“Okay,” he says. “You win. I’ll make you coauthor of my paper. This paper.”
Herman brings the car to a stop and looks over at Mead. “You say that now, Fegley, but what is to stop you from changing your mind an hour from now when you’re sitting in the safety of your parents’ cozy little house. I’m afraid I can’t take the chance.”
“I won’t change my mind, I swear.”
Herman pulls the lighter out of the dashboard, holds it to the end of his cigarette, and lights up, inhaling deeply. “You know, you are the most unique person I have ever known. You don’t care about what other people think; you just care about math. I admire you, Fegley. I just want you to know how much I admire you. You were the closest thing to a friend I ever had.” The lock on Mead’s door thunks again. “Go on, Fegley, get out.”
He’s letting him go. Thank god. Mead cracks open the door then looks back at Herman. Were, he said. You were the closest thing to a friend I ever had. Past tense. Mead pulls the door closed again and says, “No.”
Herman smiles. “There you go again, Fegley. You say we aren’t friends but then you go and act like the best friend in the world. You’re amazing, Fegley, truly amazing. Now get out.”
“No,” Mead says and crosses his arms over his chest.
“Then I’ll get out.” And he puts the car in PARK and does just that: gets out and walks up to the edge of the cliff and looks down. He sucks on the cigarette and exhales a large plume of smoke then turns back toward the car and, squinting into the bright headlights, says, “Now I see why you were so hesitant to jump. It’s quite scary from up here. How many stories above the water do you think we are: Four? Five?”
Mead does not answer; instead he crawls over the gearshift into the driver’s seat. It is a new feeling for him, sitting behind the wheel. Exciting and scary at the same time.
Herman sucks on the cigarette. “You want to hear something crazy? I never learned how to swim. My father tried to teach me once but I got hysterical when he put me in the water. He thought I was acting out, he thought I was deliberately being difficult to embarrass him in front of all the other men at the yacht club.” Herman takes another puff. “What can I say? It was a lot less embarrassing to let him think that than to know the truth, than to know that his bastard son was a spineless wimp who was scared to death of drowning.”
Mead leans his head out the window. “Get back in the car, Weinstein. Now.”
“I can’t go back, Fegley. There’s nothing for me to go back to.”
Mead looks at Herman looking at the moon and remembers something Uncle Martin once told him about why men hunt. He said they are propelled by an atavistic impulse to reconnect with nature, that they are seeking a way to get back in touch with their basic instincts, to escape, even if just for a few hours, from the pressures of their day-to-day lives. So that must be why Herman has been stalking Mead —hunting him, really —for the past three years: He has been trying to get back in touch with something he lost. Or maybe never had at all. But death is the goal of the hunt, not the hunter.
“Come on, Weinstein, it’ll be fine. You’re a smart guy. If you don’t want me to help you write a paper, fine, write one on your own. Trust me, if you put as much time and energy into studying as you put into stalking me, you’ll do just fine. And don’t do it for your father, do it for yourself. Find a subject you love. Maybe it isn’t math; maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s something that’ll really piss your father off. You know, a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of thing. Think of the possibilities.”
Herman inhales on the cigarette, then drops it to the ground and stamps it out with the toe of his shoe. “That sounds great, Fegley, that sounds really great. In theory. But I’m not much interested in proving or disproving it.” And then he jumps off the cliff.
Herman doesn’t scream but Mead hears his body hit the water as he scrambles out of the car and rushes toward Dead Man’s Leap. He peers over the edge and down into the black hole that is the lake, waiting for Herman to pop back up to the surface. Only he doesn’t. Shit. A wave of nausea rolls over Mead. He thinks about the quarryman who jumped off this same cliff a hundred years ago. He thinks about Percy driving into that tree. No one could save that quarryman and Mead wasn’t there to save Percy. But the quarry is now filled with water and Mead is here. Boys as young as eight jump off this cliff in the belief that when they hit the water they’ll be men. Mead sure as hell hopes that’s true, closes his eyes, holds his nose, and steps into the air.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE DAY I GOT IT IN MY HEAD to write a novel. It would be my life’s purpose. My family most likely thought me crazy: the middle kid seeking attention again. But a college friend sent me her copy of The Artist’s Way. I taped a couple of its inspirational passages over my desk, then sat down and wrote my heart out. The result wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible either. I was hooked. Over the intervening years, a few special people have read and reread and reread and reread my numerous attempts to sculpt a publishable story. Without them I could never have done it. And so I want to extend thanks to my sister, Mary Jacoby, and to Meredith Reed, Mary Keane, Gary Brozek, and Jaya Miceli for their honest feedback and unflagging support. I also want to thank Barney Karpfinger for plucking my novel from the hundreds that have passed through his hands over the years and Jamie Raab for believing in me and giving me the benefit of her sharp editorial eye. I would like to extend an intellectual debit to Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset and Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire. They taught me, respectively, the language of hunting philosophy and of math. And lastly I want to thank my college friend, Amy Muir Stevens Sternberg, who passed away before I managed to get published. I still have your book, Amy. And if it’s all right with you, I think I’ll keep it.
Life After Genius Page 37
