“Yeah,” she said. Lindsey was seated in a plush armchair beneath a giant wall-length bulletin board, on which she’d thumbtacked pictures of herself and Katrina, herself and TOC, herself in camouflage. It was like every single picture of Lindsey Lee Wells ever taken—except Colin noticed immediately that they were all from the last couple of years. No baby pictures, no kid pictures, and no emo-alternative-gothy-screamo-punk synthesis pictures. A four-poster queen-size bed jutted up against the wall opposite the bulletin board. Notably, the room lacked pink.
“It’s not so pink in here,” Colin commented.
“It’s the only refuge in the entire house,” she said.
“Do you have a match?”
“Sure, I got a shitload of ’em,” Lindsey answered without looking up. “Why?”
“I want to burn this,” he said, holding it up. “I can’t finish my Theorem, and so I want to burn it.”
Lindsey stood up, darted toward Colin, and snatched the notebook from his hand. She paged through it for a while. “Can’t you just throw it away?”
Colin sighed. Clearly, she didn’t get it. “Well, yeah, I could. But look, if I can’t be a genius—and clearly I can’t be—I can at least burn my work like one. Look at all the geniuses who either successfully or unsuccessfully tried to burn their papers.”
“Yes,” Lindsey said absentmindedly, still reading from the notebook. “Just look at all of them.”
“Carlyle, Kafka, Virgil. It’s hard to imagine better company, really.”
“Yes. Hey, explain this to me,” she said, sitting down on the bed and motioning for him to sit next to her. She was reading from a page with an early version of the formula and several inaccurate graphs.
“The idea is that you take two people and figure out if they’re Dumpers or Dumpees. You use a scale that goes from -5 for a strong Dumpee to +5 for a strong Dumper. The difference between those numbers gives you the variable, D, and then by putting D into the formula, you get a graph that predicts the relationship. Only—” he paused, trying to think of a way to put his failure poetically. “Uh, it doesn’t really work.”
She didn’t look up at him; just closed the notebook. “You can burn it,” she said, “but not tonight. I want it for a couple days.”
“Uh, okay,” Colin said, and then he waited for Lindsey to say something more. Finally, she added, “It’s just a cool-ass way to tell stories. I mean, I hate math. But this is cool.”
“Okay. But soon, we burn it!” Colin said, his finger in the air, mock emphatic.
“For sure, yo. Now go to bed before your day gets any worse.”
54 The odd thing about that is that Nikola Tesla actually did love birds, but not one-legged chickens. Tesla, who did at least as much for electricity as Thomas Edison, had a quasi-romantic fascination with pigeons. He really fell for one particular white pigeon. Of her, he wrote, “I loved that pigeon. I loved her as a man loves a woman.”
55 A roach disk.
(eleven)
On their fifth night in Gutshot, Hassan and Colin split up. Hassan went out with Lindsey to go “cruising,” an activity that apparently involved driving in Hollis’s pink truck from the Gutshot General Store to the gas station/Taco Hell and then back to the General Store, and then back to the gas station/Taco Hell, ad infinitum.
“You should come out,” Hassan told him. He was standing beside Lindsey in the living room. She wore dangly blue earrings and quite a bit of rouge, which made her look flushed.
“I’m behind on my reading,” Colin explained.
“Behind on your reading? All you do is read,” Lindsey said.
“I’ve been way behind because I’ve worked so hard on the Theorem and because of oral historianing. I try to read four hundred pages a day—ever since I was seven.”
“Even on weekends?”
“Particularly on weekends, because then I can really focus on pleasure reading.”
Hassan shook his head. “Dude, you’re such a geek. And that’s coming from an overweight Star Trek fan who scored a 5 on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave.” He rubbed Colin’s Jew-fro as if for luck, and then turned away.
“You should go; keep them out of trouble,” Hollis yelled from the couch.
Without a word, Colin grabbed his book (a biography of Thomas Edison)56 and headed upstairs to his room, where he lay on his bed and read in peace. Over the next five hours, he finished that book and started one he found on the bookshelf in his room called Foxfire. Foxfire discussed how people did things in the old days of Appalachia.