Sure. If you have a patient with a condition that’s not understood why not ascribe it to a disorder that is also not understood? Autism occurs in males more than it does in females. So does higher order mathematical intuition. We think: What is this about? Dont know. What is at the heart of it? Dont know. All I can tell you is that I like numbers. I like their shapes and their colors and their smells and the way they taste. And I dont like to take people’s word for things. My father finally did stay with us during the last months of my mother’s illness. He had a study in the smokehouse out back. He’d cut a big square hole in the wall and put in a window so he could look out at the fields and the creek beyond. His desk was a wooden door set up on sawhorses and there was an old leather sofa there that was stuffed with horsehair. It was all dried and cracked and the horsehair was leaking out but he put a blanket over it. I went in one day and sat at his desk and looked at the problem he was working on. I already knew some math. Quite a bit, actually. I tried to puzzle out the paper but it was hard. I loved the equations. I loved the big sigma signs with the codes for the summations. I loved the narrative that was unfolding. My father came in and found me there and I thought I was in trouble and I jumped up but he took me by the hand and led me back to the chair and sat me down and went over the paper with me. His explanations were clear. Simple. But it was more than that. They were filled with metaphor. He drew a couple of Feynman diagrams and I thought they were pretty cool. They mapped the world of the subatomic particles he was attempting to explain. The collisions. The weighted routes. I understood—really understood—that the equations were not a supposition of the form whose life was confined to the symbols on the page which described them but that they were there before my eyes. In actuality. They were in the paper, the ink, in me. The universe. Their invisibility could never speak against them or their being. Their age. Which was the age of reality itself. Which was itself invisible and always had been. He never let go of my hand.

Are you all right?

Yes. I’m sorry.

Do you want another cigarette?

No. I dont even like them. Let’s stop.

All right. Can I ask you something?

Sure.

What about just some memory of your brother.

My brother.

Yes.

Oh boy. All right. The beach house in North Carolina. When I got up in the morning and went to his room he’d already gone out and I fixed a thermos of tea and went down to the beach in the dark and he was sitting there in the sand and we had tea and waited for the sun. We watched through our dark glasses as it came red and dripping up out of the sea. We’d walked on the beach the night before and there was a moon and a mock moon that rode in the rings and we talked about the paraselene and I said something to the effect that to speak of such things which are composed solely of light as problematic or perhaps as wrongly seen or even wrongly known or of questionable reality had always seemed to me something of a betrayal. He looked at me and he said betrayal? And I said yes. Things composed of light. In need of our protection. Then in the morning we sat in the sand and drank our tea and watched the sun come up.