"Then," said Scott, "I think you should tell me the whole story."
"What whole story?" Lynette asked.
Scott sighed. "I wasn't the greatest cop in the entire world," he said. "But I was good enough to tell when someone wasn't telling me everything important. And you, missy, have been holding some things back since the first moment I met you."
Lynette opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. Could she tell Scott about the gray man? Would he believe her? After all, it wasn't even certain that he believed her about Kevin and the fact that he had saved Ruth and her baby, though Lynette knew without a doubt that that was the case; could feel it in her bones as certainly as she could feel that Kevin was her son and that she loved him with all her heart.
Maybe not all of it. Maybe there's room for one more.
Stop it, Lynette.
To Scott, she finally answered simply, "You're right, I haven't told you everything."
"So?" Now it was his turn to cross his arms. "You gonna spill or what?"
She looked around. Though they were no longer the center of attention, there were still far too many people around for her to feel comfortable simply expelling the story of her life - at least, the story as far as it mattered - to a new friend.
"Not here," she said.
"Where then? When?"
She looked around again. A police cruiser had just pulled into the parking lot and was pulling to a stop next to the smoking remains of the truck and the Volvo. She pointed at it. "You tell me."
"What?" he said, looking befuddled.
"You were a cop, right?" she answered. "Are they going to 'take us downtown' or 'book us' or anything like I see on all those cop shows?"
"No," he said with a smile. He was so handsome when he smiled. "But we'll probably have to make a statement, and I don't know if they'll have us do it here or invite us to the station to do it."
"Oh, so you guys invite people places? I thought it was just handcuffs and guns."
Scott smiled again. "Oh, police invite people all the time. Just it's kind of like getting an invitation from deity. You should probably say yes, because the alternative isn't likely to be nearly as good as the invitation."
Lynette noted that he said "deity" instead of "God" or even "Buddha" or "Allah" or any kind of proper name that indicated he believed in a higher power and filed the fact away for future reference. She sensed there was a story there, too, and she wanted to hear it.
"So it's going to be a while before we can escape the clutches of the pigs," she said, grinning wickedly.
"Hey! Watch how you talk about the brothers!" said Scott in mock anger. Then he smiled once more, and once more the grin lit up his face like a candle from within. "Yeah, it'll probably be an hour or two before we're done here. I'll talk to the 'pig' on the scene, though. He probably knows Gil, so I suspect that Gil will be over there in a second telling him what happened and asking him to take your statement first, so that you can get Kevin home."
"Preferential treatment?" she said.
"Just don't want you getting mad and hitting anyone else," he said over-seriously, rubbing his arm where she had slapped him a few moments ago.
And he was right. Within a few moments an Officer Olacsi came over and asked her if he could ask her a few questions. She said yes, then turned to Scott quickly and said, "Tonight. My place for coffee."
"I don't drink coffee," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "And I'm not sure I remember where you live."
"Cocoa, then," she answered. "And I know you remember where I live."
"Sure of yourself aren't you?" he replied.
"Of course," she said with her best imitation of a model flicking her hair on a L'Oreal commercial. "I'm stunning."
"You are that," answered Scott, and suddenly she knew that he wasn't joking, and it was her turn to be embarrassed.
She turned quickly to Officer Olacsi and began walking away with him, then turned back at the last second and said, "Don't flake on me, Scott Cowley."
He held up both hands. "Wouldn't dream of it."
And she smiled again, and he smiled at her. This time, his smile was even nicer, and she wondered if it was because he was happy that she was smiling at him, too. She didn't know, but she liked the thought, and smiled even more widely.
Then she thought of the night to come, and the story she was going to tell, and wondered if Scott would believe any of it, and now her smile was gone, swallowed up not by a scarred face and blue eyes, but by an old man in a gray suit.
Would she tell Scott about the gray man? she wondered.
Would she ever tell anyone about the gray man?
A sudden wind, unseasonably chill for this time of year, whipped through the parking lot. She shivered, but not from the cold of the wind. She shivered from the cold of the color gray, and the expressionless eyes of a madman who had tried to kill her and her son.
Somehow, she knew that today was linked intrinsically to the events of her past.
Somehow, she knew that she would be seeing the gray man again.
And soon.
***
28.
***
Scott listened to Lynette's tale with an odd combination of belief and incredulity. He knew that she had to be speaking the truth, because in her stories of the ghostly gray man and his homicidal urges he heard echoes of his own past that resonated together too closely to be anything but compelling harmonies to the same music. In fact, he sensed at one point that he was believing too easily, at least in her mind. And he couldn't blame her for being suspicious of the easy way that he believed her tales of phantom bullets appearing in utero; of bright red balls - she brought them out and showed them to him - that disappeared and reappeared forty feet away without anyone apparently moving them; of the words "Witten was white" uttered over and over in the otherwise deathly silence of a toddler's sleep; and, most of all, of a gray-suited old man who was trying to kill her son.
So to allay her obvious fear that he was putting her on - and because their stories were clearly intertwined, he told his own version of the things that had happened. He told her of the deaths of his son and wife, and of Mr. Gray's attempt on his own life. He told her of John Doe, who had died and then reappeared eight years later, and of Mr. Gray's own reappearances, both ghostly and corporeal, but in all cases a Mr. Gray who was much older, and who claimed to have been a "ghost" for sixty years and more. He told her of the fact that their meeting had not been coincidental; that John Doe had told him to show up on the very night and time - and at the very address - when she was moving in. She told him everything, he knew, even the parts that were most painful to her, and he could not help but do the same in return.
At last, exhausted, they broke from the seriousness of their conversation, and for a time talked about nothing more nor less amazing than what it was to be a parent, a spouse, a part of a family. Scott's heart ached when he heard her speak of her love for Robbie, and ached still more when she spoke of her love for Kevin. And it was not that he thought his own spouse less important than his dead child; it was instead the fact that when she spoke of Kevin she spoke of a person still present, a member of her family who still lived and, as much as was possible, thrived, with her. Scott had no corresponding family member to be with him, so he twinged with the slightest hints of aching jealousy as she spoke of Kevin, of his good heart, of his typed communications that were the only and best way that he spoke to others.
At that moment, as if on cue, Kevin wandered out. They had put him to bed several hours before, and Scott almost wept when he helped the boy into his bed. Kevin was only a little bit older than Chad had been when he died, and he had not realized, in all the fading halls of his memories, how much he missed putting his son to bed.
He did cry, in fact, just a little bit, when Kevin reached up and hugged him goodnight.
But apparently the boy had not done much sleeping, for he was wandering out of his room, looking wan and thin, looking in fact as though something terrible wa
s happening. Sensing that he needed to say something, Scott immediately grabbed the boy's laptop from where it had been sitting on the table between him and Lynette, and though he fancied it was only imagination, still he thought that he caught her looking at him with something more than gratitude for the action, stronger than gratefulness for the movement.
He felt warm at the thought.
No time to comment on it, though, for Kevin grabbed the laptop and immediately began typing.
"It's all wrong," he wrote.
"What is, honey?" asked Lynette, and just as he had missed putting his son to bed, so now Scott realized that he missed the sight of a mother longing to aid her son, of a woman who existed primarily - if not only - to care for another.
"It's all wrong," he wrote again.
"What is, baby?" she repeated. "What's all wrong?"
"It's all wrong. It's all wrong. It's all wrong."
Scott could sense Lynette growing frustrated, and raised his hand, looking for all the world like one of his students who needed a pee break.
"For goodness' sake, we're not in school," she said. "You can speak without raising your hand."
"I just...you said that Kevin gets overwhelmed more easily when he's agitated."
"Yes, so?"
"Well, what if your asking is overwhelming him? I mean, he's certainly agitated."
Lynette looked stricken. Again, the mothering instinct was surfacing harder than a whale breaching the waves after staying too long underwater.
"Can I try something?" he asked.
"Please."
He looked away from Kevin, and said, "Kevin, I'm going to ask you a question." He knew from what he had observed and from what Lynette had told him over the course of the night that looking at him while he was distressed would be a mistake, just as doing what he was about to try without warning him would likely bear only disastrous results.
He heard typing, and glanced at the computer. "It's all wrong. It's all wrong." The same thing, over and over.
"I know it is, bud, I know it is, and we want to help, but first I've got to do something."
And with that, Scott reached out and, slowly, took the keyboard from Kevin's tight grasp. He almost had to pry the boy's fingers away, but he firmly removed the computer from Kevin's hands and held it in his own.
"What are you doing?" Lynette demanded, and he heard more than a trace of vinegar in her voice. Again, though, he could hardly blame her: he was taking away Kevin's only mode of regular conversation - or at least, so it seemed.
But that was not Scott's intent. He looked at Lynette with an arched eyebrow. "Trust me," he whispered.
Then, slowly, he typed something on Kevin's keyboard and then returned it to the boy.
"What's wrong?" it said, the cursor blinking steadily next to the question mark.
Kevin looked at the sentence - probably the first one that anyone other than him had ever entered on his computer - for a long time, and Scott began to worry that perhaps his plan had backfired. He didn't know what he would do if it turned out that, instead of helping the boy to talk, he had stolen his only voice.
Apparently Lynette was worried about the same thing, for she began, "Scott, I don't think that -"
Then she stopped midsentence, as Kevin began to type. His fingers, long since grown proficient on the keyboard, practically flew across the black lettered tiles, typing a response so quickly that Scott was amazed. If nothing else, he could see that the boy was a prodigy at typing, and could probably get a job even now at any software company that needed high-volume data entry done.
What Kevin was doing was not mere data entry, however. At least, it didn't seem so, because every so often he would pause as though thinking of the next phrase, then would resume his lightning clickety-clack.
Scott felt something on his arm and looked down. It was Lynette's hand. "Oh God, please let this work," she murmured. Scott couldn't imagine what she was feeling right now. What if this was in reality a truly effective way of communicating with her boy? What if Scott had just opened the doors to real communication between mother and son, simply by inputting the question on the computer rather than asking it aloud?
Then Kevin finished. He turned the computer around, and Scott's heart sank. He heard Lynette sob beside him.
It was gibberish. There was nothing remotely approaching English on the screen - nothing even approaching language, for that matter. It was mostly signs and numbers, as though the boy had inadvertently hit the caps lock at the beginning of his response, rendering everything unintelligible.
But no. The boy was fully aware - or as fully aware as ever he was - for a moment later he spun the computer around to face him once more and typed a quick phrase at the end of the long cipher he had already typed.
He spun the computer around again. "It's all wrong," he had typed at the end of the strange phrases.
Lynette was no longer sobbing beside Scott, she was full-on crying. Quietly it was true, but crying nonetheless. "Oh, dammit, dammit, dammit," she was muttering under her breath in between ratcheting sobs that seemed to shake her from the inside.
Scott reached an arm around her, and though he was as sad as she, perhaps, it nevertheless felt right that he should be holding her this way.
Then Kevin spoke. "Witten was white," he said, and pointed at the gibberish on the monitor of his laptop.
Lynette's sobbing redoubled, as though she was sure that with this cryptic repetition all hope was lost, but suddenly Scott was not so sure. He carefully - sadly, almost - disengaged from Lynette's arms and turned back to Kevin.
"Kevin," he said, "I'm going to do something again, okay?"
He reached out and took the computer once again, and looked at the typing. The first line itself actually didn't look like Kevin had typed with the caps lock on. In point of fact, it looked much stranger than that:
σN{f, g} − N[σN(f), σN(g)] → 0
He looked a few lines down. A new phrase:
σ¯h{f, g} ≈ 1/¯h [σ¯h(f), σ¯h(g)]
And there was more, much more. And all of it followed by the words, "It's all wrong. It's all wrong."
Scott looked at Kevin. "Whitten was white?" he asked.
Kevin nodded.
Beside him, he felt Lynette suddenly holding her breath.
He looked farther down.
K0(A)ρ/≃ Z2, ρ (trivial module) = (1, 0)
"Holy shit," he whispered.
Then he looked at Lynette.
"What is it?"
Scott didn't answer. He highlighted the phrases, opened a web browser, and copied them into Google to run a search. The response was instant: a single hit that read "Noncommutative Geometry, Matrix Theory, and Tori Compactification."
"What is that?" asked Lynette, looking over his shoulder.
"Damned if I know," answered Scott, feeling as though he was on the verge of some monumental discovery, feeling the way that he imagined Columbus must have felt when first setting eyes on the New World. "But I'd be willing to bet one thing: when we figure it out, I bet we'll find out that it's all wrong. And," he added, "I bet we'll find out that Witten was white."
***
29.
***
Lynette and Scott stayed up into the small hours of that night, researching and trying to make sense of what new event was transpiring in Kevin's life.
"Got it," she said.
"What?" said Scott, putting away Kevin's laptop. She had been working on her own computer, and Scott had taken over Kevin's when her son went back to bed, both of them searching the 'net for some kind of clue as to what the long strings of mathematical ciphers that Kevin had written could mean.
"He wasn't saying 'Witten was white,'" said Lynette. "He was saying 'Witten was right.'"
"Oh," said Scott, trying to imply by his tone that she had made no further sense at all.
"It's right here," she said. "Edward Witten is a theoretical physicist."
"Naturally," said Scott.
"Don
't be mad just because you haven't figured out what's going on yet."
"Mad? Dear heavens, you'd be rescuing us," Scott said with a smile. She liked it when he smiled. It did wonderful things to his face, changing it from something closed and guarded to something entirely new; something open and pleasant.
"Witten is a physicist who works on string theory."
"Oh," said Scott again.
"You mean you didn't know that?" said Lynette with an exaggerated shake of the head and a few tsk-tsks thrown in for good measure. "And you call yourself a teacher?"
"Physical Education. It's not the same as theoretical physics. Though they both have 'phys' in them, so I can see why you'd be fooled."
"String theory argues that all matter is made up of different kinds of strings. The paper you found, the one that Kevin was quoting in his laptop, was a paper about some basic string theory-related stuff."
"What kind of stuff?"
"Beats me," admitted Lynette. "I'm an accountant, not a theoretical physicist, though they both deal with numbers, so I can see why you'd be fooled."
Scott smirked. "Touché," he said.
"Anyway, it looks like Kevin has been doing some kind of mathematical computations of his own."
"And?"
"And apparently he thinks that some of the basic foundations of string theory geometry are incorrect."
Scott gaped at her. She couldn't blame him. The idea that a nine year old boy could even grasp what string theory was, let alone write commentary on it, was beyond her understanding as well.
"So what did this Witten do, exactly?"
"Well, basically, there are several different kinds of string theory. They all have different ways of looking at the universe. Witten's biggest contribution to the theory has been to prove that several of the major theories of string theory are in fact the same thing."
"Wait, a bunch of geniuses needed someone to point out that the same thing is the same thing?" said Scott.
The Meridians Page 19
