He didnt actually say that.

No. But it worried him. He thought that people hallucinated more than they cared to admit. It didnt necessarily mean that you were nuts. Especially if you were twelve and already nuts by definition. But it worried him anyway and later on he thought that my worldview might be infecting my mathematics. Grothendieck says somewhere that twentieth century mathematics has begun to lose its moral compass. Bobby thought that sort of talk was goofy but when I asked him if he actually knew what Grothendieck meant he had to admit that he didnt. By the time Grothendieck left IHES he was already pretty strange and Bobby thought that he might have had a sort of malign influence on me—which wasnt true—and he also told me that I should rethink submitting my thesis.

He read your thesis.

He read three different drafts of it, actually.

Did he understand it?

Pretty much. He understood what was wrong with it.

And that was?

That nobody could understand it.

You’re not serious.

What was wrong with it was that while it proved three problems in topos theory it then set about dismantling the mechanism of the proofs. Not to show that these particular proofs were wrong but that any such proofs ignored their own case. Addressing along the way the more commonly argued claims of mathematical reality.

Mathematics had become a questionable enterprise for you.

I thought about David Bohm. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics—largely because Einstein had half convinced him that the theory was faulty. He wanted to get his thoughts down on paper. By the time he’d finished the book he didnt believe in the theory.

Writing your thesis made a skeptic of you.

It didnt help.

Was your brother concerned about your state of mind?

Did he think I was crazy?

All right.

In the vernacular or clinically nuts?

Clinically.

I dont think so. But it could be that the more he thought about it the more concerned he became that maybe I wasnt.

That the news could be worse?

Yes.

Maybe as in what if she is right.

I dont know. Bobby wasnt happy about any of this. I’d stopped talking about it. But by then he’d given up all pretense of an interest in the verity of life on the other side of the glass and he was only interested in how to get rid of it. And by then I wasnt all that sure that I wanted to. Get rid of it.

Why.

Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasnt going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.

Did you tell your brother that?

Yes. I did.