Michael Horn's life began at the age of eighteen, when he found himself on a stage in Prague, being handed a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Later that evening, he found himself in the arms — not to mention the bed — of another medalist, whose name he had forgotten (along with whichever southeast Asian country she'd represented) before his flight home had left the tarmac.
Looking out from the airbus, he saw the angel-white formations of the Dolomites pass by, to be replaced by the brown horns of the western Alps. He turned to the passenger seated next to him.
"Quite the view" she said. Her voice had an accent normally exclusive to both the upper classes and the over sixties. This was odd, since she was around thirty and he'd heard her speaking to a flight attendant in a distinctly non-english language.
"It's a bloody good view" he responded, in a half-ablated Northern accent, then paused. "You going on holiday, um, what's bringing you to England?" "I'm visiting my cousin, she's reading Medicine at Cambridge, but since it's the long vacation just starting, we're spending some time in Yorkshire" "I'm going to do Maths in Cambridge in a couple of months" "Oh, really?" She sounded surprised. `"That"s awfully impressive of you, you know. I read MML there myself, and now my Czech is so good I keep getting mistaken for a native speaker! It's a wonderful place but I'm sure you'll find somewhere you fit in'' "Thanks."
He fumbled in his pocket for his phone, and a Czech Koruna fell to the floor. He put his headphones in and lent against the window.
The perpetual rains of Manchester greeted him with an applause of thunder as the plane came in to land. Until now, Michael had been terrified of flying, but on this particular occasion he wept. His seat-neighbor asked if he was alright, and he said he was, because he couldn't quite tell what was the problem (what his heart knew that his mind did not: he was falling from a height to which he would not climb back for several years).
When he arrived home, he carefully and gently placed the medal in a middle drawer and forgot about it. It was a dreary summer, as northern English summers often are, and his father congratulated him on his foreign victory by holding a barbecue in the spitting rain, attended by three physically proximate but relationally distant uncles. These uncles were all on his father's side, as his mother was no longer in contact with her Muslim relatives, who still lived in the centre of Manchester, which their house stood on a hill overlooking. She stood in the far corner of the garden, slowly chewing her bacon butty and silently surveying the city below.
The pregnant stasis of the two or three months before leaving home is something quite unlike any other period of time. Michael would barely remember those weeks, which seemed at the time to go on forever, and during which he fell into an endless rhythm: borrow his mother's car, a tiny little blue thing which was fit for two normal sized people or perhaps four very tiny people, and drive out into the peak district. Five days a week he'd walk the same hills and valleys exactly, through a route which started by formation of limestone known as "the finger" or ("God's finger" among the older religious folk who lived around the area) and ended in a chasm called "Lud's Church".
Michael took out his phone and searched up the origins of the name; it was nothing to do with the loom-smashers of old.
"Good." he muttered under his breath, as he put his palm against the mossy stone walls. The days continued to pass at the same speed they always had.
He took the medal with him when he left.
By some twist of fate, the first person he met when he arrived at Cambridge was a very posh MML student who he strongly suspected to be the cousin of the woman he'd met on the plane, though he did not mention the connection. He responded with a vague affirmative when she asked if he'd be at the pub that evening.
"Gosh, you have the most marvelous accent!" she replied.
At the pub, she insisted on buying him a rum and Coca-Cola, and quizzed him about his life in Manchester.
"You were brave to apply, you know, since you didn't go to private school."
"Not really. My school had a few of people get in every year."
"Oh but, given your Mum has been through so much with her family."
"Well, she never liked them much anyway. And it happened before I was born."
"And your Dad, does he work?"
"He's a programmer."
"But it must be hard living somewhere rough like Yorkshire."
"Manchester's not in Yorkshire ... but we had a nice place, looked out over the Peaks-"
She leaned towards him.
"Oh but you're so impressive I think..." She paused.
At this point he got up and left, feeling vaguely uneasy and quite unimpressed with her. The next day, he told his new course-mates about the incident in a gap between lectures: they described it as a "fumble".
Michael found that he preferred his tennis-playing friends to his mathematician friends. Those other mathmos struggled and complained about their workload, whereas he found it — well — moderately taxing. On the other hand, he was one of his College's worst tennis players, which was a refreshing change of pace! Thursday after Thursday he'd head to the courts to be utterly trounced by the other players.
"There's something relaxing about playing against you" he told Percy (who was the best player in College by quite a way) one evening. "There's no pressure, I can just sit back, relax, and lose."
Percy laughed.
Yet the human mind is nothing if not a reinforcement-learning system, and Michael — though he scarcely admitted it — wanted not just success but victory. What use is getting a first-class degree, if nobody gets kicked out of the uni because of him? (he'd once drunkenly asked that of his tennis-mates before they headed to some dingy nightclub, and, again, they laughed) and Percy told him that within a year he'd be good enough to apply to the University team.
He also sought success in another way. In another drunken game, Percy asked what he most wanted in life: "Gold! Gold, and women and ... well that's it I think!" and there was a chorus of laughter from those who had heard his words.
So he decided to get good at that too, and he began the slow process of memorizing a bag of tricks which served him well. The first, and most important, was a superstition. He always kept his IMO medal in his pocket when he went out, or left it wrapped in a towel by the court when he played.
Rule after rule he gathered, some for the court, some for courtship, and he felt he was almost at the point of a breakthrough in both when he was forced home by the end of the summer term. That autumn, he turned up a week early for the university tennis club tryouts, which, miraculously, he succeeded in. His next success came precisely a year and a day after his first night in Cambridge, when he found himself in a rather familiar conversation, albeit with an unfamiliar lady:
"And where are you from, I love your accent?" she asked, and with a prickle in his chest he responded:
"Oh um ... I grew up in the north ... but I'd rather not talk about it ..." and about fifteen minutes later she left with him.
And after each night of revelry, he would walk home, alone or with someone else, under the stars or the clouds, and once he was finally asleep he would dream. Most dreams he did not remember, but there was one he did: he was climbing a mountain, towards what he did not know. Each time the dream recurred, he was exactly where he'd left off the last time.
For the remaining three years of his degree these dreams continued, and he climbed higher, until the summit was almost in sight. At the end of his fourth year (he'd achieved one of the best grades of anyone in the exams, not that he really cared) he and the rest of the tennis team went to Oxford to compete.
After the tournament was done (he'd won all of his matches) he went back to the room of one of the Oxford players, and later on, finding he'd missed his train, she kindly let him stay over rather than kicking him to the curb.
That night, squished into one half of a single bed, he finally found himself at the peak, where an altar made of the same whitish rock as the mountain stood. Sitting on it was a sword and a crown. He reached for the sword first, as if to hold it aloft and declare himself the victor over an imaginary Everest, but before he could pick it up it burst into flames, both the hilt and the blade, and he yanked his arm back.
It was 7.45 AM, and his new acquaintance's morning alarm woke them both up. They dressed themselves and Michael made a sprint for the train station.