Darkness Dwindles

Darkness Dwindles Chapter Eight

Daniel was gone the rest of the day. He called early in the evening to say only that he would be out all night, then hung up. Noon the next day he pulled up in the driveway with someone riding shotgun beside him. Joey watched them get out of the Porsche as he practiced in front of his bedroom window. He had met Daniel's companion before. It was Duessa.

"Hey, bro," Daniel said cheerfully, his arm around her waist, as they appeared in his bedroom doorway. "Duessa says you've already met. We're all going out to eat for lunch. Steve'll be joining us. Take a shower and put on some nicer clothes, okay? I thought it might be fun to go to Contessa Grill."

"Okay, Daniel." Joey put down his clarinet and went to take his second shower of the day.

Contessa Grill was a moderately fancy restaurant that specialized, not surprisingly, in grilled foods. The hostess, who seemed to know Daniel, flirted outrageously as she led them to their table. Duessa sauntered confidently beside him, apparently unconcerned by the other woman's antics. Joey trailed behind.

Steve showed up a few minutes after they had been seated. His dreadlocks and paint-splashed plaid shirt drew looks from the other patrons.

"I thought you said you were going to dress up?" Daniel asked.

"I did. I put on a tie."

"God -- you did!" Daniel laughed. Steve's tie was painted to match the plaid pattern of his shirt. He had even put buttons on it.

"Very cool." Duessa reached over to examine the tie. She raised her gaze to meet Steve's and grinned. "I'm Duessa."

"Steve." He nodded.

The waiter came by to take drink orders. They settled back to look over the menu.

Steve glanced around. "Didn't you have lunch with T.E.O.D. here the day before yesterday?"

"Yeah," Daniel answered.

"How is she?"

"Her usual self."

"Who's `Tea Ode?'" Duessa asked.

"My mother," said Daniel, "The Empress Of Drama."

"Oh," Duessa grinned again. "I get it. Know just what you mean."

The waiter came back with drinks and they ordered lunch. Daniel, Steve and Duessa chatted while they waited for food. Joey was quiet. Duessa asked several questions clearly intended to draw him out. She looked baffled by his terse, mumbled replies.

"Don't worry about Dan's little brother," said Steve. He nudged Joey companionably. "He's not a big talker. When you get a chance though, ask him to play something for you. The kid's a musical genius."

"Cool," she smiled at Joey. "I love music." Joey didn't respond.

Duessa grimaced. "Excuse me, boys," she rose from the table. "Time to make a pit stop." She sauntered off.

"So, what do you think?" Daniel asked as soon as Duessa was out of earshot.

"Of what?" Steve asked innocently.

"Dickhead. You know what I mean."

"Oh, you mean your date?" Steve scratched his head. "You're asking me what I think of her? Sorry, I didn't realize that was what you meant because it's only, you know, the same question you ask me every time you introduce me to someone you're going out with. So you can understand my confusion, right?"

"She's different. Really, this time's different."

"Wow, dude. This conversation just gets more and more déja vu."

"Double dickhead. You going answer my question or not?"

"Okay, okay, let's see. Pretty, but that's a given. Weird name. Bet she's got a great tattoo somewhere. Wears some funky perfume -- what is that stuff, anyway?"

"It's myrrh. I had the same reaction the first time I met her. Give it some time, though. It grows on you."

"Yeah? Okay then. She seems cool."

After lunch Steve left and they went back to the house where Joey watched Daniel give Duessa a tour of his studio. She poured over his paintings, oohing and aahing in an appreciative fashion.

"And what have we here?"

"No," Daniel intercepted her hand as it reached for the large sheet covering his latest piece.

"Oh, work in progress, huh?"

"You could say that."

"Okay, I can respect that. Can't wait to see it when you're done, though."

"Yeah, well, it may take a while."

"That's okay. I'm not going anywhere." She stuck her tongue out at him and clicked the bar against her front teeth.

Daniel grinned. "Tour's over. Bro," he said, his eyes fixed on Duessa, "why don't you go practice your clarinet or something?"

Joey went up the stairs and back to his bedroom. He closed the door and turned on the TV.

Typically Daniel's dating relationships went one of two ways. There were those that sizzled hot and heavy for a few days and then were just as quickly over, and there were those that heated up much more slowly and tended to last considerably longer before ending. It was as if Daniel had decreed the total number of calories that could be consumed by any romantic relationship. That total could be reached quickly or slowly, but once he hit it the relationship was over.

His thing with Duessa didn't seem to follow the caloric total rule. She came over daily, like his hot and heavies, but by the end of the first week things didn't show any signs of slowing down. Daniel spent a lot of time with her in the studio and his bedroom. He also spent nights over at her condo. They missed their appointment with Dr. Fellers and although Daniel assured Joey he would call to reschedule as soon as he got the chance, he didn't mention it again.

Despite the time he was spending with Duessa, Daniel didn't forget about the demon and his determination to help his brother. He dedicated all of his spare moments at home to going through their father's and Joey's mother's old papers.

Jonathan and Mercedes had shared a home office. It and the garage, the laundry room and a windowless storeroom had occupied the entire lower floor of the house. In the center of their office the couple had pushed two desks together in so they could work facing each other. A bank of windows filled up one long wall of the room; along the opposite wall had been bookshelves and file cabinets.

Daniel had disturbed nothing in the room while his stepmother was alive. A few months after her death, he and Joey had boxed up the books and given them away to a local charity that ran a used bookstore. The contents of the desks and file cabinets they had transferred to sturdy plastic bins and stacked in the storeroom. The office had become Daniel's painting and martial arts studio.

Now, one by one, Daniel and Joey carried the plastic bins up out of the storeroom and stacked them in the studio. One by one Daniel began to go through them.

Joey stood out of the way and practiced on his clarinet as his brother went through the bins' contents.

"Here's something interesting," Daniel said one afternoon. He was reading through an old dog-eared term paper.

Joey lowered his clarinet. "What is it, Daniel?"

"Something your mom wrote in graduate school. It's pretty wild. Listen to this," he flipped back through the pages. "In 1976 there was this social scientist named Julian Jaynes who wrote a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The lay folks liked it, but it was panned by most academicians. Jaynes claimed that back in ancient times human beings weren't self-aware the way we are today. Instead, they literally heard their observing self telling them what to do, as if that part of their mind was an external voice. It was an hallucination, like the way schizophrenics hear voices in their heads and think someone is really talking to them. In fact, Jaynes said that modern schizophrenia is some sort of throwback to the ancient human mind.

"Like I said, Jaynes' peers dissed his ideas. Mercedes loved the book. She thought he had done a great job of bringing together data from a lot of different fields. But she writes here that Jaynes missed the whole point: that in the distant past there actually were real spirits who spoke to people and commanded their actions. Over time those spirits have grown weaker and they can't speak to humans with the power they once could. But they're still around. They've devolved from being gods to being demons to these days being just strange impulses that move us to act in ways we can't explain.

"Get it, bro?" Daniel looked at Joey intently. "The incubus, or whatever it is that's inside of you, used to be a lot more powerful. Over thousands of years it's gotten weaker and weaker. No wonder it wants to know what Dad discovered. This is a life-or-death issue for it."

Joey stared down at the clarinet in his hands. "Oh."

Daniel sighed. "I know." He tossed the manuscript back into the bin. "It doesn't really help. I need to find what Dad was working on right at the end." He frowned at the unopened bins. "But we didn't label any of this crap when we were packing them. So I have to go through everything." He moved on to the next one.

Two bins later Daniel opened a lid and stared down for a long moment.

"Oh, shit," he said softly. "I'd forgotten about that."

"What is it, Daniel?"

"We cleared everything off the top of their desks and threw it in here, remember?" He reached down and lifted out the cassette-player answering machine that had sat on the corner of Mercedes' desk for as long as Joey could remember.

"And there's still a tape in it."

Daniel plugged in the machine and rewound the tape, then hit the play button. Voices came out. They were messages from after their father had died: teary condolences from friends of Mercedes and their father, painfully formal statements from their father's relatives, a brief call from Vivana saying she would be coming to the service but wouldn't be bringing `the girls.' The messages ended after ten minutes.

Daniel peered down. "There's another tape." From the bin he lifted out another cassette. He popped the other out of the machine and slipped it in. He pressed the play button.

From the old answering machine came the sound of a voice they had not heard in eight years. It was their father.

"Loddy," he said, "I'm at the airport. Just got off the plane from the conference."

There was that hiss to the recording that cassettes got after many playings. But their father's voice still sounded warm and excited, as if they had missed him by just a few minutes. Daniel sucked in a gulp of air. He reached out to grab his brother's hand. They sat together listening to the machine.

"Sorry I didn't call last night," their father continued, "but I never went to bed. Stayed up all night working out a new angle that came to me in the middle of a presentation. Everything just clicked together and, Loddy, I think I've done it. The math is so, so beautiful. It all fits perfectly together, just perfectly. And there's a little surprise in it for you and all your shadowy friends. You won't believe it." There was a smile in his voice. "Decant the bottle, will you? I'll be home soon. Darkness dwindles my ass - you won't believe what I've got to tell you!"

He hung up. The cassette hissed softly for a minute before Daniel reached out to click it off.

"Why did he call her Loddy, Daniel?"

"I don't know," Daniel answered absently. "Wait -- I think I do. He used to say she was his Lady of Darkness. L-O-D. I bet that's why."

He looked down. His thumb was moving gently back and forth across his brother's knuckles.

Daniel snatched his hand away. He stood up and unplugged the answering machine, then set it carefully back into the bin. "This is what the demon heard in her head," he said as he looked down. "It wants to know what Dad figured out."

Daniel continued to stare down into the bin. "What the hell?" he muttered. He reached down and lifted out a dog-eared brochure.

"What is it, Daniel?"

"It's a schedule for a physics conference hosted by the London Mathematical Society. The date is right. This is the conference Dad was coming back from when he died. And ... bingo."

He lifted out of the bin a notebook stuffed with spare sheets of paper. "I bet this was what he was working on just before he died. This must be it!"

Grinning, he swooped down toward Joey like he was coming in for a kiss. Six inches from contact he checked himself and abruptly stepped back, his eyes wide with surprise.

"Yeah, I think I'll take this with me and look it over at Duessa's." He clutched the notebook. "I was supposed to be there an hour ago. Later, bro." He left the room in a run.

Daniel was gone until the following afternoon. Joey was in the living room watching TV when he came home. Daniel flopped down on the couch, then tossed the notebook onto the coffee table and glared at it.

Joey muted the TV. "What's wrong, Daniel?"

"That." He pointed at the notebook in disgust. "I've been looking at it all day, but it just makes my head spin. I'm supposed to be good at math, but whatever Dad was working on is like another language."

Joey smoothed his hair back. "Uncle Walt could understand it."

"Uncle Walter." Daniel grimaced. "You know he's not really our uncle? He was just a friend of Dad's."

"I know that, Daniel. But he's a physicist, too."

Daniel looked thoughtful. "And he was Dad's closest friend. I bet he even knows about the Project. Yeah, maybe you're right, little bro. Maybe it is time to give o' Uncle Walter a call."

Two days later they met Uncle Walter at a Starbucks north of downtown. Daniel and Joey got there early. Daniel ordered an espresso for himself and a hot chocolate for Joey. They sat by a window and waited. Dressed in a lime-colored polo with his Ray-Bans slid up on his head, Daniel looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of GQ. People all around the room were giving him looks.

Uncle Walter came in and waved as he made his way over to them. Their father's old friend was a spindly-limbed man with balding hair and the beginnings of a potbelly.

"Danny, Joey, its good to see you boys." He pumped their hands. Up close he exuded the familiar odor of menthol cigarettes; their father had often joked that it was Walter's eau de toilette.

"It's been a while," he continued. "Wasn't the last time opening night for your exhibition at that gallery downtown, Danny?"

"Yeah, I think it was."

"Last fall, wasn't it?"

"No, the year before that."

"You're kidding! That long? How have things been?"

"Pretty good. We've been going through some of the stuff from Dad's office. I found an old yearbook from the boarding school you and Dad went to. I think you were both fourteen."

"Really? That's something. Let me get a coffee and I'll be right back. You kids need anything else?"

"No," Daniel replied, "we're good."

Walter was back a minute later. "I haven't thought about that old school in years," he said as he seated himself. "I remember the other boys and I used to call your dad S-squared, short for Savant Squared."

Daniel thought about it, then nodded. "You mean he was a savant savant?"

"Exactly," Walter's grin was boyish, "as opposed to idiot savant. He was admitted to MIT when he was sixteen and was already a junior by the time I got there. I think he stuck around for that extra year before going to Stanford just to keep me company. Then at Stanford he blazed through and was already on the faculty while I was still trying to pick my dissertation topic. They were willing to give him whatever he wanted to keep him." Walter chuckled. "I heard the Dean of Mathematics at MIT was furious."

He shook his head. "Sorry, boys. I've told that story before, haven't I?"

"That's okay," said Daniel. "He met my mom during that extra year in Boston, didn't he?"

Walter nodded. He took a sip of coffee. "She was the quintessential Radcliff girl, in those final years before they became extinct. The wedding was amazing. Her grandfather paid for it and he insisted it be over the top." Walter gave Daniel a sympathetic look. "I'm sorry it didn't work out with your mom. I know they gave it their best shot. Genius can be hard to live with."

"Yeah, well," Daniel returned a crooked grin, "so can my mom. How'd he meet Mercedes?"

"Oh, now there's a story." Walter took another sip. "You know I was there when it happened? It was an end-of-semester holiday party at some department chair's house. I can't remember whose. They were both there, surrounded by their own little cliques. He was the dashing mathematics prodigy and she was the exotic luminary of the linguistics department. It was like watching the meeting of royalty, of a Plantagenet prince and an Incan princess. He kept staring at her across the room and she kept darting him coy glances. They were both so beautiful, so smart, so charismatic. Everyone in the room could feel what was happening. It was like we were all part of a giant Raphaelite painting, The Meeting of Jonathan and Mercedes."

He shook his head. "Boys, there really is such a thing as love at first sight. That's what happened that night. From the moment they set eyes on each other they were smitten."

"When did they start working on the Project together?"

Walter froze with the coffee half-way to his lips. Carefully he set it down. "I didn't realize you knew about that, Danny."

"I didn't at the time." Daniel watched the older man. "But you did?"

Walter took a deep breath in through his nose, slowly exhaled. "Yes," he said cautiously. "Your father and I had a number of conversations about it. How did you learn about it?"

"Like I said, we've been looking through his notebooks."

"I see."

"Can we talk about it, Uncle Walter?"

"I -- yes, of course. If you wish. Do ... do you want to know what the Project was?"

"I think we already know. They were trying to understand why the magic is fading, right?"

Walter pursed his lips. "Hypersynchronicity."

"What?"

"Your father didn't call it magic, Danny. He called it hypersynchronicity. Mercedes said the Darkness was dwindling. Your father said that meant there must be a hypersynchronistic decay sequence."

"Hypersynchronistic Decay Sequence," Daniel repeated slowly. He nodded. "I think he shortened it to HDS in his notes. He was looking for an equation to explain it, wasn't he?"

"Among other things, yes, he was trying to model it."

"Did very many people know he was working on it?"

"No, not many, but enough. It ruined his career. Hers too, probably, but she never really cared about that. Once she'd shown Jonathan what she could do -- and he was never willing to tell me what, exactly -- he was hooked. He had to figure it out. He had to build a model of the universe that included hypersynchronicity and its decay sequence."

Uncle Walter shook his head. "People thought he was nuts, that he'd totally gone off the deep end. By then he already had tenure and couldn't be fired, but he sure as hell was ostracized. Academics can be real bastards. It was around then that he left Stanford to come here. Do you remember any of this, Danny? You were eight at the time."

"Yeah, mostly I remember the family part of it. My mom was furious when she learned that he was remarrying. And his whole family was so upset about him leaving Stanford. He had a shouting match with Grandpa in the living room at the house in Nantucket. Grandma was crying and Uncle Stan just looked so confused. No one came to the wedding."

"No, none of his relatives did. It was a small ceremony, mostly just the friends who hadn't turned away from them. The only blood relatives there were Mercedes' sister and you." He smiled at Joey. "You were there, too, but none of us knew it. She wasn't showing yet.

"So, they moved, bought a new house, and for ten years lived there raising Joey -- and you, when they had you -- and not caring in the least what the rest of the world thought of them. They seemed incredibly happy. Jonathan and I had dinner once a month and he would talk about their work together on the Project. I couldn't follow all of it. His mind was as brilliant as ever, maybe even more so, but the directions his thinking took him were orthogonal to anything anyone else was considering."

"And then he died in the car crash." Daniel's voice was flat.

"Yes," Walter said sadly. "And then he died."

Daniel leaned forward. "What did you hear about what happened?"

"He was driving home from the airport. He'd just gotten back from some conference, an international thing. It was in the morning, not early, but before noon. The car went off the road on one of those hairpin curves coming through the hills. It was strange, because the weather was fine and Jonathan had driven that road a thousand times. There were no skid marks to indicate that another car was involved, or even that he had swerved to avoid an animal. He just drove off the road. The police said he must have fallen asleep."

"What did Mercedes say?"

"Mercedes didn't say much. She was shook up and devastated, of course. But she also seemed ... enraged."

Daniel nodded. "I remember that, too. What do you think she was so angry about?"

"It's a stage of grief, isn't it? She'd just lost the love of her life. I thought she had good reason to be angry."

"What did you think about Mercedes going crazy?"

Walter shook his head. "In a way, that was the most bizarre part of the whole tragedy. I have no idea why her mind snapped. She seemed so self-possessed every time I talked to her, even in her grief. She never looked fragile. She was the last person I've known that I would have picked to have had a breakdown."

Daniel nodded slowly.

"Danny, why are you asking these questions after all this time? We've never talked about this before."

"I'm just trying to understand what happened." Daniel placed the notebook on the table between them. "I found something I'd like you to look at for us."

"What is it?"

"It's the notes Dad brought back from the conference. It must have been in his briefcase, in the car."

Walter stared at the notebook. "How did you get it?"

"Probably the highway patrol gave it to Mercedes. She put it in a drawer in her desk. We boxed it up with the rest of her office stuff after she died. I just unpacked it."

"You want me to look at it?" Walter's gaze was riveted on the notebook. "Why?"

"Because Dad called from the airport and left a message on the home machine. He said that he had figured it all out, and that the math worked perfectly. He said that there was a surprise in it. Will you find out what it was, Uncle Walter?"

Walter's eyes jerked up to stare into Daniel's. "You want me to retrace his work -- to reconstruct his final model?"

"Yes. Will you do it?"

"Danny, I -- " Walter swallowed. "I'll look at it. I can't make any promises. It's been a long time and I don't have your father's mind. I don't know how organized these notes are."

"I understand. But if there is anyone who can make sense of Dad's work, it's you. No one else could do it."

Walter smiled ruefully. "And no one else would try?" Gingerly he picked up the notebook. "Give me a few days, alright? I'll call you."

"Thank you, Uncle Walter." Daniel gave Walter a level gaze. "I know Dad would appreciate it."

The older man nodded. His eyes were bright with unspilled tears. "Good to see you, Joey," he said. He stood up and left.

Daniel watched Walter walk away. He slid his Ray-Bans down onto his nose.

"You know," he said quietly, "I never liked ol' Uncle Walt all that much. I always suspected he was secretly in love with Dad." His head turned toward Joey. The dark lenses hid his gaze, but not the flush that crept into his cheeks. "These days I'm not so judgmental about that. You can't control what the animal inside feels."

He stood. "Let's go home, little bro."

==============================================================

Danny-boy is right, you know. It is a matter of life and death. Didn't always used to be this way. Back when, in illo tempore, as Mercedes would have said it, we made you. We wiped your rivals -- the Neanderthals -- off of the planet because they were too nice. Neanderthals were reflective, cooperative, peaceful. Boooring. You were impulsive, competitive, violent. We loved you. Read any ancient history lately? You were such fun. And so tasty.

Yes, I said tasty. That's why we bred you: to feed us your passions and pathos. Get it? You're the pigs on our animal farm. Oink, oink. Lately you've developed a pretty high opinion of yourselves. You may think you're running the show, but at the end of the day you're still just bacon. And while you may be facing global warming, for us the world just keeps getting colder and colder. Which means we need more calories. So fire up that grill: I love the sound of the sizzle!

Oh, dear -- am I troubling you? Honey, that's the nature of my game.

InvertedBeast@yahoo.com