Jon Evans - Swarm

“No.”

“You’re missing out.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“What about you?” she asked. “From Toronto originally?”

“Not quite. Small town in Southern Ontario. About a couple hours away.”

“What’s that like?”

I grimaced. “I used to call it the Land of Bland.”

“Right now that doesn’t sound so bad.”

“True,” I admitted.

But at the time it had felt like a prison. I had been a sickly and lonely kid, had spent most of my youth in small-town strip-mall Ontario reading books, watching movies, and playing video and role-playing games, with Jesse my only true friend, both of us frustrated by the interminable dullness of our lives. We knew that somewhere out there was a world of discovery and adventure, where people who mattered did things that mattered. When he and I were teenagers our frustration had sometimes erupted into acts of futile and minor destruction: smashing windows, stealing signs, setting fires.

University had been better, but I had learned there, to my consternation, that being the second smartest person in my high school meant nothing in the real world. Waterloo was Canada’s finest technical school, “the MIT of the North,” and amid that galaxy of talent my star was merely average. After graduation I had drifted from one lucrative but joyless engineering job to another, met and moved in with a perfectly nice and perfectly ordinary girl named Sonia – and been miserable and frustrated beyond description, thanks to the ceaseless gnawing of my thwarted ambitions.

Back then, every time I heard about anything extraordinary, anything done by someone amazing, it made my gut tighten into a knot of angry frustration, made me want to spit. Scientists bursting the frontiers of human knowledge, engineers unveiling world-changing creations, journalists reporting on discoveries and desperate conflicts, artists reshaping their culture, tycoons staking billion-dollar bets on the future: that kind of news just rubbed my nose in the fact that I would never in my life experience anything remotely similar; that all the incredible richness and endless wild possibilities of the world outside my own little bubble of dull comfort would go forever undiscovered.

Or so I had thought, until I met Sophie.

Without her I was ordinary; and what I had always wanted, more than anything, was an extraordinary life.

It was her mischievous grin that had first caught my attention at the party where we met, even before Jesse had introduced us, even before I began to realize just how extraordinary she was. During the one year Sophie had spent in standard undergraduate classes, before she was fast-tracked straight to a doctorate, a strange and sometimes unseemly competition to invent math puzzles that she might find challenging had developed among Caltech’s faculty. When she wore that impish grin she looked a lot like a spoiled teenager, but in truth she was an intellectual titan.

The great and the good flocked like moths to her searchlight mind. Because of her I had dined with senators and Nobel laureates, met with billionaires planning the future of space exploration, attended the legendary Davos and TED conferences, been flown first-class to the world’s greatest research complexes, experienced a world that people like me could usually only taste in dreams and stories.

But it still hadn’t been easy spending the last three years of my life in orbit around hers. The ratio of people who knew me as Dr. Warren’s boyfriend to those who knew my name was probably five to one. It was like being a 1950s wife, or an ordinary guy dating a movie star. Not that there was supposed to be anything wrong with that, in this era of sexual equality – but there was. Playing eternal second fiddle to my genius girlfriend rankled, a lot. By normal-person standards, I was well above average: smart, athletic, interesting, successful. But from Sophie’s rarefied intellectual eyrie there wasn’t much space between me and mediocrity. The work I did for her lab, building, testing, and repairing, was interesting and nontrivial; but others treated me not as her partner, but more like a subservient assistant who Dr. Warren happened to sleep with.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lisa said.

I shrugged awkwardly. “Sophie.”

“I’m going to get you back to her. I promise.”

I forced a smile. “Thanks.”

A drop fell on my face. Then another, and another.

“Oh, no,” I said, rolling to look up at the sky. There were no stars visible. “Oh, no, you’re shitting me, you have to be kidding. Come on. This isn’t fair.”

The rain ignored my pleas. It was more gentle than the afternoon downpour, but it was steady and insistent, and it wouldn’t stop.

I thought of all the adventure stories I had read growing up, of Frodo and Sam crossing the endless wastes, Allen Quatermain in Africa, Juan Rico at Camp Arthur Currie, Biggles landing on some godforsaken runway, Huck Finn rafting down the Mississippi, Jim Hawkins in the Caribbean. Too late I was realizing that no one in their right minds would ever want to have a real adventure. There had never been much in those books about endless hours of gnawing misery, gasping exhaustion, and bone-shuddering terror.

I looked at Lisa and saw that her eyes were distant and she was smiling. A real smile, not a grimace; a little forced, maybe, but a little dreamy too.

“What are you smiling at?” I asked.

She said, “I’m trying to enjoy the moment.”

I stared at her incredulously. “What?”

“Happiness comes from within. The Stoics believed it was possible to be happy even as you were stretched upon the rack.”

“Right. I’m sorry, but that’s fucking insane. I have never been more miserable in my entire life than right now.”

“You can’t think of it like that. You can’t compare it to the good times. Times like this you have to remember, every instant is precious, life is short, we could die any minute. Every moment of your life without exception is a gift to be treasured, even this one. Especially this one.”

“You don’t seriously believe that.”

“You don’t seriously not.”

I didn’t answer.

“Close your eyes and breathe deep,” she said. “Just concentrate on that. On how good it is just to breathe, even if it hurts. It helps. I promise.”

“Like meditation?”

“Sort of. But more like a celebration.”

I tried, and in fact, there was something to it. Maybe knowing how close I was to death made every breath, every morsel of life, taste particularly delicious. My aches and pains and the cold rain were awful, but at the same time, somehow, for a few minutes at least, I convinced myself that it was glorious to still be alive.

But only for a few minutes. I was insufficiently stoic to enjoy freezing to death. As we grew soaked my teeth began to chatter, and Lisa began to shiver against me too.

“We have to start moving or we’ll get hypothermia,” she said.

“What happened to enjoying every moment?” I asked nastily. “Isn’t hypothermia a precious gift too?”

“Don’t be an asshole. Get up.”

I felt too weak to stand, much less move, but I made myself totter to my feet and follow her through the darkness. Travelling through the jungle was even worse in the darkness than by day. I let Lisa take my hand and lead me like a child.

The rest of that night was a horrific miasma of total exhaustion. Twice I sat down and told her I could go no further. The first time she cajoled me back to my feet. The second time she had to order me. I didn’t have the strength to disobey.

I had no idea where we were going. In the morning I learned that she hadn’t either; she had simply advanced blindly into the jungle, counting on the natural human tendency to go in circles when lost. It worked. When dawn finally broke through the torn curtains of the rainclouds, lifting my spirits and restoring some semblance of strength, we walked straight towards the sun and reached the river in less than half an hour. From there, after a brief discussion of the wisdom or foolishness of remaining near the crash, we continued downstream.