During their sixth song, it happened.
And it began with the memory of Tiana’s kiss.
Colin found himself inspecting the internal void, the empty point at the center of his heart, and doing so without the customary pain. Instead, he breathed around it with an element of new comfort, a sensation so alien he had trouble accepting it as real. A number of others began gathering in that same space, people who cared for him and accepted him for who and what he was. Friends and now Tiana. Colin struggled to put a name to what he felt, and finally accepted the simple fact that he was becoming a man.
The band had played several cuts from their new album,Lineage. Corea then switched gears, and played a song from his earlier days with Stanley Clarke and their band Return to Forever. Soon as the first bar sounded, the crowd erupted. Colin felt a chill course through his entire body. The thrill of being surrounded by people so viscerally connected to him, the evening, the music … Amazing.
Midway through the song, Colin watched as his life’s diverse fragments all flowed together. The conflict and resistance and effort that had defined the months …
Gone.
He listened to the music with a new intensity. The fact that some newly awakened portion of his brain now sang in harmony only heightened his ability tohear.
Each of these incredibly talented musicians, they playedin tandem. They flowedtogether. And as a result, the music took on new power. It became greater. It formed …
Colin did not consciously organize his thoughts. They simply flowed, as clear and precise as the band members.The mathematical exactness of jazz. The algorithmic principles. The cartoons. The music theory. The software engineering. The …
He listened to the music, while inwardly he shaped his own.
By the time the melody ended, he knew what he was going to do.
CHAPTER39
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 andhunting 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 chestinfection. “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’mtryingto 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.”
