Disclaimer: CBS owns Numb3rs, not me. No copyright infringement is intended.

Looking for Charlie used to feel a lot like an adult game of hide-and-seek. As long as he wasn’t working someplace immediately obvious, like the living room floor or the kitchen table, I’d start at the front door and work my way through the house moving toward the back by checking his favorite spots and calling his name ahead, hoping he’d be mentally present enough to answer.

Not anymore.

I shut the front door and stand just inside the darkened foyer, leaning back against the wood to listen. The house is silent, except for the sound of the bird’s claws dancing on a perch in the middle distance and, farther out, the faint, high-speed chatter of my brother’s computer. He’s working out back. He’s got the volume turned down low, but at night the sound carries far enough to just reach the living room, so I cross through the house to the back door and step out onto the back porch. I sit beside him in the dark. The lights are turned off and I leave them that way because I still don’t feel right operating them for him. “Hey, Charlie.”

Annoyance winces across his face and disappears. I’ve seen that expression a lot these last couple of years, and I’m usually responsible for it. I just can’t get used to the change: before, it never mattered if I talked while he worked. He’d just ignore me if he was concentrating, keep staring at the equation scrawled out on his chalkboard; the trouble is, now he stares with his ears, and if I’m filling them with words I might as well be body-blocking his chalkboard. You still don’t understand, do you, Don? New factors, new equation. One new factor changes everything.

Even after two years, he still refers to blindness as ‘the new factor,’ and it’s not just a euphemism coined for my sake; he honestly treats it that way. Emotions, especially strong ones, are a variable Charlie isn’t comfortable working with, and he’ll go to great lengths to avoid them. I know he hasn’t factored them into this new equation of his yet, because when he does it’ll get even more complicated. For one thing, once he comes to terms with what I let happen to him, he won’t want anything to do with me. But until then we’re still brothers, and as far as he’s concerned everything is status quo between us; blindness may be a new equation, but it’s one he’s figured out how to work.

His fingers tap out a command I don’t catch and send the program backwards to repeat whatever it was that I made him miss. He works another few minutes without acknowledging me, occasionally stopping the voice output to check the braille display built into the bottom of the keyboard, then yawns and eventually stops long enough to massage his face. “Hi, Don.”

“Hey. Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay.” He hits something else on the keyboard, but I can’t tell what the thing is doing because there’s no monitor and he’s got the speech output set to a pace that can nearly keep up with his brain. That leaves me way out of the equation. “I was almost done anyway.”

“Good.” I watch him for a while, but then I have to look away. I’m okay during the day, at work, even when he’s there to help out, but it’s a different story at night, at home, when he’s not the FBI’s consulting mathematician and he’s just my brother again. I can handle the fact that a consulting specialist got hurt in the field on one of my operations; but letting my little brother get hurt, that’s the part I’m still working through. Instead, I watch the breeze stirring the flowers in the planter bed across the patio. “So, where’s Dad?”

“He went out for drinks with Kirby Mancos. Did you need to talk to him? You could try his cellphone.”

“No, it’s fine.” In fact, I already knew Dad’s whereabouts because he called to tell me he was going out. That’s why I dropped by tonight. Charlie can take care of himself, so it’s not that he needs looking-after; in fact, it has very little to do with Charlie at all. I just keep hoping the more I expose myself to it, the faster I’ll work through it. “I just came over for the company. If you’re not too busy, I mean.”

“No, that’s fine.” Charlie gets up and reaches for the back door. His fingers touch the screen instead, and he slides his hand sideways to find the handle. “I haven’t eaten. Have you?”

“Not yet. You want me to cook?”

“I can cook.”

Something’s wrong. Charlie’s never been defensive about what he can and can’t do. Even in those first few days after the accident—or whatever you want to call it that happened—when he was in the hospital with bandages over his eyes and still pretty much helpless, he’s never snapped at me. Not once since this whole mess happened. Whatever’s been going on inside his head the last two years, to the world he’s stayed the same: he’s just been Charlie, soft-spoken and good natured. “I know you can. That’s not what I asked.” That’s why it’s so hard to keep from reacting to this. But he’s tired. He just flew in this morning from a three-day conference in Baton Rouge, so I assume that’s why the change. “You’ve been gone for three days. I assume you’re tired and maybe you don’t feel like messing around in the kitchen, you know? I know I don’t after I get back from a trip. That’s all I meant.”

Sitting his computer on the kitchen counter, he seems to deflate. He nods a few times and lets his head sag, arms supporting him. “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.” He straightens and heads into the kitchen. “We can both cook. I don’t even know what’s in here.”

“Dad made chili a couple nights ago, and you know Dad. He made enough for about eight of us. There’s plenty of leftovers in the freezer. I think he even marked the containers for you, come to think of it.”

Charlie nods and opens the freezer door. “Sounds good. Where at?”

“Second shelf under the ice cube tray, the two plastic containers with wide rubber bands around the bodies.”

He fingers a couple other containers first, then sets one of the chili tubs on the counter. “What’s the narrow rubber band for?”

“Chicken soup. That was the first night you were gone. Listen, you want me to warm the chili up while you rest? You look exhausted.”

He shakes his head. “I’ll do.”

This is so unlike Charlie. It’s almost like he’s trying to prove something, which is absolutely as far out of character as anyone could possibly pull my little brother. The only thing I can figure is that something must have happened at the conference. “So, do you want to talk about it?” I pull out one of the kitchen chairs, turn it backwards, and straddle it.

“Talk about what? The conference?”

“About whatever happened at the conference.”

“We talked about math. What is there to say?”

Despite myself, if only for a moment, I smile. Charlie’s a horrible liar and not much better at avoiding things, even when he really does want to avoid them. “I meant whatever happened between the lectures.”

“What makes you think something happened?”

“The way you’re acting. The fact that you nearly bit my head off a minute ago. The fact that, when I suggested something had happened, you didn’t automatically deny it. So?”

Squatting in front of a lower cabinet, rummaging for a pot to warm the chili in, he shakes his head. “Just people. It’s nothing; I’m just tired.”

“Charlie, you’re the worst liar in Los Angeles County. What happened?”

“You’ve met every liar in the county?”

“Just about.” My work actually does bring me into direct contact with a disproportionate number of liars, so it’s a claim I can make. “What about it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” He sets the pot on the front burner and uses his fingers to center it, then reaches for the frozen container and empties the block of chili into the pot before he turns the burner on.

The way he’s defending his ability in the kitchen, insisting on doing everything himself, avoiding my questions—I guess it was inevitable. At some point, he had to realize that blindness does more than change the factors in an equation. “Okay.” It multiplies the complexity of the equation exponentially, using his terms. This equation involves the one factor he struggles with most: emotion, his own and everyone else’s.

Silence settles between us. Charlie stands at the stove, stirring the block of chili around the pot with a wooden spoon until the block starts to melt. He stuffs his free hand in his pocket. “I never realized how other people saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell what they were seeing—I mean, were they seeing me or were they just reacting to it and I never entered into the equation at all? Either way, I never figured it that way.”

I swallow a mouthful of stomach acid and get up for a glass of water to wash it down. “Did somebody say something?”

“It’s not what was said; it’s what happened. First, there was the hotel and restaurant staff: the desk clerk, the bellhop, the maid, the maitre d’, three different waiters and waitresses. Nobody knew what to do with me. The desk clerk couldn’t figure out how to show me where to sign my name when I registered. I asked the bellhop to put my luggage next to the bed so I could find it; he sat it in the walkway where I could trip on it when I walked in the door. I asked the maid to leave certain things where I put them after she cleaned, so I could find them again; she moved them and didn’t pay any attention to where she sat them down, so I was constantly having to look over the whole room to find my things. The maitre d’ didn’t know how to show me to the table. One night the waiter didn’t want to read me the menu. The next night, at a different restaurant, the waitress offered a braille menu, then got irritated when I took too long to read it.” Charlie reads both English and math-code braille, but you can guess which one he’s more familiar with, and he’s not nearly as fast with either one as he is with his ears. “And the last waitress never checked in after she brought the food, even though I asked her to check back frequently because I had no way of flagging her down. I feel like I’ve spent three days being reminded of all the things I have trouble doing.

“And then there were the other people attending the conference. I might as well not have been there. They kept asking each other where it would be best to sit me, and when I spoke up to say I wanted to sit close to the front—so I could hear better; the sound system was lousy—they ended up falling all over themselves apologizing and making a huge deal out of it. And the one time I went to lunch with a group, it was after the lecture I gave; five professors from MIT and Harvard came up after the lecture to say how impressed they were and to see if I’d like to go to lunch with them. They were planning on discussing my topic, and they wanted to hear what I had to say. But then when I pulled out my cane and asked if I could hold onto one of their elbows, all of a sudden I might as well have been a child as far as they were concerned. Every time I opened my mouth to say something about the discussion, they acted like I wasn’t making sense even though I was just elaborating on what I’d said in the lecture. And at one of the small-group workshops, the presenter was using an overhead projector and she kept saying how sorry she was that I couldn’t see it and she hoped she was making sense to me anyway, even though whatever she had on the overhead was obviously just a visual representation of what she was saying. I’m just tired of everyone assuming I can’t. That’s why I snapped at you about the cooking. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s understandable, considering. Sounds like it was a pretty rough three days.”

He nods. “It’s good to be home.”

I don’t know what else to say. Charlie’s obviously a fast learner, which is how he made it through high school fast enough to graduate with me and which is also how he mastered two different forms of braille and half a dozen adaptive life skills in six months; that’s less than the time it takes most people to learn one form of braille. All of his teachers at the center for the blind commented on it, not just on how fast he learns but also on how quickly he’s adjusted. The way he handles himself, it’s easy to forget how little time it’s actually been and how new all of this is to him. “Man, Charlie, I—”

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say you’re sorry.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

He turns to look at me over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. “You weren’t?” It’s genuine surprise.

“No. Why?”

He shrugs, letting one shoulder drop. “Because statistically you should. You apologize every time we talk about this.”

“Do I really?”

He nods.

“Every time?”

He nods again. “Until this time. You don’t realize you’re doing it?”

“I guess not. I mean, I know how often I think it because it is my fault, but I—”

“Don, over a dozen variables were responsible for what happened. You and I were only two of them, so how can I hold any one factor responsible over all the others?” While the chili thaws, he turns to pull a couple bowls out of the cupboard and brings them over to the table, along with a couple spoons.

Sometimes I still don’t understand my brother. He’s talking about the event that left him blind for the rest of his life like it’s any other equation. “Over a dozen variables?”

“You and me, each of the individuals you were trying to arrest, the timing of the arrest, the number of officers involved, the kind of weapons chosen by your officers, the type of laser weapons your suspects were carrying—”

“Okay, okay. I get it. You can stop.”

He smiles. I can’t imagine why, until he says, “None of that matters to you, does it? You still hold yourself responsible.” He sets out two bowls and spoons, one on the placemat directly behind where I’m sitting—I’m still facing away from the table, although I’ve turned to look at him over my shoulder—and the other on the placemat to my left.

“Do I hold myself responsible for screwing up my little brother’s life? Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do, because without me that operation would never have happened and you would never have been there. So I am ultimately responsible.”

“You didn’t screw up my life.” He goes back to the stove to break up the block of chili with the tip of the wooden spoon. “You just changed it.”

Finally. We’ve been arguing this for two years, and this is the first time he’s ever consented my point. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered that my logic has finally met his standards, or if I should feel even guiltier. The truth is, I never expected to win—not by his own admission, anyway—and now that I have, I’m not sure what to say. Especially not in light of his consenting remark. “What, now you’re into word games? Same difference.”

“No, it isn’t. Change isn’t bad.”

“No?”

“Change is a statistical norm. It’s neither good nor bad; it’s just a fact, like gravity.”

Conversations with Charlie are always revealing. Sometimes, like now, I feel like he should be the older brother, not me. He’s so wise sometimes. “So if it’s just a fact, why do I still feel guilty for causing it?”

He shrugs. “Don’t ask me. Maybe it’s like P versus NP—maybe there is no answer.”

In a way he’s right. Emotions, like his old nemesis problem, are essentially unsolvable, which is probably why he retreats to the P versus NP problem when his emotions get too overwhelming. At least P versus NP can be quantified, attempted in some rational order; at least the problem seems manageable on the surface, until he starts digging into it. “What, you’re saying I’m unsolvable?”

“Most people are.” His hand hovers over the surface of the pot, feeling for steam rising off the chili. Then he comes back to the table, pulls out the chair in front of the bowl he set out for himself, and flops back. “Man, I’m tired.”

It’s not physical exhaustion I’ve been noticing. It’s emotional exhaustion, the kind you can’t sleep off and that doesn’t go away overnight. “I’m sorry you had such a lousy time at the conference,” I say eventually because I think we’re both ready to talk about something else. “But your lecture went all right?”

He brightens a little, although he’s still basically draped over the back of the chair. “Yeah, my lecture went great—and so were the other general lectures.” Out of nowhere, he smiles. “Maybe next time I’ll just wait until they post the lectures on the internet on streaming video and I’ll attend virtually. Less hassle, same net effect.”

To Be Continued...