recognized both the Einstein and Yeats quotes, was puzzled over the choice of Zeus as the toaster-pastry image. The usual thing was either Christ or the Virgin Mary.

  The commitment papers had been signed by Dr. Tremling’s sister, a sweet, dim, easily frightened woman who had never been comfortable with her brilliant brother but who was fond of Eliot. She was leaving the hospital as her nephew arrived.

  “Eliot! Are you alone?”

  “Yes, Aunt Sue.” In Susan Tremling Fisher’s mind, Eliot was perpetually nine instead of sixteen, and should not be riding buses alone. “How is he?”

  “The same.” She sighed. “Only they want to—he wants to—Eliot, are you eating enough? You look thinner.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You shouldn’t stay in that apartment alone. Anything could happen! Please come and stay with Uncle Ned and me, you know we’d love to have you and I hate to think of you alone in that big apartment without—”

  If Eliot didn’t stop her, she would start her Poor Motherless Lamb speech. “What does Dad want to do?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘They want to—he wants to’—so what do the doctors want to do?”

  She sighed again. “I wish I had your memory, Eliot. You get it from poor Carl. That doctor with the mustache, he wants to try some new procedure on Carl.”

  “What new procedure?”

  “I can’t recall the name …” She fumbled in her purse as if the name might be among the tissues and supermarket coupons.

  “Was it Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?”

  “Yes! The very words! Your memory, Eliot, I swear, your mother would have been so proud of—”

  Eliot grabbed her arm. “Are you going to let them operate? Are you?”

  “Why, Eliot! You’re hurting me!”

  He let go. “I’m sorry. But—you are going to let them operate, aren’t you?”

  Aunt Sue looked at him. She had small eyes of no particular color, and a little mouth that was pursing and unpursing in distress. But she was a Tremling. Into those small eyes came stubbornness, an unthinking but resolute stubbornness and yet somehow murky, like a muddy pool over bedrock. She said gently, “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Aunt Sue—”

  “Carl will come to himself eventually, Eliot. He’s had spells before, you know—why, just consider that time he shut himself up in my spare room for six days and wouldn’t even come out to eat! I had to bring him meals on a tray!”

  “He was working on his big breakthrough on the topography of knots!”

  “Not only would he not eat, he wouldn’t even wash. I had to air that room out for two days afterward, and in February. But Carl came out of that spell and he’ll come out of this one, too. You just wait and see.”

  “It’s not the same! Don’t you understand, his whole mental construct has been turned upside down!”

  “That’s exactly what he said when he came out of my spare room with those knot numbers,” she said triumphantly. “Knots! But even as a boy Carl took fits, why I remember when he was just eight years old and he found out that somebody named Girdle proved there were things you couldn’t prove, why that doesn’t even make common sense to—”

  “Aunt Sue! You have to sign the papers allowing this operation!”

  “No. I won’t. Eliot, you listen to me. I went online last night and read about this Memory Obligation Whatever. It’s new and it’s dangerous because the doctors don’t really know what they’re doing yet. In one case, after the operation a woman didn’t even remember who she was, or recognize her own children, or anything! In another case, a man could no longer read and—get this!—he couldn’t relearn how to do it, either! Something had just gone missing in his brain as a result of the operation. Imagine Carl unable to read! We can’t risk—”

  Eliot was no longer listening. He’d known Aunt Sue all his life; she wasn’t going to budge. He barreled down the hall and rattled the door to the ward, which was of course locked. An orderly wielding a mop peered at him through the reinforced glass and pantomimed pressing the call button.

  “Yes?” said the disembodied voice of a nurse. Eliot recognized it.

  “Mary, I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

  “Oh, Eliot, I’m glad you came just now, your father is quiet and—”

  “I don’t want to see my father! I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

  “He’s not here, dear. I’ll just buzz you in.”

  Mary came out of the nurse’s station to meet him. Middle-aged, kind, motherly, she radiated the kind of brisk competence that Eliot admired, and had seen so little of in his own disordered household. Or at least he would have admired it if it weren’t for the motherliness. She saw him not as the intellectual he knew himself to be, but rather as the skinny, short, floppy-haired kid he seemed to be. He was smarter than Mary, smarter than Aunt Sue, smarter than most of the world, so why the hell couldn’t the world notice that?

  “I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

  “He’s not on the ward, dear.”

  “Call him!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Eliot, you seem upset.”

  “I am upset! Isn’t my father going to have SMON-R? Because my aunt wouldn’t sign the papers?”

  Motherliness gave way to professionalism. “You know I can’t discuss this with you.”

  No one would discuss anything with Eliot. He didn’t count. The rational world didn’t count, not in here. Eliot glared at Mary, who gazed calmly back. He said, “I’ll sign them! I will!”

  “You’re underage, Eliot. And your father is non compos mentis. Did you come to visit? He’s in the day room. But if you’re going to upset him, it might be better if you chose another time to visit.”

  Eliot bolted past her and ran into the day room.

  His father was not flinging furniture. He slumped inert in a chair, staring at the TV, which showed a rerun of Jeopardy. Eliot groaned. His father had published papers in scientific journals, developed algorithms for high-resolution space imagery, had a promising lead on actually solving the Riemann Hypothesis. He did not watch Jeopardy. This was the anti-psychotic drugs, not the real Carl Tremling. Everything the hospital was doing was just making the situation worse.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hey, Eliot.”

  Alex Trebek said, “The tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Just fine.” But he frowned. “Only I can’t quite … there was something …”

  Something. There were a lot of somethings. There was rational thought, and logical progressions, and the need to restore a man’s proper intellect.

  Someone on the TV said, “What is ‘inertia’?”

  “Zeus,” Dr. Tremling brought out triumphantly. “Who would have believed—”
All at once his face sagged from underneath, like a pie crust cooling. “Who would have believed …” His face crumpled and he clutched Eliot’s sleeve. “It’s real, Eliot! It’s loose in the world and nothing that I thought was true—”

  “It was a toaster pastry, Dad!”

  Three patients slowly swiveled their heads at Eliot’s raised voice. He lowered it. “Listen to me. Please listen to me. The doctors want to do a procedure on you called Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing. It will remove the memory of the … the incident from your mind. Only Aunt Sue—”

  “Where’s the pig?” Dr. Tremling said.

  Eliot rocked back and forth with frustration. “Even if Aunt Sue won’t sign the papers, if you can seem reasonably lucid—in compos mentis—then—”

  “I asked you to bring the pig!”

  “It’s broken!”

  Dr. Tremling stared at Eliot. Then he threw back his head and howled at the ceiling. Two orderlies, a nurse, and four patients sprang to attention. Dr. Tremling rose, overcoming the inertia of his drugs, and picked up his chair. His face was a mask of grief. “It isn’t true. Nothing I believed is true! The universe—Zeus—dice—”

  Eliot shouted, “It was just a fucking toaster pastry!”

  “I needed that pig!” He flung the chair at the wall. Orderlies rushed forward.

  Nurse Mary grabbed Eliot and hustled him out of the room. “I told you not to upset him!”

  “I didn’t upset him, you did, by not giving him what he needs! Do you know how finely balanced a mathematician’s brain is, how prone to obsessions already, and it needs to be clear to—you’re refusing to remove a tumor from his brain!”

  “Your father does not have a brain tumor, and you need to leave now,” Mary said, hustling him down the hallway.

  A male voice said, “I’ll take scientific terms for 400, Alex.”

  “It’s his brain!” Eliot shouted. He meant: My brain, and he knew it, and the knowledge made him even angrier.

  Mary got him to the door of the ward, keyed in a code to unlock it, and waved him through. As he stalked off, she called after him, “Eliot? Dear? Do you have enough money for the bus home?”

  Eliot’s parents had met at college, where both studied mathematics. Even though Eliot’s mother was not beautiful, there were few girls in the graduate math program, and she was sought after by every mathematician with enough social skills to approach her, including two of the professors. Her own social skills lacked coherence, but something in Carl Tremling appealed to her. She emailed her bewildered mother, “There is a boy here I think I like. He’s interested in nothing but algorithms and pigs.” Carl, who had grown up in farm country, had a theory that pigs were much smarter than other animals and deserved respect.

  Fuming on the bus, Eliot wondered why his father had wanted the ceramic pig. Did he have a premonition that in its artificial pink wrinkles he might see Hermes, god of mathematics? Aphrodite? His dead wife? How could his mind have so betrayed Carl Tremling? Eliot wanted his father back, and in his own mind.

  Eliot’s mind was so much like his father’s. Everybody said so.

  “Fuck,” he said aloud, which caused a man to glare at him across the bus aisle and a woman to change her seat. Embarrassed, Eliot pulled out his school tablet.

  Memory, he wrote, is a bridge between what you are today and what you were for all the days before that. All your life you go back and forth across that bridge, extending and reinforcing it. You add a new strut. You hang flower pots on the railing. You lay down kitty litter during icy weather. You chase away the kids who are smoking pot on top of the pilings and under the roadway. Then one day, a section of the bridge gives way. When that happens, it is criminal to not repair it. An unrepaired bridge is like a deep pothole on a dark road and—

  Two metaphors. This was not working. And it was due Tuesday.

  The man across the aisle was still watching him. Probably thought that Eliot was some sort of gang-affiliated punk. Well, no, not that, not with his build and clothing. A crazy, then. The man thought Eliot might be a gun-toting, cheerleader-loathing shooter who would court death to kill everybody on the bus, perhaps because school shooting was now such a risk, what with all the metal detectors and guards and lock-down protocols.

  I am not a shooter, Eliot silently told the man. He was a rationalist and an intellectual, and he just wanted his father back, whole, the way he had been before.

  He got off the bus at his Aunt Sue’s building.

  The building was depressing because it was so smug. It looked as if nothing bad could ever happen here as long as the stoop was swept clean and the curtains were a bright color and the flower boxes were watered. Nothing bad! Wanna bet? Inside, his aunt’s apartment was even worse. Her decorating style was country-mystic, with wreaths of dried flowers and tapestries of unicorns and small ceramic plaques that said things like “LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA.”

  “Aunt Sue, I have to tell you things I didn’t get a chance to say at the hospital. Please listen to me.”

  “Of course, Eliot. Don’t I always?”

  Almost never. But he composed himself and arranged his arguments. “I was online last night, too. Those two cases you mentioned, the man who couldn’t read again and the woman who didn’t recognize her kids, were anomalies. Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing is new, yes, but it passed clinical trials and FDA approval and it has an eighty-nine percent success rate, with a one percent confidence level. Of the remaining eleven percent, two-thirds were neither better nor worse after the operation. That leaves only three-point-eight percent and when you take into account those with only minor—”

  “No.”

  “You’re not listening!”

  “I am listening. Nobody is going to cut into Carl’s brain.”

  “But he believes he saw a defunct Greek god in a toaster pastry!”

  “Eliot, is that so bad?”

  “It’s not true!”

  “Well, it’s true that Carl saw it, anyway, or he wouldn’t be so upset. He’ll come out of whatever spell he’s having about it, he always does. And anyway, I don’t understand Carl’s reaction. Would it be so bad to believe this Zeus-god is around?”

  “That’s the part that’s not true!”

  She shrugged. “Are you so sure you know what’s true?”

  “Yes!” Eliot shouted. “Mathematics is true! Physics is true! Memory can play us false, there’s a ton of research on that, nobody can be sure if their memories are accurate—” He stopped, no longer sure what he was saying.

  Aunt Sue said calmly, “Well, if memory is playing Carl false, then he’s all the more likely to get over it, isn’t he?”

  “No! It isn’t—I didn’t mean—”

  “Wouldn’t you like some walnut cake, Eliot? I baked it fresh this morning.”

  Hopeless. They came from two different planets. And she—this kind, stupid woman who inexplicably shared one-quarter of his genes—held the power. In a truly rational world, that couldn’t have been true.

  “Cream-cheese icing,” she said brightly, and caressed his cheek.

  Eliot wrote: Memory is like a corn stalk. Corn blight can wreck any entire economy, starve an entire nation, but it responds to science. Find the bad gene, cut it out, replace it with a genetically engineered Bt gene that fights blight because it allows the use of strong pesticides and voila! Memory functions again! Science triumphs!

  Possibly the worst writing he had ever done. He hit DELETE.

  His father’s liquor cabinet still held three inches of Scotch. Eliot poured himself two fingers’ worth, so he could sleep.

  The next morning, just as he was leaving to catch the bus for school, the hospital called.

  “The answer,” his father said, “is obvious.”

  It wasn’t obvious to Eliot. His father sat in the day room, out of his bathrobe and dressed in his ordinary baggy khakis and badly-pilled sweater. Dr. Tremling had shaved. He looked just as he once did, and Eliot wo
uld have felt hopeful if he hadn’t felt so bewildered, or if the new twitch at the corner of his father’s left eye wasn’t beating madly and irregularly as a malfunctioning metronome.

  “I did see what I thought I saw,” his father said carefully. “I know so, in a way that, although it defies explanation, is so incontrovertible that—”

  “Dad,” Eliot said, equally carefully—if only that twitch would stop! “You can’t actually ‘know’ that for certain. Surely you’re aware that all our minds can play tricks on us that—”

  “Not this time,” Dr. Tremling said simply. “I saw it. And I know it was true, not just an aberration of pastry. I know, too, that mathematics, the whole rational underpinning of the universe, is also true. The dichotomy was … upsetting me.”

  Upsetting him. Eliot glanced around at the mental hospital, the orderlies watchful in the corners of the room, the barred window. His father had always had a gift for understatement, which was in part what had made this whole thing so … so upsetting.

  “What I failed to see,” Dr. Tremling said, “was that this is a gift. I have just been handed my life’s work.”

  “I thought the topography of knots was your life’s work?”

  “It was, yes. But now my life’s work is to find the rational and mathematical underpinnings for this new phenomenon.”

  “For Zeus? In a toaster pastry?”

  The twitch beat faster, even more irregularly. “I concede that it is a big job.”

  “Dad—”

  “There must be a larger consciousness, Eliot. If so, it is a physical entity, made up of energy and matter, must be a physical entity. And a physical entity can be described mathematically, possibly through a system that does not yet exist, possibly based on non-local quantum physics.”

  Eliot managed to say, “You aren’t a quantum physicist.”