Thales’ chair is on the edge of the terrace, inches from the empty air. Far below him, waves bellow and dissolve into foam, sometimes so loud that they keep him from sleeping. He wonders where his mother is—there’s no railing, and it would be easy to take a step forward and go tumbling into space. The coastline is concave here and across the water the surf shimmers before the grey masses of the beachward favelas, where the poor dwell, where he has never been, a ghost Los Angeles shimmering in a heat haze below the real city.
The breeze catches the awning above him, its shadow undulating over the Cartesian grid of the black basalt tiles, and he thinks of the equations describing its rippling curve, the elegant entanglement of position and motion. With an effort, he pushes mathematics from his mind, as the surgeon says he must, if he’s to improve, and focuses on the world: the weave and texture of his white linen trousers, the Corbusier table beside him, the water beading on the heavy crystal tumbler, its wedge of lemon entombed in ice.
He closes his eyes, and the details of the water glass have already vanished. This is how it was before the implant, he supposes, though in fact the memories of that time are scarce—he looks down at the water, sees the orange surf buoys bobbing in the swell, remembers how, the last time he saw them, he’d thought of their house deep in the Amazonian jungle, the river flowing past it in full flood; swimming in the “safe zone” denoted by buoys, the prehistoric menace of the crocodiles sliding down the muddy bank into the tea-colored water.
They’re in the rooftop suite of the St. Mark Hotel, which his mother had said was the best that was practical but even so leaves him feeling exposed, with the constant hum of drone traffic overhead, and the lines of sight from the terrace to the rooftops of distant buildings, like an invitation to a sniper’s bullet; he misses the sense of hermetic insulation of the family compound in Leblon and the hotels they’d stayed in when they still had money. Since his father’s death and their flight to LA he’s overheard his mother on the phone trying to arrange high-interest loans secured on frozen assets in Rio, on the house she built in the mountains around Los Angeles, and even to get new architectural commissions, though she hasn’t practiced in many years, but he’s made a point of pretending not to notice.
His brothers, Helio and Marco Aurelio, will come and find him soon, and greet him with back-slapping false bonhomie. (He suspects they’re glad to be out of Rio, regard LA as an adventure—Marco Aurelio had been expelled from his college for choking someone half to death at a party, and Helio had been brought up on rape charges, though they’d soon been quashed—a columnist who’d said the family was Brazil’s answer to the Julio-Claudian dynasty had never worked again.) They’ll see the book beside his water glass—Ramanujan’s Analytical Theory of Numbers—and look disconsolate but say nothing as they take him away from the hotel and out into the city, and the day will be the same as every other. He’ll pass the morning in the humid jiu-jitsu studio of the Malibu Athletic Club, watching them roll on the blue mats in white gis. In the afternoon he’ll wait in the dunes wishing he had his book with him as his brothers ply the waves on their longboards, and when the sun sets their friends will gather, the cauliflower-eared jiu-jitsu players and their slim-waisted girls, and all watch the fading light through a serene cannabis haze. His brothers pity him, but take pains to hide it; he accepts their charity without resentment, for to him they are no more than vacant, handsome animals, moved solely by instinct, blind to all the beauty of mathematics and the world.
A wave closes with the shore, and as it approaches the narrow beach below the cliff its vitreous curvature furls and collapses, and the equations of hydrodynamics rise in his mind, but the white foam is unanalyzable; the world around him shivers, then, and fractures into a meaningless chaos of atoms and light. Where the water glass was there’s an illegible confusion of reflections; he sees the warped light of migraine, and closes his eyes.
Luminous patterns burn inside his eyelids. He opens his eyes onto a blur of pinions, white motion, refracted light. The headache intensifies, and he starts to panic, but he’s going to the clinic in the evening, and the surgeon, a competent man, will help him; he draws a deep breath, focuses, and the blur resolves into a gull hovering over the table, its churning wings glowing in the sunlight, red eyes on the untouched omelette on the rough porcelain plate.