“He was very precious to me,” Bobby said softly as he looked down at the table.
“I was surprised that I didn’t see you at Joe’s funeral,” the dean said.
Bobby blushed. “I wasn’t well at the time. I couldn’t attend.”
“I see. So —you were saying.”
“Right, well Joe impressed upon me the importance of using my abilities in a socially productive way—particularly for medical research. Since his death, that has been my sole focus and it will continue to be.”
“That’s admirable.”
“Only in certain circles,” said Bobby. “The Institute’s mission statement is related to military applications and aerospace. When I told them of my intentions, I received an ultimatum which was supported by MIT and Harvard. They threw me out as of last week.”
“Surely they’ll come to their senses.”
“No they won’t. So I’m going to be blunt. What I need is a cubicle to work in and around the clock access to your high-speed computers, library and laboratory archives, and when needed, access to the grad and medical schools’ research laboratories and assistants. Oh—and just to put all my cards on the table, I also need a dorm room to live in, because I get evicted tomorrow.”
As Bobby spoke, Walterberg was busy making notes. He then looked up and said, “Robert, after our call the other day when you told me you were looking for a new home in which to do your research, I met with the president of this University in preparation for today’s meeting. He authorized me to make whatever arrangements were necessary to bring you into the Tufts family. We’re an institution that takes great pride in our academic independence from outside influences including the government, and while our resources are not as grand as those of Harvard, we’re not poor. We can satisfy your needs.”
In what appeared to be an involuntary response to Walterberg’s comments, the chairman of the mathematics department clapped his hands several times, like a little kid bursting with enthusiasm.
His face flushed, Bobby said, “dean—and chairmen—I can’t thank you enough. This is the best news I’ve had in a long time.”
“Robert, here’s how we envision this working. Tomorrow, we’ll have a studio apartment ready for you in the graduate dormitories so you can move in. It’s not fancy, but I think you’ll find it adequate. Effective immediately, you’ll be awarded a graduate fellowship stipend which will cover your food requirements and put a little spending money in your pocket.”
“That’s wonderful dean. Extremely generous.”
“As for the cubicle, I think we can do a bit better than that. We’ll find an office for you in the computer sciences lab, which will afford you enough room and complete privacy so that you can work undisturbed and keep whatever hours you want. Of course, twenty four hour access to our supercomputers and laboratories is not a problem. You’ll coordinate all of this through Professor Charles Alan, our chairman of Computer Sciences who is seated here at the conference table.”
Professor Alan raised his hand and nodded in Bobby’s direction.
“How does that sound, Robert?” asked the dean.
“I only hope I’ll be worthy of your faith in me.”
“We have no doubt that you will be, Robert. We admire your goals. Welcome to Tufts,” said the dean.
The seven professors rose from their chairs and broke into applause. Bobby’s face turned deep red. He made his way around the table, grasping each one’s hands and thanking them profusely.
As Bobby walked out of the building, he murmured to an invisible listener, “Okay Joe, we’re back in business.”
27
When Bobby returned to his dorm at the Institute, his doorway was blocked by stacks of large disassembled moving cartons, rolls of bubble-wrap, and spools of packing tape. He shook his head. These guys are all heart. He kicked the cartons and batted the bubble wrap out of his way. “It’s just a school. Who cares? I’m finally free of Varneys,” Bobby muttered.
He shoved his key into his door lock, but it wouldn’t open. Jiggling it frantically, he pulled hard on the knob as he kicked at the door. “I can’t believe it. The assholes changed the lock. They locked me out of my own room,” he hissed as he slammed his weight into the door. Suddenly, the door opened. As the heat flash that had coursed through his body began to dissipate, he shook his head, realizing just how upset he was.
Hoping to ward off an impending migraine, Bobby walked over to Copernicus Hall to get some lunch. Was it his imagination or did it get very quiet in the cafeteria when he walked in? Was everyone looking at him? As he filed along the cafeteria line, one of the food servers said to him as she heaped extra gravy on his hot turkey sandwich, “So today’s your last day. Don’t worry, you’re a nice kid, you’ll do okay.”
Before she finished her words, Bobby’s mind raced. How does she know it’s my last day? If she knows, everyone knows. No wonder they’re all staring at me. Bobby walked to the nearest table he could find in a corner away from everybody. Shoveling food into his mouth, he studied the ceiling tiles with apparent interest. He then made an exit as quickly as he could while not looking left or right. On the way out, he saw a group of the Institute’s teachers standing around and talking. He could swear they were looking at him and talking about him.
Relieved to get back to the privacy of his dorm room, he began to assemble the moving cartons robotically. Trying to be stoic, he took his possessions down from the crowded shelves, some of which had been there since he was a little kid. It only got worse when he took down the framed photos of Peter and Edith which they had given him when he had first entered the Institute. Sitting down on the edge of his bed, he buried his face in his hands as he massaged his temples with his finger tips.
Go away. Just leave me alone, he thought. But whoever began knocking shortly after he sat down, knocked again, and then a few seconds later, a third series of knocks, harder and louder. They probably want to know if I’m packed up already. Want to inspect the room. Probably will put my stuff in a shopping cart and point the way to the highway. Bobby hurriedly wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and opened the door. Extending down the jammed hallway was a large crowd of kids from the Institute, six of Bobby’s teachers, Dr. Verjee and a bunch of the teaching assistants.
One of the kids yelled, “Hey Robert—we’re here to help—to give you a hand packing.”
“Yeah, we heard what they did to you. It’s really screwed up, really wrong,” said a grad student.
Bobby burst into a huge smile, but from the expressions on a few of the kids’ faces, he thought they noticed his red eyes and tear stained cheeks.
“I was just having an allergy attack,” he said, as he rubbed his eyes. “Thank you all so much—I can’t believe this.”
The crowd piled into his room and one of the grad students appointed himself foreman and directed the packing. “Just leave it to us. We’ll be real careful with everything.” Another kid bounded into the room toting a huge boom-box. Within a minute, Jay-Z was blasting loudly.
Dr. Verjee put his arm around Bobby’s shoulders and led him to a corner of the room. “I want you to know that you’re leaving here doesn’t mean that I’m not available to help you. If you ever need me, you can always call me.” Verjee handed Bobby a card.
At ten the next morning, one of the Institute’s vans pulled up in front of Bobby’s dorm to collect his belongings and take them over to Tufts. As the van was being loaded, a sparkling white golf cart emblazoned with the Institute’s logo in blue and gold lettering pulled up. Impeccably dressed, as usual, Avalon Vanderslice got out of the cart.
“Robert—I just came to say goodbye. I’m sorry to see you go.”
“Thanks, dean. I’m sorry too—but you know what happened.”
“It didn’t take you more than a moment to make a new affiliation. Tufts is
a good facility. It’s not Harvard or MIT, but it’s good. At one time, the Institute was thinking of associating with Tufts, but when Harvard and MIT came into the fold, what was the point?”
“Tufts is an independent facility, Doctor. I’ve only recently begun to understand the significance of that.” A sour expression overtook Vanderslice’s face as she got back into the cart.
28
The parade of visitors began within the first hour of Bobby’s arrival at his office in the Tufts computer lab. The head of the lab, Dr. Alan, was in the process of showing him around, when the first “Sorry to interrupt-I just wanted to say hello” occurred. It was rapid fire after that. Apparently, every professor and grad student in the math and science departments wanted to meet Bobby, as did all of the University’s senior administrators. Oblivious to the reputation he had already garnered in the academic community at only twenty years of age, Bobby was surprised by all of the interest. “I guess I’m something of a circus attraction,” he said to Dean Walterberg. Because of their extraordinary content, his doctoral theses had been widely circulated in the international academic community. Scores of graduate students in different parts of the world had earned their own doctoral degrees by analyzing the first two theses that Bobby had written at ages fourteen and sixteen. It also had become folklore that starting at age ten, Bobby had made crucial contributions to highly regarded treatises written by Harvard and MIT professors. Always polite and accommodating to his visitors, after a few days he said to Walterberg, “It’s great to meet so many of the folks here, but it’s kind of impossible to concentrate with all the interruptions.” Realizing that the situation was out of control, Walterberg imposed a moratorium on unscheduled visits.
Bobby’s first year at Tufts was spent almost exclusively in the computer laboratory, as Bobby endlessly conducted research and began to build his new mathematical language. He became resolute in his belief that one of the problems causing roadblocks in disease research, was an artificial division among the scientific disciplines. Carrying on from his controversial hypothesis years earlier, he worked tirelessly to expand what he called “the vocabulary of mathematics” so that it could become the unifying integrative language to encompass all scientific phenomena, thereby allowing biochemical and biophysical interactions to be expressed mathematically and to be run and manipulated, in every possible permutation at computer speed. Bobby felt that this was the tool he needed to rapidly accelerate the progress of disease research. The directions in which he was taking mathematics were astoundingly complex and original. Bobby’s capacity for the highest levels of innovative theoretical problem solving, first recognized by his examiners during IQ tests when he was four years old, had now come to full fruition.
Dean Walterberg persuaded Bobby to make a presentation to an inter-disciplinary symposium that he was hosting for science and math professors from Tufts, MIT, Harvard and Amherst. Bobby saw this as an opportunity to talk about his new integrative language. Addressing the attendees, he opened by saying:
“All elements are defined by their relationships to all others. Those relationships can be mathematically expressed and the interaction of those elements can be mathematically manipulated. There is one continuum of all sciences, phenomena and time. There are no divisions. And math is the language of that continuum.”
He reviewed for the audience, with the aid of visual projections from his computer files, what he was working on. When the ninety minute presentation was over, he was greeted by silence.
Bobby’s heart sank. Looking out at the sea of blank expressions gazing back at him, he asked, hopefully, “Are there any questions?”
After an awkward moment, the chairman of the Mathematics Department at MIT, who knew Bobby well, stood up. “Robert, I say this with all due respect. And maybe it’s just me. But what you have been talking about for the last hour and a half is absolutely incomprehensible.”
“That goes for me too. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I can’t understand one iota of it. I don’t even know where to start,” said the chairman of the Harvard Physics Department, one of Bobby’s former professors.
“It’s absolutely fascinating. But I lost you after the first five minutes,” said Tufts’ Chemistry chair.
“To say you baffled me would certainly be an understatement,” added Amherst’s Nobel laureate in chemistry.
“I see,” said Bobby. “Does anybody get it?”
“No,” was the resounding answer delivered in unison by the attendees, their heads wagging from side to side to emphasize the definiteness of the ‘no.’
“I’m sorry then. Obviously, I’ve been too obtuse in my presentation. I’ll have to find a way to explain this better. This ‘new language,’ as I call it, isn’t intended to be anything other than a tool to be used to accelerate problem solving. It just takes some time to get your head around it. But I’ve prepared some materials which may be helpful. I’ll email them to you all.”
The materials were beyond the mental capacity of the recipients. Some of the individual equations and formulas which Bobby devised ran two hundred pages each.
Alternating between his walls of blackboards, stacks of notebooks and computer console, Bobby’s presence in the lab was intense. The mental energy radiating from him was palpable. As had been the case since he was a young child, his level of concentration and focus was extraordinary, and his intellectual stamina was inexhaustible. Seemingly in his own world, he frequently became the object of jokes and sarcastic comments, all made discretely behind his back. But Bobby was aware of them. He had grown used to this ever since his early years at the Institute.
Sitting behind his desk lost in thought, Bobby would fall into one of his trances almost every day. By now, each one usually lasted almost two hours. When he would rejoin the present, he would pick-up where he had left off in his work. Frequently, that would mean discarding the tact he had been on, and embarking on a new direction to tackle the problem. His co-workers, who observed this phenomenon, came to believe that the trances were an extension of Bobby’s thinking process, during which he rose to a higher level of cognitive activity that could only be attained by disconnecting with normal human consciousness.
Relentless in pursuit of his singular goal, Bobby had turned Joe Manzini’s admonition of “Don’t waste your talents, make a difference” into a mantra of self-abnegation. His small office became his de facto apartment as he frequently crashed on its sofa to sleep, rather than taking the time to walk back to his dorm only to return just a few hours later to start again.
“Dr. Austin, do you ever sleep?” asked one of his lab assistants. “You’re always here.”
“Sleep is my least favorite thing in the world, Mike. I don’t do too well with it. It’s always been that way for me.”
“ Beauty sleep never hurts, Doc.”
“There’s no beauty in my sleep. Believe me.”
On one particular Friday night when he was only twenty-two and he sat in the lab pouring over the results of experiments, he realized that he could no longer concentrate. His nightmares had become so extreme over the last few months that it had been impossible for him to get any uninterrupted sleep. He was physically and mentally exhausted. He had to find an escape. He left the lab and went into the city.
29
Walking the streets of Boston, Bobby was desperately looking for diversion. He came upon a dance club named, “Venu.” Paying his admission fee, he entered a warehouse that had been converted into a throbbing strobe lit bacchanalia of blisteringly loud music and swirling partiers. No one knew who he was or cared. Making his way to the crowded bar, he drank endless numbers of blue luminescent alcoholic drinks, and then he moved on to shots of Jaegermeister served on the dance floor by scantily clad hostesses. He opened his shirt and breathed deeply. He lost himself in dance as the alcohol anesthetized his intellect. He felt dissolute and supe
rficial and he loved it. His striking good looks and tall lithe physique didn’t escape the attention of the girls. Two of them sandwiched him in between them as they danced and sensually rubbed their bodies against his. High from all the booze, his hands lightly caressed them as his body moved to their rhythm and he pressed his face against their hair.
“Damn, you smell so amazing,” he said to one of them, a curvy Latina in tight satin pants.
“It’s called perfume, baby.”
“It doesn’t smell like that in the bottle, that’s for sure,” replied Bobby.
“You’re an expert?” she said, as she laughed and bumped her left hip against his.
“It’s chemistry. Trust me, I know,” he replied.
The other dancer, a leggy Black girl in a white leather mini-skirt, whispered in his ear, “You move really good, sweetie.”
“I’m inspired.”
“We already got inspired. We’re rolling. Do you want to roll too?”
Bobby raised his eyebrows. “Roll. What do you mean? Are you leaving?”
“No hon. E— you want some?”
As inebriated as he was, Bobby declined, wary of the potential effects of drugs on his psyche. The girls picked up the pace of their movements as they ground against him. He closed his eyes and felt the music wash over him as the drinks kicked in like depth charges. His mind transported him back to the dance party on Cruz Beach in St. John. He was there again with Joe and they were laughing and hugging like drunken sailors as they bumped hips with the socca contestants. Joe’s face was tanned and his eyes sparkled in the blinding tropical sun. His smile was broad and radiant. The music grew louder and louder and the percussion more urgent. Bobby shook his head hard, opened his eyes to the glaring strobe lights, and grabbed two more shots off the hostess’ tray and downed them in quick succession. He put his arms around the girls and suggested that they continue their party in more intimate surroundings. They were game and took him back to their apartment. As he and his two companions intertwined in varying combinations throughout the night, he finally escaped his demons. When the three had finally exhausted each other, Bobby slept soundly for eleven hours.
Miracle Man Page 13
