Ethereal Pixie Rings Of Mercy (EPROM) 2/8

This is the second of the eight chapters I'll be posting this week. If you didn't read the first chapter yet, it is available here.

Old Friends

David’s talk with Naila had not gone the way David had hoped or expected. It had given David something much more valuable than what he could ever have hoped for, though. Naila was a dear friend and a brilliant and distinguished Wolf-prize-winning mathematician. In addition to that, Naila had acquired a PhD in a handful of other subjects, including physics and biology. When Naila had finally found time in her busy schedule to come and visit him in the hospital, David had been filled with hope about convincing her to continue his important work. If there was one scientist in this world who was intelligent and skilled enough in both mathematics and physics to complete his work with only his chaotic notes to work with, it was Naila.
David was a brilliant mathematician, but at the same time David combined his off-the-scale intelligence and fast-paced thinking with a total lack of discipline regarding work in progress. To put it bluntly, when it came to archiving his work and keeping records and indexes, David had the attention span of a toddler. On any given day, David would work on a few dozen sub-problems and other things completely unrelated to his work. At the end of the day most of his work would end up in the ‘unsorted’ segment of David's archive, often together with unrelated scribbles regarding things like an analysis of geopolitical events which David had scribbled down after reading his daily stack of international newspapers, David’s notes regarding his ongoing struggles with the creation of the perfect lamb stew recipe, notes from David’s wife regarding dry cleaning that he had forgotten to pick up during the day, and many other such pieces of paper that truly did not belong there. Effectively, the sorted part of David's archive existed mostly inside his brain.
After David had gotten the bad news, he had started to frantically work at sorting out his notes and had started putting substantial time into his paper. The final stage of the disease had gone faster than David had expected though. After only two weeks, David had lost the use of his legs, and one week later the tremors in his hands had grown so bad that it became impossible for him to continue his work on his own. In the four weeks before David was hospitalized, he had managed to burn through six assistants. He wasn’t asking them to do anything intellectually challenging, but even for doing the mundane tasks involved with sorting out David's archive under his supervision, their brains were simply working too slow for David’s diminishing patience. And what was worse, each of them, having been selected by HR based partially on their Mensa membership, had been so confident of their own mental abilities that they all refused to accept that David’s criticism as justified. Naila was David’s last hope.

Naila had been David’s only remaining true friend. Their relationship had been rather complex, though. Naila, at the time that David met her, had been something of a stowaway student. One morning, while giving the last lecture before a major examination, David had been pleasantly surprised by the fact that the attendance was significantly higher than it normally was. Being used to large numbers skipping classes, David took a few seconds to do a quick headcount: “507?!” No. that couldn’t be right! There were only 506 students enrolled in his class! A quick recount, however, confirmed it. The lecture after the exam David had discovered what happened. One pretty young dark-skinned girl that looked a tiny bit more mature than most of her classmates appeared to show absolutely no interest in the grades that David had put up near the classroom door. When confronted by David, who queried her about her lack of interest in her grade, the girl ended up admitting to him that she did not take the exam due to the fact that in fact she wasn't really one of the students. Naila turned out to be a bright morning cleaning crew member that was secretly hanging around to attend advanced math and science classes. Although Naila lacked any form of formal education, this young lady had managed to educate herself beyond what David had thought humanly possible.
What happened after that was where things had grown to become emotionally quite complex for David.
Being intrigued by her amazing story, instead of reprimanding this young girl he had gone out of his way to bend the rules for her. For the first time in his life, David realized the limits of his own intellect, and, more importantly, for the first time in his life, David realized many of his own shortcomings. This young girl without even a completed elementary school education had managed to pick up more from being a stowaway in university lectures and in the university library, than any student David had ever taught. And more, this was not your average high IQ individual. This young intelligent girl was almost like a force of nature. Alive in a way that David had not been since…, no, David would not allow his mind to go there.
David took Naila under his wing at the university, helped her get formal recognition for her incredible autodidactically-obtained knowledge and skills. Two years later Naila had obtained her first PhD under his supervision. But referring to himself as Naila’s mentor would in no way do justice to their complex relationship. Naila was 15 years younger than David, and in the academic sense David had definitely been her mentor, but in a way that really counted, she had in fact been his mentor instead.
Naila had shown David how to extract every little bit of life out of every day, even while life kept throwing horrible events at them. David treasured each and every exhilarating moment that he had the privilege of spending with this amazingly complete person. Her vibrant personality combined with her street-smart intelligence and a deep, spiritual wisdom that was sometimes quite disconcerting coming from someone her age. This was what made Naila more David’s mentor and maybe even David’s muse. In a way Naila and David were very much alike. Naila to David was the person David hoped he himself could be if only he could capture some of her attitude towards life and the misfortunes on life’s road.
David had carried a deep secret for many years. A secret that he would take with him to his grave. David loved his wife with all his heart, but for a truly long time David had been secretly and deeply in love with Naila in a way that exceeded David’s capacity to cope with his own feelings and emotions. Or had he really been in love? David had never really been in touch with his feelings. All he knew was that spending time with Naila was like a drug to him. Oh, that amazing mind and vibrant force-of-nature personality. To David, at that time, the world never moved at his pace. All those annoying narrow- and small-minded people with their excruciatingly slow mental processes.
David’ s brain had been a chaotic mess, but a fast-working chaotic mess.
Ah, those inconvenient feelings. Why did Naila have to be this vibrant and intelligent? Why of all people did it have to be this beautiful young lady, his student, that was the only person David had ever met that he could have an intelligent ‘full-speed’ discussion with about things other than science? Why did Naila have to be so amazing, and why of all people did David have to develop feelings for her that exceeded any emotion David had ever felt in his life for anything or anyone, that exceeded even David’s emotions for his beautiful wife Sarah. Luckily David's feelings had subsided now, and neither his wife nor Naila would ever need to know about them. David had realized quickly enough that he had to let go of Naila. He used his influence to create a career opportunity for her far away from him. David’s feelings for his beautiful and caring wife Sarah did not deserve to be overshadowed by his feelings for Naila. No, Naila was amazing, but at the same time she was toxic to him, a toxic addiction. And David knew how to deal with an addiction. No matter how bad it made him feel, and no matter how much David valued their friendship, Naila was a drug to him. David decided to do what he had done before in the face of addiction, he decided he had to go cold turkey. After Naila left to America, it had taken five full years for David to get her out of his system completely.
But now, after years of keeping his distance out of fear of rekindling his own, hopefully one-sided, feelings, Naila had become his last hope with respect to the completion of his work on his theorem.
Only she could make sense of his chaotic archives. Only she could complete his work if he could just convince her of the importance of getting it finished and published. Naila might even be the best person for doing what he could not: making the essential leap from pure math to physics. Little did he expect their six- hour long talk to go where it did. Naila, like she had done many times before in the past, had presented David with a clarity of vision that had put David’s tenacious pursuit of his paradox into a completely different perspective. Would she continue David's life work? Naila had not promised David anything regarding his work, but she was not the kind of person to commit in any professional sense. She was almost as much of a scatterbrain as David, but she had gotten to grips with it much better than David had. She had given David something else though: a sense of perspective.
After their talk, his priorities shifted significantly.
David finally, and quite possibly too late, realized he had even more important things to do. Over the last four years David had withdrawn from his own life through working on his personal crusade against religion. So much so that he had even shut out his own wife and daughter in a frantic attempt to complete his life's work before his death.
Naila had once more opened his eyes to his own limited talent for truly being alive. He discovered that no, he had probably not actually been in love with Naila. He instead might just have been in love with the feeling of being alive that Naila’s vibrant personality and their intense intellectual and spiritual discussions had brought into his life, with all the clarity of mind Naila had given him regarding life’s priorities.
David knew now what he had to do. He had to let go of his battles. There was nothing left now that David could do now regarding his life’s work. He should give his wife and daughter the farewell they both deserved. Thinking back on his life after his talk with Naila, things were put into a quite different perspective.
If David had not provided the career opportunity for Naila that had taken her out of his life, if he had not been overwhelmed and confused by the strength of his feelings for Naila, then she could have prevented him from losing contact with his own life while pursuing his battles. Naila had not been the threat to his marriage that David feared. In fact, sending her away might have been what allowed David to fall back into his old obsessive behavioral pattern that had him neglecting his wife and family in favor of his scientific endeavors. Thinking back David knew now that he had made two big mistakes in his life. Mistakes that together led to him denying his wife and daughter the quality time they deserved. And at the same time, mistakes that led to him not being able to complete his life's work in time.
If David had not temporarily lost his way as a student, he would not have lost that year that he never managed to fully make up for, and his paper would have been finished well in time before the disease reached its final stage. If David had not perceived his relationship with Naila as a threat to his marriage, Naila could have been the perfect assistant that would both have allowed him to balance his life’s work with his private life and could have allowed his life’s work to have been long completed.
Now, as a result of these two mistakes, not only had he not managed to complete his work, he had denied his wife and daughter, and himself, the possibility of sharing the precious last months of his life as a true family.

Continue to Chapter 3