The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

  “Lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon,” Libby rattled off. “Those are all solid. Take any one of ‘em.”

  Zanna tuned out the girls, idly playing with the coordinates of her cube and poking holes through it with her finger. Cedwick was a few tables down with Amir, Tyson, and a Spaniard named Benito, though the group seemed to be largely ignoring him. Amir and Tyson were making their cubes sumo wrestle.

  Ever since Zanna had landed Cedwick in detention and then caught him crying in the limousine, he had steered clear of her, which she took as a blessing. It made Mathematics a little awkward, though, since Dr. Fitzie kept insisting they group up in their original triangles.

  “Zanna?” Beatrice’s large brown eyes were full of concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Huh?” Zanna had poked so many holes in her cube it looked like Swiss cheese. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  Beatrice frowned, not fooled at all by the halfhearted lie, so Zanna caved. “I got a letter from my dad yesterday. He’s coming back for the holidays.”

  “Well that’s exciting!” Beatrice said, but at Zanna’s expression, she dialed back her excitement a bit. “Isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Zanna said, shrugging. “It should be. I don’t know. So much has happened since I last saw him.”

  “What does he do?” Libby asked.

  “He’s a pilot,” Zanna said. She made her Swiss-cheese finger holes close up and then squashed her cube out like jelly. “Mostly flights in the southern hemisphere. China and Australia and India, that area.”

  “And they don’t let him come home except for the holidays?” Libby asked. “What kind of evil airline does he work for?”

  “They’re going through a lot,” Zanna said, more down to her squashed cube than to any of the girls. “The airline isn’t doing too well, so he’s had to pick up some extra flights. And you know, it’s a big hassle to fly halfway around the world. He travels so much already.”

  “You travel out into the middle of the Atlantic every day,” Libby pointed out.

  “That is hardly a fair comparison,” Nora admonished. “That’s Scientific travel.”

  “So what are you worried about?” Beatrice’s Italian accent softened the edges of her words, making her gentle voice even gentler. She pushed her cube aside in order to give Zanna her undivided attention. “That he’s not going to recognize you?”

  “I don’t really know,” Zanna muttered. She scraped her smushed cube back together like cookie dough. “I guess just . . . explaining everything.”

  “About being a Scientist?”

  Zanna fidgeted around the question. “I haven’t told him anything. At all. We don’t . . . talk.”

  “He doesn’t have to understand it,” Libby said. “I mean, my dad doesn’t really understand science, either. He just knows I go to this special school for smart kids. You don’t have to tell him about—” she gestured to the cubes and the ancient classroom— “gravitational functions and everything.”

  Zanna shook her head. “No, I mean—” A groan escaped her. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

  “Okay,” Beatrice said quietly, ever respectful of Zanna’s wishes.

  “We’re only trying to help,” Libby said. With a quick shrug of her shoulders, she picked up her theoretical cube and began toying around with its gravitational functions again, seeing how fast she could make it spin. “So when do you think they’re finally going to give us real objects?”

  Nora’s exasperated sigh said everything.

  Zanna moved listlessly through the rest of Physics class and lunch, eating even slower than Nora and only answering questions directly put to her. The girls all tried to cheer her up in their different ways. Nora distracted her with a story of how the Scientists had stolen the castle that made up the west wing of the school from a French countryside. Libby and Amir—who were an inseparable couple now, at the expense of Nora’s patience—told her about the prank they were going to pull on Dr. Piccowitz that Friday. Beatrice said nothing, but she gave Zanna’s hand a comforting squeeze, which worked a little, but nothing really lifted the fog hanging around her.

  “Books away,” Dr. Trout said when they entered Self that afternoon. A murmur rose from the class, excited and a little hopeful, but Dr. Trout swatted it down quickly. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “Today we will be diving into our own functions. It will not be fun.”

  Zanna was sure that the woman’s gaze lingered on her for an extra moment, as if the professor could see the fog Zanna felt herself wallowing around in. It was only a second, but Zanna had to avert her eyes almost immediately. Her professor’s piercing gaze was intimidating.

  “Absolute silence,” Dr. Trout said, and the classroom went still. All Zanna heard was the blood in her ears and the clear, demanding voice of Dr. Trout. “Eyes closed.”

  Amir and Tyson giggled a little, and Dr. Trout shushed them angrily. “Completely shut,” the professor said. “Turn your thoughts inward. You are a box. Dig into it. Search for the bottom.”

  Zanna sighed and tried to do as her teacher instructed. She imagined a doofy-looking cardboard box named Zanna filled with functions she could dig through, and amazingly, it began to work. Functions that she knew, or at least could guess at, drifted up into view. The tangle of gravity working on her. The simple chemical compounds of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water. Stresses from her weight pressing down in the chair, and the chair pressing back, from her clothes and her shoes and the pencil she had absentmindedly tucked under her velvet bonnet in Chemistry. The lunch digesting in her stomach.

  Zanna went deeper. Under the nameable functions at the top came a million smaller things, tiny and inscrutable and working to keep her alive. Every once in a while, she glimpsed something she recognized from Biology, something that was cellular reproduction or DNA or part of the Krebs cycle. It was dense down here, and yet, Dr. Trout encouraged them to keep digging, to keep sinking lower and lower. “Find the bottom,” she said. “Find the foundation of yourself.”

  Then Zanna broke through, and the sight took her breath away. For what she saw had no horizon and no edge. It was a writhing, tangled, unreadable black planet of function. This was her—Zanna Mayfield—spelled out in unflinching mathematical notation.

  She jerked away from it like a red-hot piece of iron and opened her eyes. Dr. Trout was there, staring at her. “Close your eyes, Ms. Mayfield,” she said. “I said this would not be fun.”

  “But—”

  “Close your eyes.” Her voice brokered no arguments.

  Zanna did as she was told and reluctantly returned to the planet of function. Dr. Trout’s hypnotizing voice continued in the background, and Zanna tentatively looked over the tangle of herself, still afraid of the sight. Simple things began to appear out of the jumble, like shapes materializing out of a fog. Her name, her friends, her grandfather and five uncles, her love of puzzles, her fear of heights. It was exhilarating to feel parts of her Self click into place, like a good crack of the knuckles. So exhilarating that she forgot Dr. Trout’s warning that this would not be fun.

  She looked closer, and the functions shaped themselves into a memory.

  It had been five years after Zanna’s mother had died giving birth to her, and her father had disappeared into his pilot work. Then the invitation had come for Zanna to take a flight with him. He wanted to show her the world.

  Halfway through the flight, he brought her up to the cockpit. How clearly she remembered his arm, heavily tanned and sporting an enormous silver wristwatch, as he pointed through the clouds at the scene below them. She had clung to his neck and refused to look.

  “Come on, Zanna,” her father said, using his free hand to force her to look out the windshield. “Take a look. Look at the Earth there. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  She squirmed and shied away. “I want to go back.”

  “No, you don’t. You want t
o stay up here.”

  “No.” She pulled at his airline tie. “I’m scared.”

  “I can take her,” one of the other men in the cockpit offered.

  “Nonsense!” her father laughed. He pried her fingers off his tie and turned her head again. “No daughter of mine is going to be afraid of heights! Come on now, Zanna, see? We’re perfectly safe. Would I let you fall?”

  But he had let her fall. He let her fall every time he wasn’t there. No pilot worked for months on end without a single day off to visit his daughter, no matter how badly the airline was doing. Zanna had always known, even when she was only five, but down in her Self function, it was spelled out in lines of cold logic. Her father wanted nothing to do with her.

  “I CAN’T!” Cedwick’s shout jolted her back to the classroom in an instant. It jolted the rest of the class, as well. In a flurry, Dr. Trout descended on the English boy, covering both of them with a privacy illusion that obscured anything they might be talking about. Whispers sprung up at once. Amir snickered, and Libby elbowed him a bit roughly. Poor Beatrice looked almost distraught with concern.

  The veil lifted. Cedwick sat low in his chair, eyes focused on an empty space of air, and Dr. Trout cleared her throat sharply. “I believe we’re ready for some discussion,” she said, silencing the class. Her eyes landed on Amir, who was still shaking a little with laughter. “Mr. Al-Remmul, thank you for volunteering. What did you see in your Self function?”

  Amir scratched at his nose. “Me playing in a band.”

  Dr. Trout shook her head disapprovingly. “Ms. Wilder?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Libby said. “Maybe my dogs?”

  This only made Dr. Trout shake her head even more. “Ms. Mayfield?”

  Zanna considered telling Dr. Trout that she had seen her father and the day he had shown her what the world looked like, but then she decided against it. Not with everyone in the class listening. Especially not with Cedwick in earshot. “A planet,” Zanna said, which wasn’t really a lie.

  But it wasn’t what Dr. Trout had been looking for, either, and her Self professor let out a deep sigh. “Well, that is not surprising,” she said. “It seems Mr. Hemmington is the only one interested in learning about his Self. So for the rest of you, spend half an hour every day for the next two weeks in meditation, and write me a paper about what you see.” Her eyebrows lowered. “I expect it to be substantial.”

  There wasn’t any sort of outcry—Zanna and the rest of them had learned in the first week that complaining only made Dr. Trout add more work—but after the bell rang, it was a different story. “Lousy Cedwick,” Libby grumbled. “I can’t believe he got out of those dumb meditation exercises.”

  “You should have told Dr. Trout what you saw then,” Nora scolded her. “You only have yourself to blame.”

  “And what did you see?” Libby said, turning on her at once. “Feel like sharing it?” When Nora had nothing to say in return, Libby just nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

  Zanna kept quiet. Cedwick’s outburst and the memory of her father kept playing over and over, making her more and more nauseous with each repeat.

  On the bus ride home, she threw up again.

  Chapter Nine

  “I have figured it out!” Nora started talking the moment Zanna sat down on the bus, her eyes glittering with excitement. “I’ve been considering several hypotheses to your problem. Your father, I mean. And last night, I found your solution. Let’s throw him a party to welcome him back! That way we can be there for moral support. Safety in numbers. It’s almost guaranteed!”

  “Hang on,” Zanna said through a wide and slow yawn. Thanks to Dr. Trout’s meditation exercises, she had to spend half an hour every night thinking about her father and how he had abandoned her, with nothing to show for it but bad dreams. Fortunately, this was the last day she had to do them. “Can you say everything again?”

  Nora spelled it out with only a small hint of frustration. “I said, let’s throw a party for your father.”

  “A party?”

  “Yes. We will need streamers. And balloons.”

  “I know what a party is,” Zanna said. “I just—why?”

  “So you don’t have to face your dad alone,” Nora said, her voice dropping a bit. “So we can be there with you.”

  “Face him alone?” Zanna said. “He’s my father, not an executioner.”

  “You don’t like it?” Nora asked, a tinge of sadness creeping into her voice. “It’s a perfect plan. I thought through every possibility. I was going to bring my dehumidifier to prove that you’re telling the truth—”

  “No, I think it’ll work,” Zanna said quickly. Her head felt like a drawer someone had stuffed too many socks into and was trying to slam closed. “I just need to think.”

  There was something different about Dr. Fitzie when they walked into their sunny Mathematics classroom that morning. Her teacher always looked a little overjoyed at everything, but this morning, she looked fit to explode. “Don’t sit down!” she snapped at Tyson when he began to put his backpack on one of the ancient marble tables. “We’re going on an adventure today!”

  Libby’s eyebrows raised in anticipation.

  “Yes, yes, let me just make sure everyone is here,” Dr. Fitzie said, quickly counting heads. “Fantastic! Now, if you will follow me.”

  They trailed out into the corridor, following Dr. Fitzie into the castle wing of the school. She wouldn’t answer any questions about where they were going, but she did keep up a running commentary on everything they passed. Their journey took them through the English garden of the administration tower, down a short Baroque hallway, and through a set of paneled doors into what had been the atrium of an opera house. Two sweeping staircases climbed up to a central door of bright-yellow metal that resembled the one Zanna had seen in Dr. Mumble’s office.

  Beatrice gasped, pointing upward, and Zanna followed her gaze, her own mouth falling open at the sight. An enormous pendulum of silver and crystal glass swung in a lazy and unceasing arc, its plumb coming just inches from the wall on either side. Golden light swept across the atrium with each swing. It made Zanna feel as if she were watching days go by, each pass of the pendulum another sunrise and sunset dashing over the landscape.

  Dr. Fitzie climbed the staircase, touched the slab of golden metal, and spoke her name in a clear voice. At once, the doors shot open with a hush of displaced air.

  “Don’t dawdle now!” Dr. Fitzie said, beckoning to them. “Shake a leg!”

  The room beyond was endless. Zanna recognized it at once, for she had seen it from the air many times. They were in the Gothic cathedral on the western side of the school. No other building the Scientists had stolen was this big. Windows taller and wider than Zanna’s house looked out on the blue cloudless sky, hitting Zanna with a punch of unease. One of the school’s orbiting islands was slowly passing by. She could almost fit the entire island in the window frame.

  Chandeliers hung at intervals, casting shimmering light on the floor’s geometric-patterned dark-lacquered wood. She would have called it a grand royal ballroom, except that instead of dancers on the floor it was all strange machinery. There were big glass jars she could have climbed inside, skinny distillation towers, electrical engines churning in a steady rhythm, banks of lasers scattering their rays over a drafting table, and even something off in a corner that might have been a nuclear reactor. Everyone crowded at the entrance, afraid to cross the threshold into the realm of the machines.

  “Well!” Dr. Fitzie said, waving her hand at the entire scene. “What do you think of our Laboratory?”

  The class gawked. One by one they filtered in. Dr. Cheever was waiting just around the side of a bank of Van de Graaff generators, his horseshoe iron reshaped into an uncomfortable-looking lawn chair. “Spread out! That’s it,” he said, standing up and flashing his dazzling smile at the
m. He had cleared out the space around a machine that looked like a giant fishbowl on a block of iron.

  “Where’s Simon?” Dr. Fitzie asked as she looked over the fishbowl machine and tapped on its thick glass.

  “Take a wild guess,” Dr. Cheever said. “He’s running late.”

  An awkward minute passed with the teachers fiddling with the machine and refusing to explain what they were doing in there, and then Zanna heard someone coming up the staircase. Dr. Piccowitz stood in the doorway, looking a bit sheepish. “H-Hullo,” he said.

  “Any longer, and we would have started without you!” Dr. Fitzie said.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Dr. Piccowitz muttered. In his hands was a block of carbon, which he put into the fishbowl at the top of the machine before manipulating the glass so it was a seamless sphere. The machine buzzed to life with a warm purr.

  “Well,” Dr. Fitzie said, “now that we’re all here—”

  Dr. Cheever cleared his throat. “Hey, hey, hey. Slow down there, Maru. I believe it’s my turn this year.”

  “Nonsense,” Dr. Fitzie said. “You did it year before last.”

  “No, that was me,” Dr. Piccowitz said, making skittish rat movements with his fingers. “Me, Andrew, you, me, Andrew, you. I did it last year. It’s his turn.”

  Dr. Fitzie frowned, but she apparently knew she had been caught and stepped back. Dr. Cheever took a deep breath, relishing the moment.

  “Welcome,” he said, putting a hand on the fishbowl machine. “You’re all mighty clever sorts, so I’m guessing you’ve already figured out why we’re here. Today, we’re taking our first step out of the realm of the theoretical and into the real. Today is the day we put what we’ve been learning for the past three and a half months into practice.”

  Zanna could almost feel the excitement radiating off Libby.

  “One at a time, you’ll come up to the vacuum chamber,” Dr. Cheever said, patting the fishbowl’s thick glass. “Our object for manipulation is a graphite cube. Everyone will get six minutes in front of the cube. We will call you up according to your given name in alphabetical order. While you wait, I highly recommend that you brush up on your gravitational functions.”