Vanderbilt Lecture Hall
Dr. Alyssa Morell eyed her class like a cop administering a breathalyzer. Her stare lasted a full six seconds before she continued, “If we could assign a number value to anything that could ever happen, every event would be contained in pi. The beauty of pi is that it shows up in equations that have nothing to do with circles. It could very well be the most important number in human history.” Morell’s students clicked at their laptops as she spoke.
Morell had not spoken to anyone from Benjamin Hoek’s cookout. In fact, she’d had little contact with anyone from the university besides her summer school students. The brief separation from colleagues had given her a chance to consider her career options without the distractions that arise during the fall and spring semesters.
A former college teammate informed her of a job opening for a Systems Analyst position at Google. She’d visited San Francisco last summer and loved it. The weather, the people, the culture—everything appealed to her sensibilities. She couldn’t justify moving unless a job at Stanford or some other major college became available. She hadn’t considered the business sector. A job at Google, with its flexible hours, generous benefits, and quirky work culture, could be what lured her away from Vanderbilt. She would also have the freedom to merge her interest in theoretical equations with practical application without it conflicting with other aspects of her job like grading tests and joining committees.
Although she enjoyed lecturing, she was disappointed to find that many—students, smart, talented students—lacked the focus she had as an undergrad. When she graded hastily done take home exams or asked a question based on the class readings and saw that half of them had not read, she felt a twinge of resentment at having to spend her time preparing to help them when she could be helping herself. Her ambivalence concerning the Google job wore on her. She had to decide soon whether or not to apply.
She glanced at her watch before concluding the lecture. “Keep in mind that numbers are not abstract images on a two-dimensional plane. They are living, moving entities that reflect themselves in our thoughts and actions. It’s all a matter of re-imagining them. Have a good weekend.” She gathered her stuff and walked down the hall towards her office. She’d already begun thinking of what she’d be cooking for dinner. Her planning was interrupted when she noticed Julian Daniels leaning on the wall next to her office door, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle.
Alyssa froze and looked at him as if she’d opened the door to her home and found a stranger comfortably watching tv.
“Dr. Alyssa Morell. Let me introduce myself, Dr. Julian Daniels.”
“Hello. Can I help you with something?”
“Yes, I need your help.”
Alyssa waited a beat. “Okay.” Although the word lilted upward on the last syllable, it was more statement than question.
“I need to know what our problem is. I don’t care if someone doesn’t like me. Most of the time, I’m not even interested in why. But in your case, I’m a little curious.”
Alyssa wanted to at least set down her briefcase, but she didn’t want to do it in the hallway, nor did she want to invite him into her office. She knew the conversation would not end if all she did was give one and two word answers. She sighed, unlocking her office door. “After you,” she said.
He sat in a brown, cushioned chair opposite of her desk. He looked around at the University of Maryland paraphernalia. He nodded approvingly at the meticulous decoration, the neatly lined oak book shelf, the evenly spaced framed awards lining the wall above her desk chair. Even the most casual observer would conclude that the owner of the room was precise and goal oriented.
“I didn’t know you were a college athlete.”
“Look, I’m busy. What do you want?”
“I just want to know why you and I have a problem. We don’t have to be friends or anything, but I do want to know since you’d never met me before the cookout at Ben’s.”
“Fair enough. I don’t like guys who cheat. And I don’t like guys who cheat on my friends.”
Julian turned his head as if to look at her with one eye. “Who’s your friend?”
Alyssa shook her head and smiled. “I imagine it’s hard to keep up with all your conquests. Christine Thompson. Remember her?”
He let out a breath and nodded. “I remember her. We dated for eight months. What about her?”
“What’s about her is that we’re pretty good friends. And I don’t appreciate my friends getting lied to and cheated on. I just don’t. Weird, I know.”
“We cheated on each other! I’m not saying what I did was right, but it’s a little different if we’re both doing it. And besides, she cheated first.”
Alyssa was caught off guard. “So you justify bad behavior by pointing at other bad behavior. Really Dr. Daniels, that type of reasoning is beneath you.”
“That’s not my argument. My argument is you can’t play the victim if you, too are a perpetrator. That’s like a car thief calling the cops after finding his car missing. Look, you’re her friend. You should take her side. But if you know me and interact with me, then I’m no longer some abstract ex-boyfriend. At that point, you must be willing to learn the whole story or else you’re being intellectually dishonest.”
Alyssa laughed sarcastically. “Oh wow! You’re good. You’re good. I see why you’re such a successful author. You know how to make even the most outlandish viewpoints work for you.”
“Look, there’s parts to the story that, if you knew, would alter your perception of me. And if you’re going to base your treatment of me on that story, you should be willing to learn as much as you can about it as possible. If not, then you can’t say you’re acting with integrity.”
Alyssa crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. Julian knew he was making her angry. But he knew this was better than her one-worded, stony dismissals. He had to play the situation carefully, applying the right amount of emotional pressure so that she would continue to engage him.
“Aly–Dr. Morell, I’m not implying that you don’t have integrity. I’m saying there’s more to know, and if you’re unwilling to take in new information that could change your position, you’re not being as honest as possible with yourself.” He made her integrity part of the conversation in order to get her attention, then redefined the term in hopes of clarifying his point. Now he needed an example to show that he could identify with her.
“Look at it this way: you’re an economist and an athlete. I know you remember the backlash in the baseball world when Moneyball came out. There’s a section in the afterword where one baseball exec criticized the book in one breath and then, in the next breath, proudly admitted that he’d never read it. There’s nothing wrong with not having read a book. But if he’s willing to make a value judgment on that book based on biased, incomplete information—information that is within his grasp but he refuses to at least look at—then that’s not completely honest.”
Alyssa chewed her lower lip. By referencing her economic background and then couching his argument in that way, Julian made an intellectual appeal. The fact that she was thinking about it meant he could engage her logic, which also meant that she would be more open to what he had to say. He knew that emotions were good, but when someone has her mind made up and refuses to change it, that is a result of emotional resolution rather than intellectual certainty.
“I have nothing against Christine. I saw her a few weeks ago at during a concert at the Ryman. She was with some guy and seemed to be happy. I know that her being civil to me doesn’t mean anything. But it’s evidence that whatever issues that we had have begun to dissipate.”
Alyssa knew that her friend was dating someone new. She knew that some wounds from some relationships never fully healed. But with the vast majority of break ups, time and changing perspectives tended to mollify past feelings. “That’s a good point,” she said.
Julian was careful to appear impassive. Her conceding that he had a point meant she was willing to change her mind. But if he showed that he was emotionally invested in her decision, it would hurt the intellectual appeal he was making.
“Anyway, I know you’re busy. So I don’t want to bog you down with unnecessary details about my relationship with Christine. But for about the last month of our relationship, we both started talking to other people. She’d met some guy named Terrence, I think. And I’d begun texting my ex again.”
“She said you spent the night with her,” Alyssa said, arms still crossed.
“Yes, I stayed the night at her house,” Julian subtly changed the connotation of her sentence, thinking ‘stayed the night’ sounded less sexual. “I slept in her bed, but we didn’t have sex. I don’t expect you or Christine to believe that. Either way, I know that staying at your ex’s is problematic no matter what you did or didn’t do. I told Christine the next day because I didn’t want it to come out later and seem worse than it really was.”
“But earlier you said, ‘she cheated, too,’ which implies that you did cheat on her at some point,” Alyssa said.
“Yes, a week after I stayed the night, I hooked up with my ex.” By that time the relationship with Christine was all but over. Here’s the thing, though—when she talks about me cheating, she’s referring to when I stayed the night. She doesn’t know about what happened that next week. By that time, I hadn’t spoken to Christine for days. She wouldn’t respond to my texts nor return my calls.”
Alyssa began chewing her lip again. “Now you said she cheated, too.”
“Yes, a friend of mine saw her on Broadway. He took a pic and texted it to me.” Julian took out his phone, scrolled to the picture, and handed it to Alyssa.
She studied it. No doubt the girl was Christine. She was at one of the Nashville honky tonks, sitting on a mystery guy’s lap.
Julian continued, “This doesn’t mean she cheated. It’s just a picture. But I texted her several times that night as well as the next morning and got no response. When I finally got ahold of her, she was unusually sweet. She even laughed off the things I do that would normally annoy her. I never told her about the picture. I figured it wouldn’t help anything, but it definitely colored how I approached our relationship. This was ten days before I stayed the night at my ex’s.”
Alyssa unfolded her arms and shifted in her seat. She had no reason to think Julian was lying, and the evidence he gave was circumstantial but plausible. The truthfulness of his version of events was secondary to the fact that she probably should drop whatever grudge she had. If Christine was no longer wasting energy on it, then she had no need to. In this instance, her adherence to the Girl Code had reached its statute of limitations.
Julian could tell by her body language that he’d convinced her to, at the very least, not dislike him. But he knew that convincing her to work with him, Robert, and Kristoff, would have to wait another day. Correctly orchestrated rhetoric was effective, but it also had its limits.
“Well Dr. Morell—Alyssa—I just wanted to clear that up. I’ll let you get back to work.” As he stood up, he extended his hand.
She shook it and said, “Thank you for taking the time to do that. I appreciate it.”
Alyssa waited until she could no longer hear his footsteps down the hallway before she gathered up her work material. She wanted to make sure he was gone because even though her thoughts about him had changed, her attitude had yet to catch up.
**********
Thompson’s Station,
Williamson County, TN
Robert and Kristoff sat in oak finished chairs in Kristoff’s living room. They faced his coffee table where dozens of books lay sprawled on top of each other, covering the wooden, rectangular space. Each created a make-shift desk with a tv food tray where they set their laptops. If either man couldn’t find a particular book in the make-shift study area, he could get up, walk to the dining room where another army of books rested neatly on top of each other.
Both scholars would’ve appreciated the dichotomy between the orderly kitchen and the messy living room—the visual metaphors of between work and rest—were they not absorbed in their research, clicking furiously on their keyboards, sketching in notebooks, and underlining book passages.
Two hours had passed since either man had spoken. They muttered thoughts but knew that the time to read came before the time to speak, thought before action.
Robert ran his red pen under each line of a book titled Medieval Semiotics, a dense, scholarly work written by a Harvard professor of symbols who used images of the past to decode meanings about how people of that time saw the universe and saw themselves. Semiotics, the study of symbols, is a field that for years fell under a litany of disciplines. What field in the humanities didn’t try to coax meaning out of pictures—whether psychologists understanding Freud and his cigar, art historians drawing insight out of spires, or linguists analyzing the changing shape of a letter? But semiotics took the process a step further. While studying symbols was part of those other fields, it was the essence of this one.
Robert enjoyed semiotics because he created meaning through pictures daily. The secret to his ability to recall large amounts of information came through his knack of creating memorable images and storing them in a specific place in his mind. From the memory masters of antiquity to modern educators, the secret to memorizing staggering amounts of information came from using designated spots at specific “memory palace” locations and then connecting them with information one wanted to remember through memorable actions. For example, if Robert wanted to begin a lecture on the influence of Hebraic thought on Western civilization with an anecdote from the Old Testament about Abraham and Isaac, he might picture Abraham Lincoln at his front door ramming his way through it using a giant apple.
The image was nonsensical, yet it possessed all the information he needed to recall his opening lines. The front door is where the entrance or beginning to his home, which served as one of many memory palaces, Abraham Lincoln is a memorable enough figure and the apple represents Isaac Newton, which for Robert’s purposes, would be Isaac in the biblical story. That picture may be nonsensical but it would be memorable enough to cue what he wanted to say.
The more vivid the picture, the more vivid the memory. The picture was simply a cue to jog the memory, a symbol of a given thought. By now, McDonough’s use of symbols to crystalize memories was second nature. And so his interest in studying them had a practical purpose–he used them every day to help him remember names, events, even numbers. But now, he was studying them in a way he was unfamiliar with, to piece together the story of one individual in hopes of solving a mystery. He usually worked inductively, taking the bits of information he gleaned and plastering them to a larger picture. However, he was doing the inverse: using what he knew about the larger picture in hopes of understanding the details.
Only now the information led to such little insight that it was akin to being farsighted and looking through binoculars. All he could do was continue to adjust the focus until the picture turned clear, except he had no idea how long he’d have to adjust or even what the image was, but he knew he’d instantly recognize the picture the moment it came into focus.
He flipped through Medieval Semiotics searching for words that would lead him to anything pertaining to memory cults or underground organizations. The more he searched, the more obscure the research became. Robert kept reminding himself that no secret involving more than three people was completely devoid of evidence. Harvel’s tattoo showed that the Shadow Knights had roots in ancient traditions, but how far back did they go? Perhaps they were a relatively new organization that simply adopted ancient symbols?
The problem was that unlike groups like the Masons or Yale’s Skull and Bones Society, this group seemed to work on the microlevel, with average people like Harvel who were less likely to have their lives recorded for posterity. If a politician joined a secret society, that secret will eventually come to light because he is a public figure—people will talk. But the Shadow Knights seemed to target extraordinary individuals living ordinary lives like a talented criminal who went to prison for embezzlement but in another life could’ve been a mathematician.
A man with a low profile would be hard to track and would leave behind a small historical footprint, especially several centuries ago. Someone like Harvel would have surely melted away into the annals of history, even if he’d killed someone because the details of his life would have been virtually non-existent beyond his military record. There’s no telling how many Harvels have existed throughout the course of human history.
Robert and Kristoff worked for hours, and even their considerable powers of concentration were beginning to wane. Robert was pondering the likelihood of finding evidence of men like Harvel throughout history when Kristoff interrupted his thought process. “Robert! We’ve been going about this all wrong!”
It took Robert a moment to shake out of the fog of thought he’d put himself in. “Wh-what do you mean? How is that?”
“We’re tracing people by looking at evidence of symbols, right? We don’t need to find Harvel or anyone else. We need to look for actions similar to the one he committed. If we study those, we’ll find the Knights of the Shadow. They may only be shadows, but shadow doesn’t equal non-existent.
This need to change tactics excited the two professors, it meant they were making some headway. Even a failed hypothesis brought them a step closer to the truth. But that also meant scrapping much of the work they’d done up until that point, which made them tired. Kristoff often admonished his physics students on the value of failed experiments with a quote from the legendary computer engineer John W. Backus, “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”
But like New York city, Franklin is a small but loud part of a much bigger territory. Most of Williamson County is rural and quiet. And that peace—that remoteness—is what drew Kristoff Tulowitzki to the county. He is able to be isolated both physically and financially, which allows him to disappear amid the green trees of the county’s landscape and the green backs of the county’s economy.
“Dr. Daniels you joke, but that’s exactly what they were looking for. They were obsessed with harnessing the mind’s potential. They were aware of the subconscious centuries before Freud introduced it. They understood that if you could consciously control the subconscious of a person, then that person could be your slave and more importantly, they wouldn’t know it.”
nickxsavestheday 
Fake Quote Friday: Western Conference Finals, Eastern Hemisphere Summit Edition
“Who knows with that dude. He changes directions more than Chris Paul in the lane off a high screen and roll after a set play called during a timeout.” –Kim Jong Un
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