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| Author Ted Galdi |
The next morning Sean scurries down the stairs of
his house in Pasadena Los Angeles
“Morning.”
Running a hand through his messy hair, he walks to the refrigerator,
grabs a gallon of orange juice, and chugs from the bottle.
She realizes what he’s doing just from the
noise. “What did I tell you about
that? Get a glass you animal.” She holds a stony look on him, but he can
sense she doesn’t mind deep down. Living
with her the last ten years, he’s accustomed to every line and curl in her
expressions and their meanings. He
decides to have some fun and test her.
He swigs again. She rolls her
eyes, then says, “Me and my friend from book club are going bowling a little
later. Want to come?”
He feels a hint of accomplishment knowing she
wasn’t going to question him again about drinking from the bottle. “I’ve been putting off that independent
study. The Traveling Salesman thing I
told you about.” He takes another gulp. “I want to get it out of the way. I feel bad for the professor. He thinks I’ve been working on it.”
“Oh yeah, I kind of remember. You need to find the shortest distance
between all the cities a salesman has to visit on a business trip?”
“That’s the one.”
He puts the jug away and knees the refrigerator shut. “Nobody’s been able to come up with a formula
to automatically do it.”
“Ever?”
“Not one that would work in any case.”
“Jeez. My
head would explode trying to figure that out.”
She folds the paper to the Opinion section. “Chicken on the barbecue okay for dinner
later?” she asks, skimming a column about violence in videogames.
“I’m gonna eat at Kyle’s. His parents invited me over.” He opens a cabinet and snatches a bag of
M&Ms.
She hears the crumple of the package and asks with
disappointment, “That’s your breakfast?”
With a smirk he scampers out. She
groans and returns to the videogame article.
He goes up the steps and into his room, passing an
unmade bed with a Die Hard poster
above, scattered clothing on the rug, and a brown dresser with half the drawers
open, half shut. He scoops his laptop
from the floor and sits at his desk.
He closes Netflix, Family Guy episode paused on the screen, then creates a new
Microsoft Word document, titling it “Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem:
Computing the Least Cost Cyclic Route Through All Nodes of a Weighted Graph in
Polynomial Runtime.”
He grabs his phone and scrolls through its music
library, selecting the album Siamese
Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins. He
fishes his headphones from a drawer and plugs them in. Wrapping them around his ears with one hand,
he hits play with the other.
As the first song starts he tears the candy pack
with his teeth and pours some in his mouth.
Chewing, he empties fifteen or so pieces on the carpet by the chair,
situating them a few inches from each other.
He pictures each M&M as a city a salesman could
visit on a trip, envisioning all the possible paths connecting them. Closing his eyes, he pumps his right knee to
the rhythm. The large studio-grade
headphones cover the full of his ears, giving them a toasty feeling as his mind
rips through mathematical questions that have dumbfounded the world’s top
scholars for decades.
In an hour or so he stops the music. He figured it out. The whole thing. He doesn’t appear excited, rather,
disappointed. He cracks his neck and
begins typing the answer in the Word document.
Bonus feature - here's a sneak peek at his Book Trailer!
Thanks for stopping by to check out our
featured author of the week, Ted Galdi.
Until next time - stay casual, live life to the
fullest, and have a piece of chocolate for me.
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