CHAPTER 5
UNDER THE SAME ROOF
FOURTEEN YEARS LATER
Time comes when childhood friends grow up and have to go separate ways. That point where the term “childhood friends” is coined for the first time and friendship becomes the business of self-interest. Adulthood means loneliness most of the time. Everyone has somehow suffered and, consequently has been the protagonist of others sufferings. It becomes a vicious circle, making trust a scarce resource. Experience doesn’t make us wiser, it makes us cold enough to distance emotions from problem solving which proves to be quite effective. It brings pseudo independence and that fear of not doing better in life than your childhood friends/opponents.
Lucy, Gabe, and Steve were aware of all this but theirs was a particular case where ignorance or the lack of it were both equally useless. It’s just nature. When the time comes, the bird has got to leave the nest.
Their paths had crossed 14 years ago and they were never meant to go together forever. A fork laid ahead. Lucy smiled intensively at the boys’ jokes. They seemed more interesting, funnier. It signified not a smile of happiness but instead, her last. She swallowed her tears of the fear of loneliness she was certain would follow. If Gabe and Steve were gone, she would have nobody else but she also foreknew their path towards greatness, each in his own way. She loved them and yet she felt betrayed and abandoned for they made a promise they weren’t going to keep. She remembered it, as clearly as it was yesterday, but she also knew bringing it up was pointless.
Steve could feel Lucy’s resentment behind that sincere but painful smile. He knew what that farewell meeting really meant but also did the others, each in their own way. At that moment, the stupid misogynistic jokes of Gabe unwittingly made him smile. It was amazing how a sexually twisted mind could imagine the most unsuspected analogies between two completely different things. It brought him serious headaches on defining creativity. He couldn’t believe Einstein could accept that skill as the creativity he once said was better than intelligence. It would be unconceivable. Gabe’s IQ wasn’t very attractive but his looks and confidence gave him an incredible advantage over people. Besides, Gabe only remembered his insufficient IQ when Steve was around. Steve was, to put it in Gabe’s exact eloquent words, “a pain in the ass that gets itchy over time”. Itchiness is uncomfortable but it brings within it a certain pleasure that outweighs the pain, a pseudo-masochism if one may say. He would often brag by saying he was namesake with the most intelligent man of the 21st century, pointing out how Stephen Hawking fought against nature by defeating his own fate, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
They were on their usual sacred spot, sitting on that old round log of wood, so old its maker was probably dead, under the gigantic mango tree they had carved their names onto when they were just kids, and every time they saw their names on it, their friendship strengthened even more. The tree was next to a very sandy rood, 200 metres from the nunnery and 1700 metres from the city. It was Christmas Eve and they had agreed that every Christmas Eve, no matter how far, how occupied or how dead they were, they would always come back to the tree. They kept talking for hours till it was time to leave.
“Lucy, I can’t get used to seeing you with this monastic Darth Vader’s regimentals and yet, you have been wearing them for 3 years,” Steve commented. Lucy made an unsatisfied face because Steve knew the reason but also that nuns sometimes wore other clothes so she said, “It’s what it is Steve. I do own a pair of jeans hidden at my locker back at the Convent, though. Actually, all the sisters have.”
Gabe rushed to comment. “I think Stevie here just found out he’s got something between his legs, ham?” Gabe scorned Steve with a sarcastic grin and he wrinkled his brows. Then he stared at Lucy, seemingly hesitant to what his dirty mind requested him to say. Words came out before he could hold them. “About that, is it true that you nuns keep a few dildos hidden too?” He waited a bit and remarked, “Just in case?” Lucy gave a timid grin. “Yes. Last Sunday I saw a couple of girls playing with a vibrator on the dormitory. Not me, though.”
“Now that is an image I want to keep in my head. Can you picture it, Steve? I am picturing it. So sexily vivid,” Gabe kept poking Steve to see how he would react but Steve didn’t react at all, at least not immediately. After self-cogitating on Gabe’s despicable comments, Steve casted back, “Precisely 14 years have passed and I still can’t understand your behaviour. I am starting to think that you have gone past level 3 cancer.” Then he gave a small but suspenseful pause. His speech pauses had become sacred. If he got lost inside his head, no one was to interfere until he found his way out of his labyrinth, the end of his thought processing and exposition. He resumed, “Why do you only think of the opposite sex, automobiles and intercourse, Gabe? Doesn’t your brain contain other topics to preoccupy itself?
“We can’t all be nerds Stevie,” Gabe answered almost instantly. “I am as good with women as you are good at, whatever you are good at.”
“Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Computers, Genetics…” Steve started specifying his Scientific Knowledge fields which seemed to be infinite. Lucy closed his mouth with her left hand. Steve’s eyes goggled. “I hate it when you go all Narcissus, Steve. It’s annoying. I told you, humility makes people admire your intelligence even more. Pride gives you nothing.”
Lucy was the only person Steve respected aside of his parents. She was too smart for an ordinary human and especially for a woman, according to Steve who believed that a few privileged female minds are geniuses while the rest tries to keep up with men sociocultural advantages over the millenniums. She was like an elder sister to him although his mind was more than a century old. But he always liked to show her who was the boss, so he retorted, “Einstein would disagree!”
“Einstein created nothing,” Lucy said.
“Ouch,” Gabe joked.
Steve’s face suddenly changed in indignation. What he was thinking was clearly offensive, so he cleansed his words and said instead. “A practical theory like the Relativity Law is infinitely more important than creating ah, Coca-Cola”.
“OK, OK. Einstein created the Relativity Law. What have you created?” She replied a bit impatient than she wanted to appear.
Gabe took advantage of the quite compelling plea. “Yeah, if you die tomorrow no one will remember you, man. But I have won 3 cart championships for Austral Africa. Besides, you can’t even get a girlfriend. If being smart means not getting laid, so it’s true, ‘ignorance is bliss,’ Steve shook his head in discontentment. “This is unbelievable. Don’t you really understand that we say ‘ignorance is bliss’ when not knowing something gives you more advantages than actually knowing it?”
“And what did I just say?” Gabe asked surprised. Steve looked at Lucy as to say ‘Please explain to this moron’. She made a gesture of indifference. She wasn’t going to take parts in this fight, she never did. Steve, impatient and incredulous, looked at Gabe in the eyes. “Are you capable of fathoming any abstract concept, Gabe? It seems like you are only aware of the term ‘plate’ when you have a plate in front of you.”
“What’s a plate?” Gabe said, “You mean the normal plate?” Steve thought that Gabe either didn’t understand it or he did understand it and was being ironic. At last, he realised he had thought too highly of him so he turned his attention to Lucy, resuming his point.
“Lucy, you have a rather amusing but interesting point. I haven’t publicly announced any of my creations and perhaps I won’t. My creations are so ahead of time that I shan’t disclose any information about it.”
“Aham, like Coca-Cola,” Lucy mocked. She made a short pause when Steve gave her a displeasure look and resumed with a more friendly approach to retreat her remark.
“Steve, Gabe, you are both amazing, each one in his peculiar way.”
“If that is true, thank God my peculiar way is not stupidity,” Steve provoked.
“Really
Steve. Every year?” Lucy said with a total dislike of what Steve just said, the alarm on her phone inside her monastic habit rang interrupting her speech. She gave a profound breath for she knew exactly what it was since she had put the alarm herself. “Boys, it’s time to go”.
“Common, don’t go, Lu,” Gabe shouted. Lucy looked at Steve as if expecting a reaction and finally it came. “Don’t. If you leave, my conversation with Gabe will be more like two monolinguals from different languages using Google Translator to communicate. It is full of ambiguities, no thorough understandable conceptualisation and pseudo synonymy.” Steve was not very fond of the idea, not the elementary errors of the giant search engine but the one where Lucy left. That was his way of saying ‘Common, don’t go, Lu.’
Lucy’s mobile phone rang again but this time she rushed to pick it up. It was a different ringtone, not the mobile’s default. It was Pavarotti singing. She put it on her right ear and uttered “Yes Mother Mary.” Silence followed, and then, a rather gloomy face. “I am on my way there.” She put the phone wherever it was before, somewhere inside her habit, and she looked at the boys with a baby sad gaze.
“Again, it seems I have got to go. Bye kids. I will miss you”. As she said that, she hugged both of them at the same time. Gabe was promptly responsive but Steve was like a statue so Lucy hauled him hard to her loving arms, “Don’t you two forget about me, especially you Steve because you have a photographic memory. You have no excuses.” She hugged them again until they started complaining for asphyxiation and then she turned around, walked towards the Convent and never looked back. “Now, next time, don’t call us kids. You are just a year older, you know?” Gabe shouted while Lucy was a few metres away. Still without looking back she replied, “Only if next time I become a year younger”. Steve gave an intrinsic timid grin and said, “If you go to Space you might. Einstein’s not so important creation proved that.” Lucy stopped, shook her head as in ‘oh, here he comes again with his science crap’, and still not looking back she went on.
Steve and Gabe stayed and watched her leave. Lucy was a very attractive Caucasian woman even always covered in religious habit. At the Convent at Lhanguene, Maputo, where she had lived her entire life, the black African girls often approached her to befriend her but the older she got, more hated she was. Some boys at the Convent for Boys would sometimes stare at her like she was a super model. Some would fantasise about her in intimate times. They had agreed with something: She was too beautiful and attractive to be a nun. A nun is supposed to be sexless. She inspired it.
“Isn’t she something?” Steve commented. Gabe, still staring at the lower part of Lucy’s back. “Yeah, look at that ass man. It’s spectacular. What a waste.”
“She is a nun Gabe, have you forgotten? And even if she weren't, she’s too smart to date a misogynistic womanizer like you.”
“Attraction has nothing to do with logic and intelligence man. Why do you think you have been in love with her all this time?” “What? I am not...,” Steve stuttered.
“Really?” Gabe said confused because he thought Steve always loved her.
“She’s married to God or Jesus or both or at least one of these two?” Steve explained, “I don’t quite know which one and I am sure she doesn’t either.” Steve said this while doing what he almost never did, to stare at Lucy’s butt and yes, she almost seemed African from behind.
“What if she weren’t a nun? Would you want her?” Gabe asked.
Steve looked at him, trying to understand the purpose of those questions and then said, “Under normal conditions I never answer to pointless questions but I’ll make an exception this time. No, I wouldn’t. And again, she’s married to, you know who.”
Steve had lied. He had loved Lucy since they were kids, before she became a nun 3 years ago. He never knew what to do because Lucy always stated loud and clear that she was going to be a nun and that it was her faith. He contented himself with the love of friendship she was willing to give him. He never had a girlfriend because to him, no female had what he was looking for: a pure heart, a sharp brain, a motivational attitude, good manners, a well-designed pear-shaped body and blond hair.
“About GOD, He doesn’t even exist for Christ sake,” Gabe said in vexation. Steve laughed out loud, “Your statement is a contradiction in itself.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Semantic logic is probably rocket science for you.”
“What? Do you think there’s a God? A guy that watches me take a shit and fuck? If I believed he existed, I wouldn’t feel that I have any privacy man,” Gabe joked.
“Gabe, I don’t know,” Steve said in a low tone.
Gabe couldn’t believe he had just said that. “What? This is the first time you say that. Last time you gave me 100 digits for the Pi number, man.
“And you just said ‘what’ three times in a row. Don’t you find that awkward?” Steve remarked, “But actually I have come to realise that I find saying ‘I don’t know’ as hard as you saying ‘I love you’ to one of your... sex... partners?” He almost got lost there, so he stuttered, and then he went back on track. “But for what’s worth, I believe there’s ‘something’ that created all this (The Universe). Be it an alien race, an intelligent natural force or even this God they dogmatically serve. There’s no absolute proof for or against anything. Therefore, I understand both you and Lucy. Although I have to confess that I envy those who believe. It must be good to feel like you’ve been chosen and that with a 5 minutes confession all your misdeeds can disappear along with the suffering of your conscience.”
As soon as Steve explained himself, Gabe retaliated, “You are just a coward, man. You are either an atheist like me, playing it safe not to hurt others or a theist like Lucy, afraid of going to hell.”
Steve was surprised by that coherent mental conception. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps Gabe was smarter than he thought. Actually, Steve seemed drug-clean. He was sober, so he acknowledged, “That was quite a theory Gabe. Your trip to Europe did change something!” Gabe smiled but he didn’t confess that somebody shared to him a link that talked about that. Steve’s compliment was always comforting. He didn't intend to spoil that triumphant moment.
His phone rang. He made a shock-aroused face when he checked his inbox and showed Steve a selfie, a close-up of huge breasts. “Look at these,” Gabe said, “I have got go man. Work calls.”
Before Steve even related those huge round rather familiar objects on the photo to what they really were (Woman’s breasts, 99% probability of being implants), Gabe put the phone in the pocket. A late thinker, Steve noticed a word that hadn’t come out from the rightful mouth so he asked. “You mentioned ‘work’? You know how consistently I have been promoting this idea but what happened to ‘Steve, work is for poor people, my allowance is enough for a middle-class person to live comfortably for 6 months?’”
“I am going to seize this chance, this Christmas season, to say goodbye to the three W’s. I have a girlfriend and I will be taking over my father’s business. But forget that, do you want a lift back to your house?” Gabe asked with a more serious and calm tone as to incline how he had a vehicle and Steve didn't.
Steve tried again to relate the World Wide Web with Gabe’s life and didn’t find a match so he finally asked, not the question he was asked but a rather distantly different one altogether. “What do the three W’s stand for?”
“Oh, Woman, Weed and Wine. You knew right?” Steve answered with a lot of enthusiasm. Steve shook his head and laughed to himself. “No, I didn’t and no, I won’t need a lift.” He took something out of his pocket. It was a transparent weirdly designed panel. Gabe mistook it as a mirror, but why would Steve have a small mirror in his pocket and why would he be talking to it? When he stopped thinking and trying to figure out what it was, he assumed it was a phone. He had assumed right, half right. The gadget had all the functions of a phone but it was also a device that when connected to a house,
when properly monitored, remotely handled every single piece of technology, from a microwave to a car, via a 10 times more powerful wireless platform he had designed exclusively for himself. “Come and pick me up,” Steve said to the glass-like object. A few seconds later, an oddly designed vehicle arrived. I resembled a solar-driven car with a rustic Toyota touch. Gabe was so impressed he couldn’t even close his mouth yet he couldn’t talk.
“Oh, there you are dear,” Steve said while going towards his car, “Gabe, this is A.I.D.I. A.I.D.I, this is Gabe. You wondered if I had created anything. Well, A.I.D.I is an acronym for ‘Artificial Intelligent Designed for Interactivity’. She is an interactive supercomputer interface installed in every single piece of software I have. Right now, only the U.S is aware of her existence and all they have is an unfinished prototype that is as AI as Apple’s Siri. I am not making the same mistake Oppenheimer has made.” Steve stopped for a second and resumed, “Somehow, I suspect you don’t understand the reference. But anyway, A.I.D.I, say hi to Gabe and let’s go home.”
“Hi Gabe. Steve talks a lot about you. He mentions several depreciative traits but nostalgic memories are the most common. Nice to meet you,” A.I.D.I, the supercomputer, had a rather warm, pleasant and friendly voice like every single AI he had seen in movies which made Gabe wonder why Steve couldn’t do it differently. Was there a rule for that? Why was the voice so sexy? Was it because nerds needed that to relax, later? Was a female voice more trustful? Listening to a guy who was smarter than you wouldn’t be gratifying, so it made sense to him and he stopped looking for other possible reasons.
Steve entered the car, the hatch automatically closed and it left in an unbelievable speed. Gabe looked at his Ferrari and it instantly became old, slow and obsolete, and laughed at his own thoughts. A few minutes later, he entered his and went towards his mansion. The chateau had a classic architecture. It had a basketball/Football court, a pool with a waterfall as big as Dubai’s artificial waters and an infinite green yard. He thought ‘What if he didn’t have those things’ and the world architected an answer never to be predicted.