Chapter 39
It seemed to Colin as though an entirely new universe opened before him. Time and again he was reminded of the history surrounding the Hubble telescope, how astronomers responded to those first clear images. Flummoxed and thrilled in equal measure. Which was precisely how he felt.
The days swam by. He was vaguely aware of outside activities.
Tiana and he spoke most afternoons, brief snippets of conversations, or so they felt to him afterward.
She had contracted a virus of some sort and was not coming back with the others.
She refused to go into details, and Colin did not press.
Their shared moments were treasured breaks from the drama unfolding in his head.
Gradually it enveloped even his apartment.
The only way he could keep track of things was to create a wall graph, which grew to dominate the entire living room, and finally trailed its way around all the kitchen walls and then into the downstairs bedroom.
It was like watching an octopus take over his home.
A great beast of the deep unfolding its tentacles, writhing and hunting in mathematical splendor. Colin found it glorious and exhausting.
The upcoming presidential election formed a noisy backdrop that grew increasingly strident with every passing week.
His father’s face began to show up on the nightly news, Donald Trump’s champion in North Carolina’s coastal regions.
Roger Eames both ran for reelection and extolled the man whose cause he had taken as his own.
Colin did his best to ignore it all. And failed.
The work on his new project grew tendrils against his will, binding him to people and society and today.
He observed fracture lines growing along political leanings, first in what he read, then revealing themselves in far too many adult conversations.
Ethan and Alexi’s political stand grew increasingly rigid.
Roland and Regina changed churches, a transition both refused to discuss. From Mira he heard almost nothing.
Gradually he became more confident riding his bike.
Colin took to leaving his apartment soon after dawn, while the world and roads were still quiet.
He loved discovering new routes, places, people.
He found a riverside café frequented by cyclists, and from them heard about the River to Sea Bikeway, and how it connected to bikes-only paths extending throughout the city.
On cloudless days he began leaving the academy before daybreak and riding east across the causeway, then north along Lumina, fourteen miles each way, halting at an empty public beach access where he sat in the cool sand and watched the day take hold.
Seated there before the sapphire sea, listening to the music of breaking waves, Colin often thought he understood why his mother had remained so still, and returned home so content.
Those days often held the season’s only real sense of progress.
The last Friday in August, Tiana revealed she had a chest infection. “They won’t let me come back. The doctors are saying October. Maybe. At the earliest.”
The previous week she had confessed to asthma. Bad enough to have hospitalized her several times as an infant. Colin replied, “You have to get well before you travel.”
“But school!” She almost wailed, then had to stop and cough. “Term! Exams!” She hit another high note with, “Duke!”
“Your parents are right. You can’t come now.” He was studying the paper octopus when it struck him. “I have an idea.”
When he finished telling her, Tiana rewarded him with silence, then, “Sofia insisted you were a knight in shining armor. Now I’m beginning to think she was right.”
The week before term started, Colin hit a wall.
He invited Arnold over, carried by some vague hope that explaining what he was trying to accomplish might unplug things.
Arnold and Sandrine had just returned from a month-long vacation in the High Sierras.
Colin’s suntanned adviser was thunderstruck by what he found upon entering. “Great heavens above!”
“This is nothing. You should see downstairs.”
Arnold did a slow sweep of the walls. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. What I’m trying to do, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
His two windows were now framed with the latest attempt at algorithms. “What are you trying, then?”
But the concept sounded so absurd, he could not draw out the words. So lame. All he said was, “I thought I had an idea to tie everything together. Maybe I was wrong.”
“No.” Arnold stepped back. “Physicists have been struggling with a unified field theory for over a generation. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong to try.”
Colin reflected on that night at the concert. “I thought I was so close.”
“Maybe you are.” He studied his younger friend. “Walk away. That’s the ticket. Leave it behind. Go do something fun.”
“Fun. I remember hearing that word somewhere.” He changed the subject then, and explained what he had in mind in regard to helping Tiana. Using his position as prefect to serve as Tiana’s examiner. Take the exams to the lady, set up the time schedule according to school rules …
Arnold barely let him finish. “It’s great. No, better than that. What’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Stuck? Frozen in place? Screaming with frustration?”
“Look at the funny man. Seriously, Sandrine has spoken several times with Tiana’s parents. They all agree she should not return yet. Between the diabetes and the chest infection …” Arnold caught sight of his expression. “You didn’t know?”
“Only about her chest thing. She is super secretive.”
“Something else you have in common. Word of advice. Let her tell you when she’s ready.
But yes, the lady has some health issues.
And her parents want to keep her away for the semester.
Which would hold her back from graduating and entering Duke.
Until now.” Arnold nodded. “You should come over, watch Sandrine do back flips. Tiana is one of her favorites.”
Colin took to walking upstairs in the middle of the night when he woke and could not go back to sleep.
Tracing the cardboard tentacles, looking for the missing elements that might draw him closer to his aims. Some mornings, as dawn painted faint grey strokes on his east-facing windows, Colin began to see the calculations and words and concepts take on an entirely different form.
Like lines of color and tension, binding and struggling and writhing in something that might actually become beautiful, someday, when the frustration was not so overwhelming.
As the mornings strengthened, almost mocking his weary state, he felt increasingly convinced that he was on the right track.
At the deep level of bone and sinew and subconscious actions, he thought it was only a matter of time.
And work. And many more mornings like this.
On the approach to the new academic year, Colin made an appointment to see Fremdt and Dean Sykes together.
He struggled through an attempt to explain both the problem and his intended goal, but neither seemed to mind.
They both gave their approval to his auditing the classes he had already taken for credit.
Effectively losing the semester, and yet granting him the space to hear the lessons a second time, and continue searching for those hidden links.
Colin left the meeting uncertain they actually understood, but grateful for the confidence they continued to show in his abilities.
And then, the third week of September, two days after his birthday, Mira called.
Their communications had grown so strained, and so one-sided, Colin had stopped phoning. He could not remember the last time they spoke. Nine weeks? Eleven? He demanded, “Why haven’t you been in touch?”
“Same reason I didn’t come home this summer. I’ve been hiding. Mostly.”
“From what?”
Mira changed the subject with, “How have you been?”
“Struggling so hard I almost stopped missing you.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It is. Was. How are you, Mira?”
“Struggling, too. Can you come? I don’t want to venture south. If I drive down, my folks …”
He understood. “When was the last time you saw your family?”
“I actually can’t remember. Two months? Fifteen years?”
“I’m happy to drive up. How does tomorrow sound?”
“I didn’t mean you had to drop everything.”
“Mira, dropping everything would be a pleasure. Especially if it means seeing you again.”
Her tone lightened immensely. “Tomorrow would be great.”
And just like that, the silence and the distance were gone.
The trip on I-95 from Wilmington to Charlottesville took five hours.
Colin broke it into manageable segments, stopping for coffee and a meal and another coffee, timing it so he missed Richmond’s afternoon rush hour, then stopping at a Red Roof Inn long before dusk.
The journey proved to be a mental elixir, drawing him ever farther from the intensity and frustration and barriers.
Granting him a much-needed opportunity to view his objectives from a distance.
Over dinner at the neighboring Denny’s, Colin liked studying the book holding his notations.
In reality most of his attention remained on the cardboard octopus back in his apartment.
From such a distance as now, he could see the gaps more clearly.
Realize the points where the smooth flow became bumpy, then halted altogether.
By the time he returned to his motel room, Colin felt as though the answers to his questions had become a trifle clearer.
Mira met him at an off-campus coffee shop.
It shared an upscale strip mall with the restaurant where she worked three nights each week.
Mira did not look good. She had lost weight.
Her beautiful raven hair hung limply down her back, like it had become defeated by whatever shadows she now carried. “I look awful, I know.”
“What’s wrong?”