The Meridians (27 page)

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 was 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.

K
₀
(A)ρ/≃ Z
²
, 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.

"Don't get uppity. Basically there's been a problem in physics for the last few decades."

"Only one?" said Scott.

"If you're going to keep interrupting...," began Lynette.

Scott wrapped his hands around his hot cocoa and grinned impishly. "Never," he said.

"The basic problem is that Einstein's theories of general relativity - which is a fancy term for gravity - doesn't get along too well with some parts of quantum physics. So some brainiacs came up with string theory as a way to reconcile the parts that don't work. Instead of things being made of matter or energy - or both, as Einstein thought - string theory says that all objects in our universe are made up of either vibrating filaments called strings, or something called branes."

"Brains? As in the thing zombies eat?"

"No, not brains,
branes
. B-R-A-N-E-S. I think it's short for membranes." Lynette took a moment to sip at her own cocoa before continuing. "Anyway, string theory, uh, theorizes that there's this connection called supersymmetry that exists between different types of particles in our universe. The supersymmetry theory is that there are two types of particles called bosons and fermions, and there is exactly one fermion for every boson."

"Supersymmetry: the Love Connection of string theory."

"Not far wrong," said Lynette. "So one of the neat things about string theory is that it allows for different dimensions to exist. Seems to insist on it, in fact. And each particle - or string, or whatever, I'm probably screwing this up, but it's the best I can do - has a partner in one of the other dimensions. Superpartners."

"Wonder Twin Powers, activate!"

Lynette rolled her eyes, but couldn't help but laugh a bit as well. "So anyway, there are all these different kinds of string theory. In the nineteen seventies, string theories were shown to require extra dimensions, but the physicists were still arguing about what set of mathematical equations were the right ones. But in the mid-nineties, a guy named Edward Witten -"