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Anyway, I finished the math, frantically explaining to my mother how it all worked in between her sobs. Funny, I don't even know what you'd call these equations. I guess it's because I've never told this story before. How about calling it Metaprobability. It essentially determines the probability of probability, how the odds come together to make a predetermined whole. Yep, the secret is to realize that since time is relative, then everything probable has happened, and is therefore calculable. Yeah, it's math that tells the future. I know, I know. Using it on a lotto ticket was a waste. But how was I to know? It was my first time fully using the gift and I just wanted my Mom to believe me.
After I got the answer, I tried to put it on the ticket, but it just wouldn't work. Each time the number would just be a line of threes. So, after tearing up a bunch of lotto tickets, I eventually forced my mother to write down the answer. I may have been screaming at this point.
She didn't speak to me on the ride back and went straight to her bedroom when we got home. I took the car and drove back to college that night, which wasn't a problem since she would have enough cash to afford a new one soon enough. It was the last time I saw her.
It was when I first got back to college that I realized what this gift really was. I had a test on Russian writers-Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, to be exact. I hadn't read any of the Chekhov, but it wasn't a problem-I had knowledge of every book that ever had or would be written. I aced it. A week later we had a paper and I went to write on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, my favorite novel. I couldn't remember a thing. I was empty. It was as if I had never read the book. I grabbed my old dog-eared copy and began to reread it, but forget everything after the third word. It was as if the book was seared out of my brain and only a lifeless scar was left.
That was the full price of my gift. If I were to ever impart my knowledge, it would be gone forever, unable to be reclaimed. I don't think you don't get it. It's like having the best curveball in the world, but only able to pitch it once, or being able to give the most passionate, beautiful kiss but having your lips burnt off right afterwards. This wasn't a gift, it was a curse. My life fell apart. I couldn't do homework or pass an exam without losing that knowledge forever. I couldn't be a doctor because I could only perform a type of surgery once before losing it forever. I became afraid-afraid of what would happen to me if I talked to someone and let something slip about my past. If I told someone that on my fourth birthday I had plunged headfirst into a chocolate cake just to give my mother a rise, would it be erased? I knew more than anyone else, I was smarter than all the Nobel laureates and Field medallists combined, but I would have traded it in a second for a chance to just talk to someone without part of my soul being torn away.
There is a saying that you should never make a deal with the Devil. Now, I haven't met the man myself, but I couldn't imagine him giving any worse a deal than what I got that day. The Lord told me it was a gift, but forgot to mention who it was for. I certainly never received the benefits from it.
What? Well, no I suppose it did have its moments. The trick was to figure out just how to use the gift effectively, to make sure none of it was wasted on something frivolous. After my mother won the lottery, she kept trying to call me, saying she was sorry. I never answered. Only sent a letter telling her to forget about me. At this point I had become paranoid that talking to anyone would sap my thoughts, so I started wandering, using the interest off the significant amount of cash that my mother put in my bank account to keep me going. I spent a good-God, was it that long?-twelve years moving from place to place. Most of my time was spent in the United States, specifically the mid and southwest. It would have been nice if I could have gone abroad to some far away place, but Pakistan and India had started that damned nuclear war and everyplace else was doing just as bad if not worse than us.
I'd stop in diners, hearing people talk to each other during the evening news about how the world had gone to hell and nobody knew how to fix it. Didn't talk much then, but I became a great listener out of habit. It's strange thinking back-not one of these apocalyptic scenarios made me even consider using my gift. Instead, I just drifted from place to place, watching everything slowly collapse.
You know what finally got me a backbone? It was during the riots in Chicago after their subway was bombed. I was trying to lay low and went into an alley to hunker down till all the violence blew over. Turns out someone else had the same idea, a little Lebanese girl named Amina. I want you to remember that name. She was only six and her eyes were just like my mother's. We huddled down behind a dumpster and I listened while she told me about her life. She had a mother and two older brothers. Her father was a marine who died in Afghanistan before she was born.
Eventually she got bored and started imagining shapes in the clouds. You know, ducks, spatulas and the like. I heard a crowd in the distance but didn't pay much attention to it, content to listen to the stories Amina made up about her cloud-friends. Amina was telling me the tale of the teddy bear that had lost his scarf on a sailboat when part of a thundercloud loomed over the alleyway. Amina. She wanted to find out what happened next so she ran out into the street to see what the cloud looked like. A mob was passing by and didn't take kindly to her hijab. I could have stopped them. I could have figured out the precise location and resonance and toppled a streetlight onto them with one hit of a pipe. I could have hotwired a car to run into them and explode. I could have at least tried to talk them down. But I didn't.
I didn't do anything.
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