HEAR (7 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Einstein got it wrong,” Uncle Brian tells us. “Even geniuses get things wrong. Remember that. Einstein believed the universe was deterministic—meaning the past has already dictated the way things will turn out, that nothing happens randomly or in ways that can't be predicted. He even famously said—and I'm paraphrasing—‘That God plays dice and uses “telepathic” methods is something I cannot believe for a single moment.' Yet on the contrary, any physicist will tell you that this was Einstein's biggest blunder. Not only does God play dice; it would appear he quite enjoys the game.”

I can't help but wonder if this is the lecture Uncle Brian had planned to give us today or if the subject of randomness was inspired by the senselessness of yesterday's shooting.

When he finally returned to the lab after the midmorning break had stretched to two hours, Brian was pale and visibly trembling. An elderly colleague with longish white hair à la Andrew Jackson accompanied him. Brian didn't bother to introduce the man at his side. Instead he said he'd just been informed his “dear friend and colleague,” Professor Graham Pinberg, had been shot and killed at the Bridgestone Mall. He told us to take the rest of the day off. “But please be careful out there,” he said as we gathered our things. “The gunman is still at large, and if this animal will shoot someone as decent and good as Graham, no one is safe. We all may as well have targets on our backs.”

I didn't hear Uncle Brian come home last night, but this morning I found him drinking his coffee in the kitchen. He stood behind the kitchen curtains, staring out the window. His eyes were a little bleary—they still are—but he seemed determined to forge ahead with the day as planned, in spite of the tragedy. I wasn't sure how much he'd want to talk about his friend, so I just asked if the university would hold a memorial service. Brian exhaled heavily, mumbled that there'd be a tribute of some kind, but that it was important to keep on with the work in front of us. “Graham was a man whose life was dedicated to the pursuit of discovery, and getting on with it honors him best.”

As we drove to school this morning, we saw flags lowered to half-staff throughout the town. We also discovered that a large number of security guards had suddenly materialized on campus. With the “armed and extremely dangerous” gunman still presumed to be in the immediate vicinity, their presence had ironically only made me feel more vulnerable.

“Einstein believed in entanglement, though, didn't he?” Dan now asks Brian.

“ Yes, that he did,” Brian responds.

“Entanglement?” Pankaj repeats.

Brian nods. “That's when two particles that are separated by any distance—even light-years—instantaneously affect each other, as if they were part of the same unified system.”

I shift in my seat, barely paying attention to what's being discussed. This whole incomprehensible conversation began when Mara started talking about her tarot cards. She was on edge when she came into the lab—we all were—but then she started babbling about the “challenging read” she'd picked from the deck upon waking up. That set Dan off on some long tangent about the relationship between tarot cards and quantum mechanics. And that's when I started to tune out.

Truthfully, though, I'm much more concerned about Alex—or rather, the absence of Alex. He's been AWOL ever since he fled the lab yesterday. No one saw him in the dorm, and no one knows what time he got home last night. Or
if
he got home last night. Yet I seem to be the only one freaked out that Alex is missing and the shooter's still at large. It's not only distressing; it's
weird
. . .

By 10:10, I can no longer sit still. I feel like I'm going to lose it. But right at the moment that I'm about to blow—as if on cue—Alex bursts through the door.

“Hey, all,” he says, his hair wet from the shower, sunglasses hanging from a button of his stylish plaid shirt. “Sorry I'm late.”

My jaw hangs open. That's it?

Brian raises his eyebrows. “Care to explain?”

“I need space after these things happen, so I tend to vanish for a while,” Alex answers quietly, matter-of-factly. He doesn't look at any of us when he speaks; he just sits on his stool. “It's really hard when you know about this stuff before it goes down but you're powerless to stop it, you know?” Mara and Dan nod to themselves. “It was a whole tidal wave of emotion. For a while I was even feeling happy because it was your colleague and not you, Professor. Then I felt guilty for feeling happy because it's so wrong. Someone was gunned down in cold blood. But my mind kept racing.” Alex takes a breath and finds Brian's eyes. “I mean,
what if it had been you?
” He shakes his head.

Brian continues to study Alex for a moment, and we all wait for his response. But instead of offering comforting words or reading Alex the riot act for having disappeared for nearly eighteen hours, Brian picks up a yellow legal pad, flips through several pages, and scrawls some notes.

“Okay, so moving on,” Brian says, eventually looking back up at us.

I try to process the weirdness I've just witnessed, but I can't. Maybe Uncle Brian is trying to deflect his own grief by cataloging Alex's response?

“For the tests we'll be doing later in the day,” Brian says, “we'll be studying anomalies that arise from human-machine interactions. I want to see if you can bias a machine.”

“Bias a machine?” Pankaj asks with a grin. “Easy. Just tell it its job has been outsourced to cheaper machines in a foreign country.”

Brian breaks into a grin, and I laugh, but then quickly put my hand over my mouth. Laughter hardly seems appropriate on a day like today. Then again, with this group, I have no idea what's considered “appropriate.”

“Bias in the sense of influencing a machine with your mind alone,” Brian clarifies.

Collecting myself, I straighten on my stool. “ You want us to make a machine do something without touching it?” When my uncle nods, I continue: “Okay, that's just impossible. No way can that happen.”

Brian shakes his head, but his grin hasn't entirely faded. “Let's not forget the lesson of our man Einstein, Kass. Even geniuses get things wrong.”

I head to the
bathroom at the end of another ridiculous day. No one appeared to influence anything, but Uncle Brian watched us all afternoon and took copious notes. I'm looking at my hands as I wash them in the sink when I feel something slide down the back of my hair. I'm momentarily seized with terror, and my head jerks up. I see Mara's reflection in the mirror. She's standing right behind me.

“ Your hair is so pretty, Kass,” she says.

I try not to shudder. Who sneaks up behind someone and starts petting her hair? It'd be alarming even without a lunatic on the loose. Mara runs her hand through her own silky black hair and tousles it; she has one of those silent movie–star hairdos you need the perfect heart-shaped face to carry off. Mara's face is so delicate it seems like the haircut was created solely for her. And her wide-set eyes, framed by long, false lashes, make her look like a manga heroine. “Thanks,” I manage to reply.

I want to leave, but she stands between me and the door.

“I used to have great hair too,” she says, the words tumbling out quickly, “but in a fit of
I don't know what
, I chopped it all off a few months ago—actually, I do know what.” She leans in a little closer behind me and lowers her voice. “I was getting too much attention from the male population of Oklahoma, and it got to be disturbing.”

Having tried to remain inconspicuous myself for the past two years, I can actually relate. But I'm not buying it. She's up to something.

“Boys don't like the short hair,” she goes on. “Or at least not on me, so my plan seems to have worked. Almost too well.” She hesitates, and then looks me in the eye. “Let's get out of here. Come on, there's someplace I want to show you.”

I have to admit, even though I'm a little creeped out, I'm intrigued by the invitation. Maybe we
can
be friends after all? Doubtful. But maybe.

“Where?”

“Follow me.” She flashes a mischievous smile.

Mara runs—backward—the
whole way
from the building, yelling that I need to move faster, faster, faster! I don't know where we're headed, but for some reason I don't think her urgency has anything to do with her fear of the gunman. It feels more like she's rushing me someplace that has a limited-quantity giveaway or a unicorn. Finally she stops in front of the enormous sculpture on the art museum's front lawn.

“Look at
this
!”

I pause to catch my breath. “ Yeah,” I gasp. “ Yeah, it's nice.” I wonder if I'm missing something. I mean it's fine, but it's no unicorn.

“They have the most amazing American art here!” As Mara throws open the museum's doors, I'm tempted to ask her how many energy drinks she's had today; she seems to be operating at three times her normal speed.

A guard asks for our IDs, and as I fish mine out of my bag, Mara pulls hers from the top of her T-shirt. “Voilà,” she says to the guard, who, it must be said, seems to have enjoyed the trick. Maybe Mara's overcompensating for the gloom that's fallen over the campus. Maybe she doesn't notice or care. But there's something unhinged in those huge eyes.

I follow her, warily, as she flits through the galleries. After a few minutes, she stands still in front of a black-and-white painting . . . of nothing. Seriously. To me it just looks like black and white paint, possibly the outline of a chair.

“What's going on?” I ask.

“I find this mesmerizing. Look.” She points to a segment where the black paint seems to be peeking out from under the white paint. “ You assume the artist, Franz Kline, was using black paint on a white canvas, right? I mean, that's the way things usually go. But here you can't tell what's the background and what's the foreground. The eye is fooled because he applies paint in layers.”

Where is she going with this? There's no way Mara dragged me here to discuss modern art. But I play along. “Uh-huh.”

“We come to a painting believing we understand the rules in advance, right?” Mara turns to me, her brown eyes glittering beneath the fringe of lashes. “The canvas is white; the black goes on top. But in this work it's completely unclear which came first. Maybe it's white paint on a black canvas. We can't know. And that's the point. With abstract expressionism, the artist is telling us to expect the unexpected.” She takes a step toward me and lowers her voice. “It's kind of like the feeling of falling in love; you know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh,” I say again. I have absolutely no idea what she means. This would be a problem if we were going to be friends. But since I can't follow her leap from paint thrown on canvas to falling in love, I feel pretty confident the friendship thing ain't happening. “I guess.”

“Come on, Kass. You've fallen in love, haven't you?” She says this like a taunt. As if she knows my secret.

“ Yeah,” I reply noncommittally. The problem is, I'm not actually sure of the answer to that question: Is it love if it's only one-sided? Or did the feelings I had for Pete Lewis count as something else? Obsession maybe? I haven't thought of him since I've been at Henley—which must be some kind of record for me given that I used to think of him every few seconds. But he was my infinity crush, the boy I'd been dreaming about since I first laid eyes on him in eighth-grade math class. He was the boy whose smile sent me spinning. The boy whose betrayal felt like a death.

“When I'm in love, colors are brighter,” Mara says in the silence. “Smells are sharper; my skin is more sensitive; my visions stronger. It's like the emotion pumps pure adrenaline through my body!” She spins around several times, and when she stops, she lets out a “Woo!” She grabs my arm to brace herself. A couple of the security guards frown in our direction. I don't blame them. Even if there
weren't
a killer on the loose, even if a member of the Henley community
hadn't
been killed, her behavior wouldn't exactly be museum appropriate.

“Hey, Mara, let me ask you something. You seem a little—”

“Alive?”

Interesting word choice. “Well, that, yeah, but also—”

“Tired?”

“No, I definitely wasn't going to go with tired.”

“Oh, good, because the thing is I haven't really slept in the last few days.” She twirls once more, then rubs her eyes. “I'm worried it's starting to show.”

I force a smile. “Well, you might be a little punchy . . .”

“Like this?” With a laugh, she punches me in the arm. Not lightly. She has a decent jab for a small girl; I rub my biceps. “Sorry, sorry,” she says. “I know I'm a little all over the place right now, and
my God
,” she says loudly, “I am
so
horny.”

The guards are glaring now. I can feel my face reddening. Mara just smiles and waves at them, and they glance at each other and turn away.

“Ever since I stopped taking my medication, I just feel so much freer. Like I said, more aliiiiiive!” She grabs my hand and pulls me down the hall—away from the guards, thankfully.

“What medication did you stop taking?” I whisper.

“The mood stabilizers.”

Aha
,
I think. I'm no less embarrassed or concerned or freaked, but I'm at least finally cognizant of what's going on. She looks manic because she
is
manic. Clinically. Diagnostically.

“I've been weaning myself off them since I got here because Professor Black told me to stop taking them. But you can't stop all at once or else—” Mara makes a gesture like she's hanged herself with an imaginary rope, her head falling to her left shoulder, her tongue sticking out of her mouth. “But it's okay. I've been eating a lot of ginger instead. Its chemical compounds have calming properties.”