Alarmed at the sight of her alone, I sensed in her solitude an omen of some event that I dared not contemplate.
I approached the bed—and woke in it, beside her, where I had not been lying in the dream. Gone were the nautilus spirals of books, replaced by darkness and the pale geometry of curtained windows.
Penny’s soft rhythmic breathing was a mooring to which I could tether myself in the gloom; her respiration should have settled me but did not. I continued to feel adrift, and anxious.
Wanting something, not knowing what I wanted, I eased out of bed and, barefoot in pajamas, left the master suite.
Moonlight through skylights frosted the longer run of the L-shaped upstairs hallway. Passing a thus twice-silvered mirror, I glanced at my reflection, which appeared as diaphanous as a ghost.
I was awake but felt still dreambound. This venue, though it was my own house, seemed more sinister than the deserted library or than the department store haunted by an elusive laughing spirit.
My rising anxiety focused on Milo. I hurried the length of the main hall and turned right into the darker short arm.
From the gap between the threshold and the bottom of Milo’s bedroom door, a fan of radiance continuously fluttered between a sapphire-blue intensity and an icy gunmetal blue, not the light of fire or television but suggesting mortal danger nonetheless.
We have a policy of knocking, but I opened the door without announcing myself—and was relieved to find Milo safe and asleep.
The dimmer switch on the bedside lamp had been dialed down to an approximation of candlelight. He lay supine, head raised on a pillow. Behind his closed eyelids, rapid eye movement signified dream sleep.
With him lay Lassie, her chin resting on his abdomen. She was as awake as any guardian charged with a sacred task. She rolled her eyes to watch me without moving her head.
On the U-shaped desk, intermingling clouds of color—each a shade of blue—billowed in slow motion across the computer monitor, like a kaleidoscope with amorphous forms instead of geometric shapes.
I had never seen such a screen saver. Because Milo’s computer had no Internet access, this couldn’t have been downloaded from the Web.
The Internet is more a force for evil than for good. It offers the worst of humankind absolute license and anonymity—and numerous addictive pursuits over which to become obsessive. Kids are having innocence and willpower—if not free will itself—stolen from them.
When Milo wanted to go online, he had to use my computer or Penny’s. We have installed serious site-blocking software.
The wing of the desk to the left of the computer was covered with circuit boards, carefully labeled microchips in small plastic bags, a disassembled alphanumeric keypad, a disassembled radio, dozens of arcane items I had purchased for him at RadioShack and elsewhere, and a scattering of miniature tools.
I had no idea what my boy might be creating with any of those things. However, I trusted him to obey the rules and to avoid doing anything that might electrocute him, burn down the house, or transport him to the Jurassic Era with no way of getting back to us.
In movies, raising a prodigy is always an exhilarating and uplifting journey to triumphant accomplishment. In reality, it is also exhausting and even sometimes terrifying.
I suppose that would not be true if his genius expressed itself as a talent for the piano and for musical composition. Even Mozart couldn’t play the piano with such brilliance that it would explode and kill bystanders with ivory shrapnel.
Unfortunately—or fortunately, as only time would tell—Milo’s talent was for theoretical and applied mathematics, also theoretical and applied physics, with a deep intuitive understanding of magnetic and electromagnetic fields.
This we were told by the experts who studied and tested Milo for two weeks. I have only a dim idea of what their assessment means.
For a while we hired graduate students to tutor him, but they tended only to inhibit his learning. He is a classic autodidact, self-motivated, and already in possession of his high-school GED.
I am as proud of the little guy as I am intimidated. Given his brainpower, he’ll probably never be interested in having me teach him a pastime as boring as baseball. Which is all right, I guess, because I’ve always been rotten at sports.
The wing of the desk to the right of the computer held a large tablet open to a working drawing of some device requiring an array of microprocessors, instruction caches, data caches, bus connections, and other more mysterious items—all linked by a bewildering maze of circuit traces.
If microsoldering was required, neither Milo nor I would be permitted to do it. Such work must be left to Penny. She has, after all, the steady hands of an artist, the emotional maturity that Milo lacks, and a mechanical competence of which I can only dream.
The ever-changing forms on the monitor, like a churning mass of blue protoplasm, had begun to seem ominous to me, as if this were a living thing that, by applying pressure, might crack the screen and surge into the room. I wanted to switch off the computer, but I did not. Milo had left it on not inadvertently but for some reason.
At the bed once more, I gazed at him for a while in the low lamplight. A beautiful child.
Although blessed with a vivid imagination, I could not begin to envision the topography of Milo’s mindscape.
I worried about him a lot.
He had no friends his age because kids bored him. Penny, Lassie, Vivian Norby, Clotilda, Grimbald, and I were his social universe.
I hoped he could live as normally as his gifts would allow, but I felt inadequate to show him the way. I wanted my son to know much laughter and more love, to appreciate the grace of this world and the abiding mystery of it, to know the pleasure of small achievements, of trifles and of follies, to be always aware of the million wonderful little pictures in the big one, to be a humble master of his gift and not the servant of it. Because I could not imagine what it must be like to be him, I could not lead on every issue; much of the time, we would have to find our way together.
I loved him enough to endure any horror for him and to die that he might be spared.
No matter how much you care for another person, however, you can’t guarantee him a happy life, not with love or money, not with sacrifice. You can only do your best—and pray for him.
I kissed Milo on the forehead without disturbing his sleep. Impulsively, I kissed Lassie on the head, as well. She seemed to be pleased by this affection, but I got some fur on my lips.
The bedside clock read 5:00 A.M. In seven and a half hours, the dog would be sitting in the living-room window seat, watching the street and wondering when I would return with her cherished companion—and Milo and I would be having lunch at Roxie’s Bistro, spying on the nation’s premier literary critic.
At 12:10, the lunch crowd in Roxie’s Bistro was slightly noisier than the dinner customers, but the ambience remained relaxing and conducive to quiet conversation.
Hamal Sarkissian seated us at a table for two at the back of the long rectangular room. He provided a booster pillow for Milo.
“Will you want wine with lunch?” Hamal asked the boy.
“A glass or two,” Milo confirmed.
“I will have it for you in fifteen years,” Hamal said.
I had told Penny that I was taking Milo to the library, to an electronics store to buy items he needed for his current project, and finally to lunch at Roxie’s. All this was true. I don’t lie to Penny.