VACANCY & ARIEL

At the age of nineteen, while a student at Cal Tech, stoned on a quantity of excellent post-Taliban Afghani hash, I jotted down a series of mathematical propositions—fantasies, really—that soon thereafter was turned into breakthrough work by my best friend, Rahul Osauri. Those few minutes of inspired scribbling comprise the sum of my experience of the world of genius, but Rahul, born in India on the Malabar Coast, was a genius every waking moment of his life. He understood what I had merely glimpsed and with my permission, for I perceived no great value in what I had done, he set to work investigating the potentials of my crude conception and not only crafted of it a new model of the universe, but devised engineering applications that enabled the exploration of territories whose existence until that point had been purely speculative. Seven years later he died when the classified project informed by my moment of inspiration was destroyed in an explosion. I was at the time an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan (I had dropped my physics major and transferred to UCLA during my junior year in order to pursue a brunette coed with beautiful legs) and ten days after Rahul’s death, in early December, I was summoned to a meeting with Patrick Karlan, the head of the department. On entering his office I found two men waiting, neither of them Professor Karlan and both radiating a police vibe, causing me to speculate that the sophomore with whom I’d had an affair the previous semester had spilled the beans. The older of the two, a gray-haired patrician sort wearing pinstripes and a foulard tie, surveyed me with an expression of undisguised distaste, taking in my long hair and jeans and patched car coat. He asked if I was the Richard Cyrus who had attended Cal Tech with Rahul Osauri.

“Dick Cyrus,” I said. “Nobody’s called me Richard since grammar school.”

The gray-haired man stared at me incuriously.

“I hate the name Richard,” I went on, growing more nervous by the second and talking in order to conceal it. “It’s a kid thing, y’know. There was this quarterback at Georgia. Richard Wycliff. He killed the University of Florida four straight years. I hated the bastard.”

“Very well. Dick.”

“I asked my dad if I could change my name to Frank,” I said, trying to be disingenuously friendly. “Didn’t go over too well, so I settled on Dick.”

“Excellent choice,” said the second man with more than a little sarcasm.

The gray-haired man introduced himself as Paul Capuano and offered credentials that established him as an official with the NSC. He did not bother to introduce the second and younger man, who stood attentive at his shoulder throughout the interview—less an aide, it appeared, than a slim blue-suited accessory—and he cautioned me that everything said would be privy to the Official Secrets Act, briefed me on the penalties I risked should I breach security, and began to question me about my relationship with Rahul and my involvement with his work.

“You’ve made quite a lot of money as a result of your youthful indiscretions,” Capuano said after we had done with the preliminaries.

“I don’t consider smoking a bowl of hash that much of an indiscretion,” I said. “As for the money, I came up with the basic concept—Rahul thought I should share in any profits resulting from his patents. I never expected there would be any practical applications.”

Sitting in Professor Karlan’s chair, Capuano studied me coldly from across the desk and I felt a twinge of paranoia. “Something wrong with my having profited?” I asked.

“There’s a question as to whether the patents were modified after Osauri began working for the government. Though the devices themselves have nothing to do with the project, it’s possible there may be some technical problem with legality.”

I understood from this that nothing was wrong with the patents—I was being threatened, and none too subtly.

“What do you want?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about your project.”

“That’s not altogether true.” Capuano removed a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and read from it: “‘I bet I know what you’re doing. I imagine the project to be something like an arcade machine. You know, the ones with the toy crane mounted in a plastic cube that you manipulate with a joystick, trying to snag a wristwatch from a heap of cheap pins and rings and combs.’” He glanced up at me. “Recognize it?”

“Yeah. It’s an email I sent Rahul. But he never responded. He certainly never said I was right.”

“We know that.” Capuano’s haughty tone suggested that there was little that “we” did not know. “Nevertheless, it demonstrates that you understood what he was up to.”

“I was Rahul’s friend,” I said. “I know what excited him about the idea. It wasn’t tough to figure out what he’d try to do. But understand his work? I don’t think so. Rahul was on another plane, man. I couldn’t even follow his first equations. They might have been magic spells for all I knew.”