He changes positions. Now he’s lying flat on his back, knees bent, hands laced behind his head.
I shift my body again for no reason, pulling my legs into my chest and wrapping my arms around them. Our bodies are having their own conversation separate and apart from us. Is this the difference between friendship and something else? This awareness that I have of him?
The air filters cycle on, making a low hum beneath the sound of the fan.
“How does that work?” His eyes are scanning the ceiling.
“It’s industrial. The windows are sealed so air only comes in through the filters on the roof. Nothing over 0.3 microns gets in. Also, the circulation system completely changes all the air in the house every four hours.”
“Wow.” He turns his head to look at me and I can see him trying to come to terms with just how sick I am.
I look away. “The settlement paid for it.” Before he can ask I add: “The trucker who killed my dad and brother fell asleep behind the wheel. He’d been working three shifts in a row. They settled with my mom.”
He turns his head back toward the ceiling. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s strange because I don’t really remember them. Meaning I don’t remember them at all.” I try to ignore the feelings that surface when I think about them. There’s sadness that’s not quite sadness, and then guilt. “It’s weird to miss something you’ve never had—or don’t remember having, anyway.”
“Not so weird,” he says. We’re both quiet and he closes his eyes.
“Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you could just change one thing?” he asks.
Not usually, but I’m starting to. What if I weren’t sick? What if my dad and brother hadn’t died? Not wondering about impossible things is how I’ve managed to be relatively Zen.
“Everyone thinks they’re special,” he says. “Everyone’s a snowflake, right? We’re all unique and complicated. We can never know the human heart, and all that?”
I nod slowly, certain I agree with what he’s saying now, but equally certain that I’m going to disagree with whatever’s next.
“I think that’s nonsense. We’re not snowflakes. We’re just outputs for a set of inputs.”
I stop nodding. “Like a formula?”
“Exactly like a formula.” He props himself up to his elbows and looks at me. “I think there are one or two inputs that matter the most. Figure those out and you’ve figured out the person. You can predict anything about them.”
“Really? What am I going to say now?”
He winks at me. “You think I’m a brute, a heretic, a—”
“A crackpot,” I complete for him. “You don’t really believe we’re math equations?”
“I might.” He lies back down.
“But how do you know which input to change?” I ask.
He sighs a long, suffering sigh. “Yeah, that’s the problem. Even if you could figure out which one to change, then how much should you change it? And what if you can’t change it precisely enough? Then you couldn’t predict the new output. You could make things worse.”
He sits up again. “Imagine, though, if you could just change the right inputs; you could fix things before they went wrong.” He says this last part quietly, but with the frustration of someone who’s been trying to solve the same unsolvable problem for a long time now. Our eyes meet and he looks embarrassed, like he’s revealed more than he meant to.
He lies back down and throws a forearm across his eyes. “The problem is chaos theory. There are too many inputs to the formula and even the small ones matter more than you think. And you can never measure them precisely enough. But! If you could, you could write a formula to predict the weather, the future, people.”
“But chaos theory says you can’t?”
“Yup.”
“You needed a whole branch of mathematics to tell you that people are unpredictable?”
“Had that figured out, did you?”