Complicate the Universe (Remix in C Major)

Normal dreams, Charlie knew, were supposed to be prophetic in some way. That is, when you weren't naked in front of a classroom. But Charlie's dreams were almost always of numbers. The waking world was often so complicated, love and friendship and criminals, that Charlie's dreams were his refuge. He only dreamt in color when he dreamt of people. In Charlie's color dreams, his mother would wear green, then black then white. If he was in the house, the walls might be ecru, or red, or brown. The only things that ever stayed the same were the numbers.

Only now, that of which he dreamt began to cloud his world of numbers. His emotions overtook the numbers and the numbers betrayed him, grew more complex.

Formed words.

Not just words.

Poetry.

Poetry and music. Words made mathematical. Frequencies made evocative.

The numbers formed words that formed structures. In the waking times when he couldn't form an equation Charlie seemed to know all the rules for a sestina (lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; 6, 1, 5, 2, 3, 4…) and he remembered chord progressions he hadn't studied in years (I, V, I; I, IV, V, I…).

Everything he knew was skewed and atonal.

Charlie turned and turned in the widening gyre. Things fell apart and his center could not hold.

--

There was no moving the orchestras and poets once they settled in his mind. They obscured his thoughts of almost everything else. Standing in front of blackboards, Charlie would turn the volume on his iPod up as high as it would go, blasting Metallica, Placebo, anything he deemed the opposite of Beethoven and Brahms. He biked to the public library and secluded himself in a carrel reading John Grisham and Stephen King and People magazine. None of it had any effect. At home Charlie spent much of his spare time in the kitchen, but he didn't eat. Instead, he cooked. More accurately, he baked, and as he baked music swirled in his head. Baking was a comfort, because everything had to be measured and mixed and heated to exact specifications to make the chemistry perfect. Pastry was a mathematical art. Days passed and the counters filled with containers of chocolate-chip cookies and pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting and cinnamon-raisin-walnut rugelach and sourdough rye bread. For days Charlie baked, but his time in the kitchen didn't fool Alan for a second into thinking he was actually eating.

"Charlie, if you don't eat, I'm going to be forced to commit you," Alan told him as he settled beside Charlie on the couch.

Charlie refused to open his eyes, breathing in the tart golden scent of the cherry pie (Don's favorite) that he had in the oven. Alan's voice reverberated (the echo in a concert hall, acoustics, the piano) through the quiet living room. Charlie curled into a ball and tried to shut out sound along with the light, but he couldn't. The loudest noises were in his ears, sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world.

"Charlie?" Alan repeated. "You listening to me?"

For a moment, Charlie couldn't speak above the pulsing lines in his head, the tolling of iron bells.

"You can't commit me. I'm an adult. I'd have to consent, or you'd need a psychological evaluation."

Alan didn't seem to buy it. "And no psychologist would ever consider you unhealthy, am I right?

"Dad." Charlie sighed over the music. "I'm fine, and I vaguely recall entering this cool thing called adulthood. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself."

"Have you eaten dinner yet, Mister Capable?"

Charlie gave a nearly imperceptible shrug. "I'm not hungry right now."

Frustration colored Alan's features. "You're not hungry, you're not hungry. You've baked enough to feed an army and it's all just sitting on the counter. You've been saying you're not hungry for how many days now?"

"Baking doesn't make you hungry."

"There's only so long you can not be hungry, Charlie."

"Well, I haven't hit that point yet," Charlie said. And it was the truth. Normally when he got hungry he would shake and get cranky and his stomach would pain him, but now he just felt a little lightheaded, not hungry at all. His sustenance now was the music and poetry that had grown from his numbers. Villanelles (refrain, line, refrain; line, line, refrain…) and dirges and pentatonic scales made him focus on something other than his hunger. There was no way to tell Alan this, however, without Alan thinking he really should be committed.

There was escape in the cherry pie in the oven.

Alan's face, drawn and suspicious, haunted Charlie as he swung through the kitchen door, surrounded by the smell of fresh pie. He took the pie out of the oven and left it to cool on the window over the sink. It was perfect, brown at the edges, steaming sweetly. Tomorrow, he would feed Don and his father.

For now, he would have to go gentle into that good night.

"I'm turning in, Dad. I'll see you tomorrow," he mumbled. He headed for his bedroom.

Like the sounds of the piano Charlie hadn't played in years, Alan's voice floated up the stairs. "There's pasta in the fridge. You know. For when you do hit that point."

Pasta. Alan was comforting him with comfort food. It was a nice gesture. He would thank Alan later, after he ate it.

And he would eat after he slept, perchance to dream of numbers again.

--

Charlie could not make the answers he needed appear on his boards. He'd been through the equations a thousand times, left to right, as precise and as predictably structured as a Sousa march, tempo at exactly one hundred and twenty beats per minute. Still, through measures and sections and repeats he couldn't get the sums. He tapped his chalk on the board in time with the snare drums and French horns in his head. Why couldn't he figure this out?

"Charles?"

Larry's voice was like a clarinet, solid and quiet and melodious. Charlie nodded and turned back to the boards. Larry took twelve steps (six measures) across the room, coming in on little cat feet and looking over Charlie's harbor and city.

"Charles, a man who neither eats nor rests his mind has an incredibly slim chance of reaching his body's optimum performance level, which always did seem to be your goal."

"I'm eating, Larry," he sighed. "I'm just – I'm just very busy at the moment, okay?" It was a gross understatement. Although his workload was no more than usual the amount of information, the pantoums (line 1, 2, 3, 4 repeat 2, 5, 4, 6, repeat…) and passacaglias (or were they chaconnes?) wore him down, smothered him.

Larry's fingers tapped out a code of long and short rhythms on his chin. Iambic tetrameter. Syncopated syllables. BeCAUSE i COULD not STOP for DEATH…. "But math," Larry advised, "as beautiful a mistress as she indeed is, cannot distract you from your life forever. Your problems will come full circle eventually."

Surveying Charlie from silent haunches, Larry moved on.

--

As much as Charlie knew all the rules of math, he also knew that there was a time to break the rules. That had been the point of The Art of Fugue, after all, the most mathematical book ever written about music. J.S. Bach wrote all the rules, applied them to his compositions, and then he broke them. Through centuries one could see Bach's mathematical influences on music. Any music theorist worth his salt could sing along to music he barely knew, just by using Bach's rules and anticipating chord progressions. Charlie liked to think of his math like The Art of Fugue, rules to be applied to almost every situation. Math even went beyond music, giving him ways to excel in sports and assisting Don in his investigations. Math was Charlie's link to the rest of the world.

Math might have been perfect but Charlie knew that he was fallible. Numbers were just numbers, neither inherently wrong nor right. He, however, could make errors, miss variables. The variables he missed could destroy everything he worked for. With his problem on the board, the answer would come to him some way, some how. His larger problem, the words and music that plagued him and pushed his numbers into near silence, was a variable he hadn't accounted for.

He hated himself for every variable he didn't account for.

This variable, that music, these words were staring him in the face, and he didn't know how to work with it, around it, or through them. He didn't even know if there was a solution to this problem for him to find.

It was torture to live through, never knowing what would be on the other side of the equal sign.

--

The next day, Charlie made a little progress on one of his side projects. This cheered him and he was in the best mood he'd seen in a long time when his phone rang. He'd set his phone to a simple ring days ago. No music. Not now.

"I've got a case we could really use your help on, Charlie. It's an in—"

"Don, I really don't think I can help you out on this one."

"Now wait, Charlie, hold on a sec. This is good, I swear. You'll like it. It's an investment broker—"

"Don, listen to me. I can't help you."

"Well, why not? Do you have another lecture?"

"Yes, I – I do. A lot of them. Actually, I don't think I'll be able to come around and consult for you much from now on. I'm getting really busy."

"What? Charlie, you—"

"Don, I'm sorry. I hope you understand."

Charlie shut his eyes and the world dropped dead.

--

An interlude:

"What's going on with Chuck?"

Don had come for dinner. His voice wafted up the stairs, winding around the lingering scent of the date-nut bread Charlie had baked earlier that day. Charlie paused just short of the landing.

"Not eating," said Alan, his voice in perfect harmony (root + lowered third minor chord) with Don's. Slumping against the banister, Charlie listened to the lowered tones, their variations on a theme of concerns he'd heard more than once before.

"Again?" A suspension at the end of Don's question, then a resolution into his next measures. "Do you at least know why this time?"

"Do I ever know why? At least when your mother died, we knew the reason he went AWOL – " A pause, and a suffocating full rest. "But now... Now he's just shutting down."

Pianissimo. "P vs. NP?"

"Not this time."

Agitato. "Why does he do shit like this?" Accent on do, the halfway point, the apex of the sentence. "He could open a bakery with all that crap in the kitchen yet he's not eating?"

"Your brother is beyond explanation, Don. You know this."

Don sighed, a woodwind solo leading the next phrase. "He doesn't want to work with us anymore. My supervisors'll be really unhappy."

"You mean you'll be unhappy?"

Quarter rest. "Well, you know... Yeah. He's good. He knows the answers. He helps."

"You like having him there."

"That too."

"He's your brother. He worships the ground you walk on. Tell him you like having him around. It might bring him out of this slump."

"Do you think it was something I did? Do you think working with the FBI is... too much for him?"

"Donnie, your brother doesn't live in this world. The problem could be anything. You should talk to him."

It was the thing that Charlie had only heard his parents and Don ever talk about in whispers, the thing formed in another's haunting words: From childhood's hour I have not been as others were; I have not seen as others saw; I could not bring my passions from a common spring. Don could try talking, sure, but Don knew even better than Charlie that Don was the one who lived and breathed that common spring. And Charlie was alone for it.

"I would," Don said, "but I don't think he'd listen." Their footsteps grew closer to the base of the stairs. Charlie tensed his legs, ready to run if they got too close. "I just don't. He's Charlie. He knows best, I guess. I don't know what to do, Dad."

Coda.

--

Charlie awoke in the back of Don's SUV with music in his ears, a piece he'd heard Don and his mother play on the piano: Bach, Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Klavier. Two long notes, six short (three repeated). It was the same music that wouldn't stop running through his head when he collapsed during a lecture earlier that day. At the hospital they ran an IV into his arm and a doctor stood watch as he ate something greasy and tasteless. Don never left his side, but he had the decency to not watch Charlie eat.

Later, Charlie heard Alan's footsteps in the hall. They were unmistakable, evenly paced with one weighted more than the other, the BRAIN is DEEPer THAN the SEA, for HOLD them BLUE to BLUE. Alan scoffed when the doctor said "eating disorder," but after the doctor left Alan turned on Charlie.

"You are a thirty-year-old mathematician, Charlie," he said with a shake of his head. "You have a career, friends, a family that loves you… Why are you doing this? What's wrong? An eating disorder?"

"He doesn't have an eating disorder," Don stated. It was a tone Charlie knew well, the tone that no one messed with. "He's been stressed. That doctor is an idiot."

The steel chair by Charlie's bed squeaked as Alan lowered himself into it. "I'm going to ask once," he said, "and I want Charlie to be the one to answer me." He held up his hand as Don drew breath to respond. Then he turned to Charlie. "Do you have an eating disorder, Charlie? If you do, we'll get you the help you need. But you need to tell me."

Charlie stared silently until Don nudged him. "Come on, Charlie. Answer."

The Bach in C Major continued to play.

--

Just after sunset, Don pushed on Charlie's shoulder and said, "Shove over." It was a tight fit, the two of them in Charlie's bed. Don propped himself up on one elbow and studied Charlie.

The scrutiny made Charlie itch beneath his skin. "What?"

Don swallowed. "You lying, Charlie? About the eating disorder?"

"I wasn't!" The protest was the most amount of physical effort Charlie had exerted in a while.

"Charlie." Don shifted so he was leaning against Charlie's shoulder, his breath warm vapor on Charlie's neck. "I want you to be okay, bud. You've gotta… admit the problem for that to happen."

Someone else's words, words he'd thought of not long ago when talking to Larry, entered Charlie's mind. Because he could not stop for Don, Don kindly stopped for him.

"I'm...," he said with a deep exhalation, "I don't. Have an eating disorder. I'm just...not doing so well right now, Don."

"Why not?"

In the moment when the words of others had beleaguered him most, Charlie had to shut them all out and form his own sentence. "The – the numbers are gone."

Don's brow narrowed. "The numbers? You mean, like, your job? You didn't get fired, did you?"

"No, no, my job is fine. It's the actual numbers that I'm talking about. They're not enough anymore," he explained. "I don't dream about them anymore. I'm...drowning. Yes. Like…like that poem: I was much too far out all my life, and not waving but drowning."

Don's silence worried Charlie. Once again, Charlie had said too much. He panicked, scrambling to come up with the words to make Don understand but felt himself flailing again in layers of violins and sonnets.

Then Don spoke.

"If you're drowning, you need a life jacket. And I… I can be that for you. You feel like you're drowning, or you haven't got your numbers, you come see me. We'll have a sandwich and watch crappy movies. That's gotta be better than starving yourself, right?"

"It wouldn't be an intrusion?"

Don flashed him a grin. "You're my brother. So. You know. No more than usual."

Charlie had to laugh. He knew it was Don's way of saying that he loved him. Don, who was all at once the little lamb and the tyger tyger burning bright.

Darkness enveloped the room as Don and Charlie lay together in Charlie's tiny white bed. Don drifted in and out of sleep while Charlie stayed awake, studying the fine lines of Don's face in the ambient light. Tracing the curves of Don's jaw, Charlie wound Don's short, soft hair through his fingers. Don sighed, leaning into Charlie's hand.

"Don?" Charlie whispered.

Don's head turned. "Yeah?" he whispered back.

"Would it be all right if I kissed you?"

The moments of Don's hesitation were some of the longest of Charlie's life.

"Yeah."

As Charlie's lips met Don's he held infinity in the palm of his hand and eternity in an hour. When they broke from the kiss Charlie stayed within an inch of Don's face, hesitant yet wanting more. Don ran his hand through Charlie's hair, cupping his jaw. Unlike Don, Charlie was shaking. He was glad he wasn't hooked up to a heart monitor, because he was sure the spike of his pulse would be enough to sound an alarm. Don leaned down once more to kiss Charlie's forehead, then his cheek. Shifting up on the bed, Don buried his face in Charlie's hair, his hand on Charlie's upper arm.

For the first time in weeks, or maybe by now it was months, Charlie's mind was blissfully, delightfully blank, waiting again to be filled with numbers. And that night he dreamed of diagrams and charts and formulas and making a breakthrough in his cognitive emergence work. Everything was black and white and instead of music there was the tapping of chalk, pleasing in its randomness.

--

When Don took Charlie back to the house the next morning after his discharge, Charlie put the efforts of his recent baking, lemon poppy seed muffins and chipotle brownies and pecan bars and blueberry scones and carrot cake, into a large cardboard box.

"Take this to the office," he instructed. "David and Colby and Megan will like them."

Accepting the box, Don set it down on the floor. He looked to Charlie for a minute, moving his hands from his hips to the small of his back like he didn't know what to do with them. "Charlie, listen, I know last night you were in pretty bad shape, but I…"

"You what, Don?"

Don shifted his weight and wet his lips. "What happened, it's… We were close, and you'd been through a lot, and I know there was a lot of tension and things like that can happen because of the situation you're in but then you get back in the real world and it's like…"

Charlie understood. He said nothing, but placed a finger over Don's mouth. As Don had done the night before, Charlie kissed Don's forehead, then his cheek.

"Come by later, okay? I saved the cherry pie for you."

"Do you want me to stay and have breakfast?"

"No," Charlie replied. "I'll be okay."

With a nod, Don picked up the box and left.

Charlie stood in the center of the sunny kitchen for a moment, breathing what was left of the scent of flour and chocolate.

Then he headed for the refrigerator. Maybe there was leftover pasta.

--

end

--

Author's notes: First, many thanks to M and T for betaing. This fic is a remix of "Simplify the World" by Serotonin Storm, written for Remix 2008. Second, I have incorporated many lines from poetry into Charlie's thoughts and the narrative. In order of appearance, those poems are: The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats; The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe; Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas; the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet; Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson; Fog by Carl Sandburg; Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath; Alone by Edgar Allan Poe; The Brain is wider than the Sky by Emily Dickinson; Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith; The Lamb, The Tyger, and Auguries of Innocence all by William Blake.