The Nash living room was quieter than a library.
That one line—"Tell me more"—felt like a seal being lifted. But over the next hour, Link realized this wasn't an interview at all. It felt like sitting for a PhD qualifying exam in mathematics.
Nash refused to answer any questions about emotions.
"Were you scared back then?" Russell asked.
"Fear is an irrational emotional variable," Nash replied without lifting his head, his finger tracing slow circles on the armrest. "It interferes with calculation."
"Then… do you love your wife?" Jennifer asked carefully, her voice gentle.
"Love is a sociological concept," Nash said. "Its definition changes depending on historical context."
Link cursed under his breath.
This old man was harder to deal with than Harvey.
Russell's impatience flared again. His fingers tapped sharply against the couch armrest. It felt less like talking to a person and more like having a conversation with a walking copy of Principia Mathematica.
Jennifer, meanwhile, turned her gaze to Alicia.
Between the two women, there seemed to be a wordless understanding. Alicia only smiled at her now and then, refilled her coffee, her eyes carrying a quiet resignation—as if to say, See? This is the man I've spent my life with.
Link leaned back on the couch and stopped talking. He just watched Nash.
Watched the unconscious tapping of his fingers on the table—not evenly, but in a pattern: one long, two short, like Morse code. Watched him stare at a patch of light on the curtain for a full five minutes without blinking.
Damn it.
This was a movie already.
Suddenly, Russell straightened up, his breathing quickening.
"Professor," he said sharply, like a bull trapped in a pen, "when they sent you to the mental hospital and put you through insulin shock therapy—what were you thinking at the time?!"
The air froze instantly.
Alicia's hand stopped midair, her glass suspended.
Nash's tapping fingers stopped too.
Slowly, he lifted his head. For the first time, his aged eyes locked directly onto Russell's. There was no emotion in them.
"You are an actor," Nash said. "You're looking for an emotional breaking point—something that lets you cry, scream in front of the camera, and walk away with a trophy."
Russell's face flushed a deep, ugly red.
"You ask what I was thinking?" Nash continued, his voice flat but sharp as a blade. "I was thinking about whether insulin-induced seizures could cause irreversible topological damage to neuronal connections in the cerebral cortex."
He paused, his voice dropping even lower.
"I was thinking about whether I would still be able… to see the numbers."
Russell stood frozen, mouth open, like he'd just been slapped.
—Shit. This is going sideways.
Link's heart sank.
He was about to step in when something clicked.
"That equation…" Link said suddenly. His voice wasn't loud, but everyone turned to look at him. "The paper you published in Annals of Mathematics—the one on non-cooperative games. I didn't understand it, so I had a Princeton PhD candidate read it to me."
He looked straight at Nash, completely serious.
"Was it… beautiful?"
Nash froze.
He stared at Link, and for the first time, a crack appeared in that icy shell around his eyes.
"Beautiful?" he repeated, as if he'd never heard the word used that way before.
"Yes." Link nodded, calm and certain. "Like a poem. Or a painting. Its structure, its logic, its… simplicity. Wasn't it beautiful?"
Nash fell silent.
He lowered his head and looked at his hands, speckled with age spots. After a long moment, he spoke again—this time with the faintest warmth in his voice.
"It is not beautiful."
"It is… harmonious."
"Every symbol is exactly where it should be. Like stars in the universe—no more, no less."
In that moment, Russell Crowe forgot how to breathe.
Watching the old man suddenly speak with quiet passion, he felt—for the first time—that he'd touched the handle of a door that had long been shut.
Link said nothing. He only shot Russell a look.
—Shut up. Listen.
That afternoon, they didn't ask a single question about feelings.
They talked only about mathematics.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem. The Riemann hypothesis. Things that sounded like pure alien language to Link.
But Russell was listening.
He stopped asking, "Why were you in pain?"
He started asking, "What does the universe inside your mind look like?"
By evening, the setting sun had washed the living room in gold.
Nash stood up.
"Come with me."
He led them across Princeton's quiet campus and into an old academic building.
The hallway smelled of chalk dust and aging paper.
He pushed open an office door.
Inside looked like a tornado had passed through. Books were piled everywhere. Three massive blackboards covered the walls from top to bottom, crammed with dense equations, symbols, and arrows.
Like a madman's mural.
"This," Nash said, standing before the storm of numbers and turning back to them, "is my world."
Russell held his breath.
He finally understood.
The man's pain, his madness, his struggle—everything—was hidden inside those symbols no outsider could read.
This was the real script.
As they were getting ready to leave, Alicia stopped Link.
She pulled him to the end of the hallway, away from Russell and Jennifer.
Her expression was complicated—grateful, but deeply tired.
"Mr. Link," she said softly, "thank you. John… hasn't spoken this calmly in a very long time."
"It was our honor."
Alicia took a deep breath, as if making a difficult decision.
"This weekend, you should visit a place."
She pulled an old key from her pocket.
"Trenton. The old wing of the state psychiatric hospital."
She paused, her voice dropping.
"That was once his 'laboratory.'"
"Go see it."
"See how that genius was once locked inside his own world."