Chapter Eight: Blindsided

“When I was a child we lived on the Island of Sardinia off the coast of Italy. I recall, even today, the smell of salt spray, brine and fish as it drifted in on seemingly every breeze. My mother would stand at the villa wall each morning and look out at the white beaches of the Mediterranean Sea. I remember thinking how beautiful she looked standing there on the obsidian gravel of the courtyard as the wind blew back her hair. That simple memory is ingrained in my mind forever. In the distance, hungry gulls would spin about in the sky crying like children. The city of Cagliari stood dew-laden in the early morning shadows behind our home. I would sit in the dooryard working for hours on my equations as the sun cast piebald shadows over my face. My mother would jokingly tease me about my expression of unadulterated concentration and she wondered out loud many times where I’d come by that trait. It was not a common gesture for either her or my father. She already knew that I was an especially odd child but she told me many times that she knew I was also an exceptionally gifted child. You see, my ability to conclude a problem in both mathematics and social situations bordered on the genius and my mother harbored high hopes for my future.”

Iben listened intently as Enzo Valenzetti, who had just been introduced to him by his long-lost mother as his long-lost father, recited the story of his incredible life - the boy genius whose eponymous yet mysterious equation outlining the fate of mankind gave new and dire import to the phrase “you do the math.”

Iben thought he knew where this was going because he’d been reading up on Valenzetti as research for his writing assignment The Apocalypse Equation. Iben had a sliver of space in his buzzing brain to wonder how a guy almost eighty could look as good as he did. In fact, both his parents looked great for the ages they claimed and Iben held out hope that he had at the very least inherited their Dorian Grey DNA, although somehow he doubted it.

“While the world was waging war, I was attending a very prestigious university and my father was becoming exceedingly rich from profits obtained selling mess kits to the German Army. But the year I graduated from the Fibonacci State Institute of Advanced Sciences my father hung himself from a tree in the town square. I was sixteen. I was told later that he was convinced that he would be labeled a war criminal and a Nazi sympathizer and that he would go to trial as such. To alleviate the shame and dishonor he thought this would cause his family he took matters into his own hands. It turns out, Iben, that he probably would not have been tried and certainly not shot but we Valenzettis have a tendency to work out problems in our head before they go out into the real world. It’s a family trait, of sorts. I’m certain you know what I mean.”

Iben had to think about it. Until now he’d had no real family, and therefore no shared traits to consider. Now he was sitting in front of two people who apparently understood him right down to his genes. It made him feel decidedly uncomfortable that they professed to know so much about him, while he knew absolutely nothing about them. True he’d researched the fictional life - and death! - of Enzo Valenzetti and Dr. Apollo had been a friend for a long while, but now it seemed that Valenzetti was more real than Apollo since everything she’d told him about herself had been a cover story to keep him from learning her true identity.

Dr. Apollo looked at him gravely. “Iben, please believe that I never wanted to lie to you. I only wanted to protect you.”

“Now, now, my dear,” Valenzetti said soothingly, putting a comforting arm around his mate’s bird-fragile shoulders. “Iben, you need to understand the gravity of the situation as we saw it, as we lived it. Let me continue my story.”

“There once was an extremely beautiful woman who had the entire world in her hands. She was smart and inquisitive with an intellect that matched university professors twice her age. At nineteen this woman met a man, a driven man with only one idea in his mind. It drove him. It became his sole purpose in life. This man was proclaimed the greatest mathematician ever born and seemed to be living up to the reputation. But, in those star-crossed days of youth he fell in love with two things: The woman you see sitting before you today and the idea that he could somehow save the world. He wooed the young lady but only half-heartedly. His work was ultimately more important to him. Yet she too fell in love. When a child was born they were at odds for the first time. He had the world to save and she was too young to raise the child herself. They turned first to the Helios Foundation and later to St. Anthony’s because they knew they would take good care of him, nurture him, teach him. And they did.”

“I got C’s,” Iben said. “How is it that I turn out to be the son of two bona fide geniuses?”

Iben had no illusions. He knew he was a bit of a plodder. That’s not to say he had no ambitions, just none so grandiose that they couldn’t be achieved through patient, dogged effort. He’d never thought of himself as a genius. Hardly. He certainly never imagined himself as a world changer. Now the world and all of its problems were being thrust upon him and he felt pretty resentful, to tell the truth. He was beginning to suspect that before long he was going to be forced to make decisions and even take action that in all likelihood would prove to be either highly dangerous or futile or some deadly combination of both.

“Please let me finish, Iben” Valenzetti said. “It is important to all of us that you hear everything. And I mean everything. You may ask any question you’d like when I am done but please allow me to finish what I must tell you.”

Iben nodded his assent.

“We were pleased that you became a man who loved words,” Valenzetti continued, “and while I had aspirations for you in the hard sciences it seems you followed more in the steps of your mother who loved literature. Be that as it may, we knew no position to give you a secure childhood. The very fact of your existence and in many ways the simple knowledge of your existence may have placed you in mortal danger. Unscrupulous groups may have tried to coerce me by kidnapping you or threatening your life.”

This was exactly the sort of trouble Iben had seen coming and he was almost certain he was not up to the challenge. Still, here he was sitting in a Copenhagen hotel room with two people who claimed to be his parents - one of whom had drugged and kidnapped him, the other a figment of some other writer’s imagination. Were they for real?

“This is what Marty must have felt like when he got “Back to the Future” and discovered that Lorraine and George had been transformed into total Yuppies. Was this his real “real” life? Or had his trip through time truly altered the future? Maybe what I need is a DeLorean to blast me back to the past,” Iben lamented distractedly.

Apollo and Valenzetti supplied grins of empty amiability. They clearly had no idea what he was getting at. For that matter, Iben didn’t really know what it was he was getting at. He was a lost soul just like the castaways on Lost, and he didn’t know which direction to go to find his bearings: he could follow Jack Shepherd’s example and tough it out, keeping all of his questions to himself. Or he could do it John Locke’s way and assign some kind of mystical relevance to this bizarre twist of fate. Then there was always Hurley’s way. Hurley at least asked the questions. The problem was, in asking, he was also likely to get answers that he might not want to hear.

Doctors Apollo and Valenzetti were waited expectantly, and then all at once they perked up.

“Ask us anything, son,” Dr. Valenzetti offered. “And we’ll expend one point twenty-one gigawatts into the flux-capacitor of our brains to get you to the answer.”

See, that’s what Iben worried about. Stuff like what happened right there. A minute ago they’d never heard of a Marty McFly or his trip big-screen adventure into the past, and now they were quoting the script verbatim. That can’t be good.

“All righty, then,” Iben began before faltering. “But… ah… how… um… why…” he blustered.

He calmed himself and started again.

“Right. Okay,” Iben took a breath, and looked Valenzetti in the eye. “Dude, you do know that you’re a fictional character? A dead fictional character. You play an off-camera role in the American television show Lost?”

Valenzetti and Apollo continued to gaze steadily at their son, seemingly urging him on while offering no response of their own to his question.

“Okay. Well, I guess my next question would have to be: if you’re a fictional character,” Iben paused here sucking in air and letting it out in little Lamaze-like puffs. “Does that mean I’m a fictional character, too?”

Valenzetti and Apollo turned to each other in confusion just as perplexed parents have done since the dawn of time when faced with the bewildering thought processes of their offspring. Then, they burst out laughing.

“Well, my dear, he’s not a scientist, you know. He’s a writer. And what an imagination!” Dr. Apollo said, clearly relieved that this foolishness was the only thing troubling her son.

“I blame it on that friend of yours at the Helios Foundation. All that New Age, mumbo-jumbo,” Dr. Valenzetti chuckled, shaking an indulgent finger at his diminutive bride.

“Pshaw, I told you we should have sent him to obedience school.”

Iben watched the interaction with growing concern. The events of the past weeks did not seem to warrant this kind of teasing. There had to be some reason why this was happening to him. Why he had been yanked from his unassuming, live-and-let-live life and plunged into this off-kilter, kill-or-be killed existence. He’d written lots of these novelizations before and never had their storylines slopped over into his day-to-day reality. Why now? And what was he supposed to do next?

His parents began to sober up a bit and after taking a few moments to wipe merry tears from their eyes, Dr. Apollo turned to Iben with a big smile.

“I know we have a lot of catching up to do. And you deserve a much more complete explanation of why we’ve stayed silent until now. But first, you have a writing assignment to complete. It will mean so much to your future success, my dear, and your father and I want to help you in every possible way to make the most of this chance,” Dr. Apollo said.

“After all, who better to explain the Valenzetti Equation than its author?” Iben’s old man answered, “Think about it: I’m easily as interesting a genius as Dr. Emmett L. Brown. If George McFly can write a bestselling science- fiction novel called “A Match Made in Space,” there’s absolutely no reason why Iben Powned can’t do the same thing with the much more promising title, The Apocalypse Equation!”

“Let’s not be overbearing, Enzo,” Dr. Apollo said. “We can offer every insight and assistance to Iben, but the first question that needs to be answered is WWID? What Would Iben Do?”

Whoa! How did they do that? They couldn’t have possibly come up with that on their own. He’d said the same thing several days ago, but only in the privacy of his own mind. Unless he talked in his sleep, there’s no way they could have overheard. It was eerie, like the way Desmond knew what Locke was going to say in his speech on the beach before it happened. Or how Ben Linus knew that Jack was interested in the Red Sox World Series outcome or how he could quote paragraphs of text from “Of Mice and Men” to Sawyer only moments after failing to pick up on Sawyer’s allusion to the book. Or how the airplane mobile in the Other’s nursery for Claire’s baby looked the same and played the same song that she had only dreamed about.

It reminded Iben of television talking heads, those news guys who look straight at the camera and report stories while the information is being whispered into their earpieces from an unseen production booth where a director keeps track of all the breaking news stories. When he thought about it, it wasn’t so different a set up than that of Ben’s bank of monitors in the Hydra hatch. It couldn’t be, could it, that his parents were able to read his mind somehow? What exactly had happened to him when the policeman, St. Germaine, took him in for questioning? Had he made Iben’s brain readable? And if so, was someone reading it now? How about now? Suddenly it felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, his head spun and his stomach lurched. Talk about an invasion of privacy, when your thoughts are no longer your personal property, what happens to free will? You can’t just stop thinking. Well, there’s one way you can, the ultimate last resort his grandfather used as an escape hatch.

Just when Iben thought that solution might be his only escape, there was a knock at the door.

“Room Service,” a Scandinavian-accented voice said through the door. Delivery for Mr. Iben Powned.”

Iben shuffled unsteadily to the door and found on the other side a rather fierce-looking bellboy.

“A package for you, Mr. Powned,” he said handing Iben a bubble-envelope with an ABC label addressed to Iben.

“Hope it’s a bomb,” Iben joked.

“Sign here, please,” the bellboy said without expression, shoving a pad and pen into Iben’s hands. On the piece of paper was written in orange block letters: DON’T ASK ME ANY QUESTIONS. DO EXACTLY THIS. TELL THEM THE TAPE IS FROM YOUR AGENT. WATCH THE DVD IMMEDIATELY. YOUR PARENTS EYES WILL NOT BE ABLE SEE WHAT’S ON THE SCREEN. THEY WILL ONLY HEAR THE AUDIO TRACK. FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN ON THE SCREEN OR ALL WILL BE LOST. THAT MEANS YOU. DON’T THINK; OBEY.

“Tak,” Iben said, using the only word in Danish he knew by heart. He had no idea what was on this disc, but whatever it was it offered an alternative to the oblivion that had nearly engulfed him moments ago. He closed the door, tore open the envelope and popped the enclosed DVD into the suite’s home-theater player.

“Looks like Hamish tracked me down” Iben said realizing his voice was too strident and over loud. He needed to improve his acting skills if he was going to get through this charade. “He’s sent something from the network. Maybe this will help us get a grip on The Apocalypse Equation.”

The intro music from E! TV came on and a reporter’s voice said, “Bad news for the intrepid castaways on Lost, ABC has decided it will end the suspense of the uber-mystery series sooner rather than later.

Iben’s gasp owed nothing to his acting skills and everything to spontaneous distress, now he’d never get a network staff writing job. A moment later a woman absolutely unrelated to E! TV appeared on the screen. It was the girl who’d visited his apartment back in New York. She was holding up hand-lettered cards.

“SETTLE DOWN. LOST HAS NOT BEEN CANCELLED.”

Too late, Iben was already drenched in flop sweat. He turned to see Apollo and Valenzetti’s reactions. They were scowling at the TV screen, but he could tell they were worried about the cancellation, and for some reason they did not see the girl’s out of context appearance.

STOP SWEATING. THEY CANNOT READ YOUR MIND. THEY CAN ONLY ACCESS YOUR MEMORIES. SO ACT FAST. SHOW THEM HOW FURIOUS YOU ARE AT THE CANCELLATION.

“Whatthe…?” Iben sputtered.

TRY HARDER, the next card read.

“WHATTHE (@_&^%&**#)????!!!” Iben emoted.

“Oh, my dear, you don’t think this will endanger your assignment?” Dr. Apollo inquired.

SAY: “THIS IS NOT FAIR.” TELL THEM THAT IT MEANS THE BOOK IS CANCELLED, TOO.

IIben did as he was told and even added a flourish of his own, “Nice of Hamish to let me know this way, the Haggis-eating, skirt wearing, bagpiper.”

RANT. RAVE. THROW A TANTRUM.

Iben tantrumed.

READ THE NEXT CARD THEN TEAR THE DVD FROM THE PLAYER, SMASH IT.

Iben read.

Iben smashed.

STORM OUT OF THE ROOM. DON’T LET THEM STOP YOU OR COME WITH YOU. WE WILL BE WAITING IN A WHITE PANELED TRUCK WITH A SAD-FACED CLOWN IN A RING OF FIRE PAINTED ON THE SIDE.

Iben did exactly as he was told. He swore and stomped, grabbed his coat and his fanny pack in a rage, only to find himself stalled at the doors of the private elevator that provided entrance to the penthouse suite. This was awkward. He stabbed the button repeatedly as his parents began hovering. How long was it, he wondered, before his thoughts became readable memories?

“Iben, let us come with you,” Valenzetti said. “Come on, Mother, our boy shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”

Jeez, would the elevator never get here? Iben thought he just might be having a stroke when his cell phone rang and he dug it out of the fanny pack.

“Say, ‘Hamish,” the woman’s voice commanded.

“Hamish!” Iben shouted. “You son-of-a-hag…”

“Shut up and listen,” the voice on the phone ordered with urgent irritation. “Don’t wait for the elevator, take the stairs. There’s an exit door from the suite, the third door down the corridor to your left. Don’t worry; they can’t chase you down twenty flights of stairs.”

Iben took off running. Ten minutes later, he reached the sidewalk, his sides splitting from the unusual exertion, panting for breath he realized that Apollo and Valenzetti could have easily beat him to the street using the elevator. He frantically searched the street for the clown truck. Nothing. It was nowhere to be seen. Oh, no. It looked like he’d been cast as the Locke character in this scenario, doomed to be fooled not once, not twice, but each and every time. He tried his cell phone, redialing the last number that had called him. It began to ring.

And it rang. Iben scanned the street and caught sight of the hotel’s doorman as he held open the gold-tinted glass door to make way for a blond lab and her human companions merging.

And rang. Iben couldn’t see a viable hiding place that wouldn’t also cross his mom and dad’s sightlines. Maybe he should just throw himself in front of this approaching bus.

“Tak!” a woman’s voice answered at last. “Vikingeskibsmuseet.”

“What?” Iben bleated. “I mean, excuse me. I beg your pardon? Say again?”

“Jeg forstår ikke,” she said slowly, enunciating each syllable as though that might help the words penetrate his thick head.

“Wait a minute,” Iben replied with equal volume and precision as cowered between parked cars while digging out his Danish phrase book.

“Taler De engelsk?” he gasped.

“Ja ja!” she said enthusiastically, and then put him on hold. Iben stared at the phone despondently when at last he was greeted by an English-language recording: “You have reached The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde thirty kilometers from Copenhagen,” but Iben couldn’t concentrate on her directions because he could hear - heck, he could almost smell - the doggy breath closing in on his hiding spot.

“Hey, brother,” a voice called out to him from a car window. “Don’t I know you from another lifetime?”

A miniature white panel truck sped up beside him and screeched to a halt. Crammed inside the toy-sized interior were the fierce bellboy, the girl from Thanksgiving, and, accordioned into the back haul space, was Hamish himself who reached out, yanked Iben right off his haunches, just as the lab had sniffed out his quarry and was about to go into full retriever mode. Iben’s feet still protruded from the clown car as the driver shifted gears, slid across four lanes of dense traffic and sped away, either away from or straight into his doom. Iben didn’t dare guess which way it was going to go.

Once Iben had found a way to accommodate his limbs and operate his lungs, he decided to ask, “Hamish, what’s this all about?”

Hamish considered the question. “Oh, I think you know.”

“No, Hamish, I do not know.” Iben insisted.

“Really? Well, then the problem is that whatever you know, you don’t know you know. At least not yet.”

Iben lapsed into stricken, hopeless silence. He knew for sure he did not now nor had he ever known anything that would make any sense of this.

“Ah, don’t worry you’re wee head, Iben,” Hamish said. “Whatever’s stuck up in there,” he said poking Iben’s forehead with this finger, “we’ll pry it out of you or die trying.”

Iben sighed. “Better you than me,” Iben thought, and wondered if somewhere someone was reading this impolitic thought and what it would mean to him if he had been overheard.

“I didn’t mean that,” Iben said out loud to the unseen powers that be.

“No, no, don’t apologize for sighing,” Hamish countered. “We’re all a bit uptight. Truth be known, I misspoke myself just now, too. What I meant to say was that we’re going to do whatever it takes to get at the truth inside your brain, if that is indeed where the solution resides, and we really, sincerely hope that you don’t die while we’re trying.”

And then, without another thought, errant or otherwise, Iben did the only sensible thing to do and fainted dead away.