LOST Chapter 9: What the Symbol Means

Read chapter 9 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Breakfast was rice and miso and a small dish of pickled vegetables and fish that had been grilled simply, the skin still on. I ate it at the kitchen table while Hana's daughter ate cereal across from me and watched me with the direct assessment of a seven-year-old who has not yet learned that staring is impolite or who has learned it and decided it doesn't apply here in her own kitchen. Her name was Mei. Hana had introduced us with the matter-of-fact brevity she seemed to bring to most things. This is Mei. This is the guest from room four. Mei had nodded as though guest from room four were a category she encountered regularly and had a settled opinion about. She said: are you a researcher. I said: of a kind. She said: my mother says most researchers don't know what they're looking for until they find it. I said: your mother is right. She seemed satisfied with this and went back to her cereal. I went back to the fish. Hana was at the counter doing something with the coffee machine that required her full attention or that she was giving her full attention in order to have her back to the room, which I had noticed was occasionally her method of giving a conversation space to develop without her having to participate in it directly. I had been awake since five. I had lain in the room-four bed until five-fifteen and then given up and sat at the small desk by the harbor window with my notebook and worked on the field equations that had been sitting half-finished in volume twenty-eight for the last two months. I had made more progress in two hours than I had made in the previous three weeks, which I noted without knowing what to make of it, whether this was the effect of being in a wrong world clarifying what mattered or simply the effect of having nothing else to think about. At six-thirty I had gone into the hall to find the bathroom and stopped at room three. The triangle was still there. Of course it was still there. I stood in front of it in the early morning light with the hallway quiet around me and looked at it, and I thought about what I had written the night before: not mine. Which was true as far as it went and did not go nearly far enough. What I had been doing since I wrote that, in the five-thirty to seven-fifteen period of lying in bed not sleeping and then sitting at the desk doing equations and then standing in the hall, was trying to reconstruct the moment I had first drawn the shape. Not the first time I drew it in a notebook, I could locate that precisely, inside front cover of volume one, I was seventeen and I had just spent three days working on the initial rupture propagation model and the triangle had appeared in the margin of my scratch paper as a natural expression of the geometry. But the first time I had thought it, which must have preceded the drawing, the moment when the shape had been not-yet-external. I could not find it. That was the thing. Seven years of notebooks and I could not locate the origin of the symbol in my own thinking, could not find the chapter where I had derived it, could not reconstruct the reasoning that had produced it, because as far as I could determine it had simply been there, the way certain ideas are there before you know where they came from. I had assumed this was how all theoretical work functioned, the subconscious doing its processing before the conscious mind arrives to take credit. I was less certain of this now. Hana poured coffee and set a cup at my place. Mei finished her cereal and rinsed her bowl with the competence of someone who has been doing this long enough that it is not a performance of competence but simply a thing she does. She picked up her school bag, which was very large relative to her, and said goodbye to Hana in the particular tone of a goodbye that contains several other things, and then she looked at me and said: I hope you find what you're looking for. I said: thank you. She went out. The door closed. Hana sat down across from me with her own coff