Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (17 page)

I tried to escape to these familiar visions when I was uncomfortable. Even if something was very beautiful, I found it could overwhelm me. This was never more clear than when Elena took me to the Hermitage, the former Winter Palace of the czars that’s now a treasure-filled art museum. She later said our time there was classic Jason. I suppose it was.

We were walking in a gallery filled with eighteenth-century portraits. The ceilings soared and the archways were enormous. It was gilded—no expense had been spared in its creation. The paintings were also oversize; anything smaller than those gigantic canvases would have been utterly lost in that space. Elena was feeling great pride in her heritage and carefully paused at each face or faces, explaining to me the history behind them. We were so important to each other by then that I knew she wanted me to not just see the paintings but feel them, to know her through them. However, I was distracted, and I kept looking over my shoulder. She told me later how it hurt to lose my attention. She tried to emphasize certain points louder and look in my eyes directly to hold my gaze, but it was no use. I couldn’t help it. I walked away, down the hallway, where I ended up with my face about an inch away from a mirror hanging there. I’m not usually that rude. Elena followed me down the hall and asked what I was doing.

“Elena,” I said, all seriousness. “Do you see the way the light is reflecting off this mirror? It’s so beautiful.” Though I had seen and even been obsessed with light playing off glass and mirrors before, the scale of the mirror as well as the enormous window letting the light in created the most elaborate, incredible, prismatic fanning-out of light rays I’d ever seen.

I learned later this light play is known in Italian as
gibigianna
, which translated to “charming woman.” It certainly charmed me.

It was not that I didn’t appreciate the collections in the Hermitage. But something in me saw more beauty, more value, in the natural and geometric underpinnings of the world. I may have had treasures untold at my feet in that moment, but they paled by comparison.

We made our way to Pskov and I gained even more appreciation and affection for Elena when I realized the difficulty of the journey she made to meet me. Compared to St. Petersburg, Pskov was pristine and reminded me of some of the small towns I’d lived in in Alaska. I’d arranged to rent a small flat about a mile from Elena’s apartment. Her parents’ place was too small for another person and they didn’t know me yet. I vowed to win her parents over.

Elena’s mom and dad were very kind to me from the start, and Elena translated patiently as we got to know one another. Through them, I saw the fall of the empire. Her father had lost his government engineering job in the breakup of the Soviet Union. He spoke briefly of having worked at Chernobyl after the nuclear meltdown and how he hadn’t felt well since then. But he mostly talked about what happened to one of his friends. The colleague found a wristwatch in the largely abandoned town of Chernobyl and carried it around in his pants pocket for a couple of days. One day when he stripped to bathe, he noticed the skin on his leg under the watch had turned completely black.

Later, Elena told me that during Joseph Stalin’s purges, her father’s family home was burned. I felt nothing but sympathy for these people I’d been raised to fear during the Cold War. (Her father has since passed away.)

Elena’s mother somehow managed to be the most lively, pleasant woman I’d ever met despite the great hardships she’d faced raising a child during the fall of an empire. Despite her formidable, serious beginnings—she was one of the few female software engineers of her generation, and she had had to be tough to achieve that position—she was always lighthearted and cheerful. She told me that when she’d started in the industry, a single computer took up an entire room. She had seen so much. It didn’t matter if she was on a breadline or working as an engineer in a power plant that had no heat and, at one point, no roof overhead. She met each challenge with great personal strength and sacrificed a lot for Elena, particularly after Elena’s father grew ill. She reminded me of a little brown bird I’d once seen in Alaska. I was stacking supplies on a huge metal shelf in an industrial yard near the oil fields when I disturbed a nest filled with eggs. The mother bird swooped, then flopped to the ground and pretended to have a broken wing to pull my attention to her. I’d walk toward the mother bird, away from the eggs, and she’d fly back to the nest, and then she’d repeat the swooping and flopping when I approached the shelving and the nest again. Like that bird, Elena’s mom would risk anything to give her daughter a chance, would even work in unsafe conditions to support her family. Most remarkably, she never passed on any inner fear she might have had to her child. (She recently retired, after thirty-six years with the same employer.)

Meeting Elena and her family changed my worldview. The geometry of the relationships among and within nations would never be the same for me. The lines that were borders on world maps faded in my mind.

Despite the bleak surroundings and stories, I’d gone to Russia to win Elena, and so I decided I would bring as much joy as possible into her life while I was there. One of the first things I did was take Elena and two of her girlfriends bowling. This may be considered a blue-collar activity in the States, but it’s a really posh thing to do in the former Soviet Union, and I wanted to impress her. Things were going well until a drunk Russian police officer approached our group and said something about the women.

Elena translated for me and I could smell the vodka on his breath as he teetered and glared. All I could think of was ending up in the gulag. According to Elena, he was challenging me to a bowling match.
At least it’s not pistols at ten paces,
I thought.

I had seen a large, framed portrait of the reigning champion of the lane on my way in. The smiling man was surrounded by a CD player and other loot he’d won in their biggest competition. It said his average was a 160. Mine was a 200 back when I bowled. I quickly calculated that if the cop was a regular here and had been beaten by this guy, I had a chance.

“Tell him I’ll bowl against him, Elena,” I said.

With that, the cop’s eyes lit up and he reached for a bowling ball. He raised it over his head and began whipping it around in a circular fashion, shouting things that were lost to our translation system because we ducked instead of talking.

Just as the ball was on the downward curve behind his head, momentum and gravity took over, and the policeman fell flat on his back. We tried not to laugh but it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I kept my head down so no one could see my big grin.

A second policeman approached our group, warned me not to kick his friend when he was down, and dragged him out of sight. Our date resumed.

Part of the fun of traveling to Russia was meeting the people and learning to appreciate their challenges. I realized that there were vast differences between the middle and upper classes when I had to stand on a long, snaking line just to buy a bottle of water one day (members of the upper class never had to wait in lines). Just when I got to the front of the line, the cashier closed the register down and pulled a chain across it. Elena told me I should have stepped to the front of a second line that had formed, just jam myself in there like everyone else, but it didn’t feel polite to me.

I got to meet a man named Vladimir, a neighbor of Elena’s family, who’d made a lot of money under mysterious circumstances in the new Russia and who enjoyed the power and privilege that goes with wealth. Our encounter happened just as it was nearly time for me to return to the States. Elena and I were standing outside my flat waiting for a taxi she’d called, as I would be staying in her family’s apartment for my last night.

We’d handed the keys over to my landlady, and we had to stand in the thirty-below weather in our parkas for a few moments until the cab arrived. When the driver got a look at the big red satchel I was carrying he said, “Too big,” and sped off.

We ended up having to walk in the frigid cold until we stumbled upon another cab by the side of the road. We arrived at her parents’ apartment building with ice crystals on our eyelashes.

Stepping out of the shadows near the entrance to the building was the largest man I had ever seen.

“Lena, what has happened? Why do you two look so cold?” he asked her in his booming baritone. She explained our harrowing tale and how we could have died out in the subzero weather.

“Give me the name of the cab company,” said the man, who I would later learn was Vladimir. “I will handle this.”

We learned the next day that not only had Vladimir gotten the driver fired, but the company withheld his Christmas bonus as well. The hulking Russian took a real shine to me on subsequent visits and bear-hugged me, slapped me on the back, and said, “I served in Cuba with the Soviet army, Jason! We are neighbors!”

I would end up making four journeys to Russia before I convinced Elena she should return with me to the States and be my wife.

I would have liked my proposal to have been more romantic, but it actually took place over the phone during one of our reluctant separations between visits. I told her I couldn’t bear to be apart from her and wanted to build a future with her in America.

We were married on January 16, 2009, in Tacoma’s city hall with no one but a Planet Futon employee and the employee’s mother for witnesses. We were so happy—and so nervous—that we forgot to put batteries in our camera and have no photographs of the day.

In the trajectory of our love affair, I learned to trust and open up to the world again. Elena saved me in every sense of the word. I finally had someone to live the unmathematical angles of my life with and share my deepest hopes. And so there were two new things I loved now: geometry and my Elena. I returned to work with greater purpose, wanting to build a better life with her.

Chapter Eleven

I
WAS TRANSFORMED NOW
that I had Elena to share my life. I couldn’t believe my good fortune most days as we planned our future, including starting our own family. With her encouragement, I was a little more relaxed around people and out in public. It had been seven years since the attack. It was still not easy at the store sometimes, because you never really knew who would walk in.

It was funny to remember, given my skittishness about dealing with the public, that when I started selling futons out of my home in Alaska in the early 1990s, I had let all types of people through the front door for the sake of a sale. It was a far cry from the flagship Planet Futon store we would open in Tacoma in 2001. Back then, I ran a Yellow Pages ad and let customers come over at all hours to see the two models of futons from my dad’s factory I had set up in my living room. I was partying a lot in those days, but despite all the time I spent away from home or recovering from long nights out, I had a good business going. I was able to pay my rent and all my bills and put a good sum aside. It wasn’t long before I had enough saved to rent a little store in the local Anchorage mall big enough to display ten futons. I named that store Futon Gallery. Those were the golden days of futons. The popular TV show
Friends
caused a run on the item because there was one on its set. The things practically sold themselves, sort of like waterbeds did back in the day.

I used to show up at the mall late—or whenever I wanted, really. The malls didn’t fine you the way they do today if you don’t open on time. I enjoyed the customers, especially the women. I would pretend not to know which futon they were referring to just so I could whip out a muscular arm and point at pieces of the inventory. I can’t tell you how many times a pretty young woman would say, “Oh, look at your muscles. Can I touch them?” And of course I’d let her, because that was the point in the first place.

But since the brain injury, I could not stand anyone except Elena and Megan touching me. As soon as a customer came in the store, I started sizing up his hygiene and homing in on where he put his hands, what he touched, if he touched the people he came in with, where he touched them, and which hand he covered his mouth with if he coughed or sneezed. I tried to keep at least two feet of space between a customer and me at all times and if anyone came an inch closer, I backed up.

I knew that I looked uneasy so I tried to explain to some of them that I had profound OCD as a result of an accident. Most of them nodded but I don’t think many of them understood.

In addition to being hyperaware of customers’ germs, I would not turn my back on any of them, out of fear they would try to hurt me. This was part of the posttraumatic stress disorder from the mugging, no doubt. As I was scanning customers for evidence of germs, I was also looking for signs of potential violence. Many victims of traumatic brain injury suffer from an inability to understand nonverbal communication, such as body language. I was obsessed with interpreting people’s behavior, so this wasn’t a problem for me.