Chapter 220

Translator: Dreamscribe

The story was over.

Ezra took a deep breath and gathered his scattered composure. He could not let a patient see him rattled.

He was a man who had prided himself on having met tens of thousands of patients, on having looked into the darkest abyss of the human mind. And yet the account this young man laid out so matter-of-factly denied, head-on, the very foundations of the discipline he had spent his life building.

He looked at Seo-ha and asked.

"Mr. Yu, there is a historical figure who went through an experience remarkably similar to your own case. Do you happen to know who?"

"I did think our situations were alike when I read John Nash's biography."

Ezra nodded.

The real-life model for the film A Beautiful Mind, and a genius mathematician who won the Nobel Prize for Game Theory. He had suffered terribly from schizophrenia for decades. He was also the single most representative case of the relationship between mathematical talent and mental illness.

"His life can be summed up as a life-and-death struggle with the voice inside him. He received a formal diagnosis at thirty, but you of all people would understand, wouldn't you? Clever people almost never go to hospitals. And for psychiatric problems, even less so."

Seo-ha's face reddened.

He had never once thought of going to a hospital either.

"I believe he was experiencing auditory hallucinations from his teens, or his early twenties at the latest. In men it typically begins around the age of fifteen and peaks around twenty-five."

Seo-ha measured his own age and symptoms against that. He concluded that the statistics matched to a fair degree.

"And that period."

For a moment the room fell silent.

He looked Seo-ha in the eye and continued slowly.

"was John Nash's academic prime."

"Ah...."

"Establishing the equilibrium concept in Game Theory, producing groundbreaking results in Manifold Theory, all of it happened then. He received the Nobel at sixty-six, but that was a belated tribute to what he had already accomplished in his twenties. More than thirty years lie in between. Nobody talks about that."

Seo-ha nodded with a gloomy expression.

"That would have been the time he needed to separate reality from the auditory hallucinations."

"Precisely. He burned through decades convincing himself that he could not hear anything. But you are different."

Clack.

Ezra took off his glasses and set them on the table. A strange hunger showed in his eyes.

"From a psychiatric standpoint, the status you have granted Ducky is not a hallucination. You turned it into an independent self and offloaded onto it the domain that places the heaviest load on the mind. After that, the main body called Yu Seo-ha was free to concentrate on logic and social function. A chillingly efficient allocation. Was it a calculated choice?"

Seo-ha shook his head.

"I just wanted to keep doing the math I love."

He gazed at Seo-ha with deep, quiet eyes.

The primes of the geniuses who left their names in history are short.

Newton, Einstein, Gödel, and John Nash and Alan Turing as well. Every one of them produced their life's work in their twenties.

This is a subject widely studied in modern medicine, and the hypothesis that it happens because brain function has not yet fully hardened by the early twenties is gaining considerable traction.

'How long will this young man's prime last?'

The answer was simple.

For as long as the circuits in his brain responsible for creative thought remained unbroken.

"But keep this in mind. The more complex a role Ducky takes on, the greater the effect that any change in that self will have on you. And if the relationship between the two of you should break down, no one can predict what the result would be."

Whoosh-

A cold predawn wind burrowed into his collar.

Seo-ha walked toward the hospital, hunched tight against it. Seoul's gaudy neon signs glittered in the rainwater pooled on the ground.

"All my questions have been answered."

The reason he had gone to see Ezra.

His relationship with Ducky was changing. The contract he had made with him would not last forever either. Seo-ha had wanted to know in advance the worst that might come for him. And what he would have to do when it did.

Even after Seo-ha left, Ezra could not rise from his chair for a long while.

It was because the conversation with him had left an echo behind.

"Mr. Yu, let me ask one thing before you go. What is it that you fear most? Is it that the genius inside you might vanish, as it did with John Nash?"

Ezra was inwardly certain.

The sense of loss in falling to an ordinary human being, the ear that once heard the voice of God going deaf, the eye that once saw the principles of the universe going dim. How could any person bear such a tragedy?

He had paused with his hand on the doorknob, then slowly turned his head to look at Ezra.

"No, Professor. None of that frightens me at all."

"Then what does?"

"Something going wrong with my head and my losing my memories. I'm afraid that because of it I might end up hurting the people who matter to me."

"Even if that astonishing intuition of yours disappeared?"

Seo-ha shook his head with a faint smile.

"I don't think that would be a reason for me to quit mathematics. Math isn't the exclusive property of geniuses. The countless scholars who walked this road before me are proof of that. Surely I'm nothing more than one of them. And...."

"There's more?"

Seo-ha swallowed the words that had almost come out.

"No."

The line, 'It's only a matter of time; with logic alone a person can reach the same result anyway', might all too easily have sounded arrogant.

Ezra stared at the closed door for a long while.

Like every other part of our bodies, the brain is a consumable that loses function as it ages. This is a fact already proven medically.

'There were exceptions, though.'

There are rare cases of geniuses who sustained their prime for a long time.

Euler and Gauss.

Researchers had long classified the two of them as anomalies and buried them deep in the footnotes.

'Now there will be fewer distractions.'

That was the first thing Euler said upon being told he would lose his sight forever.

And in the seventeen years between going blind and dying, he poured out half of all the papers he wrote in his lifetime.

How on earth?

Psychology has a concept that can explain it.

Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory.

He devoted his entire life to answering the question, 'When is a person happiest?'

In Flow Theory he holds that the moment a human being is happiest is when his own ability and the difficulty of the task align perfectly and complete immersion is achieved.

Scientific measurements support the claim that the ecstasy this brings does not wear the brain down. At a guess, might those two great mathematicians have lived their whole lives in this state?

A realm like a blessing from God, reachable only when mathematical talent of a once-in-a-century order is joined by the right innate temperament.

In the look on Seo-ha's face as he asked what the big deal was about losing his talent, Ezra had seen a third exception.

Of course, genius on the order of Newton or Ramanujan comes with psychiatric side effects.

That is probably also why the achievements of Gauss and Euler cluster around the systematic consolidation of their fields rather than the creation of new concepts.

But Seo-ha is different.

Creativity and durability, both of the highest order. He might be the first mathematician in history to possess both.

"Perhaps his whole life will be his prime."

He laughed in a low voice.

* * *

"Ugh! I want to be discharged."

After lying in a hospital bed all day, what he was really thinking had slipped out before he knew it.

"Oppa, is it really that bad?"

Seo-eun stopped peeling the apple and looked at Seo-ha with worried eyes.

On the plate sat an apple, peeled so crookedly and so thickly that it had shrunk to half its size.

"No, it's not!"

Seo-ha sat up quickly and speared a piece of apple with his fork.

"There's nothing wrong with me, but they keep telling me to lie here. That's all it is."

"Where did you go last night?"

Seo-ha's hand faltered for a moment.

Seo-eun was clearly worrying about him far too much. It weighed on him that she wasn't even going to school, staying here in the room instead.

"I had something to take care of. Anyway, doesn't the IMO training camp start soon?"

"That? I'm not going."

"Huh?"

"Oppa's sick. Where would I go?"

Seo-eun went on peeling the apple as though it were nothing. Seo-ha let out a small sigh.

"It's nothing serious. A little rest and I'll be fine. Healthy people collapse from overwork or anemia all the time."

"That's not right, though."

Seo-eun continued without pausing the knife.

"Anemic syncope has prodromal symptoms. Dizziness, nausea, ringing in the ears. Oppa didn't have any of those."

Seo-ha's eyes went round.

"How do you know that?"

"That."

Seo-eun gestured toward the corner with her eyes.

A single book lay on the visitor's chair. It was the Medical Encyclopedia he had bought as a child.

"I read the whole thing in here. Right now even the doctors can't find the cause, can they? So you should wait quietly until the detailed test results come back."

Seo-ha's eyes darted about. There wasn't a single thing wrong with what she'd said.

"All right. I will."

Seo-eun's face brightened. Watching her, Seo-ha sank into thought.

'How can I set her mind at ease?'

Her saying she'd give up the IMO was no joke. Seo-eun took after him in the oddest ways, and her stubbornness was nothing ordinary.

Talking her out of it seemed unlikely to work; better to show her directly.

"Seo-eun, shall we go out for a bit?"

"Eh? All of a sudden?"

She seemed startled, but she didn't look the least bit unwilling.

Now that he thought about it, he had barely spent any time with his sister lately. The doctor made a pained face at a request to go out two days in a row, but the two of them slipped out of the hospital without trouble.

"So this is Daehak-ro?"

"Yeah."

As it happened, there was plenty to see nearby.

The smell of tteokbokki from the roadside stalls, an amateur singer busking on the street, the lively laughter of the crowds. Just walking through it made him happy.

They each bought a corn dog and strolled slowly down the street.

It was a good time.

They had made a full loop of Daehak-ro and were about to head back to the hospital when Seo-eun's gaze fixed on the display window of a stationery shop.

"It's a fountain pen."

"Yeah, the same one oppa uses."

Jingle.

Seo-ha went inside and placed in her arms a fountain pen identical to his own except for the color.

"Do you like it?"

"Ehehe!"

Whatever it was that pleased her so much, Seo-eun hugged the box and grinned from ear to ear.

Away from the stifling hospital room, his head cleared.

Creak.

Like a shut-off tap being opened, his thinking began to turn furiously.

Seo-ha stopped walking and stood blankly in the middle of the street. Seo-eun looked back at him, puzzled.

'Something's different?'

Intricate geometric structures overlaid themselves transparently onto the scene in front of him. It felt as though he could convert the movements of the people into vector values. Even the light of the streetlamps looked like the graph of a wave equation.

This was something he had only ever been able to do while Ducky was with him.

Stage 8 of the hypothesis suddenly came to mind.

Back then, merely seeing the essence of the problem had felt as though it would burn his head out. But now that his brain could function fully, the gears of his thought meshed and turned without the slightest friction.

"Oppa?"

'Oops!'

Seo-ha hurried back to reality and smiled at his sister.

It was the very thing he had felt on the day the contract with Ducky was completed. That sense of release, which had until now been only a vague impression, Seo-ha finally understood with his whole body.

Was it because this time had been enjoyable?

The feeling of his nerves loosening gently and settling back into place.

'I can break through Stage 8.'

"Let's go back to the hospital room."

"Okay!"

Seo-eun reached out quietly and took her oppa's hand.

*****

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