Branches of Science
Francis was a mathematician who played it for the amusement value.
It was a good thing he wasn't an architect. Some architects pride themselves on being able to support an entire cathedral on one narrow pillar. Francis would have prided himself on knowing exactly which single brick to pull out to bring the whole thing tumbling down. Plus he was an agnostic, which didn't help. He also wasn't much of an aesthete, which wouldn't have helped either. The only thing he would've been good for is building housing blocks, and he only would have done that in order to pull out one cinderblock and knock it all down.
So all in all, it was better that he was a mathematician than an architect--although it wasn't entirely good that he was a mathematician, either.
Equations seemed ingrained in Francis, somehow etched into the rivulets of his mind with the sharpened point of a precision compass, or scribbled on the back of his eyelids with an ultrafine mechanical pencil point. Francis saw things, saw matrices, patterns, equations in the movement of crowds. He saw the future, but he kept it mostly to himself. He wasn't psychic. He was just very, very observant.
Yesterday he quit Intel, although they begged him to stay; he was one of the main designers of the new Pentium chip. He felt it was time to move on. Besides, he had been responsible for inserting a dividing error into the chip's circuitry that no one had caught yet, and he wanted to be gone before that came up.
Of course, he had taken and left many other jobs--he was never at a loss for offers. When he first got out of college, Francis had even dropped out of sight to avoid the entreaties by creepy men wearing expensive shoes trying to recruit him for the NSA or think tanks, but he couldn't help calling attention to himself and they always came back, so he went back to being Francis again. He'd worked semesters at small, unprestigious colleges, but many non-academic jobs too: a stockbroker, a clothing designer, a screenwriter, a cab driver, a health inspector, a political consultant, a policeman, and a food taster. Francis had a wide range of interests.
He was having his morning coffee at McDonald's when he noticed the possibilities for a man and a woman standing in line behind one another, caught up in their own thoughts. After working out a quick 20 by 20 matrix with his thumbnail in the styrofoam of his cup, Francis knew what to do. He grabbed his coffee and got up. First he bumped into the man, making him turn around, then spilled the coffee on the woman. She screamed and jumped back. "Watch it, bitch," Francis yelled as he continued out the door. Looking back over his shoulder, he could see the woman looking pissed off and the man drying her with napkins. A bond had been formed; Francis knew where it would end. He went to the mall and bought a yo-yo. Then he watched a stupid romantic comedy at the cinema and laughed his ass off.
After the movie let out, it was almost time for his focus group. Francis was, in derogatory corporate terms, a "focus whore." It was a friendly little community of people who really enjoyed, for one reason or another, being in those little workshops picked by advertisers to judge the marketability of a product, movie, government policy, etc. Usually, being in a focus group was like being picked for jury duty--it didn't happen very often. But focus whores did it as often as possible. They had web sites and newsgroups with updates on recruiting stations (Francis had gotten picked up for today's at 33rd and Elm), tips on how to answer phone surveys to give yourself the best shot at getting asked to come in, and debates on the ethics of their hobby. Some grouped because they wanted to positively influence the direction of consumer products. Others, like Francis, did not. He liked to aggravate them by not being a sincere consumer.
On Monday it had been Nabisco; Thursday it was Atlantic; today it was Universal. First came the survey.
"How many movies do you see in an average month?" 43.
"How many hours of TV do you watch in an average month?" 1.
"What is your level of education?" Post-doctoral.
"What is your profession?" Baggage handler.
"Do you find Adam Sandler funny?" Yes.
"Do you like big-budget action movies?" Yes.
"What would you like to see a movie about?" Trepanation.
"Does seeing a product in the context of a movie make you want to buy it?" Only if it is rubbed against the main character's right wrist.
"Are any groups underrepresented in movies?" Belgians.
"What do you like to read?" Transportation journals. Lucky number books. Religious pamphlets.
In the roundtable discussion, which focused on people's general issues with movies, he screamed at a woman who complained that movie prices were too high, viciously defending the rights of the industry. He also sided with a man who said there should be more special effects in movies. Finally, he gave a little speech about the glorious heyday of the mid-80's, especially John Hughes' films and the need to revive the Police Academy series.
As he was walking out of the group session, he saw a small child sitting alone on a fountain, obviously lost. A matrix flashed into his head, but he chased it away. Maybe fifteen years earlier he might have done something, but not now.
Francis often said, "While it's true that the random decision of one moment can change your life completely, it's also true that most decisions don't make a bit of difference, especially as you get older. Most people are so normal it's piercing. They've got maybe two outcomes and that's it. I can't do anything with them."
Children were different, though. The possibilities were close to endless there, and a kid's matrix was almost unmanageable. So the challenge he used to give himself was to change the little things without changing the big things: to change their taste in peanut butter without making them a sociopath, a harder task than it appears. It was a precision exercise. But one day he was in the post office redirecting mail when he glanced at a short man wearing a business suit and experienced a blinding shock of recognition--and almost a connection. He resolved to leave children alone from then on.
That night he went to a baseball game. He was no stranger to sporting events: they were easy, but relaxing. First he wandered down to the bullpen and took a look at the pitchers, then glanced in the home team's dugout on the way to his seat. The guy sitting next to him had a radio turned to the sports channel, and Francis soaked up some of the pregame chatter. At the souvenir booth he bought a scorecard, looked it over quickly, took out a pencil, and worked out the whole game between the ads for Army supply stores. Then he had a hot dog.
In the bottom of the eighth, he walked behind the left-field bleachers and took out a BB gun. One minute and thirty-eight seconds later, he pulled the trigger. Then he put the gun back in his briefcase and returned to his seat. Twelve innings later, the game ended, and he went home.
Francis had unfortunately forgotten his family. In the process of acquiring his degree and all the theory that made his brain work the way it did, that information just got overwritten somewhere along the line. Francis was fairly certain he had a family--it stood to reason, after all--he just wasn't sure who or where they were. He figured that someday he'd find them and just instinctively recognize them.
Like most men who lived in their heads, Francis didn't take much care of himself; he didn't notice his body unless it gave a loud neural scream. He even resisted the normal human urge to look in every reflective surface he passed, since he was too busy looking at everyone else. So he didn't really know what he looked like. He had a general idea--the equations governing the coordinates of his body were locked away in his head--but he couldn't describe himself to a sketch artist if required.
The next day he was out switching roadsigns when he happened upon a screen-printing shop. On a whim, he went in and said he wanted a t-shirt made.
"What do you want on it?" the salesman asked.
Pepperoni, the mathematician thought, and giggled. "I want you to use the really cheesy letters. Like the ones you see on little league uniforms."
"OK."
"Use a cheap blue shirt. Maybe it could have gray sleeves."
"What size are you?"
"Large. And I want it to say…"
"Yeah?"
"I want it to say, 'I whupped God's ass.' "
The salesman gave him a look. "OK."
He put the shirt on and walked out of the shop. While he got odd looks from passers-by, unlike Francis' looks, these didn't see anything.
That afternoon Francis gave a guest lecture at a prestigious college, in a large, carpeted room with projectors and benches and a huge, overwhelming blackboard. He stood behind the podium wearing his t-shirt. The posters said he was going to talk about knot theory. Instead, he told them a story.
"Many great men," he said, "have fucked, fucked up, discovered important things by accident, been bad cooks, kept gardens with poinsettias, played games obsessively, drunk a glass of wine every night, joined fraternal orders, flapped their arms in the privacy of their own backyards, trying to fly. Our subject was one of these."
Papers ruffled in the room. "He was a doctor to priests of all colors and sizes: a medicine man to the medicine men of many different gods. Graduate of Harvard, top of his class, deserving of the highest fees and best clients.
"One night he is sitting in his living room, drinking his customary glass of wine. After drinking about two-thirds of what he originally poured, the liquid causes a bitter taste at the back of his tongue. He reaches down, dips a cracker into a jar of peanut butter--his renowned hands' guilty habit--and eats it. When he looks up, there is a hole in his floor."
Francis came out from behind the podium. The room was restless, but he did not acknowledge his audience--very professional. "But not a hole. A hole. A break. A tear. Something new. Our subject gets up from his couch and looks down into the hole.
"Down there he sees something that triggers a thought, like the bitter taste at the back of his tongue (now gone), but harder to grasp. He stares and stares and listens, and finally he gets it. The hole is rubbing his fingertips together for hours on end while sitting on the couch in his old house when he was nine. If he rubbed them long enough, they began to feel round, smooth, like ball bearings. It's this that is in the hole. There's no other way of describing it.
"Over the next few weeks, he asks his various religious patients what the meaning of this incident is. None have any answer; indeed, most are completely dumbfounded and think he is playing a joke on them. Our subject scours the neuroscience, and even (with a shudder) the psychology journals in hopes of finding an answer, with no success.
"At night he lies in bed. He no longer drinks his glass of wine. And sometimes he will press his fingers together and rub, slowly, gently. But it doesn't work--his hands have changed too much.
"This fits in with nothing he knows. Our subject cannot rationally understand what has happened. And yet he cannot forget it, either. He can only sit in bed, futilely rubbing his fingertips against one another and hoping for a miracle.
"I'll take questions now."
A long minute passed. Then a hand went up in the back of the room. Francis pointed to it. A girl rose and said something unintelligible. "Speak up, please," Francis said.
"I know you," the girl said.
"Do you?"
"Yes. You once told me that people's destinies are boring and limited. That there's not really that much choice. Is that true?"
Francis paused. "Yes, it is sort of true," he said. "And yet. And yet. When pressed, I must admit that no matter what I see, the number of futures actively avoided by individuals from moment to moment is immense and almost crushing in its magnitude. So many possibilities achievable with a little effort. But that's not my domain. It's out of my reach. Do you understand?"
"Yes," the girl said. "Thank you."
Afterwards, Francis ducked into a bathroom just outside the auditorium to wash his hands. After rinsing them off, he looked up and happened to catch the sight of his own image in the mirror. He was fascinated; it was a very long time since he had seen himself. Indeed, at first he didn't recognize the reflection as his own. But slowly the realization spread over him, the body recognizing itself in its muscles and bones, the mind mapping its terrain once again.
And for the first time that he could remember, Francis saw his own possibilities: a line. It was a beam whose glow glinted in the white porcelain of the sinks and toilets, the metal of the stall dividers, and in the blue of his own two eyes. The line was unmistakable, strong, and definite. And--as he realized he had been expecting--the line went from the middle of his chest, into the mirror, and through the chest of his reflection. Francis looked at himself for a few moments longer, then wiped his hands on his pants and walked out of the bathroom.
the end
M. is a writer.