Nina felt worse and worse about the purpose of her call. “Kurt, listen. Bob’s moved to Carmel and back in the last ten months and made a trip to Sweden to visit you,” she said. “He’s back in school now. He needs stability.”

“You mean you do.”

“What?”

“Bob told me you split up with Paul.”

“It was inevitable. But that has nothing to do with…”

“Bob seems confused.”

“You mean-because I took away his father substitute?” Nina said. “That’s ridiculous. He never viewed Paul as a father.”

“He liked Paul. They had a relationship, too.”

Stung, Nina said, “I can’t help that. I really can’t. What’s your point, Kurt?”

“Hey, just be honest about what’s going on.”

“I’m trying.”

“Let him come, Nina. He can miss a week or two of school. He’s a smart guy. He’ll make it up. He can write a photo-essay about Germany.”

“I just think that Bob-”

“Ah, it’s so frustrating. I have no power in this situation, which makes me angry.”

“Kurt, it’s tough. You live half a world away. Okay, I do rely on him, maybe more than I should. And I don’t want to keep him from you, but I don’t like him putting his energy into schemes to get back to Europe all the time.”

“You’re used to having him all to yourself. Wait. I don’t mean it that way.”

“You can always make me feel guilty.” She had kept Bob’s existence a secret from Kurt for twelve years. Now he liked being in his son’s life. Naturally.

“I’m not trying to bring up old business, Nina. Let’s deal with this right now.”

“Right now I feel like I’m in some kind of popularity contest with you that I might lose.”

He laughed, easing some of the tension between them. “You’re joking, right?”

The car in front of her came to an abrupt halt. Slamming on her brakes, she realized minutes had passed and she had no consciousness of driving. “I have to go.”

“We aren’t finished, Nina.”

She knew that, and she knew they had reached an impasse.

“Give my love to the boy.”

And the feeling in his voice almost changed her mind, but swerving left, distracted by a car broken down alongside the road, she kept her good-bye brief. They hung up. The Bronco toiled up the winding road along the American River with the other trucks and SUVs. Nina felt guilty, but Bob would stay home. He would understand when she explained it to him, and Kurt would support her. He had no choice.

8

FOR SEVERAL DAYS IT RAINED STEADILY on the island. Elliott and his father had a thousand-piece picture puzzle to work on. Gloria brought in the groceries. Elliott spent a lot of time in his room, worrying about the man in the mask, thinking about the robbery two years before. He couldn’t concentrate on working on the proof. He stared out the window at the new streams running down the steep ravine behind the house into the cove.

Elliott never had been able to prove that irrational numbers don’t exist, but his father gave him a canoe anyway the day he turned twelve. That was when Elliott dropped out of school and started teaching himself, though his mother made him take piano lessons and volunteer at the library.

Not far from the house the woods gave way to a small, stony beach and a sheltered cove bounded by tumbled rocks. Elliott spent his teenage summers pulling rhythmically on the oars, circling the cove, mostly alone, thinking. His parents didn’t bother him, and he had no friends, so he was free to think. Sometimes he thought about girls, but mostly he thought about calculus. He began carrying a spiral notebook with him to record his thoughts. When it filled, he would start a new one.

Numbers: the integers, the irrationals, the transcendents, the imaginaries; numbers that presented mysteries brighter and more challenging than the mysteries of religion, because they could be solved with logic, someday, by someone.

He had first met the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of the prime numbers, when he was ten years old.

How these building blocks of all numbers are distributed along the great number line has never been understood. They seem to occur at random-2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17-and so on and on forever to those regions of monstrous limitlessness where Elliott’s little breeze blew. An integer was a prime number if you couldn’t divide it by any other integer except itself and one. But no formula could predict the sequence of primes. No formula could find the factors of large numbers, except by the crude method of searching one by one along the number line.

Yet all the great minds in mathematics over all the centuries agreed on one thing: The primes could not be random. If they were random, the ground of the universe was random, and this could not be, not with planets revolving around stars, not with the soaring bridges and skyscrapers people have built, not with the human eye, which seeks and finds harmony everywhere.

No, the primes could not be randomly distributed. One day as he furiously rowed across the flat water, Elliott made up his mind to devote his life to the primes. If he introduced a new devil into the world, if he found a truth that added to chaos instead of harmony, he would hold his answer close and decide then what to do with it.

He read everything he could about the attempts to find a formula to predict the primes. The geniuses of mathematics, the smartest people who ever lived, had tried to understand the primes, and been defeated. Some had lived long, quiet lives, but many who flirted with the primes had fallen while very young: Gauss, who left math forever in his twenties; Ramanujan, the vegetarian Brahmin who died at thirty-two; Gödel, who starved himself to death; Nash, teetering on the edge of the void most of his life; Grothendieck, still alive, cloistered in a hut in the Pyrenees, obsessed with the devil; Turing, who killed himself at forty-one by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

And the greatest of them all, in Elliott’s mind at least, Bernhard Riemann, who died in Italy at thirty-nine. Because of pleurisy, the books said, but Elliott figured he had died because the heat in him had died. Riemann had simply gone as far as he could. He had found a possible order in the primes and given the world a direction in the Riemann Hypothesis. It made sense to die then.

“The distribution of primes is linked to a mistake about what Zero and One actually are,” he told his parents at dinner one day. “Zero and One are the same point. They are definitely not numbers.”

“Prove it,” his father said.

“I will. I am going to be a mathematician.”

“Of course you are,” his father said. “But you have to study hard so you can go to a great university.”

Elliott scored a perfect 800 on his math SATs, but only 710 on the verbal side. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a scholarship anyway. He was eighteen when he got on the plane to Boston. His mother gave him two ham sandwiches so he wouldn’t have to eat airplane food. His father gave him a silver-chased mechanical pencil. He wrote down his solutions with that pencil forever after.

MIT appeared to bustle with student life, but in fact it was a lonely place where a lot of young people like himself, wearing specs, walked around in the same pair of jeans for days and ate alone in cheap eateries, punching calculators and hunching under the weight of their backpacks. Elliott wasn’t free to think anymore; he had to take classes in areas of knowledge that bored him, like English literature, and he spent a lot of time eating pizza and hiding out the first year. His dorm room, a high-rise on Memorial Drive, was always too hot from the central heating, and he shared the room with a social misfit from Minneapolis who talked even less than he did and dropped out during the second part of his sophomore year, leaving behind an empty bed and a starker silence.