He quickly managed to discourage his sister from accompanying him anywhere. He drew his own itineraries and came to like the city, where he could be even less visible.
He liked the open-air amphitheater the best. There were people there at all times, like everywhere else in the city, but the space was designed for it. It was created with many people in mind. Even when it was empty, a distant din seemed to ripple through the air, inhabiting the area. He was moved by this ghostly presence. To him the human race appeared remarkable, as long as it remained at a distance.
The idea of apartment space, for example, seemed ridiculous to him. In the kitchen you cook. In the sitting room you sit. The bedroom is for sleep, and the children’s room is for play. And in order to legitimize this division of space, people fitted each room with the respective pieces of furniture and appliances. And as if that was not enough, the damn shapes of these spaces simply drove him to despair.
They were all the same. He could see it from the outside. A mere glimpse at the façade and he could picture the hive inside. A hive that was not a real hive, and was much worse than the little man-made toy houses for the so-called domestic bees. What human beings considered rational was miles away from the living economy of bees. Between the act of pressing the washing machine button and the mood of the person pressing it there was an entire universe of folly that people called their lives.
Houses were a different story—when they were not ruined by the desire to transform them into modern apartments. They revealed unexpected spaces, which welcomed human beings the way a wooded glade did. But that was rare. He had looked carefully at all the houses in the old part of the city, but they all resembled taxidermied animals. Even if they had been alive before, today they were lifeless. Their colors were almost painful to look at.
His sister made it her habit to come into his room to wake him early in the morning. Even when she realized that Boris was always awake by the time she came in, she persisted. He decided not to deprive her of this privilege, allowing her to keep this tiny harmless territory so he could gain much larger terrain. For example, the right to be absent from the evening gatherings of the family. Or the right not to watch television.
His sister began to feel a peculiar awe toward him. Once Boris had openly acknowledged that he was different, she was no longer surprised by anything he did. He functioned like clockwork, always doing the same things at the same time of day, without showing impatience or boredom. He never talked about school or about his friends. How was he?—He was fine. Was everything alright?—It was.
The profound difference between them was compensated for by the absence of any serious problems. His behavior suggested that everything was under control, and people around him, at a loss about what else to think, reassured themselves that indeed “everything was under control,” believing they had reached that conclusion alone. Meanwhile, Boris spent his time reading, the overlap between his inner and outer age thinned, and he seemed to be always deep in thought, always thinking, but about what—that was beyond anyone’s guess.
6.
Ghosts
Something did happen once, however. Or, to put it differently, something went out of control once.
Because of his calmness, Boris could often join a small group of classmates walking together part of the way back from school. Since he could accommodate both their conversation and his own thoughts, his classmates, tame enough, accepted his silent presence. He nodded, replied in monosyllables, and smiled if necessary so they would not consider him a complete stranger. Besides, for some inexplicable reason, he looked like an athlete; he was as fit as other boys would be only with much exercise. One day he took part in a group fight and that, once and for all, confirmed his right to be there, doing nothing.
There was a girl in the group who, despite his resistance, drew his attention. He could not explain the phenomenon in any rational way. The girl wore a pleated skirt, spread out like an umbrella over legs as thin as walking sticks, and that was that. Boris never looked at her, but was somehow constantly aware of her position or movement, which he felt like a spatial relation he could not overcome. He rebelled against this awareness which was forcing itself upon him, mobilized all his strength to destroy it, but it remained intact, as if some part of his mind, insusceptible to reason, kept registering the girl’s presence. Perpetual motion. She was there, she was not there, she was approaching, she was moving away, tick-tick-tick—the skirt with the little legs.
His record of warmth-waves expanded like a file. The information, most of it monotonous and unvaried, kept accumulating, and Boris felt he now lived with it, as if it was his second heart.
A year passed, and then another. The girl stopped wearing the umbrella skirt, but he never even noticed. He was collecting the data of her movements, her appearances and disappearances. An oscillogram. Until one day she vanished from his life.
Late one evening, having wandered through the streets for a while, he saw her walking up the front of a white house. With her skirt and her thin little legs. Like a fly, like a bee. He saw her and that was that. He blinked in the moonlight, but he still saw her. She climbed to the eaves and continued over the roof, reached its top and disappeared on the other side.
Boris stood motionless in the silence. It never crossed his mind to run to the other side and watch her descent. He knew she was climbing down the other side. And so he left, carrying with him the image of the girl walking down the back wall of a white house.
7.
Digital Worlds
He kept reading until the moment he discovered computers. Then he finally entered a world that corresponded to his own expectations—he found a new way of creating order. A new way of possessing what he called his own. Entrances were designated by icons.
There was nothing friendlier in his life than these icons, behind which sparkled his treasures. The icons multiplied, and the electronic beeps with which his computer responded felt closer to home than anything else.
Then he began to create virtual civilizations. Primitive, medieval, improbable, all kinds of civilizations. Their populations grew according to the variables he would input, and people slaughtered each other, they always destroyed themselves completely, whether their lives were short, or long. The civilizations that quickly declined were not his favorites. He learned how to keep an archive of their histories and return to it for reference. Gradually he began to see the mistakes he had made, if these could indeed be called mistakes. He was not using all available options.
His first virtual worlds were short-lived, like explosions. Later they began to resemble pyramids, then spirals. The graphs of their development showed their respective level of stability. His goal was to create a kaleidoscopic civilization. He tried setting aleatory parameters. But his creations did not submit to such operations.
Then he started to feel some kind of responsibility for the people in his virtual worlds. And fear. Their longevity and their death depended on him. At first he liked the idea, but then he began to feel uncomfortable. Events were taking place on his computer even in his absence. Whenever he peeked inside, he was astounded to see how much his creations had progressed. He began to realize that his task was to slow down their development. And slowing it down meant adding more parameters. This, in turn, meant more variables. He searched for an optimal relationship between input parameters and the predictability of outcomes.
And, at some point, toward the end of high school, he knew what he wanted to do later in life.
8.
Fathers and Their Professions
Philip met Maria at a friend’s house. Although he never liked to admit it, he failed to notice her at first. She had been sitting in some part of the room, watching him. He had felt her gaze, though without being able to identify where it came from.
For a long time afterward, he wondered why this creature stood there draped in black cloth, as if she were an extra in a bustling film scene.
Philip