“Seeing is maybe too literal. It’s hard to describe. I just get this … sense? I guess it’s kind of visual, but it’s also a feeling? I don’t know ... but I understand things.”
“Wait. You get this when you touch anything?” He lets his hand drop, as if he’s hurting me. This is what I was afraid of.
“Just about. Except …” I hesitate to tell him, because it sounds weird and romantic and possibly a little creepy. “Well, except you.”
“Except me?”
“Yeah.”
“You can touch me and you don’t get them?”
I nod.
He looks down at my hand and lets it sink in for a minute. “Well. Lucky me,” he says. I think he thinks I’m joking.
“I’m serious,” I tell him. “I’ve had them ever since I can remember. But with you … I don’t.”
As if to try to prove it, I lift my hand and place it on his cheek, directly on his warm skin. Nothing, except for that fluttering in my stomach.
“I don’t know why.” My voice is almost a whisper. He stares at me for a minute and then he takes my hand from his face and holds it, palm up, in his hands.
“You’re serious?” he asks.
I nod.
“Have you gone to a doctor?”
“Tons.” I nod. “And psychiatrists. And even, like, an exorcist.”
“What!”
I laugh a little. “Well, not an exorcist, exactly, but like a psychic healer? Don’t tell my dad. He’d freak out. My mom took me one time. Didn’t work.”
“You don’t know what causes it?”
I shake my head. “It might be something I was born with or …” I plant the seed for a future conversation: “I was in an accident when I was little and I had, like, a minor head injury or something. But I’ve had MRIs and CT scans and all that stuff since then. They haven’t been able to find anything unusual. At this point my only hope may be to figure it out myself. At MIT, Northwestern, Stanford …”
Zenn is still looking at my hand, his fingers now tracing up and down mine like he’s feeling for the reason. “It’s like my paintings?”
I nod and close my eyes, enjoying his touch. Simple, innocent stroking of his fingertips along my palm. It’s even better than I imagined. “I call them fractals because … there are, like, patterns? Repeating patterns. Remember how we talked about Mandelbrot? The mathematician?”
“Mmmm hmmm.” Now he lines up our hands, our fingers, palms pressing against each other. I open my eyes and see that his fingers are longer than mine by nearly a whole segment. He could almost bend the tips of his fingers over the tops of mine.
“Mandelbrot had this idea that things that typically appear as rough or chaotic, like waves or shorelines, actually have a degree of order. There is a geometric repetition on all scales.” I realize I’m sounding a little technical and nerdy, but I’m not sure how else to explain it. “No matter how close you look, the patterns never get simpler.” I let this sink in for a second. I can tell he’s listening because he’s looking at me now, focused and intent.
I continue. “When I touch people or their stuff, I get these glimpses into their shit. The stuff that they struggle with. Which, in some ways could probably make me a great therapist or something someday. But the problem is, the patterns never get simpler. In fact, in some ways they get more intense each time. And when I start to think I can solve it, that I can help or do something, the pattern is always there. Like Russian nesting dolls that go on forever. Perfect little miniatures of one another that never end.”
I close my eyes again.
“They make me feel useless. I want to help but I can’t. And then I know this stuff about people — these very private problems — and I can’t unknow any of it. So I’ve always just avoided touching people. And stuff in general. It’s why people think I’m, like, a germ freak.”
Now his fingers slide between mine and we make a little prayer of sorts with our two hands.
“You get it from touching things, too? Not just people?”
I nod. “It’s why I want people to bring their calculators when I start tutoring. Because the calculators soak up all their math frustrations. And … well … it’s just math, so I can figure it out pretty quick and it helps me get to the core of what they’re struggling with.”
“Seriously? That’s the secret to your tutoring genius? You cheat?”
He’s kidding. “I prefer, ‘use my God-given gift.’”
“Did you get anything from my calculator?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
Maybe he’s proud that he stymied me?
“Do you think you’re a math prodigy because of the fractals? Like, maybe your brain works differently in general?”
I shrug. “I don’t really know. Since we don’t understand why I have them, it’s hard to know which came first, the math stuff or the fractals. I sort of think” — I bite my lip, hoping this won’t sound too weird — “that the fractals are the way they are because that’s just how my brain works. Maybe if I were a creative person, like you, they’d be different. But math is my language so they are kind of like math. With patterns and stuff. Of course, if the fractals came first, then maybe I’m good at math because of that. Or maybe they’re both related.” I sigh and shrug again. “Short answer is, I really have no idea.”
“But wait. If you don’t get these fractals from me, why do you get them from my jacket?”
“Because it was your dad’s jacket. Right?”
“How did you know?”
“Um … well … they’re clearly his fractals.”
A look of mild terror crosses his face. “No wonder you wanted me to take it off.”
“I suppose if I got fractals from you, then the jacket would eventually take on your own personal shit from you wearing it. But since you seem to be sort of neutral, all your dad’s shit is still right there. And maybe … some of your mom’s?”
He still looks worried. He hasn’t told me anything about his dad and I suppose he’s wondering what I might have learned.
“It’s, like, nothing specific,” I reassure him. “At first. My fractals, I mean. The more I touch one person, or their stuff, the more I can see over time. But at first it’s all just kind of a mess.”
He looks relieved. Can’t say that I blame him. I think of how complicated my mom’s fractals can be — laden with all her guilty regret for the things she gave up when she quit school to raise me, with her intense grief, with her constant exhaustion — and they are nothing compared to his dad’s.
“Can you show me?”
I’m confused. “Show you?”
“Like, touch something and tell me what it feels like?”
I hesitate. Do I really want to prove what a freak I am? But how else do I make him believe me?
“Yeah. I guess so.” I look around. “But not in here. It’s all kid stuff in here and I don’t get them from kids.” I catch myself. “Well, sometimes I do, but they’re different. Happier. And the younger they are, the fewer I get.”
I get up and he stands, too.