Also known as: Fuckface (my coinage, fifth grade; he liked it the moment he heard it), the boss of the Sparkler Clan (my invention, under pressure), my GPS (his proposal)
Occupation: Mathematician. The youngest recipient of a Fields Medal. Now employed by a state enterprise he calls CERN, which has the biggest, longest basement in the world.
First appears: Chapter 013, as text messages
Status: All around me. Not visible.
Usually seen with: A thick, bushy red beard and square spectacles from a children’s party. It is a disguise. It does not work.
His philosophy of life, as far as I could reconstruct it
Fuckface does not make mistakes. He says so himself, and I have never caught him in one. If at fourteen you already know what you will be doing at forty-one, he says, you have obviously made a mistake somewhere; so he turned down every great university in the world and sat the high-school entrance exam like any ordinary student. Adulation bores him. Hatred, he says, is honest. Missing a friend, starting a doctorate and being recruited through an algorithm written in Pascal have, for him, the same truth value. He would call this consistency.
What I think he thinks of me
Dumbass. He gave me the name in fifth grade, in exchange for the one I gave him, and has never seen a reason to revise it. When I pulled three louts off him in the schoolyard, he smiled at me through blood-covered teeth and thanked my conscience. The next day he pinned a letter to the school notice board appointing me his only friend and personal secretary, and genuinely believed he was doing me a favor. In exchange I had to learn bridge, Go and classical guitar, and give up yellow for good. He told me to take up writing. I did. He has been right about me ever since, which is his least forgivable quality.
What I think of him
I hated him from the very first moment: a tall, thin ten-year-old who knew the whole of Țiganiada by heart and surveyed our class with barely concealed contempt. By eighth grade, in his presence, I had devolved into an arthropod with a rudimentary nervous system. The inferiority complexes of superior people are terrible. He is an anomaly, the sort of thing that happens when God allows human beings to be monstrously gifted. When a problem absorbs him, he leaves his body behind. He told me he is being held captive in the Third Heaven of Mathematics. I have no doubt it is true. For more than ten years I heard nothing from him. Then he came back as a text message, and he has helped me every time since, mostly without being seen.
Things he said, all of which came true
“I appreciate hatred, you know! Hatred is honest! There’s something comforting about hating!”
“Dumbass! I know everything!”
“Besides, if at fourteen you already know what you’ll be doing at forty-one, you’ve obviously made a mistake somewhere. And I never make mistakes!”
“Usually, I’m being held captive in the Third Heaven of Mathematics.”
“They all have the same truth value, don’t they?”
“You’re closer to words than to programming code. Take up writing.”
“A journalist is only as good as his information. Otherwise, he writes fiction and calls himself a novelist.”
“Just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean I’m not all around you!”
Andrei’s footnote: He can’t stand yellow. There is none on this page.
