My mother, perceptive as she had always been, must have guessed me correctly, for a tray of refreshment and traditional sweets --exactly like it had been in my childhood-- was prepared on the table by the time I went back to the living room. She waited there patiently, a proud lotus on her throne. She didn't ask me why I didn't rest, or why I appeared from the room I had despised most during my lifetime here.

"Why did you marry him!?"

"Why are you so patient!?"

"Why wouldn't you leave him for neglect!?"

"What... why..."

"Why didn't you hate him?"

The questions that had been buried in me for twenty years flooded all at once, and I grew choked by each passing second.

The dam had been broken.

"Have a seat."

---------------

She breathed deeply. Inhale, exhale, and finally the curtain of her bangs parted as she opened her eyes. I watched mesmerized as she rummaged the drawer. A diary? A journal? Or perhaps a letter?

"I would ask the sculptor to carve this on his headstone tomorrow. What do you think of it?"

"MOM!"

I slapped the paper away, and it rolled to the foot of the table, stopping in a pitiful thud. Disappointment was evident on my face. What was she doing?

"I should warn you that the dead could speak no longer."

"He could've spoken when he was alive."

"But would you listen, then?"

"Can we just get straight to the point? I'd waited for so long!"

She sighed.

Outside, the sky was set ablaze, and the odd autumn scent mingled with the faint trace of formalin. The wake had been held here in the house, and now I could see his ghost permeating every corner with his presence.

That must be the reason I kept getting flashes of images.

Finally, my mother averted her eyes from cosmoses and chrysanthemums, but when she spoke her voice sounded like it was from another time altogether.

"I met him in the heights of our youth. Our future seemed boundless, and we would be engrossed in the field our hearts had taken to. I in Botany, and he in his Maths, with all the wrinkles and creases that came with it."

"He'd been working in the same research even then. See, statistics and applied maths were on the rise, promising everyone the holy grail of a comfortable life. Afterall, the modern world was said to be ruled by numbers. But this fellow, he had his eyes set on something else instead."

I tried to hold my protest back as she calmly took a bite of black bean pancakes. Tried to see what she was seeing, tried to see beyond the wild hatred that had grown between the thorny years we'd spent apart. I'd tried to get her away many times, but she wouldn't budge. Her whole being, she told me over and over again, had rooted deep to the home and its soils, where she had pledged herself to protect. But protect from what? Protect for who?

"The unsolved problems. The honey trap for mathematicians worldwide. Young and old, people from all walks of life had attempted these, but many of them never see a solution emerge for hundreds of years."

"Eventually, it became some kind of a self-defeating belief that the only people who would be able to provide the solutions are the elites, the chosen genius, and everyone else should just stay away."

"He was having none of that, and he worked feverishly."

The ghost in her voice unnerved me, and slowly I lost my own conviction. What was the purpose of my asking all these now? What was I looking for? Was it redemption, for him? Or...

"You see, fate has a cruel joke. People shine the brightest when they're doing and talking about what they love. We like the ethereal qualities that they seemed to exude."

"You asked me if I have ever hated him for neglect. The answer is no. That was why I fell for him in the first place."

"But therein lies the trap, you see, for people like that don't have much interest in the ordinary life. They have something to chase, something to seek. That pot at the end of the rainbow, the light at the end of the tunnel, that's all they were capable to see."

"He told me he wouldn't take me, because he feared that one day he would be lost, never to return."

"Well, I was having none of that as well."

"I assured him that everything would be alright, that he would be able to work undisturbed."

"Perhaps I was more than a bit too overconfident too. I held hope that maybe I could be his anchor, maybe I could keep him tethered in this world."

She laughed, as if the summer had never left. Why would she laugh?

"You see where that confidence had brought me."

"But I made my choice, and I regret nothing."

"And he had loved me enough for what little space he had for everything else in his heart."

Again, that faraway gaze, as if she would disappear in a fraction of second, caught in the past that had reached far into the future.

Was I, perhaps, looking for a justification for her? For all her suffering, for all her patience... but she wasn't the one having objection. I was.

"You ever notice that he had the same inscription for all his epigraphs?"

She handed me a paper. His name was written as the first author out of three. I was not aware he had time for collaboration. The notion that he might have talked more with everyone else but us made me sick.

"MQA."

"What does this mean?"

"It was our little joke. He'd call me his Queen Artemisia, the bravest in all of Persia."

I wish I could laugh. That was so... impeccably childish. Unbelievably sappy, like something out of afternoon soap opera. It was exactly the kind of story that would get my eyes rolling if my co-worker ever confided in me.

"And that's enough for you? Three letters in dusty journals nobody read for all you'd done?"

Yet in the back of my mind many things were swelling and nagging, threatening to burst apart at the seams. All those chilled untouched cup of tea because I was too busy with my countless school projects, the half-eaten dinner I'd left in favor of a sudden meeting with a friend, the lunch offers I kept declined from weekend to weekend because coming home paled in comparison to spending the day in town, the calls and messages I left unreplied because they came after office hours and I was exhausted.

What was it I was looking for?

("This is one awesome queen. You have more stories like this?"

"That I agree. Unfortunately I can't read you another. Maybe tomorrow?"

"I hope she doesn't end up with some weak King and has her kingdom fallen."

"I don't know, but I think the King would be most grateful for her."

"How are you so sure?"

"Hmm, that I wonder...")

"I don't expect you to understand."

"Don't you have a dream of your own?"

"But I have it here, all fulfilled."

She looked at her garden, vibrant and immaculate.

She looked at me.

I felt the bile rise to my throat again.

(Perhaps I too had been running. Running from him. Running from my mother. Running from myself.)

"But he failed. He's going down in history as just another nameless researcher. All his life, his works, all for nothing."

A footnote, a scribble in the margin, if he was fortunate.

"All for nothing?" She raised her eyebrows. "His works gave him joy to keep living. You put meaning in achievements, kid. Perhaps that's the right way to go in this cruel world. But for me, it doesn't work like that."

(A stormy winter night. A pot of floral tea. A picture book. A disgruntled child.

"The dragon isn't slain. The princess doesn't marry the knight. Don't you think they make for an unsafisfying story?"

A sad smile. An awkward attempt to console, and an even more frustrated child.)

"What do you mean?"

"It means a man was allowed a life in pursuit of his desire. And he doesn't need to be remembered by anyone. I, for one, will remember."

"But--"

"We human are always in the quest of immortality, don't you think? Fame and glory is just the modern form of the philosopher's stone. Or mercury. Or what you may," she paused, giggling at her own joke. "I think they're all futile. It's just a matter of luck whether the next generation will remember you or not."

"..."

"Perhaps you won't understand. I don't expect you to. See, this is where we were fallible. Before we were your parents, before all else, we're just two people trying to do what we wanted. See, that's highly egoistical. We brought a child into the world, a child that had no idea to be involved in this and was unfairly treated so."

My mother, in her ever-patient countenance, smiled.

"I wish you would find it in you to forgive us someday."

For a moment that seemed like it lasted forever, I was stunned.

I understood nothing, because mother had seen him more than a man of numbers, but such man had been long gone from the world if he had ever existed.

Then slowly, it dawned on me what she meant to carve on his tombstone. Sure enough, the image on the headstone sketch I discarded so violently was:

∞

A lemniscate.

In the silence that followed her last statement, I thought I heard voices in the breeze once more.

"Aren't you lonely in there?"

"I'm not. I know your mother is always there for me. And you."

As she looked into the setting sun, the sunrays bathing her in ethereal glow, I thought that for a moment she was entirely content--

--and dare I say it, more than a bit proud.

She looked at me, a queen of an ancient country, and rose.

-----------

-----------

(her kingdom might have crumbled to dust, but her dignity wouldn't rust)