Perri O'Shaughnessy - Case of Lies

The proofs of the main theorems of mathematics contained absolute certainty, a certainty that existed nowhere else in his universe of home and school.

A fever overtook him. The proofs burned into his eyes late at night.

Proofs were the rewards of playing this particular game of arithmetic, but he never forgot that other, more difficult games waited in the murk of the future for him to discover.

“El,” Pop called. Elliott put his memories aside, set his bowl into the stainless-steel sink, and went into the living room. Pop never went upstairs anymore; the muscles in his legs had become too weak. Pop was barefoot. His back had hunched in some indefinable way. How strange. He was growing old as well as sick.

As he looked at his father carefully taking out the ad supplements, then putting the newspaper back in order so he could read it in sequence, he felt again the burning pressure to work, to find, as quickly as possible. Pop was only fifty-five, but he had been ill for five years now and his sharp mind had changed in some way hard to describe. It was as though only small things mattered to him anymore, the Zeros, the Ones.

His mother’s clock ticked on the mantel, next to a picture of his father shaking hands with Noam Chomsky at a podium somewhere.

“I don’t know why, but I feel so cold,” Pop said.

“How about a bath?”

“I need a little push.” Elliott pushed his chair into the adjoining bedroom, pulled down the curtains, and got the water running in the tub. Pop had a special tub where you opened the waterproof door and stepped in and sat down on the bench. So far, he could manage.

“Think I’ll go upstairs and do some work,” Elliott said.

“You look tired. You haven’t told me about the conference at Lake Tahoe.”

“Well, lots of presentations that didn’t interest me much. Nothing new, really,” Elliott lied.

“Did you see any old friends?”

“I did see a couple of guys from MIT, but I didn’t know them well.”

“What are they doing these days?”

“One works at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California. The other one went to Los Alamos.” He was used to lying about his activities, so the words came out very naturally.

“Oh. Physicists. That’s nice.”

“By the way, I got paid on the consulting work I did last spring. It’ll keep us going until Christmas.”

His father said, “You have found such an interesting career, all this flitting about, doing your consulting. It’s wonderful that you can spend so much time with me.”

“It’s my home. I doubt I could work anywhere else. I wouldn’t want to leave you, Pop. We get along.”

“My good fortune, that you love it here so much.”

“I do have to go to town for a couple of hours in the morning. Gloria will be here, though. Do you want anything special at the store if I leave before you’re up?”

“How about some of those Paul Newman chocolate wafers. Those are so good.”

“Cookies it is,” Elliott said. He locked up, then went upstairs, to the scratched oak desk he had spread his papers over all his life, to the single bed with its heavy plaid comforter. The closet door was open; he pulled it shut, locked the bedroom door, and leaned out the window toward the gleam of Seattle across the sound. Cool air flowed in, and he breathed in deeply.

His thoughts went back to the man in the ski mask at Tahoe, doing something to his car. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it anymore. He went over the events of the night before again and tried to analyze them.

Two possibilities presented themselves: Either he was heading toward another psychotic break, or the Tahoe shooter had found him and still wanted something from him.

Both alternatives frightened him. It felt like his heart had turned to a sack of crushed ice. He slammed the window shut and checked the lock again, pulled the blinds.

Then peered through them one last time, but all he saw was darkness.

PLACERVILLE USED TO BE A GOLD town back in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Today, gold still can be gathered, especially in the summer, from tourists on their way up Highway 50 from the San Francisco Bay Area toward Tahoe, 250 miles of not much happening until the steep peaks of the Sierra take over. First there is the Bay Bridge to get across, then the long traffic jam of the East Bay, then the new Carquinez Bridge where the Delta country begins.

Then there is nothing much-fields, heat, truck stops, military bases, Sacramento, factory outlets-for a couple of hundred miles. Then the uplift of the Sierra succeeds the hot valley behind as the SUVs and sedans labor up seven thousand feet of altitude to Echo Summit and Lake Tahoe just beyond.

But first, where the foothills begin, still seventy miles from Tahoe, the highway goes through Placerville, with its historic courthouse, quaint streets full of shops, and endless forest all around, and the culture begins to change with the climate. The idea of working ten hours a day in a Silicon Valley cubicle begins to seem suspect. The men want to stop for a beer, DUI laws be damned. The women want to wander down the street looking for a tiny piece of history to take home with them. It is freedom they are looking for, as if the flatlands have imprisoned them, and Placerville is the first town on the road where they can let loose.

Nina turned left and went up a short hill. Most of the homes were small and old, well-settled in their arbors of firs.

She drove until she saw a metal mailbox reading “Hanna.” Cracked asphalt led to a red Ford 150 pickup, which took up a lot of the driveway, and another filthy old truck huddled in the carport. Nina parked behind the pickup and climbed out. The sun shone down; it was so quiet here she could hear the creak of the trees catching breezes high above.

Chelsi, in shorts and a shirt that showed her brown stomach, opened the screen door on the shady porch and came out to greet her. Behind her shambled a man who must have been her father, tall and athletic like her, big-handed and big-footed.

“Dad, this is Nina.”

“Roger Freeman.” He squeezed her hand and put his other hand lightly over the squeeze as if to apologize for the strength of the handshake. “Sarah’s brother. Come on in, Dave’s inside.” He shot a quick glance at Chelsi. “He’s not at his best this morning.”

Dave Hanna sat in a La-Z-Boy in front of a recorded ball game on TV, the sound turned off, his eyes glued to the screen. He didn’t get up and barely acknowledged Nina’s greeting.

The small living room still held traces of Sarah Hanna-a white-framed wedding picture on the mantel of a smiling young couple, she seated quietly, big blue eyes hopeful, flowers held in her lap, he with his hand on her shoulder, making it clear how the marital dynamics would work even then. Sarah’s auburn hair touched the shoulder of her ivory gown. Dave looked a lot younger in the picture. Nina knew from her notes they had been married for ten years before Sarah died. Dave had been thirty-two, Sarah twenty-eight when they married.

A white lace tablecloth on the dining-room table still looked as if it had received Sarah’s touch, and the green upholstered chair and ottoman with its own reading lamp across the room had obviously been hers. The rest of the room had a shoddy, stained look, and smelled like somebody slept in it.

The wreck on the recliner pressed the remote control. The TV went black. Dave Hanna shifted around, saying, “This better be good.”

“A settlement offer usually is,” Nina said. “May I?” She took Sarah’s chair. Roger pulled out a couple of straight chairs from the table, and he and Chelsi sat down. Now they had a sewing circle going, only Dave was clearly a stitch short today. Eyes downcast, he scratched his neck. Nina would bet he had already tossed down a couple of beers this morning.