Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

He was thinking of the equation for happiness as he headed to the office. One of the tenets of his breakthrough-H = R/E, or happiness equals reality divided by expectation-was based on the universal truth that you always had some expectation for what was to come. In other words, E was always a real number, since you could not divide by zero. But recently, he wondered about the truth of that. Math could only take a man so far. In the middle of the night, when he was wide awake and staring up at the ceiling, knowing that his wife lay beside him pretending to be asleep and doing the very same thing, Lewis had come to believe that you might be conditioned to expect absolutely nothing from one’s life. That way, when you lost your first son, you didn’t grieve. When your second son was jailed for a massacre, you were not shattered. You could divide by zero; it felt like a canyon where your heart used to be.

As soon as he set foot on the campus, Lewis felt better. Here, he was not the father of the shooter and never had been. He was Lewis Houghton, professor of economics. Here, he was still at the top of his game; he didn’t have to look at the body of his research and wonder at what point it had begun to unravel.

Lewis had just pulled a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase that morning when the chair of the econ department poked his head through the open doorway. Hugh Macquarie was a big man-Huge Andhairy is what the college students called him behind his back-who had taken over the position with gusto. “Houghton? What are you doing here?”

“Last I checked, the college was still paying me to work,” Lewis said, trying to make a joke. He couldn’t make jokes, never had been able to do so. His timing was off; he gave away punch lines by accident.

Hugh walked into the room. “My God, Lewis, I don’t know what to say.” He hesitated.

Lewis didn’t blame Hugh. He barely knew what to say himself. There were Hallmark cards for bereavement, for loss of a beloved pet, for getting laid off from a job, but no one seemed to have the right words of comfort for someone whose son had just killed ten people.

“I thought about calling you at home. Lisa even wanted to bring a casserole or something. How’s Lacy holding up?”

Lewis pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Oh,” he said. “You know. We’re trying to keep things as normal as possible.”

When he said this, he pictured his life as a graph. Normal was a line that stretched on and on, teasing its way closer to an axis but never really reaching it.

Hugh sat down in the chair across from Lewis’s desk-the same chair that was sometimes filled by a student who needed a tutorial in microeconomics. “Lewis, take some time off,” he said.

“Thanks, Hugh. I appreciate that.” Lewis glanced at an equation on the far blackboard that he’d been puzzling out. “Right now, though, I really need to be here. It keeps me from thinking about being there.” Reaching for some chalk, Lewis began to print across the board, a long and lovely stream of numbers that calmed him inside.

He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

Hugh put his hand on Lewis’s arm, stilling it mid-equation. “Maybe I said that wrong. We need you to take time off.”

Lewis stared at him. “Oh. Um. I see,” he said, although he didn’t. If Lewis was willing to segregate his work life from his home life, why couldn’t Sterling College do the same?

Unless.

Had that been his mistake in the first place? If you were uncertain in the decisions you made as a father, could you patch over your insecurities with the confidence you had as a professional? Or would the fix always be flimsy, a paper wall that couldn’t bear weight?

“It’s just for a bit,” Hugh said. “It’s what’s best.”

For whom? Lewis thought, but he remained silent until he heard Hugh close the door behind himself on his way out.

When the chairman was gone, Lewis lifted the chalk again. He stared at the equations until they melded together, and then he began to scrawl furiously, a composer with a symphony moving too fast for his fingers. Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation.

Lewis stepped back from the blackboard, surveying his handiwork. Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

And that made Lewis think of his son.

He stood in front of the blackboard and started to cry, his hands and his sleeves covered in fine white chalk dust, as if he had become a ghost.

The office of the Geek Squad, as Patrick affectionately referred to the tech guys who hacked into hard drives to find proof of pornography and downloads from The Anarchist Cookbook, was filled with computers. Not just the one seized from Peter Houghton’s room, but also several from Sterling High, including the one from the secretary’s main office and another batch from the library.

“He’s good,” said Orestes, a tech that Patrick would have sworn was not old enough to have graduated from high school himself. “We’re not just talking HTML programming. Guy knew his shit.”

He pulled up a few files from the bowels of Peter’s computer, graphics files that didn’t make much sense to Patrick until the tech typed a few buttons and suddenly a three-dimensional dragon appeared on the screen and breathed fire at them. “Wow,” Patrick said.

“Yeah. From what I can tell, he actually made up a few computer games, even posted them for gamers on a couple of sites where you can do that and get feedback.”

“Any message boards on those sites?”

“Dude, give me an iota of credit,” Orestes said, and he clicked onto one he’d already flagged. “Peter went by the screen name DeathWish. They’re a-”

“-band,” Patrick finished. “I know.”

“They’re not just a band,” Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “They’re the modern voice of the collective human conscience.”

“Tell that to Tipper Gore.”

“Who?”

Patrick laughed. “She was before your time, I guess.”

“What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?”

“The cavemen, banging rocks together,” Patrick said dryly.

The screen filled with a series of posts from DeathWish. Most of them were entries about how to enhance a certain graphic or reviews of other games that had been posted on the site. Two quoted lyrics from the band Death Wish. “This is my personal favorite,” Orestes said, and he scrolled down.

From: DeathWish

To: Hades 1991

This town blows. This weekend there is a craft festival where old bags come to show off the ticky tacky shit they made. They should call it a CRAP festival. I’m gonna hide in the bushes outside the church. Target practice as they cross the street-ten points each! Yee ha!