He Talks in Maths

When I was “eleven” my brother Louie, also “eleven,” got out of bed in the middle of the night, but he wasn’t awake, and he found his markers and he did his math homework on the surfaces of the living room, and the kitchen, and the hallway. I was awake.
It was October 2013. Louie got out of bed with his eyes closed; listened, floated, green Crayola Washable Broad Line marker like a dowsing rod at the far end of his limp white arm. He decorated the living room first. I hung ten feet back and contemplated digits the size of trashcan lids, symbols and squiggles that probably didn’t exist in 6th grade mathematics leaking from my brother in green sonic waves across the wallpaper, the wood floor, the coffee table.
His trashcans shrunk to Frisbees that landed in the kitchen where they became English muffins. The muffins crawled up the refrigerator and became tired. And there appeared an equal sign, followed by the number 2. In the middle of the fridge, inches from Mom’s grocery list, Louie drew a green circle around the number 2.
His plaid, scrawny shadow drifted into the hallway conducting a green orchestra along the wall. When he got to our parents’ door, carving and scratching and mumbling in numerical tongues – the climax of the equation – the door opened and he landed in our parents’ room, woke up green-handed and they made him wash it all off the next day. But they were too freaked to be seriously mad at him.
It happened again. Misdirected as usual, Mom called (not a doctor but) her son’s algebra teacher. All she found out was that this totally had nothing to do with his math homework.
Louie’s subconscious never forgave our parents for dissolving its stream before the proof was finished. It happened so many more times – the same equations, exactly, I kept track, but always in differing patterns around the house – that they gifted their haunted son with dry-erase markers by the crate. Our father installed plywood doors to keep him from vandalizing beyond the living room and replaced all the wallpaper with ceiling high dry-erase boards.
It happened many, many more times because the problem was that every single time it happened, something would go wrong. Desperately quiet as I was, a car alarm would panic in the night and wake him; dogs barking; senseless thumps; he would knock his forehead on a bookshelf and all progress would evaporate instantly as reality interrupted. Louie would shudder and rub his face and wonder where he was. Then the stories of the involuntary unconscious mission he was supposed to be at least indirectly aware of came back. Every time, he woke up – by the TV, crouched behind a dresser. And his eyes, groggy and confused, found me in the darkness with my notepad or a video camera and he suddenly remembered – oh yeah, he was a freaky math genius sleepwalker.
“Hey, Ira,” He would yawn. He had learned quickly to ignore the usual frustration on my blurry shadow of a face. “Maybe tomorrow night.”
I developed mild insomnia. And sometimes I wished he were always asleep.
We’re “24” now. My brother has been hailed as a tortured prodigy since age “eleven,” his intrigue the mystery of his perpetually unfinished masterpiece.
Until recently, that is. Because the other night, Louie finished his proof.