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Chapter 3
There was a knock on the door. I did not have to guess who it was. Since Tom told me he was coming to bring me food, I had cleaned up' to look decent to receive'. I opened the door and was immediately face-to-face with Thomas. He was carrying a large plate filled with a cornucopia of food.
"Hello," he said smiling with that certain charm that only he possessed.
"Hello," I said, "please do come in. It's a little messy though."
I held the door for him to enter my private space. I always had the perspective and strong belief that my room was my sanctuary; the place where I could take off any masks and be myself. I hated being pretentious and I had always found myself to be a genuine person. Sincerity and honesty were not negotiable in my world. A few people had found my interest in classical music, philosophy, astronomy and history pretentious. It never bothered me that they thought that. Those interests were the only threads staking me to this world. I suppose, following that logic, my intellectual core consisted of phony interests.
Tom settled down on my chair after he put the food on my desk, which left my bed as the only option for me to sit. Actually, not the only option. I had the tendency of committing the `salesman's fallacy' more often than not – a or b, no other choice. But there were always many choices. I could have sat on the floor, on my desk, my dresser or the window sill!
I chose to sit on the bed.
"Thank you again for bringing me food," I said with utmost sincerity.
"Not a problem," he said with a wink. I smiled.
"You have that smile," he said smiling after a few moments of silence.
"So do you," I responded.
"Now here is food..."
"Enough to feed a family of eight," I completed the sentence for him. "You know I don't eat that much."
"Perhaps if you had let me finish articulating my sentence you would have realized that the food is for the two of us."
"Sorry," I said, somewhat embarrassed.
He passed a fork and a knife from his pocket to me.
"Thank you," I said.
"What happened?" he asked. Normally I would have nagged and asked him to be specific, but I knew he was asking about the seizure. I told him what I knew as he chewed on whatever food was on the plate.
"You looked somewhat terrified when you were speaking just now," he offered an observation. There was no use denying it really.
"I suppose I feel terrified," I admitted. "The mind and memory have always played a large part in my existence and I have chosen to spend a lot of time on intellectual pursuits. It is perplexing that my mental faculties and memory could vanish in a matter of minutes. Who am I without my memory? Would I still be me without my past experiences that give me a sense of identity?
All this rests on a structure that is merely too delicate and fragile. I've never had to deal with something like it. I remember myself having lunch...and then... waking up in the ER. No matter how hard I try, I can't remember anything in between those two reference points." I stopped speaking and had a mouthful of what was on the plate.
"A tangential question: Aren't there some memories you wish were deleted from your mind?" he asked.
"I imagine most people do. It's a bold assumption to make, I know. I often wish for that, but not at the expense of all the other memories. What about you?"
"Like you said, most people do wish for some of their memories to be wiped clean. I fall into that group."
"Yep! All I need is a wand and to utter the spell... `obliviate'," I said while dramatically brandishing and pointing an imaginary wand toward his head. I do not think that he was captivated by my acting skills because he had a rather blank expression.
"From Harry Potter?" he asked.
"Obviously! Tolkien hardly mentions any memory wiping spells. I know I'm, for want of a better word, nerd-ish. Sorry, I just want us to have a light conversation for once. Uhm...tell me about your classes!"
"I told you I was taking courses in Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science and Math. Philosophy is great, except for the fact that we seem to always reach the conclusion that all knowledge is not certain. There are no `truths'. I think we have established that but we incessantly return to it! So our sense perception and other ways of knowing have weaknesses and flaws, but we can hardly enhance them to a significant degree that would enable us to eliminate all doubt and uncertainty in knowledge. We just need to accept, move on and be content with the inadequate and imperfect glimpses of the universe that we are capable of perceiving." He stopped and swallowed a mouthful of food.
I took the opportunity to say "I thought we were keeping conversation light." This made him laugh a bit.
"Math is alright," he continued. "Comp-sci is great and psychology is enlightening."
"Math is just `alright'?" I asked.
"My ex is in the same class."
"I trust you are polite to her. And how are you finding NCIS?" I asked with interest. I had suggested that he start watching NCIS because I had been hooked for the past 8 or so years.
"Its ok. Good old Gibbs and his boys. And then there is Ziva: I don't get what value she adds to the series!"
I was outraged! "Ziva is as important in the series as a proton is in an atom! She brings some sense of gender balance to the male-dominated field. And she is hilarious, she gets Tony's blood boiling with furious lust... as well as gang up with McGee to plan and execute pranks on Tony. But seriously, she is the fierce and feisty female assassin. Women are, as she proves, infinitely more capable than men."
"You are male right?"
"What do you mean?"
"The frequency with which you denigrate men would have one think that you are not a man."
"That's preposterous! I am a man of course, so stop fantasizing about me during your masturbatory fantasies!" I said jesting.
He laughed and punched my shoulder.
"You wish," he said winking.
And so the conversation went until we finished the food. I thanked him again for bringing me food and he left after a quick one-arm hug.
I was relieved. That encounter had not gone awry as I imagined, and I had swallowed enough carbohydrates for my cells to snack on at night – well, after the various amylases and maltase catalyzed the hydrolysis of the polysaccharides.
Tuesday was a drag. I managed to get all my work done though. I went to the admin office where I worked as an assistant – filing, scanning, sorting, faxing, copying, you name it. I had dinner with my `friend' Jana. We really were getting close and we were starting to confide to each other. With my hunger satiated and work finished, I had a free night. I chose to watch NCIS, though I found myself getting more and more bored with it since Ziva departed.
My mind wandered through trivial thoughts and memories but there was a consistently nagging problem I had recently developed – pertaining to the Standard Model of the Universe. Too many pieces of the puzzle just did not fit. I decided to start my research as far back as Lucretius' book `On the Nature of the Universe'. It was not exactly an astronomy text (more of an Epicurean gospel) but it was a good starting point.
Consequently, I was up all night to finish reading it while listening to Beethoven's symphonies from the Haydn-influenced first in C; the brilliant second in D; the powerful third in E-flat (Eroica'); the gay fourth in B-flat; the intense fifth in C minor (Fate', though that nickname had not stuck); the bucolic sixth in F (Pastoral'); the rhythmically-driven seventh in A; the experimental eighth in F; and the chaotic ninth in D minor (Chorale'). It was one of the rare wonderful nights when I could read on and on without feeling tired or losing concentration.
I fell asleep after 5am but I was restless in my sleep, so I woke up before my alarm rang and just sat in bed feeling somewhat sorry for myself. Tom was a great friend and I liked him very much, but not physically. But our relationship line was often blurred. My relationships with males tended to be that way.
I had fallen in love when I was 16. Love? Me? Yes, I had been crazy about a boy named Ben who was in most of my classes and also in the same boarding house. He was kind, warm, sweet, averagely intelligent, very good looking and very straight. This was around the same time that my depression started to render me hopeless and completely useless. (This is fact is relevant in as far as it suggests why I had desperately needed someone who would tell me that I had worth and that I was loveable.) I had effected a strict control regime to halt the fall that I had felt was coming: Up at 7, 8km jog, shower, class, play clarinet, 1 meal a day consisting of only fruits and vegetables, gym, shower, homework, sleep at midnight.
I had stuck to it 90% of the time, but sometimes I would go to Ben's room to talk about nothing productive. I had told him that I loved him. He had been kind and had assured me he was straight. We had remained friends. We would chat on WhatsApp for hours. I'd tell him I loved him and he had often replied with I love you too'. Whenever we had been together in his room, we would get very tactile – not in a sexual way. Even in the company of others, we would respond to the other's presence in a manner that was not consistent with simple' friendship. Our relationship had been more of a hybrid between asexual lovers and friendship.
I had not seen him for the past year, since graduating from high school. The thoughts of him opened a stream of memories that I had managed to avoid for the past year. I missed him, but he was gone. I had not been good enough for him or else he would have stayed in touch. I wondered if I had been a constant irritation to him. What sadness I felt was greatly overshadowed by a feeling of pure embarrassment and regret. I hated myself because of how desperate I had been.
I had vowed after that experience that I would never ever fall for anyone because they would inevitably reject me as a result of my inadequacies. I feared, however, that my relationship with Thomas had a very blurry line and we often had a few toes on the other side. I had to stop that. Very soon.
According to my alarm clock I still had an hour before I had to get up. I decide to spend it sleeping. I closed my eyes and tried to find the place and position where my troubles and pain fitted in the universe. I imagined myself as an unknown creature that disobeyed ALL laws of physics. With Smetana's `From My Homeland' playing in the background, I flew up and North America began shrinking. I zoomed out further traveling faster than light in a vacuum, and I could see the earth – our precious blue planet. Further out, the solar system with its 8 planets and Pluto's inclined orbit. Still further out, I could see the entire galaxy – our Milky Way, then a cluster of galaxies as they accelerated away from each other. I finally imagined myself getting to the edge of the universe and going out of it and watched the universe shrink into a tiny blob.
On that scale, where exactly did I fit in?
I did this often – it helped keep things in perspective.