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The screen above me is blue, with an error message in the center.
No signal.
There’s a rustle of activity offstage and the technician comes forward.
“What’s going on?” he whispers. But I can barely breathe as I scan the faces looking for Ryan, except everything looks distorted, like I’m looking through thick, swirly glass. I hear murmuring.
“Let me help,” the technician whispers. He picks up the lead and starts to plug the laptop back in.
“No!” I snatch it from him. “Just leave it,” I hiss. It’s like I’m in a nightmare; I’m in a scene from a horror movie. I’m almost surprised not to have pig’s blood drop on top of my head.
In the front row the dean looks like he’s having an apoplexy. The technician looks around, confused.
“I can fix it,” he says quietly.
“I don’t want you to,” I reply, just as quietly. He looks up at the screen. By now I’m hyperventilating. “I’ll keep going, leave it. Please go. Please.”
He retreats offstage. Someone backstage asks him something and he opens his hands in anothing-I-can-do gesture. I turn back to the audience. My gaze lands on Mila: she’s waiting, like everyone else, a small smile on her lips.
“When Alex first pointed out the connection between…” I stop abruptly. Did I just say Alex’s name? It’s the photo, it’s thrown me. I can’t concentrate. The word pulses in my brain.Whore.The dean looks puzzled. They all do.
I close my eyes, picture my children.Pretend they’re here, in the audience.
“You know what?” Miraculously, it works. “I don’t need slides. I don’t need prompts either. Because this solution doesn’t need a lecture. This solution, it’s a revelation. It’s a story. And I’m going to tell it to you.”
I take a breath. I’ve got them again, my audience. I can tell. I feel like I’ve been walking a tightrope and I lost my balance but I didn’t fall. Now I am pumping with adrenaline and the other side is so close, I can almost touch it.
“I also want to begin this, um, second part of my talk by dedicating it to Alex Brooks. Alex was a talented student at Locke Weidman and he was an inspiration to many, myself included.” I start to pace the length of the stage. “I’d like to say the solution came to me in an Archimedes-like moment, but unfortunately my flash of revelation was not so much a moment as an eternity. You could say it snuck up on me over a decade or two. My work on prime numbers began with my mother, herself a scientist of some note…”
I get there in the end, one thought lurching into the next, and when the audience claps at the end they sound like they’re on my side.
I get through the official prize-giving ceremony, the refreshments in the dean’s office, the questions, the compliments, everyone politely ignoring my moment of panic. On the way out, I manage to catch the technician, whose name, I learn, is Steve, and I apologize to him. “I don’t want your boss to think it had anything to do with you,” I say. “I’ll call tomorrow and explain.”
“Thank you, I’d appreciate that,” he says.
Then I’m in my car, feeling ill, reliving the moment when I received the text. I feel betrayed, even though Ryan is a stranger to me. He promised he’d deleted it. He even pretended to do it in front of me.
I pull out my cell, my stomach clenched in knots, and check the texts again. It’s from aprivate number.
I put the cell away and open the laptop and load up PowerPoint to view my presentation. I scan through the slides, then I do it again.
There’s no photo of me in them, naked or otherwise. I sit back against the seat and start to cry. I was so sure Ryan had found a way to insert that photo so that it would come up. Which makes no sense because it’s my laptop, and I went through my entire presentation a number of times this morning. But then again, he’s some kind of IT professional, isn’t he? Who knows what tools he has at his disposal. And what else could the text have meant?Enjoy your next slide. I know I will!Did he simply want to throw me? Probably, and it worked.
I don’t even understand what Ryan wants from me, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he wants to hurt me. Why? Because I rejected him? Did he feel humiliated by me? I sit up. I wonder if he knows about the prize? Then a thought occurs to me: does he want a piece of it? Maybe he read about it on our website. Is that what this little exercise back there was all about? A taste of what he is capable of?
All this, because he’s after my prize money?
Twenty-Six
June and I had arranged to go to an early movie after work. It was me who suggested we go this evening because, at the time, I thought it would be a nice way to unwind after the Forrester lecture. Right now, the wordunwindmakes me want to punch someone, but I rally. I text her and say I’ll meet her outside. And anyway, I don’t want to go home. I can’t bear the thought of Luis asking me how it went. The moment when I sawthattext, thinking the photo was about to be projected on the screen for the viewing pleasure of the country’s foremost scientists, is still burnt into my brain, making me smolder with humiliation.
On the way to the cinema June asks me about fifty times if I’m okay, and every time I say I’m fine.
“Is it because of your mother, that you’re upset?”
“What about my mother?”
“That she didn’t come to your talk? I assume she didn’t come, am I right?”
