The Onset

Part 4(Michael's POV)

Once my mom entered the house that late afternoon, Malia bounced off the couch and gave her the brightest, toothiest smile while extending both arms forward, looking for a hug.

“Hi mommy, how was work today!” she said. She was obviously trying to get her way through subterfuge. My mom didn’t fall for it though. She eyed Malia carefully, and said nothing as she went to the stairs and up to her room. A little later, when mom came back down in her sweats, Malia protested vehemently:

“How someone gonna go around wit’ no phone”, “What imma do in an emergency?”, “What happens if I get stranded?”, “What happens if I get kidn*pped?”, “How imma call 911?”. In response to these, my mom told her she would be more than welcome to activate her number on the spare flip-phone she kept from a couple of years ago.

“Hell nah.” my sister exclaimed. “I ain’t gonna get caught dead with that dumbshit-dumbphone!”

“Sorry, best I can do.”

Malia looked over to me. I was sitting on the armchair across from them. Up to that point, I was a quiet observer, my attention partially averted by a discussion among a panel of philosophers on the television. My sister and I often get into squabbles around this time of day. I would be watching an educational show on public programming and she would want to watch VH1, MTV, or BET, or some crap like that. My shows are brain food while hers would usually feature pop or hip-hop musicians and reality television stars who speak in dense vernacular, who have simple answers to simple questions, whose statements include the most outrageous s****l innuendos and metaphors for private parts and such, and who have polarizing political and social views. Why you watchin’ that s**t, Genius, when you could watch this s**t? Gimmie a break! No, sister. You can fall into a perpetual state of decadence by yourself.

“Genius, watchu think about this? This is mad whack, right?” I was reluctant to get involved, but I figured out something to say which I initially thought wouldn’t offend her:

“Well, first of all, I must say that I’m not really in a position to intercede between you and mom. I’m her son, you’re her daughter, and although we may put up good arguments, we will be subordinate to her as long as she pays our bills.” Mom eked out a smile. Malia rolled her eyes, and shook her head while looking up to the ceiling. “However, since you asked me,” I continued, “I would have to side with mom on this. Your grades are very poor and I think it is effective discipline for her to restrict your phone privileges until you make the right adjustments to them.” Malia could not wait to deride me:

“Wow! You always know what to say. Oh my God! This nigga should be a politician. Why don’t you do it, Genius? Why don’t you study politics in college and become a senator or secretary-a-state?” I was inwardly and outwardly dumbfounded.

“Who? Me?” I said while pointing to myself.

“Yeah, nigga! Why not? You corny as f**k! Look atchu! You already like to clean-shave. Witchya fat-a*s head! You fit in nice with tha repooblicans. You a douche, for-real!”

“That’s enough, Malia!” my mom yelled.

Malia sucked her teeth. She pouted and pouted and pouted. My mom eventually stopped talking to my overgrown toddler of a sister. She just remained seated, looking straight ahead with her arms crossed, very undaunted. I could’ve applauded for her at that moment. Bravo muh-ma. We both ignored her. Malia soon gave up.

“How long is this go-ing to last?” she asked mom.

“We’ll see after summer school is over.” It seemed like Malia wanted to shout every curse that came to her mind at that moment. She almost let out a huge F-bomb, but held her tongue.

“Does God not like me?” I heard her mutter to herself. God does not exist, I would’ve told her. But I didn’t want to aggravate the situation, so I stayed quiet.

“O-kay.” she said with such resignation, heaving a sigh.

“Now get your a*s up there and study for your finals!” mom told her tersely while pointing to the stairs. Then, sitting back with her eyes on the television sullenly said, “Maybe there’s a chance you can salvage your grades.” And with that Malia stomped up the steps.

Later, as I was walking up the stairs, I heard her slam her textbook shut and fling it to the floor. I poked my head into her room and asked her what was wrong.

“I keep gettin’ the wrong answer!” she said. “That’s why most a-da-time I don’t even botha with this s**t!” Apparently, she was having difficulty with the end-of-chapter questions in the back of her algebra textbook. I offered to help.

After she accepted, I picked up the textbook from the floor and sat next to her at her desk. I took a few seconds to scan through her work. My sister often tells me that she is impressed by how quickly I can assess a situation. Sometimes I wonder why she can’t just have more of a friendly disposition with me for my many strengths, instead of jumping on me all the time for my shortcomings, which are few and negligible. One of her frequent criticisms is that I invest much of my time and effort in learning ‘s**t nobody cares about’. She would prefer, I take it, that I-

“Okay, so basically what you’re trying to do with these examples is match the right graph with its corresponding equation.”

“Yeah, like, which one goes wit’ which.”

“Right. So, the only way to go about it is just to memorize it and test yourself with index cards. Do you have any?”

“Yeah, I think I got some here.” She opened the drawer under her desk table and rummaged through it until she could produce a bunch of index cards.

“Okay, so what I’ll do is, on a few of these, draw the graph on one side and the equation on the other and then I’ll test you until you have a good handle on it, and then we’ll do some problems from the book.”

“I’m sorry bout’ what I said earlier, Genius. This s**t’s mad f****d up, you know.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I really didn’t mind. I knew my sister was going through a phase. Eventually as she gets older she’ll be able to be more civil with me, I hope. I began marking the index cards the way I said I would.

Up until middle school, we had known each other very well. However, since then, we had grown distant. For me, it was the beginning of my intellectual vitalization. It was when I began to breeze through my classes, especially mathematics. I was often number one in my class. I required little to no tutoring. I also began to read voraciously. I first started with books targeted to my age. I couldn’t stop reading the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Some days I would read through one of them in a sitting. Then, I began reading titles such as ‘Catcher in the Rye’, ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘Lord of the Flies’, and the larger part of the voluminous Stephen King novels. By freshman year of high school I was reading books that made my sister nauseous: ‘1984’, ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’, ‘The Republic’ by Plato, and of course the books of Nietzsche. I remember the summer after junior year, I attempted to impart the brilliance of this great philosopher to my sister. Malia labored to read a few sentences from Human, all too Human, and afterwards concluded that it wasn’t written in English.

“It was originally written in German, but they translated it.” I explained.

“Well, that’s the problem.” she said.

“What problem?” I asked.

“They don’t really know how ta tawk German that good, that’s why this book is so f****d up and mad confusin’!”

“But it’s been published and studied at almost every University in the World.” I said. “People wouldn’t do that if they couldn’t understand it.”

“Well, maybe they know German, and they read it in German, that’s how come they undastand this dude.”

“Malia, it’s really not that hard, you just have to apply yourself.”

“Nah, I’m good,” she said, “I’ll apply for a job instead.” And this was the extent to which we reached an understanding. Since middle school Malia mostly concerned herself with smelling good for boys, keeping fresh, keeping her sneakers white, and navigating the power structure of her clique. That was it.

“Genius, what was you dreamin’ about that otha night?” I began to tell her while keeping my eyes on the task at hand:

“I thought I told you. I was speaking to a philosopher.”

“No, not that one. The one, like, five weeks ago. When mom was doin’ overnight.” I paused as I recalled the instance.

“Oh, that one.”

“Yeah, that one.” she echoed. “I ain’t neva heard someone scream so loud in they sleep, like neva. And when I woke you up, you were sweatin’ and shakin’ and you almost wyled out on me. I was worried about you.”

“Yeah, it was pretty terrifying.”

“So what were you dreamin’ about?”

“Well, let’s just say it was about an unresolved problem.”

“What kind of a problem?” I didn’t know how to articulate the complexity of the dream to her, so I stonewalled her for awhile. She wouldn’t quit. She continued trying to cajole it out of me, until I felt it was incumbent on me to give her an answer, however undetailed it was:

“I was struggling to figure out what my past means, and, whether I have control of my future.” She didn’t say anything for a while. It seemed that my comment struck her.

“Well, the past is the past, ain’t nothin’ we could do about it now. Just try our best not to make the same mistakes. As for tha future...shit happens anyway you look at it, ‘specially in New York. So, i dunno, I’d say do whatchu gotta do right now, know what I’m sayin’?” It was a pat response I heard many times from different people. However, at that moment, I looked at my sister and envied, of all things, her naïveté.

“Yeah, whatever.” I said.

“I mean, I’d say have faith in God,” she shrugged, “but you an atheist, so…”

“Malia, there’s a good reason why I don’t believe in God.”

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“Well, probably the strongest argument against God is Theory of Eternal Recurrence.”

“Theory of wha?”

“Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.” She sucked her teeth. That sound really gets on my nerves. “You think I’m so dumb.” she said, projecting her own opinion of herself unto me.

“It would be over your head.” I said.

She sniffed of scorn and said, “Yeah, if ya’ll were really that smart you’d be able to explain it to me.” Naturally, I felt slighted by that comment, so I began to explain to her:

“A philosopher in the late eighteen hundreds in Germany gave it a name, and explained it better than most. However, the concept goes back to Ancient India.” I paused and looked at her inquisitively to make sure she was following. She has a very short attention span.

“Okay...continue.”

“Basically, what it says is that this very moment will happen again.”

“Oh yeah, I know about that. That happens to me all the time. Like, deja vu.”

“No, Malia, ‘deja vu’ is just a feeling that you’ve been through something before. But Theory of Eternal Recurrence says that this very moment has already happened an infinite number of times.”

She c****d her head back in amazement and exclaimed, “You shittin’ me!”

“No, really. Look at it this way: It’s like taking a photograph of how things are right now. Even though what leads up to or happens after that photograph in time may be different, the physical laws of the universe say that it must occur again. And also, at some point in time, you may even live your life exactly the way you lived it after you died. Everything will re-occur.”

“Okay, so, you didn’t tell me yet.”

“What?”

“Why you don’t believe in God.”

“But don’t you see? If theory of eternal recurrence is true then that takes God out of the picture. And it’s more than just a philosophical concept; it’s an excellent scientific explanation of how things are.”

“Yeah right.”

“Okay, first thing. It has been established as scientific law that the amount of matter and energy in the universe remains constant, in other words, it only changes from one form to the other, matter and energy is never created nor destroyed. Newton’s law of conservation of mass, if you recall.”

“Uhuh.”

“Secondly, the scientific community is in agreement that time is infinite. Right?”

“Uhuh.”

“Thus, when all possible orientations of molecules are exhausted…” I explained and explained for several minutes and all she did was uhuhm’d me. I eventually understood the nature of the situation, and cut this futile lecture short:

“-there is no point in trying to explain this to you, is there?”

“Pretty much.”

“Okay, thank you for making me waste my breath.” I said, returning my focus to the index cards.

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Your life is simpler because of it.”

“True. I don’t want it to change, ever. I would like to have my phone back though. You lucky you a genius, Genius. You gonna be makin’ hella bread. Watchu gonna be studyin’ over there at Harvard? Ya philosophy?”

“No. You know mom wouldn’t let me do that. I’m doing pre-med, you know, the quote-unquote practical thing.”

“Word? That’s a bummer. Well anyway, I know you a genius, so you prolly end up findin’ some cure for some disease or some s**t like that.”

“Actually, doing something like that is not so simple.” Malia gave me an encouraging pat on the back thinking she could embolden me.

“I know you can do it.” she said. “I believe in you.”

Again, I looked at her. Silly, naive Malia. Everything about her said immaturity. That night, she tied her hair back in pigtails. To our mother’s behest, she had those old-fashioned braces with the metallic retainers. Her face was pimples galore (mostly due to overuse of makeup).

“Yep, I know you gonna be doin’ some big deal genius stuff over there.” she continued. “And you gonna be around your own genius people, talk about genius stuff like theory of eternal reference, eat genius food like yogurt smoothies and sushi...meet a genius girl.” She pinched my chin and shook it. I waved her off. “...make genius babies.” She started to laugh. I felt myself blush uncontrollably, that burning sensation in my chest and face. I’m her brother for Chris sake! “Yeah, I know I’m trippin’.” she said, giddy with laughter. I got up. I wasn’t having any of it. “Iight, iight, imma stop.” she said as she grabbed my arm. I reluctantly sat back down and started marking the index cards again.