583495793235

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.