David Walton - The Genius Plague

“I guess we don’t have anything to lose,” Paul said. He wanted to get up and move just as much as she did. And besides, as a mycologist, he found it hard to leave a mystery like this unexamined.

They walked side by side, the foxfire providing just enough light to see the path ahead of them, but not enough to see much beyond it. The going was relatively easy, and the double lines curved to avoid swampy areas and other pitfalls. They made better time than they had walking during the day.

From time to time, Paul stopped to examine the glowing spots, but he learned nothing new. The fungus all appeared to be the same species, one that he didn’t recognize. He wanted to take a sample, but he knew it would be useless to do so. All of his sample bags were still in his abandoned pack, and putting samples in his damp pocket would just mean a pocketful of decaying slime by the time he could retrieve them.

The path continued on for miles, leading them unerringly across easy terrain and around obstacles. They followed it, its twin glowing lines stretching deeper into the dark forest, until the light vanished. Without warning, the luminescence shut off as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch, plunging them into complete darkness.

He felt Maisie’s hand groping for his, and he grasped it, holding on tightly.

“Paul?” she said, her voice tight with fear. “What’s going on?”

The day I heard what happened to Paul, I spent the afternoon at my father’s house, listening to the rain patter on the roof of the enclosed porch, and wondering if my dad even knew who I was anymore. Outside, the leaves of the maple tree rustled in the wind, but inside, the house was still, the steady sound of the rain only increasing the sense of quiet. I shuffled the letter tiles in front of me, waiting for him to make his next move. Chill air seeped from the windows, and I thought the rain might turn to snow overnight.

“Whose turn is it?” my father asked.

“Yours, Dad.”

He reached out and, one at a time, placed the tiles T-A-P on the board. Four points. I dutifully recorded the score, and placed my own word, praxis , taking the double word score and using the S to pluralize another word. Forty points.

My dad chuckled and shook his finger at me. A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows and sent ripples running across Marley Creek. My parents’ property didn’t actually touch the water, but they shared a tiny wedge of waterfront with two other homeowners. My dad’s boat was moored there, though he never used it anymore. The porch smelled faintly of fish.

Time creaked by. “Whose turn is it?”

“Yours, Dad.”

He studied his letters again. “When is Neil coming back from Brazil?” he asked.

“I’m Neil,” I said. “It’s Paul who’s in Brazil, and he’s supposed to be home the day after tomorrow. I’ll pick him up at the airport after my interview at the NSA.”

My dad’s mouth split into a big smile. “The NSA, eh? Say hi to Richards. And tell Masterson that ten-dimensional Kalman filter of his is never going to work.”

“I will,” I said, though I had no idea who those people were. My father had worked for the NSA for three decades before Alzheimer’s cut short his career, and people and memories from those days sometimes popped up in his conversation without context. He had been only fifty-six when he was diagnosed, quite young for the disease, but that didn’t save him.

The symptoms had come on slowly. At first it seemed like nothing much. He would forget his keys or his jacket, or mix up names. Apparently the change was noticeable enough in his work, however, that the NSA had encouraged him to see a doctor. The diagnosis was like hearing the word guilty at a murder trial. There was no way to take it back. And there was no cure.

He lost his skill with higher math first, followed by an inability to make new memories reliably. He forgot words, forgot experiences we’d shared. Each week, it seemed, something new was lost, made all the more painful by the fact that he knew it was happening. In his final months at the NSA, he had endured psychological evaluations, revoked security clearances, and going-away parties, and then he was out the door.

After several disastrous college experiences, I had moved in with my dad, both as a place to stay and to take some of the burden of caring for him off my mom. But there was something terrifying about Alzheimer’s that seeing it all the time hadn’t taken away. I didn’t even drink anymore, because the thought of giving up control of my mind, even slightly, made my chest tighten. Little by little, it robbed him of his identity, turning a brilliant, decisive, passionate man into a hesitant and confused shadow of his former self, like a horror movie played out in slow motion.

My dad studied his letter tiles, his huge gray eyebrows furrowed, and I remembered how intimidating those brows had been when he hoisted them at me as a boy. Think , his eyebrows would say. Dig deeper. There’s more to discover. And he was always right. Now, there seemed to be only struggle behind those lowered brows, as if combining seven letters to form a word was the hardest thing he had ever attempted.

Once, my dad had dominated all comers in this game. He used to say that a cryptologist who couldn’t anagram was no cryptologist at all. He regularly produced words like tersion and matzoon , sending us scrambling for the dictionary, only to find that he was—of course—correct.

Ever since we were small, the letter magnets on our refrigerator were a continuous family challenge. What messages could we leave for each other when we were limited to only one of each letter in the alphabet? My father was king of the game, and triumphs like “PUT BACK MY ENGLISH WORD” had been passed down in family lore. He loved word games and puzzles of every type. The family joke was that he had fallen in love with my mother—whose first name was Hannah—simply because her name was a palindrome.

My dad chose three tiles from his tray and made the word stix , using the letter X that I had placed previously. He peered at it, uncertain, but eventually leaned back and left it there. I made no comment and recorded eleven points on the score sheet.

I had grown up knowing that my father was a cryptologist but not much more—the details were classified, and we were always left in the dark. In truth, I doubt he did much actual code breaking himself, but there was no way to know. There were no take-your-family-to-work days at the NSA.

Most of his thirty-four years had been spent at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, but we had also spent a decade living in Brazil when I was a child. He had been a spy—not the James Bond kind with exploding pens and sexy femmes fatales , but the real kind, officially assigned to the diplomatic corps and unofficially an NSA liaison to Agência Brasileira de Inteligência , the Brazilian intelligence service.

For most of my growing up years, I had wanted to be just like him. I wanted to work for the NSA, perform mathematical and linguistic magic to break enemy codes, and make the world safe for democracy. It was a dream I had never really left behind.

And now I would get my chance. I had an interview—a real, live interview—with the NSA on Monday morning at nine o’clock. The time couldn’t go fast enough. I knew I would get the job. I had to get it. It was like destiny. My only regret was that my dad would never really know.

“Neil!” My mom strode into the room, agitated. She was a small woman, but energetic, always juggling three activities and excelling at all of them. She wasn’t actually married to my father anymore—hadn’t been for fifteen years—but she had moved back in when he was diagnosed and took care of him even more than I did.