Ira’s mother was standing in his doorway for some reason. If he looked at her, he’d have seen that her eyes were considering the carpet in the bedroom like quicksand. She’d come up there, left the kitchen without taking off her oven mitt, and her skinny little son thought Breakfast of Champions was some sort of invisibility shield.

So she said, “why do you hate me?”

Ira looked up from the book and squinted at her and would have smiled because it was a good question and props to her for having the guts, but it was important to maintain distance with the appearance of hollow consideration.

“I dunno. Why?”

“I was just making dinner,” she said, offering her oven mitt as evidence, “and I just thought about how you must be hungry. And I think you’re a pretty cool guy. So I cut you an extra big piece of ham.”

“Thanks.”

“And then I just turned around and left the ham and before I knew it I was halfway up the stairs. So I figured while I’m up here, I would ask.”

“Weird.” Ira set the book down and folded his hands. He waited for Brenda Hofstadter to feel the intimidating silence he brought to the party. She was six feet tall with chin-length blonde hair as thick as paper; she lifted her right arm to put her paper hair behind her giant ears but was thwarted by the oven mitt. Ira stared.

“Well, hasn’t that psychic explained it to you?”

“Cheryl said you are a strong and passionate young man who asks a lot of things from the Universe and becomes resentful when they aren’t given to him. She said that you will learn in time to leave your impossible demands behind and be at Peace.”

“Hm. That must be it then.”

“You think so?”

“What do you think?”

Brenda made eye contact with her son for about a billisecond and decided she found the quicksand carpeting less terrifying. She waded through the fiber, slipped through the underlay and popped out on Christmas 2011: the living room. She was attempting to explain to a sniffling nine-year-old Louie that Metal Gear Solid 7 was unsuitable. Ira was hugging his brother and sardonically asking her to please explain exactly what it was about improved spatial and problem solving skills she found so threatening. He was eight. Brenda laughed. Ira took it as a compliment when she joked that he had blown her mind. Later, she burned her finger on the stove, knocked the Jell-O on the linoleum and heard her youngest son whispering to his brother that it must be permanently blown.

“Nothing.” Ira stared.

Brenda’s right hand was sweating.

“I love you, Ira.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Will you eat my ham?”

“Perhaps.”

Joel the astronaut should have known the sea monster would be expecting him. They had been dreaming of each other – Joel and Señora Colbert, the beast, lush by choice and omniscient sentience of the fourth dimension by obligation – for as long as things have been. The young astronaut met the Chilean Cryptogoddess on the day he quit his job.

It was the 2032nd year of Western Fable.

The United States government sold NASA to NBC Universal in 2029, and his stint as a tour guide on Universal Studios: Earth Orbit Experience paid for deli sandwiches and a room above the Paint Palace. Daily he saw the old Marble in storms of dust and wind, turning at the will of money and love, sifting it’s surface in travel and tides, and he never once in his career felt like Kate Muglrew, his grandmother, who told him in her senility that he could be whatever he wanted to be. He became a bearded man, sitting in the shuttle narrating continents and having a beard growing contest with every bearded man on earth.

On the day Joel the astronaut quit his job, the Irish heritage foundation booked the 2 p.m. shuttle to celebrate the 103rd birthday of the last natural red-head on the planet, who had a heart attack and died somewhere between seven gs and “ladies and gentleman we have left the atmosphere.” The tragedy caused the women to wail and ask why, the men to forge a bagpipe jam session, and the old men to climb into the employees only booth and beckon Joel in morbid warnings: “do not waste your days,” a rickety limey in plaid said, “have you done it all? Seen Titans? Felt the salty breeze of venture on your wretched face?”

“Not recently.”

“Then GO!” the old man charged him in freckled fury.

So the young astronaut manned the escape hatch, nodded to the plaid prophet, pressed the appropriate switches and fell at a rate of approximately 9.89 m/s/s into the southeast Pacific.

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.