The Cipher (2 page)

“Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.”

—Galileo Galilei

THURSDAY

“A man has a hundred dollars and you leave him with two. Boy, that's subtraction.”

—Mae West,
My Little Chickadee

2

IT WAS HIS
eighteenth birthday, and what was he doing?

Was he sitting front row at some amazing concert? No.

Was he in the bleachers at Fenway, scarfing cheese dogs and nachos? No.

Hot-tubbing with Melanie at the cabin on Squam Lake? No, no, no.

It was his eighteenth birthday, at nine thirty in the morning, and the biggest thing on his agenda was a trip to Massachusetts General Hospital.

Smiles had thought a lot about his eighteenth birthday over the years. It was, after all, the day his $7 million trust fund kicked in—and if his life hadn't gone haywire in the last year, he would have been celebrating in style. But his life
had
gone haywire, and now his gut was twisting in that way it did every time he had to go to Mass General.

He had woken up five minutes ago, stirred by a harsh band of sunlight inching across his living-room couch. Smiles had crashed on it again last night. A constellation of potato-chip crumbs were stuck to his cheek; they cascaded softly to the carpet as he squinted at the bare white walls of his one-bedroom apartment.

Smiles lived at the Pemberton, an apartment building in Cambridge distinguished mostly by its crumbling brick and loud plumbing. It charged exorbitant rent on the sheer force of its pretentious name and proximity to MIT, where many of its residents attended college. If Smiles had realized the nerd-to-normal-person ratio was so out of whack at the Pemberton, he never would have set foot in the place, but it was too late for that.

He'd rented the apartment back in the fall, shortly after getting the boot from Kingsley Prep. Which, on the whole, was one of the better things that had happened to him lately. There was a certain embarrassment factor to getting kicked out of school, sure, and it didn't help any that his dad was Robert Smylie. But of all the disasters that struck in the last year, it would hardly sniff the top-ten list. There were a lot of fringe benefits to the deal, including a license to sleep as late as you wanted. Smiles, who rarely woke before ten, decided to stay put another fifteen minutes out of principle.

As he closed his eyes, he heard the scrape of a flier being shoved under his door. His landlord was at it again. The guy always had some urgent bulletin to share about the laundry room (
Please retrieve your clothes in a timely fashion, in consideration of your fellow residents
), or the parking garage (
Please respect the handicap spaces, in consideration of the disabled
), or somebody who had left the community room a mess in yet another failure to consider their fellow man.

The sun pierced his eyes and Smiles reminded himself, for the fiftieth time, that he should really invest in some curtains. Groaning, he dislodged the stray bag of chips from the cushions and fished out the remains for breakfast. Jalapeño. Not bad.

After that, there was nothing to do but start his morning routine. It began, per usual, with a survey of the damage to his apartment from last night's festivities. (Moderate to extensive, depending on whether a spilled bottle of Jägermeister caused permanent carpet stains.) Next he hopped in the shower, then fed the thirteen exotic fish in the three giant tanks he kept in his apartment. The tanks were a major violation of his lease, but besides that, caring for his fish was the most responsible thing Smiles did on a daily basis, an accomplishment he was rather proud of. As far as commitments went, that left only the trip to Mass General. Time to rip off the bandage. Smiles laced his shoes and gathered up his keys.

On the way out the door, he bent to scoop up the flier . . . only to realize it wasn't a flier at all. It was a card, with his name written across the envelope in precise little letters. Smiles knew the handwriting—the card had come from Ben, the wacko kid who lived across the hall and went to MIT. He was only sixteen years old and a certified geek, but somehow the two of them got along.

Smiles took the card with him as he left the apartment, experiencing a tickling sensation that he was forgetting something. This was an extremely common occurrence and easy to ignore.

It was washed from his mind completely by the time he got down to Watson Street, swept the usual complement of parking tickets off the windshield of his Infiniti G37, and got going. The Infiniti was his most prized possession, and Smiles rarely drove it under the speed limit. Only on these trips to the hospital did he drive extra slowly, extending the ride as long as possible without bringing traffic on the Longfellow Bridge to an absolute halt and/or getting rammed from behind. Even then, the trip always seemed to pass in one short, dreadful breath.

His stomach tightened as he traced a slow path over the Mass General campus. Smiles knew his way through the lifeless gray buildings and construction zones all too well by now, just like he knew the giant knot overtaking his insides: a huge, pretzel-shaped thing that would tie up his guts until he got out of this place.

He grabbed a ticket at the parking garage and found a spot on the third level. Smiles knew he should get out of the car right away, but he could never make himself do it. Instead he stayed there, frozen, while the sports-talk-radio guys babbled on about the Red Sox's struggling bullpen. His thumb rubbed across the parking ticket with a half-conscious worry reflex.

Grasping for an excuse to put things off, Smiles plucked the card off the passenger seat and opened it—some generic thing with rainbows that Ben had probably grabbed blind from the drugstore shelf. Smiles laughed at the perfect, miniature handwriting:

Happy Birthday, Smiles!

(And thanks again for the computer.)

Your friend,

Ben

P.S. Don't forget to pick me up.

Two weeks ago, he had given Ben one of the ten laptops sitting unopened in his closet. They came from his dad, who got all the latest computers for free. He had hundreds at his office—he passed them out like Tic Tacs.

Smiles closed the card with a sudden, overwhelming sadness.

All the computer companies tried to impress his dad with their latest products. You couldn't buy a computer anymore without finding the logo for his company, Alyce Systems, stuck on it somewhere: the two interlocking keys that had become the universal symbol for computer security. Over the last decade, Alyce Systems had become the biggest success story in Boston.
Time
magazine had actually called his dad “the Man Who Changed the Internet.”

And then a year ago, the Man Who Changed the Internet went to see his doctor about a nagging headache and they discovered it. A brain tumor. Nobody knew how long he'd live.

The whole thing was unreal.

Smiles yanked the key from the ignition and laid his head against the seat. He shut his eyes, letting his head fill with the buzz from the parking-structure lights. Sometimes this was as far as he made it. He'd sit in the car for a while, then retreat to the apartment and play online poker, lying to himself that he'd return to the hospital later. Today was Smiles's birthday, though. His dad was expecting him. It wasn't exactly like he could call up and say,
Sorry Pops, can't make it, not feeling too well
.

With a monumental effort, he forced himself out of the car and headed for the hospital.

This was it. This was his eighteenth birthday.

3

SMILES ELBOWED OPEN
the door to the neuro-oncology unit.

He was double-fisting the coffee order he picked up at the café downstairs every time he visited: a small black in his left, a large decaf with light cream and cinnamon in his right. Shanti liked the way he did the cinnamon. She was his favorite nurse, with her smooth caramel skin and sexy ropes of bronze hair. There was something graceful in her walk, and Smiles believed he had detected, beneath the shapeless cover of her hospital blues, a magnificent rack.

Smiles may not have been Brad Pitt in the looks department—he was a gangly six foot one with a washed-out complexion and hair the color of a sun-faded paper bag—but he didn't care about that. If you had half a personality, he had found, you did just fine with the ladies. Not that he'd cheat on Melanie or anything. It wasn't even an issue, anyway, since Melanie had told him she needed a “break.” Just another thing that had gone wrong in the last year.

The door sighed closed behind him, leaving Smiles alone in the sterile fluorescence of the waiting area. The long curve of the reception desk was vacant, the air heavy with carpet cleaner and the general sense of doom that clung to Smiles here. He put Shanti's coffee on the ledge and checked his phone for procrastination material. It offered only a text from Darby Fisher (“
IPO baby!!! Is it a buy at $35 or what?
”) and two calls he'd slept through from a 510 number he didn't recognize. Silence on the Melanie front.

The coffee wasn't helping the knot in his stomach. Smiles tossed it and lurched down the hallway to the whiteboard that said
Ro er Sm l e
.

They wrote the patients' names outside the rooms. His dad had been admitted two months ago, and bits of purple ink had come off in the meantime, leaving his name like a half-completed crossword answer. Everyone knew who he was, of course. They probably wanted to install a plaque:
DISTINGUISHED
PATIENT
ROBERT
SMYLIE
:
FOUNDE
R
OF
ALYCE
SYSTEMS
,
H
ARVARD
PROFESSOR
OF
MATHEMATICS
,
PHILANTH
ROPIST, TWO-TIME
PEOP
LE
MAGAZINE TOP-100 SEXI
EST
MAN
ALIVE
.

True, all of it. They probably wanted to feed him grapes by hand. He had asked for no special treatment, though, so he just got the whiteboard. He hadn't been able to stop them from putting him in a private room that happened to be the biggest on the floor.

Smiles hesitated at the entrance, stopped by a cascade of familiar thoughts.

Robert Smylie
: It was his own name, too. But to think of himself accomplishing what his father had . . .

To think of himself being worthy of such respect . . .

Being half the man who lay inside, dying . . .

“Robert?”

His dad had seen him.

Smiles steeled himself. He forced some energy into his voice as he entered the room. “Hey, Dad.”

“Ahhh, he appears at last. Happy birthday, son.” The hospital bed hummed as he raised it to a sitting position. He still had the runner's body, the lean face, the crystal-blue eyes. That was the freaky part—when you couldn't even tell.

“Yeah, thanks,” Smiles said as his dad beckoned him for a hug. Smiles dipped in, forgetting for a moment that the last seizure had left him paralyzed on one side. Now Smiles had pinned his dad's good arm awkwardly beneath him. He pulled away quickly, embarrassed.

They had found a second tumor after his last seizure, one they couldn't remove without touching parts of the brain that control, like, breathing and other stuff you don't want to be screwing with. Then the paralysis set in. The doctors had given Smiles plenty of updates, their coats as white and blank as his shock-numbed mind. He couldn't keep up with all the technicalities, didn't really want to, but he got the basic vibe: This train's a-rollin', and it ain't stoppin'.

His dad motioned to a speaker on his nightstand, which as usual was playing some obscure classical number. “Turn that down, will you?”

The iPod docking gizmo was the only luxury his dad had allowed himself. He didn't even keep the gifts that arrived—he had them distributed to other patients. (When the diagnosis first became public, Smiles had seen flower arrangements from the Kennedys, the mayor, and Bill Gates. Bono had probably paid off Equatorial Guinea's national debt in his name or something.) Even after two months in the place, the room was still a spare white space—all blank walls and utilitarian furniture. It fit him all the same. Smiles could hear his dad's mantras in his head:
Live simply
,
stay humble
,
take no shortcuts
, etc. etc. When Smiles had brought the Infiniti back from the lot, his dad had eyeballed it coolly. “Flashy,” was all he'd said, but the bite in the single word could have broken skin.

The only hint of personality in the entire room came from the framed picture of his mom on the nightstand. There was something new today, though. A green screen had been erected at the front of the room, blocking out the window to the hallway. Beneath the screen, black boxes with metal closures lay on the floor, all marked with the logo of a video production company. Maybe his dad was spending his off-hours starring in an action movie.

Smiles turned the iPod thing down, but not too much. His dad loved his classical music.

“That's better,” his dad said as Smiles dragged a chair to the side of the bed. He always sat in the same spot, near the picture of his mom. As if she could still break the tension between Smiles and his dad.

Smiles nodded to the screen. “Filming something?”

“Oh, that. For the IPO.” His dad rolled his eyes. “They tell me I should make an address to the troops on Tuesday.”

Alyce Systems was going public that day. If you had a pulse and lived in Boston, you'd heard about it in a thousand breathless news reports, with countdown clocks in the corner and interviews with working stiffs ready to bank their life savings on Alyce. All the stories were the same. Each one contrasted his wise and mature dad with all the Internet phenoms from Silicon Valley who'd reached too far, too fast, or whatever. The IPO seemed to consume everyone these days, even his old Kingsley friends like Darby Fisher, who were all suddenly talking like CNBC anchors. Smiles tried to ignore it as much as he could.

“So what's this I hear about you and Melanie?”

Oh, that. Smiles hadn't said anything about it. But of course his dad had found out anyway. Perfect.

“Oh, you know, she's just got a lot going on right now. It'll be fine.”

It was hardly fine. Melanie had told him she needed “some space,” that she wanted to “take a break,” and several other code phrases for the fact that she'd be dumping Smiles for good any minute now. When he thought about it, he felt like his heart was being sledgehammered by one of those guys in the made-for-cable strong-man competitions he sometimes flipped past in the middle of the day. He didn't see the point of talking about Melanie, though—it hardly seemed like a big deal next to a case of brain cancer.

Up close, Smiles could see now that his dad was looking weak. His eyes fell shut while the piano tinkled on, driving Smiles slightly mad. Why couldn't he ever think of anything interesting to say? Why couldn't he keep his dad entertained, for just five minutes a day?

His dad smiled lethargically. “Is that GED prep boring you to death?”

The GED stuff. This is what hurt.

“It's not so bad,” Smiles said, although he had spent much of the last few months coming up with excuses to cancel his tutoring sessions for the test. He had barely opened the prep manual. Actually, he didn't even know where it was anymore. The cover was green, he knew that much. Meanwhile, his old friends, perched safely in the high thin air of Kingsley Prep, were going to Yale and Harvard and Brown—maybe Duke if they were dumb.

“It can't be much of a challenge.”

“No, it's not,” Smiles said sharply.

He couldn't keep his voice smooth, couldn't keep the raw edge of his anger tucked away. Talking about the GED with his dad. His dad, the genius. The math professor who, fifteen years ago, had revolutionized computer technology and turned Alyce Systems into a Fortune 500 company.

“Well, what subjects are you—”

“It's for idiots, Dad. It's stupid stuff.”

His dad's face settled into a familiar cast of tested patience. “Just push through it, then.”

“That's what I'm doing.” Although, of course, it wasn't.

He was being sucked into the black hole of shame that gobbled him up whenever he entered this room. His dad had toiled for years coming up with his breakthrough on computer encryption. What had Smiles ever pushed himself at? Getting Melanie to go out with him the first time, that chain email scam that backfired, and, briefly,
Call of Duty
. That was about it.

And now, as his dad patted his arm, Smiles felt Phase Two of the black-hole syndrome. It was a reflex by now: a sudden urge to be serious. To be diligent. To get passionate and work hard at a subject he found interesting. It would be a subject that was mildly cool and could lead to a fortune like his dad had made if he applied himself for a while. But . . . what?

Smiles never knew, and after a while the feeling would pass.

He was staring at the floor tiles, losing himself in a vision of Shanti's rack, when he felt his dad grasp his arm.

“Robert, we need to talk about something.”

The trust fund
, Smiles thought immediately. This was going to be about the money. A responsibility talk about what it meant to have $7 million. It was only a fraction of his dad's fortune, but he'd always been big on Smiles “finding his own way.”
Be honest, take no shortcuts, find your own way.

Then a cloud passed over his dad's face and he said, “We have to be realistic about this.”

Oh. This wasn't about money at all.

“Yeah, Dad,” Smiles said in a soft scratch of a voice.

His dad held his gaze. “Things aren't getting any better.”

He never talked like that, and Smiles knew right then that he'd be dead within a month. It should have floored him. It should have hit him like a car going seventy. But all Smiles felt was a vaguely embarrassed feeling.

“You . . . you're a fighter, Dad.”

You're a fighter? Did I really just say that?
Smiles wished someone would punch him in the face.

“Yes, I am. But listen. There's something else, and it's important.” His voice had gone thin and pained. “You've been through too much for a young person, Robert. Far too much.”

His dad's eyes slipped over to the picture of his mom. Smiles swallowed hard, feeling ambushed, wishing he could be somewhere else.

The picture had been taken at their wedding—an artsy black-and-white shot with flower girls dancing at her feet, her head tossed back in laughter. She was his stepmom, if you wanted to get biological about it. Smiles didn't think of her like that. His “real” mother had abandoned him when he was two. Fine. He'd gotten something better in the deal. Her name was Rose Carlisle, and she was his favorite person in the world. She had lazy blonde curls and big green eyes like life on fire. She looked like fun, and she was. And Smiles could seriously relate to her. And now she was gone.

She had died almost a year ago. In the crazy year of things going wrong, nothing else could compare; it sat at the very top of his top-ten list of bad things, and it would sit there forever. The accident just happened—a freak thing with her car. No warning, no good reason for it, no good-byes. She just . . . died. Tough luck. Sorry, Smiles.

“Your mother,” his dad said, “she wanted you to have something when you turned eighteen.”

Smiles had gone dizzy with the memory of his mom, but he didn't want to miss this. “She what?”

“She left you a letter. And . . .”

His dad's hand fidgeted with the sheet—his good hand, on his left side. Watching it tremble turned Smiles cold. The whole time he'd been sick, Smiles had never seen him crack. Now this. This was what it had been like when she died, when his dad had wept for a week.

“And what?” Smiles prodded gently. He needed to know what his mom had left for him.

His dad shut his eyes, his brow furrowing with some kind of memory. Finally, just when Smiles began to wonder if he'd nodded off, he spoke.

“There's a package.”

“A package? Like . . . a gift?”

“You could say that. But not a regular gift. It's a notebook.”

His dad pressed the button for the nurse then. Smiles wondered if he was getting a migraine from the swelling and needed morphine.

He was reeling with questions—
What was in this notebook? Why did she leave it for me? And what's with the letter?
—but his dad raised his good hand, fending him off.

“That's all I want to say about it, I'm afraid. Ask Marshall for the letter, okay? He has it.”

Marshall Hunt, his dad's lawyer and business partner since forever. He was Melanie's father, and also the trustee of Smiles's trust. Smiles remembered now that they had a meeting about the trust today—it was the thing he'd forgotten that morning.

“Yeah, Dad. I'll ask him.”

“Okay,” his dad said firmly. “We're done with that now.”

Shanti appeared at the door then. She raised her coffee in thanks to Smiles, but then turned quickly to his dad, giving him an aren't-we-clever look.

“Ready anytime,” his dad said with a wink, and Shanti disappeared happily back into the hallway. There was something going on that Smiles wasn't grasping, but he wasn't sure he cared.