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July 4 - July 6, 2016
Both were right. He did sweep out some nineteenth-century nonsense from our understanding of logic and language, and he did cause the death by suffocation of numerous undergraduate and graduate students.
Of course the greatest source of parallel universes, numerically speaking, Leonard reasoned, are fathers who attempt to dictate their sons’ careers, thereby instantly bringing forth the universe in which their sons obey their career choice and the universe in which their sons disobey, as well as the infinite array of universes in which their sons are probabilistically smeared between obeying and disobeying;
they could exist neither near nor far from their fathers and would spend the rest of their lives moving cyclically toward and away from them in an endless attempt to determine the ideal distance—which was probably, they knew, a chimerical concept. If they could instruct venue employees to ferry their fathers toward and away from them in a continuous oscillatory fashion, never coming too close or going too far, they absolutely would.
His mother, a museum docent, acknowledges that she may well be a figment of his imagination. His father, a rather obstinate real estate attorney, maintains his metaphysical independence.
They were in line at the deli when a black-haired man crept up to his father and shot him twice at close range, for reasons the boy was too young to grasp. He was seven years old. One day, he thought, as the black-haired man slipped into the crowd, I will find you and I will kill you. But as the years went by, and he became familiar with the ways of the world and the complexity of all things, and the chains of causation that tie each act to the future and to the past, he came to realize that he could probably get away with not doing it. Plus, how would he even find him?
Only by drowning himself, he wrote, could he prevent himself from ever insidiously influencing another student. Unfortunately, the lake in which he drowned himself was also, unbeknownst to him, a reservoir, and soon the entire college population was virulently ill.
