An Abundance of Katherines (5 page)

“I’m bleeding, aren’t I?” Colin asked.

“Like a stuck pig,” she said. “Don’t move.” She turned to Hassan and said, “Give me your T-shirt,” and Hassan promptly said no, which Colin fig u red had something to do with Hassan’s man-boobs. “We need to apply pressure,” Lindsey explained to Hassan, and then Hassan calmly said no again, and then Lindsey said, “Jesus Christ—fine,” and took off her shirt.

Colin squinted through his glassesless fuzziness but couldn’t see much. “We should probably save this for the second date,” Colin said.

“Right, perv,” she responded, but he could hear her smiling. As she wiped at his forehead and cheek softly with the T-shirt, then pressed hard on a tender spot above his right eyebrow, she kept talking. “Some friend you’ve got, by the way. Stop moving your neck. The two concerns we’ve got here are some kind of vertebral injury or a subdural hematoma. I mean, slight-slight-slight chances, but you’ve gotta be cautious, ’cause the nearest hospital’s an hour away.” He closed his eyes and tried not to wince as she pressed hard against the cut. Lindsey told Hassan, “Apply pressure with the shirt here. I’ll be back in eight minutes.”

“We should call a doctor or something,” Hassan said.

“I’m a paramedic,” Lindsey answered as she turned away.

“How the hell old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen. Okay. Fine. A paramedic
in training
. Eight minutes. I swear.” She ran off. It was not the way Curve smelled that Colin liked—not exactly. It was the way the air smelled just as Lindsey began to jog away from him. The smell the perfume left behind. There’s not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word:
sillage
. What Colin liked about Curve was not its smell on the skin but its
sillage
, the fruity sweet smell of its leaving.

 
Hassan sat down beside him in the tall grass, pushing hard at the cut. “Sorry I wouldn’t take off my shirt.”

“Man-boobs?” asked Colin.

“Yeah, well. I just feel like I should know a girl a little before I trot out the man-tits. Where are your glasses?”

“I was just asking myself that very question when the girl took her shirt off,” Colin said.

“So you couldn’t see her?”

“I couldn’t see her. Just that her bra was purple.”

“Was it ever,” Hassan replied.

And Colin thought of K-19 sitting over him on his bed wearing her purple bra as she dumped him. And he thought of Katherine XIV, who wore a black bra and also a black everything else. And he thought of Katherine XII, the first who wore a bra, and all the Katherines whose bras he’d seen (four, unless you count straps, in which case seven). People thought he was a glutton for punishment, that he liked getting dumped. But it wasn’t like that. He could just never see anything coming, and as he lay on the solid, uneven ground with Hassan pressing too hard on his forehead, Colin Singleton’s distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

“I found ’em,” Hassan said, and awkwardly tried to place the glasses on Colin’s face. But it’s hard to put glasses on someone else’s head, and finally Colin reached up and nudged them up the bridge of his own nose, and he could see.

“Eureka,”
he said softly.

Katherine XIX: The End (of the End)

She dumped him on the eighth day of the twelfth month, just twenty-two days shy of their one-year anniversary. They’d both graduated that morning, although from different schools, so Colin’s and Katherine’s parents, who were old friends, took them out to a celebratory lunch. But that evening was for them alone. Colin prepared by shaving and wearing that Wild Rain deodorant she liked so much that she’d nestle up against his chest to catch its scent.

He’d picked her up in Satan’s Hearse and they drove south down Lakeshore Drive, the windows down so they could hear, over the rumble of the engine, the waves of Lake Michigan beating against the rocky shore. Before them, the skyline towered. Colin had always loved Chicago’s skyline. Although he was not a religious person, seeing the skyline made him feel what is called in Latin the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans
—that stomach-flipping mix of awestruck fear and entrancing fascination.

They drove downtown, winding through the soaring buildings of Chicago’s Loop, and they were already late, because Katherine was always late to everything, and so after ten minutes spent searching for a parking meter, Colin paid eighteen dollars for a garage spot, which annoyed Katherine.

“I’m just saying we could have found a spot on the street,” she said as she pressed the elevator button in the parking garage.

“Well, I’ve got the money. And we’re late.”

“You shouldn’t spend money you don’t need to spend.”

“I’m about to spend fifty bucks on sushi,” he answered. “For
you
.” The doors opened. Exasperated, he leaned against the wood paneling of the elevator and sighed. They hardly spoke until they were inside the restaurant, seated in a tiny table near the bathroom.

“To graduating, and to a wonderful dinner,” she said, raising her glass of Coke.

“To the end of life as we’ve known it,” Colin replied, and they clinked glasses.

“Jesus, Colin, it’s not the end of the world.”

“It’s the end of
a
world,” he pointed out.

“Worried you won’t be the smartest boy at Northwestern?” She smiled and then sighed. He felt a sudden twinge in his gut—in retrospect, it was the first hint that some piece of him might soon go missing.

“Why are you sighing?” he asked.

The waitress came then, interrupting with a rectangular plate of California
maki
and smoked salmon
negiri
. Katherine pulled apart her chopsticks, and Colin grabbed his fork. He knew a little conversational Japanese, but chopsticks eluded him.

“Why did you sigh?” he asked again.

“Jesus, no reason.”

“No, just tell me why,” he said.

“You’re just—you spend all your time worrying about losing your edge or getting dumped or whatever and you’re never for a second grateful. Yo u ’ re the valedictorian. You’re going to a great school next year, for free. So maybe you’re not a child prodigy. That’s
good
. At least you’re not a
child
anymore. Or, you’re not supposed to be, anyway.”

Colin chewed. He liked the seaweed wrapped around the sushi roll: how tough it was to chew, the subtleness of the ocean water. “You don’t understand,” he said.

Katherine placed her chopsticks against the saucer containing her soy sauce and stared at him with something beyond frustration. “Why do you always have to say that?”

“It’s true,” he said simply, and she
didn’t
understand. She was still beautiful, still funny, still adept with chopsticks. Prodigy was what Colin had, the way language has words.

With all the nasty back-and-forth, Colin fought the urge to ask Katherine whether she still loved him, because the only thing she hated more than his saying she didn’t understand was his asking whether she still loved him. He fought the urge and fought it and fought it. For seven seconds.

“Do you still love me?”

“Oh my God, Colin. Please. We graduated. We’re happy. Celebrate!”

“What, are you afraid to say it?”

“I love you.”

She would never—not ever—tell him those words in that order ever again.

“Can sushi be anagrammed?” she asked.

“Uh, sis,” he answered immediately.

“Sis is three letters; sushi is five,” she said.

“No. ‘Uh, sis.’ The uh and the sis. There are others, but they don’t make grammatical sense.”

She smiled. “Do you ever get tired of me asking?”

“No. No. I never get tired of anything you do,” he said, and then he wanted to say he was sorry, but just that sometimes he felt un-understandable and sometimes he worried when they bickered and she went a while without saying she loved him, but he restrained himself. “Anyway, I like that sushi becomes ‘uh, sis.’ Imagine a situation.”

“Imagine a situation” was a game she’d invented where Colin found the anagrams and then Katherine imagined an anagrammatic situation.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. So a guy goes out fishing on the pier, and he catches a carp, and of course it’s all riddled with pesticides and sewage and all the nasty Lake Michigan shit, but he takes it home anyway because he figures if you fry a carp long enough, it won’t matter. He cleans it, fillets it, and then the phone rings, so he leaves it on the kitchen counter. He talks on the phone for a bit, and then he comes back into the kitchen and sees that his little sister has a big hunk of raw Lake Michigan carp in her hand, and she’s chewing, and she looks up at her brother and says, “Sushi!” And he says, “Uh, sis . . .”

They laughed. He had never loved her so much as he did then.

 
Later, after they tiptoed into the apartment and Colin walked upstairs to tell his mom he was home, leaving out the possibly relevant information that he wasn’t alone, and after they’d climbed into bed downstairs, and after she pulled off his shirt and he hers, and after they kissed until his lips were numb except for tingling, she said, “Do you really feel sad about graduating?”

“I don’t know. If I’d done it differently—if I’d gone to college at ten or whatever—there’s no way of knowing if my life would be better. We probably wouldn’t be together. I wouldn’t have known Hassan. And a lot of prodigies who push and push and push and end up even more fugged up than me. But a few of them end up like John Locke
²⁰
or Mozart or whatever. And my chances at Mozartdom are done.”

“Col, you’re
seventeen
.” She sighed again. She sighed a lot, but nothing could be wrong, because it felt so good to have her nestled up against him, her head on his shoulder, his hand brushing the soft blond hair from her face. He looked down and could see the strap of her purple bra.

“It’s the tortoise and the hare, though, K.
¹⁹
I learn faster than other people, but they keep learning. I’ve slowed down, and now they’re coming. I know I’m seventeen. But I’m past my prime.” She laughed. “Seriously. There are studies about this shit. Prodigies tend to hit their peak at, like twelve or thirteen. What have I done? I won a fugging game show a year ago? That’s my indelible mark on human history?”

She sat up, looking down at him. He thought of her other sighs, the better and different ones of his body moving against hers. For a long time she stared at him, and then she bit her lower lip and said, “Colin, maybe the problem is us.”

“Oh. Shit,” he said. And so it began.

The end occurred mostly in her whispers and his silence—because he couldn’t whisper and they didn’t want to wake Colin’s parents. They succeeded in staying quiet, in part because it felt like the air had been shocked out of him. Paradoxically, he felt as if his getting dumped was the only thing happening on the entire dark and silent planet, and also as if it weren’t happening at all. He felt himself drifting away from the one-sided whispered conversation, wondering if maybe everything big and heartbreaking and incomprehensible is a paradox.

He was a dying man staring down on the surgeons trying to save him. With an almost comfortable distance from the thing itself as it really was, Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie. This, right here, was the true abdominal snowman: it felt like something freezing in his stomach.

“I love you so much and I just want you to love me like I love you,” he said as softly as he could.

“You don’t need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but ‘I love you.’” And it felt like being stoned and sticked from the inside, a fluttering and then a sharp pain in his lower rib cage, and then he felt for the first time that a piece of his gut had been wrenched out of him.

She tried to get out as quickly and painlessly as possible, but after she begged curfew, he began to cry. She held his head against her collarbone. And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn’t want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.

But she left anyway, and he was alone in his room, searching out anagrams for
mymissingpiece
in a vain attempt to fall asleep.

six

It alWays happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say,
“Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,”
and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.

He felt the thrill of it surge through him, his eyes blinking fast as he fought to remember the idea in its completeness. Lying there on his back in the sticky, thick air, the Eureka moment felt like a thousand orgasms all at once, except not as messy.

“Eureka?” Hassan asked, the excitement evident in his voice. He’d been waiting for it, too.

“I need to write this down,” Colin said. He sat up. His head hurt like hell, but he reached into his pocket and pulled out the little notebook he kept at all times, and a #2 pencil, which was broken in the middle from his fall, but still wrote okay. He sketched:

Where x = time, and y = happiness, y = 0 beginning of relationship and breakup, y negative = breakup by m, and y positive = breakup by f: my relationship with K-19.

He was still sketching when he heard Lindsey Lee Wells coming and opened his eyes to see her wearing a fresh T-shirt (it read GUTSHOT!) and toting a first-aid box with an honest-to-God red cross on it.

She knelt beside him and pulled the T-shirt off his head slowly, and then she said, “This is going to sting,” and dug into the cut with a long Q-tip soaked in what seemed to be cayenne pepper sauce.

“FUG!” shouted Colin, wincing, and he looked up and saw her round, brown eyes blinking away sweat as she worked.

“I know. I’m sorry. Okay, done. You don’t need stitches, but you’re going to have a little scar, I bet. Is that okay?”

“What’s another scar?” he said absentmindedly as she pulled a wide gauze bandage taut against his forehead. “I feel like someone punched me in the brain.”

“ Possible concussion,” Lindsey noted. “What day is it? Where are you?”

“It’s Tuesday, and I’m in Tennessee.”

“Who was the junior senator from New Hampshire in 1873?” asked Hassan.

“Bainbridge Wadleigh,” answered Colin. “I don’t think I have a concussion.”

“Is that for real?” asked Lindsey. “I mean, did you really know that?” Colin nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I know all the senators. Also, that’s an easy one to remember—because I always think about how much your parents have to fugging hate you to name you Bainbridge Wadleigh.”

“Seriously,” said Hassan. “I mean, you’ve already got the last name Wadleigh. That’s a bad sitch, just to be a Wadleigh. But then you take that Wadleigh and you raise it to the power of Bainbridge—no wonder the poor bastard never became president.”

Lindsey added, “Well but then again, a guy named Millard Fillmore became president. No loving mother would ever make a Fillmore a Millard, either.” She fell into conversation with them so quickly and so naturally that Colin was already revising his
Celebrity Living
theorem. He’d always thought people in Nowhere, Tennessee, would be, well,
d umber
than Lindsey Lee Wells.

Hassan sat down next to Colin and grabbed the notebook from him. He held it above his head to block the sun, which had darted out from behind a cloud to further bake the cracked orange dirt.

Hassan only glanced at the paper before saying, “You just got me all riled up and your big revelation is that you like getting dumped? Shit, Colin, I could have told you that. In fact, I have.”

“Love is graphable!” Colin said defensively.

“Wait.” Hassan looked down at the paper again, and then back to Colin. “Universally? You’re claiming this will work for anyone?”

“Right. Because relationships are so predictable, right? Well, I’m finding a way to predict them. Take any two people, and even if they’ve never met each other, the formula will show who’s going to break up with whom if they ever date, and approximately how long the relationship will last.”

“Impossible,” Hassan said.

“No, it’s not, because you can see into the future if you have a basic understanding of how people are likely to act.”

Hassan’s long and slow exhalation broke into a whisper. “Yeah. Okay. That’s interesting.” Hassan could give Colin no higher compliment.

Lindsey Lee Wells reached down and grabbed the notebook from Hassan. She read it slowly. Finally, she said, “What the hell is K-19?”

Colin put a hand down in the caked-dry earth and pushed himself up. “The what’s a who,” he answered. “Katherine XIX. I’ve dated nineteen girls named Katherine.”

Lindsey Lee Wells and Colin stared at each other dead in the eye for a very long time, until finally her smile collapsed into a gentle laugh. “What?” Colin asked.

She shook her head but couldn’t stop laughing. “Nothin’,” she said. “Let’s go see the Archduke.”

“No, tell me,” he said insistently. He didn’t like secrets kept from him. Being on the outside of something annoyed him—more than it should have, really.

“It’s nothing. Just—I’ve only dated one boy.”

“Why’s that funny?” Colin asked.

“It’s funny,” she explained, “because his name is Colin.”

The Middle (of the Beginning)

By third grade, his failure to achieve “sociological well-being” had become so obvious to everyone that Colin attended regular school at Kalman only three hours a day. The rest of his day was spent with his lifelong tutor, Keith Carter, who drove a Volvo with the license plate KRAZZZY. Keith was one of those guys who never grew out of his ponytail. He also maintained (or, as the case was, failed to maintain) a thick, broad mustache that extended to his lower lip when his mouth was closed, which was very rarely the case. Keith enjoyed talking, and his favorite audience was Colin Singleton.

Keith was a friend of Colin’s dad and a psychology professor. His interest in Colin wasn’t exactly unselfish—over the years, Keith would publish a number of articles about Colin’s prodigy. Colin liked being so special that scholars would take note of him. And also, Krazy Keith was the closest thing Colin had to a best friend. Every day, Keith drove down into the city and he and Colin went to a broom-closet-of-an-office on the third floor of the Kalman School. Colin pretty much got to read whatever he wanted in silence for the next four hours, with Keith occasionally breaking in to discuss something, and then on Fridays they’d spend the day talking about what Colin had learned. Colin liked it a great deal better than regular school. For one thing, Keith never gave him an Abdominal Snowman.

Krazy Keith had a daughter, Katherine, who was Colin’s year in school but eight months older in actual life. She went to a school north of the city, but every so often Colin’s parents would have Krazy Keith and his wife and Katherine over to dinner to discuss Colin’s “progress” and the like. And then after those dinners, the parents would sit in the living room laughing louder as time passed, Keith shouting that he couldn’t
possibly
drive home, that he needed a cup of coffee after all that wine—
your home is an Alamo for oenophiles
, he’d cry.

 
One night in November of his third-grade year, after it got cold but before his mom put up the holiday decorations, Katherine came over. After a dinner of lemon chicken and brown rice, Colin and Katherine went into the living room, where Colin lay across the couch and studied Latin. He had just recently learned that President Garfield, who was not even particularly noted for his intelligence, had been able to write simultaneously in Latin and Greek—Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right. Colin intended to match this feat.
²¹
Katherine, a tiny blond with both her father’s ponytail and his fascination with prodigies, sat watching him quietly. Colin was aware of her, but it did not distract him, because people often watched him when he studied, like there was some secret in his approach to academia. The secret, in truth, was that he just spent more time studying, and paid more attention, than everyone else.

“How come you learned Latin already?”

“I study hard,” he answered.

“Why?” she asked, coming over to sit by his feet on the couch.

“I like it.”

“Why?” she asked.

He paused for a moment. Unfamiliar with the “why game,” he took her questions seriously. “I like it because it makes me different and better. And because I’m quite good at it.”

“Why?” she asked, her voice singing the monosyllable, almost smiling.

“Your dad says it’s because I remember things better than other people on account of how I pay very close attention and care very much.”

“Why?”

“Because it is important to know things. For an example, I just recently learned that Roman Emperor Vitellius once ate one thousand oysters in one day, which is a very impressive act of
abligurition
,”
²²
he said, using a word he felt sure Katherine wouldn’t know. “And also it is important to know things because it makes you special and you can read books that normal people cannot read, such as Ovid’s
Metamorphosis
, which is in Latin.”

“Why?”

“Because he lived in Rome when they spoke and wrote Latin.”

“Why?”

And that one tripped him up. Why
had
Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE
²³
and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn’t have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome? “That,” Colin said, “is a very good question and I will try to find out the answer for you,” he said, which is what Krazy Keith said when Krazy Keith did not know an answer.

“Do you want to be my
boyfriend
?” Katherine asked.

Colin sat up quickly and looked at her, her bright blue eyes staring down into her lap. He would come, eventually, to call her The Great One. Katherine I. Katherine the Magnificent. Even seated, she was noticeably shorter than he, and she looked quite serious and nervous, her lips pulled in tight as she looked down. Something surged through him. The nerve endings exploded into shivers on his skin. His diaphragm fluttered. And of course it couldn’t have been lust or love and it didn’t feel like
like
, so it must have been what the kids at school called
like-like
. And he said, “Yes, yes, I do.” She turned to him, her face round and her cheeks full and freckled and she leaned toward him, her lips pursed, and she kissed him on the cheek. It was his first kiss, and her lips felt like the coming winter—cold and dry and chapped—and it occurred to Colin that the kiss didn’t feel nearly as good as the sound of her asking if she could be his girlfriend.