Mangoes

Chapter 8

The next morning, I convince Mason to go to the urgent care for their nose. They say they’re fine going alone. I figure they’re right, and I leave them to it. I drive to Dad’s place, only thirty minutes from Mason’s, but in the direction opposite of Mom’s. I haven’t seen Dad since visitation in the hospital. I always feel bad for not stopping by more often. I hope my physical absence is compensated for by our frequent texting. He sends me articles about math, memes he makes of his cat, family photos he comes across on his hard drives. He must have an email alert for the articles, since he usually finds the interesting ones before I do. He’s a mechanical engineer, made the switch from accounting just before I was born. He and Mom fought about it, I hear. He only worked one year as an accountant before enrolling in an engineering program. They had a new mortgage and a baby on the way, and barely one income.

Since the divorce, I’ve had to divvy up these bits of conflict from our lives into different categories: ones in which Mom was in the wrong, ones in which Dad was, ones where they both fucked up, ones that were just misunderstandings. As I spent more time with my parents individually, I learned of more and more of these vignettes. Mom always found a way to make subtle digs at Dad, though I told her this bothered me. She’s toned it down, but occasionally she makes a comment here or there. Dad never had an unkind word about her. Whether this is because he genuinely has nothing negative to say or because he doesn’t want to say it in front of me, I don’t know. In the year after the divorce was finalized, I preoccupied myself with attempting to understand what went wrong, who was more responsible for the marriage’s end. I came up with nothing. No matter how I looked at the situation, I couldn’t see either at fault. Or maybe both were. It was an amicable split, initiated rather abruptly by Mom. They hadn’t fought outright in the years before the breakup, but somehow I felt it had always been coming, set into motion by events long before my birth. I’ve given up trying to understand it. Human relationships defy traditional analysis.

I ascend the stairs to Dad’s apartment. The complex’s usual smell of cigarettes swims in my lungs. I’m reminded of Dad whenever I smell them, though he never touches the things. I knock once, then unlock his door with my spare key. His cat is there to greet me. She rubs against my legs as I step inside and kick off my shoes. Dad’s in his office, zooming in and out of some blueprint I don’t recognize. Must be a new project.

“Hey,” I say. He yelps in surprise. “Sorry.”

I’m larger than my dad. I remember they feeling I had the day a doctor measured my height to show that I was taller than my own father. A part of me felt pride. Another part, one I did not interrogate for a number of years, felt a crushing weight. I still hate my height.

Dad and I talk for a bit. I tell him about the game show, neglecting to mention the application I sent in. He mentions an a headline he’s seen about Harvard economists studying the show. He sends me the article and I open it on my phone. I skim it, but don’t retain much. Something about game theory, a field of mathematics I’ve never seriously delved into. From a distance it always seemed so squishy. I tell him about the guy in the band shirt, and he suggests I take a self defense class. We watch an old movie about a man in rural Ireland who runs the only bookstore in his town. I make popcorn for both of us. Dad pauses the movie whenever a new actor comes on screen to tell me about their career, or look them up if he doesn’t recognize them. He knows most of them off the top of his head. When the movie ends, we sit through the credits, reels of actors flubbing their lines and boom mics in frame. Dad returns to work at his computer.

“What’s this?” I ask. I pull a folding chair next to his desk.

“A schematic for an electric car battery cooling plate. Here, check this out.” He tabs over to another screen that displays a flowchart webbed across a pale background. Arrows tangle into impossible knots and text boxes display notes. The boxes are different hues, indicating some color coding scheme not readily apparent to me. It reminds me of my notes on HeadScratcher. “This is my workflow,” he says with a subdued grin.

I take the mouse from his hand and click through the boxes. One after another, looping from quality control paths to different files in the main project, tactics to deal with difficult coworkers. “How long have you spent on this?” I ask. I can’t see the internal logic of the chart. I wonder if this is how his brain looks.

“More than on the project itself. If I keep myself looking busy, I can log more hours without doing anything substantial.

Dad hates the company he works for. He sends me opinion pieces he finds about the CEO, screeds decrying the executive’s fascistic rule over the company and his public persona as a womanizing philanthropist. I can’t stand the guy either, but I never read the articles. They’re too depressing. Dad got the job through a friend at the company years ago, before electric vehicles became widespread. He saw the meteoric rise of the CEO from inside the company. He’s told me a lot about the guy, stuff that’s not public knowledge. He never mentioned signing an NDA, but I’m sure he doesn’t want me to repeat the gossip.

That night, I sleep on the couch, reading the article about the economists studying HeadScratcher. They disagree about the rules of the game, whether there are rules at all. One argues that the transactions occur purely for dramatic effect, a massive win right before a commercial break, a hefty reward following a difficult trivia question. The ones who actually bothered to analyze the game disagree with each other even more fiercely. One believes that the transaction amounts are based on random atmospheric noise from weather monitoring equipment above the show’s studio in Los Angeles. How they reached this conclusion, I have no idea. The article ends with a quote from another researcher who believes the show is supposed to be a metaphor, a microcosm of the larger economy, demonstrating how fluctuations in prices and wages lead to a disordered economic system. I don’t buy this. I am certain that there are rules to this game that have yet to be understood. If the best economists in the world couldn’t figure it out, maybe a fresh set of eyes, untainted by that dismal science, might. I send Dad a text, telling him about my application to the show. I doubt he’s awake.

***

The next morning, I send a reply to the email from HeadScratcher. I schedule an interview for that afternoon. I don’t have my laptop with me, so I decide to go. Dad hugs me goodbye and tells me he loves me. He hands me a sheet of printer paper with another flowchart on it. This one is simpler, only a few boxes, neater arrows. It’s a guide for the interview. There are boxes for each question the interviewer could ask and pre-made answers for me. It’s a touching gesture.

“I know you get nervous with this sort of thing,” Dad says.

I thank him and go, carefully folding the sheet into my jacket pocket. The ride back to Mom’s place is quick. The rain has cleared up and the skies are blue for the first time in what feels like months. I get home right before the video call, rushing by Mom on the way to my room and opening my laptop. I check my appearance in the laptop camera and open the conference software. I receive the call at the exact scheduled time, not a moment sooner or later. A ringtone chimes in my headphones and I see a woman in her thirties on the screen. She has long black hair and a nose ring.

“Hi, you must be Bee,” she says with a smile. I nod. “Well, this is going to be the first in a series of interviews. So, what made you want to be on the show?”

There’s a box on Dad’s flowchart for this question. I glance down at it, hopefully quick enough that the woman on the screen doesn’t notice. An arrow branches the box and leads to two options: “Respond with enthusiasm about the show,” and “Express desire to share your research.”

“I find the show fascinating. I want to figure out the rules for myself,” I say. I worry this isn’t enough, so I continue. “I’m a mathematician, so I really like discovering the rules to a system.”

“Right, I see here that you’re actually a grad student. We typically only accept applicants who are established in your field. What do you believe you can bring to the show that someone with more experience can’t?”

There’s no box for this. I scan the page again. The closest one would be “Rejection,” leading into “Thank for their time.”

We sit in uncomfortable silence for a moment. “Well,” I say. “I think a relative outsider could bring a lot of interesting perspective. I’ve actually been trying to figure out the show from home, but there’s only so much I can do without trying it for myself. I glance at my show notes, open in a binder next to me. I consider showing them to her.

The interview continues for another few minutes. I learn that the black haired woman’s name is Sabrina. She asks about my work in graph theory. I give her a synopsis of Dijkstra’s algorithm. I don’t know whether she understands it. Nobody can be an expert in every field. I hope I sound smart.

Sabrina ends the call with a wave goodbye and says she’ll get back to me tomorrow with the result. I close my laptop, exhausted, but satisfied.

That night, Mom and I bake peanut butter cookies. We roll the dough between our palms, coating them in granulated sugar and pressing the tops in with a fork in an X shape. We play Scrabble while the cookies are in the oven. The board has the word “ASS” three times. When the oven timer goes off, I burn my tongue on the molten dough.

I get a call from Mason at 11 pm.

“Aunt Dee died.”

I tell Mom. She cries. She and Dee were friends, becoming close during our junior year, after the election. They organized a women’s book club together. Mom and Dee bonded over art, too. They painted together on occasion. Mom has one of Dee’s paintings up on her wall, an iridescent dragonfly. Mom and I drive to Mason’s house that night, in silence. The street lights smear into golden halos, a waning crescent high above us. My heart beats in my eyes, sinuses blocked from the crying. The hum of tires against the pavement lulls me into a trance. I put my hand into my pocket and hold the mango seed. I pull it out, staring at the thing, damp and warm in its ziplock home. The tendril has grown into a root, purplish and delicate, worming its way through the paper towel in search of some sustenance I cannot yet provide it.