5
Adrian Thomas Reinhardt
The next day, he asked his mother to give him Leonard’s number.
“Take it. I don’t think it works. He hasn’t been answering. Maybe he’ll pick up if he knows it’s you.”
Corey went outside to dial. The number went to a generic voicemail.
“It’s Corey. My mother’s not okay. Is there anything we can do? Are you there? If you get this, can you call me?”
Kids weren’t allowed to bring cell phones to Corey’s school, but the security guards didn’t inspect backpacks, and he was able to sneak his phone in without much trouble. He had a Samsung smartphone with the screen smashed in one corner. It had fallen from his jeans when he jumped his skateboard. During the day, he checked it in the bathroom stall six or seven times. After twenty-four hours without any word from Leonard, Corey took the subway forty minutes north to MIT.
He walked from Kendall Square to Mass Ave, to the university’s main building. From the outside, it evoked a Roman temple. Corey climbed the stone steps and walked beneath the entrance columns. He hauled open a bronze door and stepped inside a high domed lobby, which echoed like a train station or a museum. The sunset cast a rectangle of orange on the marble floor. The rest was shadow. The silence had a sacred character. It felt like a place to fly in—a giant cranium, expanded by thought. A mason had chiseled everything the granite brain knew on a ribbon of stone around the brow: Architecture, Agriculture, Industry, Engineering, Mathematics…
He’d seen those words before. Many years ago, his mother had brought him here along with Joan to show her where she’d met Leonard. They’d been on a tour of places related to Gloria’s failed romance. “Look at that,” Joan had said, squatting down to Corey’s height and pointing up at the workmanship of the dome. “Trippy! I feel like I should light a candle.”
But they hadn’t seen Leonard that day. Corey had never in his entire life seen his father at his job.
Crossing the lobby, he started down the Infinite Hallway, passing the admissions office, the office of student life, and so on, the names stenciled on frosted-glass doors in understated elegant capital letters like headlines from an old newspaper.
He saw a restroom that said Men on the glass. A laser-printed notice tacked to the antique doorframe asked “Do you want to find a gender-neutral restroom on campus?”
The hallway became a gallery of posters for everything you could do at MIT. He stopped to look at a photo of a boat cutting through bright choppy water, white sails taut, coming straight at the camera, the bow wave foaming, young people in sunglasses and life preservers sitting on the rail.
“Interested in sailing?” he read. “Come to the Sailing Pavilion on Memorial Drive.”
Interspersed among the flyers for folk singing and rocketry, he saw several notices that asked “Are You Depressed?”
Further on, he came to a laboratory on display like an open kitchen in a fancy restaurant. Closed for the night, its microscopes rested in shadow on immaculate graphite tabletops. Fume hoods climbed to the ceiling. In the back loomed a giant industrial drill.
Wandering on another floor, he stumbled across a very quiet set of rooms. The door was open and he went in, but he knew he shouldn’t be here. In the kitchenette, a coffeemaker shone with a cobalt ready light, and a handwritten note on the cabinet said, Coffee today, Nobel Prize tomorrow. It looked like a psychiatrist’s office, trimmed in blond wood and carpeted in cooling gray tones. Around one corner, he had a distant view through multiple glass walls into the heart of the building, distorted by layering and refraction. Blackboards were arrayed in a Stonehenge circle and in their center was a ring of soft chairs, the same cool muted buckwheat as the carpets. Scientists would sit in them to contemplate the blackboards. They were covered in six-foot-long equations. A warning to janitors: Do Not Erase. It was quiet as a chapel.
A raw concrete pillar rose through the floor, giving the effect of stone, as in a church. An open staircase led through the ceiling to a higher floor that promised an even more extreme silence and an even cleaner light.
He beheld a set of papers displayed on a wall. The center one was entitled: Dark Matter and Non-Hilbert Space with Implications for Black Holes.
Taped to a door, he saw a cartoon: “Physicists make bad parents.” It depicted a man, woman and, in the background, a child, the woman saying, “We can ignore Charles because he’s small.”
A corkboard by the exit held photos of the department’s members, Polaroids. They smiled shyly or looked tousled, frozen behind their glasses, some young, some old, mainly male. He saw no more than three women—Chinese or Israeli. The names weren’t Boston Irish but were full of t’s and v’s and k’s. He examined the faces, seeing one liver-spotted scientist in a cardigan treating the camera to a knowing laugh. Corey went down the line of portraits until he realized: Leonard wouldn’t be in any of them.
Another piece of humor caught his eye: “Having abandoned my search for truth, I am now looking for a good fantasy.”
In the hall outside, he looked back and saw the place he had just been in was called the Department of Theoretical Physics.
Nearby he saw more flyers: Are you feeling down? How about looking for God?
In the basement, he saw acetylene torches, kilns, signs of researchers but not the researchers themselves: their fans, coffeepots, ten-speed bicycles and socket sets. Nowhere did he find a security guard or an office of campus security, just laboratories and an endless stream of flyers for clubs, activities, internships, stress reduction and the search for God or meaning from the department of community wellness. He walked miles of internal halls. Sometimes the walls would change, plaster to concrete, and he would know he was in another building. Sometimes he could see outside and tell where he had moved in relation to the neoclassical structure where he had started.
Eventually, he backtracked and found his way back through the antiseptic white tunnel of the gynepathology research center to the physics department.
Along the way, he stopped before a series of giant laminated posters called The History and Fate of the Universe. The stars looked like the distant campus safety lights he had seen outside the window. Next to a gray planet, he read: The moon and its seas. The atmosphere on Venus is extremely dense. Absolutely no water is present. A thin red line cutting through the nuclear fireball at the heart of space showed the boundary between our universe and a universe that collapsed under the force of gravity and imploded, crushing everything in existence back down to the size of an atom.
One floor lower down, he met Adrian Thomas Reinhardt.
As he exited the stairwell, Corey passed a stadium-style auditorium whose door had been left ajar. The hundreds of seats were empty, but on the stage, there was a figure standing underneath the lights. From a distance, Corey thought he was a young professor in a motorcycle jacket writing on the blackboard. Sensing that he was being observed, the professor turned around and his eyes found Corey in the doorway.
“What are you drawing?” Corey asked.
After the two of them had finished laughing, their conversation took off right away. The young man wasn’t a professor at all; he was just a high school senior with five o’clock shadow taking AP Physics at Cambridge Rindge & Latin. He was applying early action to MIT, which explained why he was here; he’d been meeting with a professor—some old guy upstairs—who was giving him a recommendation based on an independent project he had done on the chemistry of high explosives.
“Basically, I looked at these explosive formulas with nitrogen and phosphorus, and I said if these things are explosive over here, then these other things should be explosive too.”
Within half a minute, the precocious young man was talking about improving memory, training the concentration, using the mind at its peak potential to go infinitely far into intellectual space. You have all these connections in your head, he declared. You want to have a sense of power. He said his name was Adrian, and Corey listened. He talked in terms of neurotransmitters rather than prana. Serotonin came from bananas. The chemicals degraded, so he ate them every twelve hours. In addition to being a physics honors student, he was a 190-pound bodybuilder. Strength began in the psyche before it reached the biceps. You could train your brain to output a higher voltage to your muscles. Through arousal, it was possible to unleash superhuman forces.
Corey couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He told Adrian, “I barely know you, but I’ve wanted to be you all my life.”
“Oh wow,” said Adrian. He was so pleased to be admired.
He lived on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge with his mother who, in a bizarre coincidence, had brain cancer.
“My mom’s sick too. This is crazy. Are you on Facebook? How do we stay in touch?”
As a first act of friendship, before they left together, Corey erased the picture that Adrian had been drawing on the blackboard when he came in.
“What’d you do that for? That was beautiful.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“No one’s going to know it was me.”
Corey lasted less than a week before he emailed Adrian. In the afternoons when Corey got home from school, where he was bored and depressed and driven half-mad by attacks of longing for the tan, dark-haired girls in his class, he had a habit of borrowing his mother’s laptop—he got home an hour before his mother—and he used the time to do an online bikini search. He looked at an image or two—or three or four or twenty images—of bikini models—it was sometimes hard to stop—while listening for the sound of his mother’s car arriving. After relieving his tension, he cleared his history. On this day when she got home, he was, as usual, sitting a healthy distance away from the laptop innocently doing his homework. He asked her permission to email his new friend.
“You don’t have to ask my permission. You know that.”
He wrote Adrian and asked him how physics was going.
Sometime later, while he was away at school, a reply appeared in Corey’s inbox. Adrian said he studied seven days a week until ten at night. He was doing an exhaustive review of basic mechanics and could use a study break. Corey took the Red Line north to meet Adrian in Harvard Square.
Corey saw him waiting at the top of the long escalator that led out of the T station.
“Hey, man.” Corey smiled and grasped his hand. Adrian fumbled their first attempt at a handshake.
“I guess I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You’re fine.”
“Is it a high-five or a shake?”
“It’s just a dumb convention.”
“I guess conventions are dumb,” Adrian said.
Adrian took him to the Harvard Coop bookstore. Corey looked at the book selection in awe. The store smelled like espresso. Adrian said he spent a lot of time in Philosophy and Psychology. He led the way to the P’s.
On the way, Corey noticed the Harvard women sitting in the coffee bar. They were writing papers amid their shopping bags, purses, bags of candy and open laptops, drinking cappuccinos, flipping through magazines, consulting iPhones, checking Facebook. Corey said, “Hey, how’s your homework going?” to one girl—she had chestnut-brown hair and Arabian eyes—but she gave him such an alien look that he apologized for disturbing her.
“That chick was gorgeous,” he told Adrian. But Adrian claimed he hadn’t seen her.
In the P’s, Adrian started telling Corey about the theory of plyometrics. The goal was to build explosive power by taking advantage of the muscle’s stretch reflex. You hurled the weight ballistically and exerted all your force in the opposite direction until you overcame momentum, which could be colossal. As he spoke, he stared at himself with extreme interest. He seemed to freeze in midsentence, losing himself, charmed by his own body. He expanded his hand over his bicep without touching it, as if it were even bigger than it was. He treated himself as if he were a massive piece of expensive lab equipment.
Tall philosophy graduate students, aggressive in their own rights, didn’t know how to get around him to the Heidegger. Adrian didn’t move an inch for them. He didn’t know they were there. He kept on lecturing in his droning nasal voice, which he seemed not to know how to modulate. He was the only person talking in the store and, if anything, he was getting louder.
“The animal with the most explosive muscle in the world is the panther. It has a seventeen-foot standing vertical leap. If I could get some panther muscle, I’d graft it into my own body.” He mimed doing surgery. “I’d connect up all the nerves. It’d be so awesome. I’d run right outside and jump up on a building.”
He gripped his arm, showing it was a unit that could be replaced. His enthusiasm filled Corey’s heart with hope.
Everyone could hear him—all the Harvard girls efficiently planning their weekends.
The motorcycle jacket fit him tightly. There was, at most, room for a sweatshirt underneath it. Adrian refused to wear a hat. He left the Coop with his black, leather-clad shoulders hunched up around his ears. The temperature had dropped very low that night, and the asphalt roads were streaked with frost.
Corey, in a forty-dollar bubble jacket from the Burlington Coat Factory, asked, “How come you don’t get yourself a parka?”
Adrian stopped on the redbrick sidewalk, pressed his hands together and flexed his chest to stop himself from shivering. “The cold gives me a simple thing to overcome.”
Instead of sneakers, he wore last season’s tattered wrestling shoes, a thin piece of rubberized plastic between his feet and the ground, which offered no insulation or support. He made a heaving throat-clearing noise to deal with his phlegm. He had a cold. “It’s an infection,” he smiled. He was unshaven. “I like having bacteria in my throat.”
They hiked down Mount Auburn Street to the house where Adrian lived alone with his mother. His parents had gotten divorced when he was a very little boy.
“I love making everybody sick.”
His house was the color of cocoa powder with brown trim. It was inventively designed—a set of different-sized boxes put together to form an un-box-like shape—certainly not the kind of simple, peaked-roof house a five-year-old would have drawn with eyelike windows, a sun in the sky and a dog in the yard. Corey saw a rearranged face, à la Picasso, with eyes, nose and jaw stirred in a circle.
The boys went inside. Adrian’s home boasted hardwood floors and a cathedral ceiling, and a kitchen with a breakfast nook and barstools. A cast-iron woodstove crouched on a platform in the living room. Everything was open plan. The axes of the different rooms were set at surprising angles to one another. The walls were very white.
No one was home. Adrian led him up a spiral staircase. It was open too, and the climbers were suspended in midair above the living room before they went through a ceiling. As they climbed above the second floor, the staircase and the walls—the house itself—seemed to tighten around them like a fist.
In the narrow quarters, Corey thought he smelled an animal.
“Do you own a pet?”
“That’s just me,” Adrian said, and the two of them started laughing.
Adrian had his bedroom on the fifth floor. His room was laboratory-neat. The first thing you saw when you walked in was the desk against the high white wall cut by the angle of the roof. He had a skylight, which showed the night. A physics textbook rested on the desktop. It was positioned in the center of that surface. A pen lay next to it, parallel to the spine. The book was closed. Corey had a clear vision of Adrian sitting there, his muscular shoulders hunched over his physics book until precisely ten at night.
He had a lamp with a flexible neck that clamped to the edge of the desk.
The bed hardly looked big enough for someone of his size. You would have thought a fifth-grader slept in it. A copy of The Basic Writings of Nietzsche sat on the bedside table.
Despite the wealth in the Cambridge apartment, Corey picked up a strange sense of deprivation here.
He asked to see Adrian’s Nietzsche. The book was full of handwriting—in the margins, between the lines—in all block-capital letters. He saw mathematics and the language of self-help psychology all jumbled-up together in the form of strange equations. Certain phrases leaped out at him as he flipped the pages. One was Develop Self Esteem. Another one was Happiness Equals The Integral of Power. The handwriting was so strong he could feel it in the page like Braille. He jumped ahead a hundred pages and found still more of it, blacking out the margins—an astonishing amount of obsessive note-taking, which spilled over onto the blank sheets at the end of the text. On the very last white space of the book, the inside cover, he came across a calculation and stopped to read it, his eye having picked up the number 2070, which he correctly identified as referring to a year. It took him a minute to figure out what he was seeing. It appeared that Adrian, using high school probability and statistics, was predicting the date of his own death.
“I’ve never been comfortable with science,” Corey said. “But you are.”
“To me, it’s a way of overcoming problems and controlling the universe.”
“What’s the biggest problem in your universe?”
“My mother.”
“Me too,” Corey said. “Me too.”
And Corey spoke to Adrian at length about his mother’s illness.
It struck him that Adrian listened with remarkable sensitivity—or interest. His precise words to Corey were “I’m sorry you’re going through that.”
“I’m sorry your mom has cancer. That must be rough,” Corey said in return.
Adrian frowned. “It has its disadvantages. Obviously you don’t want someone else to suffer. That would be immoral. But if somebody uses her illness to take advantage of you, that’s immoral too.”
As Adrian talked, Corey began to gather that his new friend felt very differently about his mother than he did. Adrian described his mother as “controlling.” After speaking in philosophical terms for several minutes, he concluded by saying, “I feel morally absolved from worrying about her.”
Adrian wasn’t just smart, he was funny too. He was always talking about his own ass. He farted loudly—explosively loud, cracking farts, where one could hear the muscular sides of his buttocks reverberating—and he would do it in public. He would do it right next to a woman standing at a bus stop, and Corey would die laughing.
It was almost always night when Adrian could see him. Corey had to work around Adrian’s inflexible self-improvement schedule. They studied together in Adrian’s white room. They read books together in the Coop when the rest of the world was getting ready for Thanksgiving. He followed Adrian on meandering walks through Cambridge, listening to him talk relentlessly, using physics as a metaphor for everything. They hiked all through the dark hours of the night. Corey texted his mother at three a.m. to tell her not to worry, he was learning to develop himself. They broke into Adrian’s high school gym together so he could watch Adrian working out. Adrian played his violent workout music, and Corey listened. He watched as Adrian refueled his giant muscles by drinking gallons of milk.
Corey told his mom that he had found a real-life Vairocana on which to model himself.
In view of Adrian’s greatness, Corey had to see his drawing on the blackboard at MIT as something out of character. It was the same cartoon one sees on every shithouse wall: a disembodied female genital display between a pair of open legs.