Bright Shards of Someplace Else (10 page)

“Nothing but dirty fucking bugs; what the fuck …” He felt another hard kick to the head as if he were to blame. His vision narrowed and all he could see was a butterfly, a painted lady, moving on its needle
legs like a dancer, encircled by a field of black and backlit as if it were the star of the show. “Get his wallet, man, his wallet.” They turned him over, held his neck down, then pulled his jacket off from behind; yanked it off like playground boys pulled off the wings of bugs; he would cry and point and tell them to stop until the lunch lady made him take a time out for carrying on. His head hit the metal support of one of the shelves, and a box slid down and settled on the small of his back.

The men ran off. The door was open and a breeze swept through, whipping the butterflies, dead and alive, aloft like fall leaves. Aaron began to curl and uncurl, trying to get the box off his back, convulsing like a worm poked with a stick. The box rolled off and he sat up, lifting his hand to his head, where he felt a stickiness combined with something soft and detached. When he pulled his hand away there was a crushed buttercup wet with blood, only a pinprick of yellow left on its wing. He looked at his hand a long while, then tried to stand. He kicked out his right leg; he tried to push up with his left hand; he stood up with his legs splayed and wobbled before falling to his knees. Another draft came in, and he wanted badly to be outside. The night air would fix it, he thought,
like people going to the sea in the old days to cure things
. He crawled forward, pulling with his elbows, pushing packing material, boxes, and paper release pods in front of him, often stopping and putting his head down. Blood dripped from him and spotted the bits of Styrofoam, creating small red eyes that watched him as he lurched forward again, dragging a sheet of bubble wrap with his toe. He reached the door and with a strong kick tumbled out in a wave of debris. The grass felt so good that he lay for a moment in the healing dirt.

“Right elbow,” he told himself, and put it down. “Left foot,” and he tried to push off of it, though it slipped back in the dirt. “Left hand,” and he reached forward and closed his fist around a clump of grass. “Right leg,” and he dug his knee in. He chanted these commands to himself, even when he lay flat, unable to organize himself for a moment.
He was afraid; he tried to think of the proof. The proof! He had discovered it. He tried to remember his first attempt. When was it? He put his elbow down. It had been after he had started at Final Release; he had been sitting on the floor in his childhood bedroom, rifling through the bottom drawer of his dresser. He found his high-school math textbook, the one with the picture of thousands of crayons moving down the assembly line on the cover. It contained a very basic description of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture in a purple sidebar titled “Math Mysteries!” He wrote a few things in margins. The act of writing in a book from his past felt strange. When he looked up his dad was standing in the doorway. “Watch,” he'd said, and fired up a turkey carving knife made to look like a tiny chainsaw, complete with a pull.

He slid into unconsciousness like a butterfly sidesteps under a leaf in the rain. Later that week he had begun working on the problem. He thought of how confident he was at first—it looked so simple!—but it had taken all of his concentration. His mother and father were arguing over how to revive a dying shrub outside his window, and their voices kept cutting in. He picked up his notebook and all the loose sheets he had been working on and walked away from the sound. He was looking down, calculating in his head, and before he realized it, he had walked straight into his brother's room, where it was always quiet. It was of course the same—the plaid comforter, the basketball trophies on the shelf, the tennis shoes under the dust ruffle, poking out like two deeply bonneted faces. The room had been vacuumed (how long ago?) and the carpeting groomed in perfect diagonal strokes with curves around the dresser feet.

More time passed. He was again laying down, his forehead rooted in an ant mine. His right hand was knuckle deep in the earth. He blinked, and his eyelashes raked dirt. He raised his head and saw the office door and the ball of pulsing light above it. There was a sound of crickets, a sound that seemed to travel not through the air but through the earth. The sound was like the windup truck that inexplicably
began running, deep in his brother's desk drawer, the moment he sat down and put his pen to the problem. The thing had jerked to life among the pens, erasers, and leaves his brother had preserved between bits of paper. The weak grind of the mechanism moving through this detritus had seemed like the room itself waking. He pulled the drawer open and ran his hands among the things; reaching into that dark drawer without seeing what he was touching felt illicit—touching anything in the room did.

The white back door of the office, no more than twenty feet away, rose above the grass like the keystone of some spectral ruin. He breathed in-out-in, counting, as he often did involuntarily whenever he was stressed, but this time the sound of the building numbers in his mind seemed the sole evidence that any time was passing, that any moment trailed a thread from the moment before. His brother's room had been a spacer between two times—the time he was there and the time he was not—and his parents left it untouched as if he might come back and occupy, retroactively, the years he had been gone. Occasionally, they got letters: Drew was in Alaska, hiking with the Inuits! He was in Santa Cruz, selling blown glass vases his friend made. He was bartending in Florida, he was hitchhiking across the plains, he was married, he was separated, he needed cash, he was silent.

He stood, tried to take a step, but his own body seemed infinitely far away, his feet so small that they seemed beyond control, bouncing like electrons, circling the unsteady nucleus of his head. He fell, his vision going in and out so fast it was as if his blackout were on a propeller, spinning in front of his sight. For weeks he had worked on the problem in his brother's room—at his desk—thinking that something about working there was lucky. There was something about the room—the objects so settled in the deep hush, the way even the light seemed to hesitate at the window, casting itself in modest rays that didn't touch anything, didn't even reach the bed—that seemed anticipatory, matching the mood in which he always worked. And he liked
touching the things in the room, bumping the shoes with his shoes, running his hands down the duvet cover, opening the closet and clapping the old sport uniforms, Sunday slacks, and sport coats covered in plastic between his hands. He always sat back down to the problem refreshed.

He shut his eyes and relaxed into the earth, which swayed and arched up around him, so at some moments he felt a wall of vertical grass behind his head, sometimes under his chin, and sometimes pressed to his face, damp and gentle as a hot cloth dabbed on his forehead. Afternoons in his brother's room, he would lie on his back on his brother's made bed, imagining the figures and forms of the conjecture playing themselves out on the swirled plaster above. He kept his visits to his brother's room from his parents, only working in there when they were outside or away. He knew that occupying the space would only make Drew's absence more keenly felt, whereas the empty shrine of a room, always shut, was like a brilliant idea waiting to be thought. The ceiling fan revolved but there was no breeze, as if the air in the room were gelatinous, pinching closed the moment the blade passed through. Every now and again a new angle would come to him, and he would reach over to the nightstand and scribble it on the thick block of his brother's neon notepaper. Sometimes he rumpled the duvet when he napped; he drooled on the pillow made to look like a softball. When he left the room for the day, no evidence of him remained. He even made sure the pencils were all pointing the right direction in the pencil holder, the calculations picked from the trash.

Something crawled over his nose. He snatched at his face, sending his head vibrating like the blur of a dog's scratching foot. He pressed his hands over both ears, trying to stop the movement. When he was younger and his brother would get in trouble he would put both hands over his ears and listen to the sound, the ticking and settling of his head, like an old house at night. He honestly didn't remember much about his brother. They were six years apart, and Aaron was twelve when Drew left. All his memories of Drew were memories of
trying to remember him. He used to feel guilty about how little he remembered, so he would steal into the empty room, look at his brother's stuff, and half-create, half-recall things that had happened between them, using the objects in the room to star in these inventions. The ant farm in Drew's closet—didn't they mix carpenter and regular ants to see what would happen? Didn't the two colonies burrow from opposite sides, through the sand, so they met and rumbled in the very center while he and Drew made opposing bets on who would win? It was as if the objects held the memories, as if all he had to do was concentrate on a photograph, ball, or toy and an experience he and his brother never had would form, popped like an insect from the amber. Years later he lay in that same room, bearing down on the conjecture so neatly printed out next to him in the bed, waiting for its provenance—the proof—to appear in just that way.

He concentrated on the light above the office door, trying to keep it in his flickering sight. He crawled, lost consciousness, cried out, slithered and kicked, sat up for a few seconds, and fainted. Loose butterflies were tucked in the grass all around like crocus buds. The door was ten feet away. He fluttered his eyes open and saw not the grass, butterflies, light, and fireflies but the thin light under his brother's room's door. “Have you been in Drew's room?” his mother asked, and he had shaken his head without thinking. “The light was on.” His father appeared behind her, a jeweler's loop hooked around his forefinger; he was working on something small. The next day they heard from Drew; he was coming home to get back on his feet, or something. His parents pretended to be guarded about it—he had said he was coming home before—but Aaron could sense their excitement. All he thought of was losing the room. He realized the room was just a space, just a weird little place where he worked on a pointless problem—but why should that be upturned? He didn't need the memories of his brother, both actual and invented, diluted by the real thing. His parents left for dinner (a celebratory dinner?), and he lay in Drew's dark room, not venturing the light. He had made great progress towards
the proof—the evidence lay spread all around him on Drew's notepaper, on Drew's old homework, even on the back of some girl named Heidi's love letter. He reached for his brother's clear plastic phone, the kind where all the inner workings were lit up and exposed in primary colors.

“You sound a little down,” Dr. Bajpai had said. Aaron was surprised. They had never addressed each other outside of math, though math, as Dr. Bajpai made clear, covered a lot of ground. Math could be funny, the professor had pointed out, telling a long joke that played on the ideas of negative and positive numbers, something to do with where to seat whom at a dinner table. Math could be defiant, as when Aaron, when asked to “show his work” in high school, responded by writing up a narrative of the whole development of his mind, from the cradle up until then, to explain how he had come to be able to solve the problem without “work.” Math could be mysterious, of course, what with all the conjectures, like the Birch and Swinnterton-Dyer, that behaved as perfect mathematical rules even though they had yet to be proven. But mostly math was oblivious, marching forward in its formations, unspooling into infinity, unimpeded by anything but itself. There was always something you couldn't solve, always a place math could go where you could not, it was like riding a horse in a forest of lower and lower tree branches until you were on your back in the dirt, listening to the numbers gallop off and away. He blinked, opened his eyes, and looked up at the moon. The pinprick stars widened and shook, becoming thin and sloppy before tightening back up into spots.

The door was the door to Drew's room. If he opened it, he would see all Drew's things, the bed, the sports trophies, the pinup in the red suit, the tennis shoes venturing from under the dust ruffle. It was right here in the middle of the lawn. The world tipped and tipped again, and Aaron thought he could hear the objects in Drew's room being scrambled by the motion. Maybe there were butterflies in there now, perched on the trophies, cocoons in the shoes. Fluttering when
it was in flux. The sounds made him afraid. What if he didn't make it? Would
his
room, then, become the shrine? Aaron's coat—the one he decided not to take this morning at the last minute—would never move from the old wooden rocking chair in the corner. The math textbook, spine broken, would remain opened to the conjecture, a pen in the slit between pages. His old upper body cast, propped in the corner and signed by all his college friends (mostly his professors, truth be told) would stand sentry like a truncated ghost. The blue pillowcases under his green plaid comforter would become conjecture, known but never again verified. The room would become a placeholder, a zero in the middle of a figure, the absence that anchors the eye when transcribing a long number, the nothing that changes the value completely.

Would Drew tiptoe into his room when his parents were out, running his fingers over the math theory books, the compass for drawing curves, his Final Release work shirt, with the butterfly-heart on the breast? Perhaps he would creep into Aaron's room and ponder some great question, something related to dark matter, what happens when something disappears. Leap up when he heard his parents downstairs and hurry back to his own room, the shoes, the trophies, the red suit … As Aaron talked to Dr. Bajpai about his work on the proof, looping and unlooping the phone cord around his fingers, he opened his mouth a few times to confess that yes, he was a bit down, and did Aaron ever mention that he once had a brother? But the proof and Drew were two things he had to reach hard for, grasping this, grasping that, turning from one to reach the other. He lay on Drew's bed, prostrate, trying to bring the threads closed, but Dr. Bajpai, with that warm and wonderful voice, had to go. The lights deep in the plastic phone went off.