Case of Lies

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “I just thought it must be him. I’m sorry, Mom. I just figured, you know. I couldn’t see the man by the Bronco through the rain.”

  “It’s okay, honey. I think you saved our lives.”

  “Yeah, Hitchie, we saved you.” Bob hugged the dog some more. He did not seem particularly upset by the whole incident.

  Nina said, “The world has-it’s changed. It’s not a safe place.”

  “It never was, Mom. That’s why we buy good locks and use ’em.”

  That night, as Nina lay in her bed reading, Bob knocked and came in and sat down in the wicker chair. He usually stayed up much later than she did and slept as late as he could in the morning, but he asked her to wake him up if he slept through his alarm.

  “But tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “The dump takes hazardous stuff on Sundays. We have some things under the house I need to get rid of. Taylor’s garage is full, too. What are you reading?”

  She struggled to remember. “A book about the Big Bang. New theories about what the universe looked like in the first few minutes after the explosion. Speaking of big bangs, is any of the material you have been collecting flammable? Or potentially explosive?”

  “Only a little.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that. Don’t store anything like that under the house!”

  “We charge twenty bucks per house to haul away old motor oil, mostly, Mom. We have all the customers we can manage. We’ll put it in the backyard under a tarp if you want.”

  “Why do you need money, Bob? You have a new bass. You like your skateboard, and you can’t want new clothes after all the shopping we’ve been doing.”

  Bob dropped his eyes to Hitchcock, snoozing on the carpet, and nudged him with his stockinged foot. “I want to take a trip to see my dad.”

  Nina put her fingers to her temple, closed her eyes. “You saw him in Sweden a few months ago.”

  “I need to go again.”

  “You miss him so much?”

  “Well, sure, I miss him, but the thing is, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He lost his job with the Stockholm Opera Company and he’s back in Germany. He’s having trouble with his hands.”

  Kurt Scott, Bob’s father, was a concert pianist who had eked out a living touring Europe for most of Bob’s life. He hadn’t known about Bob’s existence until a few years before, because Nina hadn’t wanted him to know. He had left her, waiting for him, with no word, soon after she learned she was pregnant. That day had become a turning point in her life, and she had polished the memory, along with the grief and rage over being abandoned, for so many years, that even when she learned years later that Kurt had left her to save her life, she had not been able to change her feelings from that day. The memory was encysted in her, permanently, it seemed.

  But Bob had no such memories. Since discovering each other, he and Kurt had seen each other several times and developed a close bond that didn’t include her.

  Nine felt a now-familiar tugging at her heart. She didn’t want Bob to leave her. It wasn’t Kurt’s fault that his life was in Europe or Bob’s fault that he wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want Bob to go, even for a few weeks. Her life, her routines, were built around Bob. She knew she feared that one day he might go and live with Kurt. Then what would she do? He was her companion, her fellow traveler.

  All right, tell the truth. She didn’t want to stay alone in the house, not right now.

  She had barely seen Kurt in the years since Bob’s birth. She trusted him with Bob, knew he cared for Bob and had been unfairly deprived of the chance to father him over the years, knew he needed to make up time. But she didn’t see why he had to take Bob away right now, at the start of a new school year, when she had so many plans for them. Okay, she hadn’t made many plans. But she would think some up, right now.

  “Now isn’t a good time,” she said.

  “I’m not asking you for a ticket or anything, Mom. I’ll pay my own way.”

  “I’m thinking we should spend some time poking around the Gold Country on weekends,” Nina said. “Take a car trip up to Idaho to ski. Maybe Uncle Matt and Aunt Andrea and Troy and Brianna would come with us.”

  “Troy and Brianna are in school. Like me. Aunt Andrea’s busy with the new baby and Uncle Matt works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, winter and summer.”

  This was more or less true. Troy, her nephew, a few years younger than Bob, had been diagnosed with a learning disability and couldn’t miss school, and her brother Matt’s tow-truck business had started up the day parasailing got too cold on the lake. There would be no big happy family trip to Idaho.

  Bob ran his hand through his dark hair. Like Kurt’s, his eyes were a speckled green.

  “Did your dad ask you to come?”

  “No. But he’d like it.”

  Nina wanted to say, But I won’t like it if you leave, but Bob didn’t need any more burdens on him right now. “What’s wrong with his hands?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s talk more about it tomorrow night,” she said. “It’s been a hard day. I’ll give your dad a call.”

  “Okay. Want to go to Wild Waters in Sparks tomorrow after I finish? They close next week.”

  “Sorry, honey. I have a meeting in Placerville.”

  “On Sunday afternoon?”

  “Drive down with me.”

  “No, thanks. I’d rather hang around here with Taylor.”

  “Okay. Did you set the alarm?”

  “An’ checked the windows good. Are you scared, Mom? I don’t see how he could know where we live, and the police are watching an’ I’m watching. He got what he wanted. He made us afraid. That’s the last of him.”

  “I guess so. I’ll be fine. Love you. G’night.”

  “G’night.”

  She turned off the lamp and shut her eyes, seeing once again Hitchcock’s frantic eyes as he lunged against the window of the Bronco.

  6

  FOUR-ELEVEN IN THE AFTERNOON. ELLIOTT was just waking up. He crunched through two bowls of crispy cereal, standing at the kitchen counter, back safe at home on Vashon Island. He had gotten in very late from Tahoe and hadn’t been able to sleep until morning because he couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the ski mask.

  In the dreary daylight, which highlighted the broken tiles near the toaster, he considered that he was now more than a thousand miles from Tahoe, an eighteen-hour drive. He was safe. Relatively safe.

  He went through a box a day sometimes. Boxed cereal might look like pure junk, but actually, the vitamins added later, plus the fact that the cereal had once, a very long time ago, grown in a field and been alive, resulted in a substance that tasted good and also contained all minimum daily requirements. It took almost no time to pour cereal and milk into a bowl. All in all, he wouldn’t eat anything else, except that Pop had surprised them both and turned into a master chef after his mother’s death.

  Through the door into the living room Elliott could see the back of his father’s head, the silver hair shaking when he disagreed with the umpire or got excited about a play. The orange-leafed trees outside their picture window, and the fact that his college team was winning, made Pop forget about the MS. Sometimes he did get depressed, though. Then he’d say things like, “El, you’ll be on your own someday.”

  But most of the time Pop seemed to feel fine. He ran the house from his wheelchair, he and Gloria the sexy housekeeper.

  Someday Pop would be in trouble. Elliott was saving up for that, to make sure he’d have the best care.

  Four-thirteen. “Get ’im!” Pop said. “Did you see that, El?”

  They still lived in the brick house he’d been born in. For many years, Pop had ferried back and forth from Seattle, where he was a professor of linguistics at the university. He was also a Sanskrit scholar. Even now, those two words sent a shiver of excitement through Elliott. His father knew things nobody else knew, about ancient magical words.

  Pop had seemed
like the smartest man in the world when Elliott was a kid. Most nights after supper, between six and seven, they’d go into the den and shut the door. His father would pull down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from the shelf, and they would read an article together. They worked in alphabetical order, so one night it would be electromagnetism, and the next, elephants.

  Then Elliott would finish his homework, which hardly took any time, because he was a bright one, so Pop said. He told Elliott about Sanskrit. Linguistics wasn’t about languages, it was about logic. Pop showed him how to diagram Sanskrit grammar so the little x’s and y’s added up to a sentence, and Elliott enjoyed this a lot, even though the words themselves flitted from his mind.

  Somehow his interest turned from the language to the x’s and the y’s. Subject plus verb plus direct object equals a sentence. In English, anyway. English moved like a number line, marching to the right. But there were other languages that put the direct object first, or even the verb. X stayed the subject, y still described the verb. Math described language; wow!

  He had first discovered numbers when he was three or four. Someone gave him a set of magnetic numbers and letters that his mother put on the refrigerator for him, and he threw away the letters and kept the numbers, because he couldn’t read, but he could add.

  He was sure numbers were real. One was the Stick, a skinny black stick that got left behind all the time. Two was the Blue Policeman; Zero was the Crystal Ball, white and glowing like a ghost. Three was the Bully, red and angry. It turned all the numbers it could divide into a reddish color.

  To him these four numbers were as real as rocks, more real, alive in some sense. But what were they? What was a number? Where did numbers come from? Had humans invented them or discovered them? Where did they go? He thought they followed a line toward some far infinity where a little breeze sprang up and supported them.

  He never saw the integers as hard-edged; to him they were like clouds, with moving centers depending on what was pulling on them from either side. The clouds touched each other, even early on in the line of numbers, but as the numbers got bigger the clouds became a continuum, a long streak of cirrus.

  But when he was young, he had little interest in the large numbers; it was Zero, One, Two, Three, and the rest was just amplification.

  “Yes, Elliott?” Mr. Pell said from the blackboard. Sharon, the girl in the desk next to him, grimaced, because Elliott was a pudgy pest who kept his hand raised all through class. He couldn’t help it. Mr. Pell kept saying all these things that made no sense. The class had spent most of the year memorizing the multiplication tables, which Elliott already knew, and this month they were learning long division.

  “Why is the answer zero when you multiply by zero?” Elliott asked.

  “Because that’s how the system works,” Mr. Pell said. Then he sighed and said, “Zero times three equals zero plus zero plus zero. Think about it.”

  Elliott was supposed to be quiet now, but instead he argued, “But zero is nothing. It can’t do anything to another number. Three times nothing can’t change three.”

  “No, one is the number that doesn’t change anything in multiplication,” Mr. Pell said.

  “Then zero and one must be the same number,” Elliott told him. The class giggled, even Sharon, as if he had said something funny, but he felt a need to know, or maybe to be right, and it didn’t stop him. “Ten times one, that’s ten times itself, isn’t it? Shouldn’t that be a hundred? One should be a-a-”

  “An exponent,” Mr. Pell said. “You’ll learn about them next year. Ten times itself is a hundred, true. But ten times one is ten.”

  “And ten times nothing is nothing?”

  “Good. Right.”

  “Then what is ten divided by zero?”

  Tall Mr. Pell looked at the big clock on the wall and finally said, “You can’t divide by zero, Elliott. It’s a rule.”

  “Why is it a rule?”

  “Because the rest of arithmetic won’t work otherwise. You just have to accept it.”

  “I thought math was supposed to be logical.”

  “It is.”

  “Then how come multiplying by nothing wipes out a number?”

  “Talk to me after class.”

  Mr. Pell went back to the blackboard after the bell rang and the rest of the class ran out. He was awfully young to be a teacher. Elliott’s father said Mr. Pell had been a PE major, but he’d minored in math and the school needed a math teacher more than a coach. He wore a bow tie and a short-sleeved blue shirt. He looked like Eddie Murphy, but without the funny stuff.

  “Look. Division is based on multiplication, right? Twelve divided by zero equals x. Then zero times x would have to equal twelve, but that can’t be. Zero times x equals zero, you already know that.”

  “But why?”

  “Because,” Mr. Pell said, “it works. A million math operations say it’s true. Let’s look at it this way. Let’s take nine divided by three. If you have nine rocks, you can separate them into three groups of three. Got that?”

  “Sure.” In his mind they were reddish rocks, like on Mars.

  “So let’s look at nine divided by zero. How many groups of zero can you separate nine rocks into?” Mr. Pell smiled. “You see? You can’t have a group made of nothing. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s an artifact of your definition,” Elliott told him.

  Mr. Pell dropped his chalk. “Who told you that?”

  “It’s logic.”

  The teacher gave Elliott a long look. He seemed excited. Elliott thought, I’m a bright one, and warm satisfaction spread through him. He couldn’t wait to see what Mr. Pell would come up with next. Without noticing, he had clenched his fists and stood with his legs apart, chin out.

  “This isn’t a boxing match,” Mr. Pell said. “You’re pretty competitive, aren’t you? All right, Elliott. Let’s try looking at it this way. When you divide by a number, you expect the result to be a number. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Let’s look at a sequence of numbers.” He wrote some fractions on the board. One over two, one over three, one over four, one over eight…

  “See how the numbers change in a regular pattern? Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Know what happens if you keep on going this way?”

  “They get smaller.”

  “Very good! That’s right. The end result is something infinitely small. Approaching zero.”

  “Awesome! It ends at zero?”

  “No, it never ends.”

  Elliott’s mouth fell open.

  “It goes on forever, approaching closer and closer to zero. Zero is sort of the end of infinity.”

  “So when it gets so small… when it’s one over zero… that’s infinity?”

  “It’s something we simply can’t assign a number to at all. It’s outside the system. I’ll tell you why. You know what negative numbers are? Minus numbers?”

  “Sure.”

  “Try following another sequence: One over minus two, one over minus four, and so on. What’s at the end of the sequence?”

  “Minus zero?”

  “Good try. In fact, the answer is also zero. Because zero is zero. There cannot be a minus zero.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not allowed. Don’t ask why. Just accept that the answer is zero for both sequences. But you can’t have the same answer for two different number sequences. Don’t ask why. You can’t. Since you can’t, we say that dividing by zero doesn’t result in a number.”

  Mr. Pell expected Elliott to ask why you couldn’t have two separate answers, or why the second sequence was zero when it ought to be minus zero. He had a couple of slam-dunk sentences planned to put Elliott away, like “Don’t ask.”

  But Elliott was way past that. “Yeah. That’s right. I always thought there was something strange about zero. Now I understand,” he said.

  “Good.” Job well done, Mr. Pell’s face said.

/>   “The number line must be a circle,” Elliott said. “Like a clock.”

  “No. No.” The bell rang again and the next class started coming in and sitting down while Mr. Pell was still shaking his head.

  “The number line. It’s really a circle. Like you said, the zero at both ends ties it together,” Elliott said hurriedly.

  “No. The number line is a line. By definition.” But Mr. Pell rubbed his mouth and said, as if he were talking to himself, “… not bad. Sounds like elliptic geometry.”

  “What?”

  “Just accept that it’s a line, Elliott.”

  “But why? Who made it that way? God?” Now several other kids were listening in. Elliott didn’t care. He needed a real answer, not an answer for a kid, an answer that worked for him, or else it might be that the nagging thought he sometimes had at night was true-that he wasn’t a bright one after all, he was just the pudgy pest of the class, too stupid to understand what was obvious to Mr. Pell.

  If he couldn’t understand a simple thing like why you can’t divide by zero, then he’d never understand anything. He felt like he was going to bust out crying. Why couldn’t Mr. Pell answer the question in a way he could understand?

  Elliott said loudly, “You don’t know anything, I guess,” to his teacher. He heard the laughing in the background again. Everybody thought he was a freak. It made him mad. “I know what an exponent is,” he boasted. “I know what a square root is. What’s the square root of minus one?”

  “This is way beyond third-grade arithmetic,” Mr. Pell said. “Who told you to ask me these questions?” He still had a peculiar look, like he was really interested, too, and this emboldened Elliott.

  “Nobody. My pop. He’s a Sanskrit scholar. What’s the square root of minus one?”

  “You know what? I bet your father already told you the answer, told you it’s an imaginary number with its own number line.”

  “Egg-zackly. So if you can set up a brand-new number line for negative square roots, why can’t you set up a new number line for one divided by zero?”