Life After Genius

by M. Ann Jacoby

  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.

  HEADLIGHTS 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 A German word used to connote unpublished papers found among a scholar’s personal effects after his death.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.

  TWELVE. 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.

  MARTIN 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.

  PERCY 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.”

  Mead closed the book. “Fine. Fail algebra. It doesn’t make any difference to me. But you might wish you’d paid more attention in class when all those numbers in the ledger book don’t add up anymore and you start losing money.”

  Percy stopped running. “Are you referring to the furniture store?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That store ain’t my problem, cousin. I’ve got other plans.” Placing his right hand on his hip, Percy leaned over and touched his left hand to his right foot.

  “I know,” Mead said.

  “What do you mean, you know. What do you know?”

  “I’ve seen you. Through the window in the library. On the baseball field.”

  Percy stood up straight. “Since when did you start watching sports?”

  “I wasn’t watching sports, I was watching you.”

  “You were watching me? Really?” Percy smiled. “Do you love me, Teddy? Huh? Do you?” And he reached for Mead’s cheek, trying to pinch it.

  “Stop it,” Mead said and pushed his cousin’s hand away.

  Percy glanced past Mead into the trees, making sure the coast was clear, then sat down next to him and said, “A scout came by the school the other day. He thinks I’m good enough to play professionally. You know, after I graduate high school. I’m gonna be a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, cousin. Whadaya think of that?” And he made a fist to show off the muscle in his right bicep. “This arm is my ticket out of here.”

  “Does Uncle Martin know?”

  “Please,” Percy said. “He’d have my ass if he knew.”

  “But he’s a big baseball fan, isn’t he?”

  “Sure, he loves watching other people play it, but not his son. He’s got other plans for his son, plans that I am not the least bit interested in. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life burying dead people. But then look who I’m talking to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Spare me the act, cousin. You don’t want to be an undertaker so bad that you’re willing to spend every waking hour of your life studying your ass off to get out of it. Your father doesn’t have any choice but to send you to college. Genius. Damned straight you’re a genius, that was the most ingenious move in the world. I only wish I’d thought of it first.”

  “That’s not why I study, Percy. I do it because I enjoy it.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, and stared out across the cornfield.

  “But it’s true.”

  “Well, if you love it so much then you can do it for both of us.”

  “You want me to do your homework for you? But that’s cheating; it’s wrong.”

  “It ain’t wrong unless someone finds out about it and no one is gonna find out because neither you nor me are gonna tell anyone.”

  “I,” Mead says. “Neither you nor I are going to tell anyone.”

  “Great. Then we’ve got us a deal.”

  MARTIN LEADS THE WAY, Lenny follows behind him, and Mead takes up the rear. The day is getting brighter by the second, the trees now standing in silhouette against an azure sky as the three men hike along the perimeter of the field. They walk for maybe ten, fifteen minutes before Martin finds a spot that suits him and hunkers down with his shotgun and cooler. Lenny steps past him, eyes set on another spot about twenty yards farther down, and Mead starts to follow. But Lenny raises his hand to stop him and nods at Martin. Mead shakes his head. Lenny gives him a stern look and Mead gives in.

  He sits down on a rock maybe ten feet from his uncle. Far enough away to be out of swinging range but close enough to talk, should his uncle be so inclined. Should he decide that he wants to offer up an apology for how he has been acting toward Mead ever since he got home. If Mead could turn back time, he would do it. And next time around he’d turn down the airline ticket Herman offered him. He’d spend his one-week spring break on campus and stay in his dorm room the entire time. That way he would be there when Percy dropped by unexpectedly. And that way he wouldn’t have had to come home one week before graduation. He could have given his presentation in Epps Hall and then he could have sat down and prepared his valedictory address for graduation day. But he can’t. He cannot turn back time.

  A brown rabbit hops out into the field maybe thirty yards away, well within shooting range. Uncle Martin lifts his gun into position, tucking the butt into his shoulder and sighting the animal down the barrel. Look with your gun and shoot where you look. Mead plugs his ears and braces for the shotgun blast.

  PERCY SQUEEZED OFF THE TRIGGER and the loud report stunned the air, sending a flock of grackles flying up out of a tree. A cloud of black smoke rose from the end of the muzzle and drifted into Mead’s eyes. He closed them and waved his hand through the air to clear it. When he opened them again, his cousin was holding the dead rabbit upside down by its hind legs. He strung it up to a tree and slit its throat.

  “I’m not going to do your homework,” Mead said. “It’s wrong.”

  Percy inserted his knife into the back of the rabbit’s neck and twisted off its head. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he said, “How much would it freak your mother out to learn that her precious little brainy-boy shot and killed a rabbit all on his own?”

  Mead knew what Percy was trying to do. And it was tempting —boy, was it ever tempting —but it wasn’t right. “That would be lying.”

  “Strictly speaking, yes. But there’re many shades of lies, cousin, ranging all the way from black to white. You do my homework for me and this rabbit is yours.”

  Mead pictured his mother’s face as he walked through the back door with a dead rabbit in a plastic baggie. Blood all over his hands. “It’s wrong.”

  “I don’t see it that way, cousin. I see it as one hand washing the other. That’s the way it works in life. Family members are supposed to stick by one another. So what’re you gonna do, are you gonna stick by me?”

  Five. That’s how many rabbits Mead supposedly killed and gutted that fall before his mother took his shotgun away and sent him to the library as penance.

  MARTIN LOWERS HIS SHOTGUN and looks over at Mead, nods toward the rabbit. Hands shaking, Mead lifts his gun into position. This time he is going to do it. To pull the trigger himself. If he kills the rabbit, it’ll make up for the five lies he told that fall. Wipe the slate clean. Clear his conscience. Right a wrong. The little brown rabbit lifts its head and sniffs the air, then looks directly at Mead. But it can’t see him because he’s in the shade and it can’t smell him because he’s downwind. The poor critter doesn’t have a clue. All Mead has to do is squeeze off the trigger and that rabbit is his. It’ll never even know what hit it. But Mead can’t do it. Because when he looks at that rabbit he sees himself sitting in the university library, reading a book. If only he had glanced up every once in a while. Paid more attention to his surroundings. Then maybe he would be sitting in his dorm room right now and not here in this stupid field.

  Mead lo
wers the gun. “I’m sorry, Uncle Martin. I knew.”

  “You knew? You knew what?”

  “That Percy was going to run off. And that A he got in math freshman year in high school? That was mine. I did his homework for him. I should’ve told. When you and Aunt Jewel were freaking out that Christmas, I should’ve told you. And I should never have agreed to do his homework, but I did and I’m sorry.”

  Martin turns away from Mead, lifts the gun to his shoulder, and squeezes off the trigger. The rabbit does a backward flip through the air and lands on its side. Martin stands up and walks out into the field to retrieve his prey, the shotgun blast still ringing in Mead’s ears. That must be it. That must be why he does not hear his uncle say anything back.