Simon

by Alexander Masters

  What sparked it off?

  Pickled beetroot.

  Simon’s like a rat, or a dog. He likes to find his base before he sets out on forays. In new towns, he has first to race about—bag banging wildly against his legs, practically knocking him off his feet—to pinpoint the public library and the biggest bus stop; only then does he relax, breathe properly and head for the medieval castle. In a buffet, it’s the same. Even if there’s not a single other human between the restaurant entrance and the mountains lining the coast of Norway, he wants to know precisely where and at which table he’s going to sit, and to establish a presence there by dropping his bag on the salt-and-pepper pots. Only then will he go up to the counter to collect his food.

  I met him loading his plate with beetroot.

  For Simon, a good breakfast is made up of different ways to ingest vinegar.

  “What number table are you, Simon?”

  “I’m twenty-one.” Then he hesitated, looked at me…“No,” he corrected, “I’m not twenty-one, I’m fifty-five, my table is twenty-one.”

  Provoked by grammar, he leapt to mathematics, and when I looked back at him for a moment from the grapefruit counter he was standing with his plate lifted to his lips letting jus de beetroot dribble down his T-shirt and pool at his feet.

  He had spotted a chink in mathematics. It had to do with the shared properties of the numbers twenty-one and fifty-five, and the way sunflowers arrange their seeds and scales are arranged on a pineapple, and then something else about triangles, best thought of in terms of piles of policemen standing on each other’s shoulders riding motorbikes, and how many other pairs of numbers shared these same properties…

  Simon’s greatest mathematical discoveries have often begun with frivolous musings like this. For the rest of the day I could not get a word out of him.

  Could it be that he had found a whisker of the Monster?

  No.

  False alarm.

  It was nothing.

  37

  I don’t mind you making stuff up if it might have happened; what I do mind is things that would never have occurred.

  Simon, email to the author

  Simon agrees that the problem of trying to translate a three-dimensional person with five dimensions of taste and ten sensual dimensions into a sequence of black letters on a two-dimensional page commits you to some degree of biographical fudge, especially when the subject you’re working on won’t talk…

  “He, he,” titters Simon.

  …can’t remember his childhood…

  “Heh, heh!”

  …has no sense of anecdote, isn’t interested in analyzing his abilities, his attitude to life or his relationships with other people…

  “Huh, huh, huh!”

  …and works on a subject of cosmic importance that no one but himself understands.

  “It is not all my fault, you see!”

  But he is not prepared to agree that in order to tell the truth about him you have to lie. To get around the flattening simplifications of nonfiction you have to be, shall we say, creative with facts.

  On the bumpy minibus journey from Kirkenes through the no-man’s-land of Karelia into Russia, I invented another method. I would manufacture our conversations before we had them: write down everything I want to ask in this future exchange, make up all the replies Simon will give, then read the result through to him. If he agrees with what I’ve made him say, we keep it.

  If not, he has to speak or else forever be misrepresented.

  English has no tense for a biography of Simon. Not “he will have done” this, but “he will did” this.

  To my shock, Simon enjoys this new technique, although I’m never quite sure how much he understands it. If I send him a section of future conversation in which he will said, “I collect bus and train timetables because I am a mad mathematician with electrified hair and believe the Monster might have hidden the secret of the universe inside them,” he replies, “I’m sure I didn’t say that.”

  What he should say, of course, is “I’m sure I will not said it, because it is balls.”

  The first city you pass after leaving Norway is Nikel, the Russian center of nickel smelting. Looked at on Google Earth, it’s a necrotic pucker of black beside the Ice Age hills of Lapland. The smokestacks dotted between the apartment blocks and corrugated-metal processing yards spit 100,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere every year—four times the total quantity from Norway. Each summer, acid rain burns holes in the residents’ umbrellas.

  For this section of our trip, I had pre-prepared a discussion about beauty.

  Alexander: “Simon, what is beauty?”

  Future-Past Simon: “Huunh.”

  Alexander: “‘Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty,’ says Bertrand Russell. ‘A beauty cold and austere, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.’”

  Future-Past Simon: “Aagguuh.”

  Alexander: “You’d think Russell was talking about icicles. G. H. Hardy, one of the greatest British mathematicians of the early nineteenth century, is equally frigid: ‘The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.’”

  (“Shall I put you down for another going to said ‘Uuugh’ here, or would you prefer ‘Huunh’?”)

  Simon: “Eaargh.”

  Alexander (waving the book he is reading, Why Beauty is Truth, by Ian Stewart): “Look! Here’s another. Paul Erdos: ‘Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.’ When it comes to describing what you do, you mathematicians are as pompous as painters. However, I take it you, like all other mathematicians, agree with these three quotes?”

  (Delete as appropriate: Simon nods/Simon shakes his head/Simon has fallen asleep)

  “So, this is the point: it’s got to be rubbish. Why should maths pay any attention to whether a human thinks it’s beautiful or not? If the truth of mathematics lies in its objectivity and its existence away from messy emotional humans, how can you use, as a primary test, one of the most subjective human ideas of all, i.e., beauty? It’s hopeless. There must be ugly mathematics that’s true, just awkward.”

  (“Now, Simon, are you listening? This is what I want you to will said next:”)

  Future-Past Simon: “I think being able to see this beauty in mathematics is a sign of your talent for it, which is why this recent talk about it taking 10,000 hours to become a genius is nonsense, because you cannot learn aesthetic pleasure, only learn how better to fake it…”

  But at this point Simon put down his map, undid his glaze and joined the conversation properly, and his answers were, naturally, much better than anything I could invent.

  “It is true that there is ugly mathematics, but it is unlikely to be important. But if the result is important—for example, if it brings together areas of mathematics that were previously thought to be unrelated—and its argument is short, the argument is almost certain to be mathematically beautiful.”

  “Economy is a vital element of mathematical beauty?”

  “But at the same time, one reason I started research work on Simple Groups such as the Monster was because they seemed to be in a fundamental way different from other Simple Groups—what you call Groups representing atoms of symmetry—not just because of size. They were called Sporadic Groups, because in a certain sense which I won’t try to explain they didn’t fit neatly into the way other Groups could be classified, and I thought that was ugly.”

  “Tidiness is also part of mathematical beauty?”

  “But when I finished my PhD and ha
dn’t managed to bring these Sporadic Groups into the regular pattern, I felt that being Sporadic was beautiful.”

  “In short, this mathematical beauty is not like other beauty: it should be mean-spirited, link parts that don’t usually fit together, like stitching a bit of ear to a piece of nose, and is in general short. It would never do on a human. The only thing that does make it like ordinary beauty is that it’s extremely unreliable, not a good objective measure of anything, and can change.”

  “All I can say,” he barked, abruptly annoyed, “is that whatever nerve it was that tingled when I saw Torghatten Mountain from the boat two nights ago, it is that same nerve that tingles when I see a piece of beautiful mathematics!”

  It is the best reply I have ever heard from a mathematician on this strange subject.

  For the next half-hour Simon pursued facts around the index pages of his Thomas Cook timetable, snapping little glances at the map and out of the minibus window to make sure the dots and contour lines weren’t getting up to mischief. Practice has trained him to read tiny print during the roughest public-transport drives without feeling sick.

  Through the window, Nikel was sucked back into the bowels of the earth, a half-emitted stool, smeary with rain.

  Our minibus took us to Murmansk, the most northerly ice-free port in the world. The hills behind the city docks have been chewed up to make room for banks of cigarette-packet-gray housing blocks.

  The small bar at our hotel was crowded with prostitutes. Squeezed around the edge of the disco-lit room, they fidgeted and pecked at cushioned gold lamé handbags; their lips bounced and wiggled under their nostrils. Occasionally a woman would give an angry squirm, as if a breeze had got in and made a saucy attack beneath the table. Two or three businessmen sat in drinking cubicles, their jackets unbuttoned, studying their mobile phones. Britney Spears (very popular in Russia) rattled a vodka bottle on the barman’s shelf.

  I paid, rather stiffly, and walked out with three bottles of water—one more than I wanted.

  In the foyer, Simon had dropped into a sofa among a crowd of half-dressed, buyable women, and was in a panic. There had been, as there sometimes is when Simon and I arrive at a foreign hotel, some “confusion” about whether we had booked a room there or not. While this was being sorted out in angry whispers at the front desk, Simon had emptied the contents of his duffel onto the carpet. As he scrabbled through the pile, a blot of crackling plastic shopping bags, rigid socks and finger-stained railway timetables spread across the floor among the girls’ legs. Wearily, they uncrossed their thighs, dropped their knees lazily to another slant, then recrossed as soon as Simon—unexcited by these fleshy movements—had panted over to another part of his gutted luggage.

  “Oh dear,” he said, stretching the word out along a sigh. “Where have you been? What is happening? I can’t find my gout pills.”

  Though short-sighted, Simon “doesn’t have time” to buy glasses.

  Simon, immersed in the kingdoms of the immaterial, started awake.

  The 1,500 kilometers between Murmansk and St. Petersburg are 70 percent trees and 30 percent lakes, forest tracks, villages of sodden-looking huts, and sleep. The train takes twenty-eight hours to hummm, cluck-cluck, hummm, cluck-cluck, hummm, cluck-cluck through the Kalevala lands. Small stations get a one- or two-minute stop. If new passengers don’t instantly scramble on board with their tartan laundry bags and cardboard boxes wrapped in rope, the train moves off with the clothes and packed lunches flying off behind. At larger stations, the wheezing engine stops, the brakes release a long, screechy puff and the wheels fall silent beside a concrete ticket hall faced with pediments and columns, and painted duck-egg blue.

  Long after our train crosses back over the Arctic Circle, the last latitude at which the sun can remain in the sky for twenty-four hours non-stop, there is still no darkness. At 5 a.m. or 5 p.m., the carriages cluck-cluck through the forests and silent towns in mid-morning daylight.

  Simon had not been asleep. He had been, I thought, in what psychologists call a state of hyperfocus. When Simon is thinking about something he cares for deeply—the Cambridge–Huntingdon rail link, an unexpected digit in the Monster’s Group Table, the algebra of socks —he responds as if he’s flown off to stand in the field of the subject; he’s considering the crop and its abstractions and unknown dimensions and practicalities in situ. In front of his eyes, the regular world has been replaced by a frenzy of Tuesday-afternoon arrival times, or an unexpected multiple of the number 7. A beaming grin settles on his chin.

  “This instant,” I demanded in a whisper. “What are you looking at, in your mind?”

  Nothing in his face registered.

  “What are you thinking? You must be thinking something. Is it the Monster? Your brain can’t be empty. Tell me what it is.”

  Still, nothing.

  I felt oddly frightened.

  “Simon! Snap out of it! Respond!”

  “Oh dear!” he sighed. In his lap was his Thomas Cook railway timetable. I noticed now that he was tapping the cover, and had probably been doing so for some time. It showed a low-angle photograph of a red train in a field of spring flowers, with glorious snow-topped mountains behind. Simon’s fingertip was on the illustrative strip of route map just below the photograph, included on the cover to tell you the whereabouts of this lovely scene.

  I moved his finger aside and stared at the point he’d picked out. It was a town in Austria. It was called “Rottenegg.”

  In the large stations, among the characters out of Gogol, Simon relaxed. What was a moment of pause for us kicked the platform into a frenzy. Women with pallets of food and plastic buckets of drink swelled out from under the station stairs and across the rails. They glanced at Simon, but he didn’t look odder than their husbands. I drank hot kvass and ate a sweet chocolate pastry. Simon checked the signposts for words he could transliterate, then raced off to the toilet because he “felt ready now.”

  At 2 a.m., I woke as we passed through a city. Two Russians had joined our cabin, pulled down the top beds and gone to sleep. Night had come back. Simon seemed like a schoolboy again, bashful and slight, caught by the Morse code of track lamps…

  “What are you thinking now?” I asked, feeling full of fondness.

  “About socks,” he whispered back.

  “What about them?”

  “One of the problems might be that when I take them off, I turn them inside out, then that part that has been nearest to the skin is closest to the air.”

  Simon’s breathing became loud, almost frightened, as though he had spotted a strange animal in the room and felt trapped.

  “When did people get into the habit of washing their clothes all the time?” he burst out irritably. “One reads in books people get bothered because they don’t have clean underwear. One gets the impression they change it every day.”

  38

  It is not in my nature to be concerned about trousers.

  Simon

  There is no conclusion to this biography—just a stepping away.

  Simon’s off to Boggy Bottom: the National Express 787, change at Hemel Hempstead.

  (“I am not prepared to put off activities!”

  “No, Simon, be still. We’re not finished with you yet.”)

  Simon’s so close to a satisfying stereotype: the world-famous mathematician with electrified hair living in indescribable mess; the fallen and lonely genius, a tramp in his own home, a perfect subject for a house-clearing show in which a busybody in flyaway glasses dumps his papers in a dumpster and leaves behind a broken and weeping outcast; a tragic case. Yet every time you try to pin categories like these on Simon he steps firmly aside: he’s not crazy, there’s nothing tragic about him, he’s definitely not poor and his life is full of purpose.

  In fact, he’s rushed off his feet. He’s got a new newsletter to write (about a man who forces his child to eat grass because of the bus cuts); the Liberal Democrats and David Cameron to defeat; his £10,000 death-to-cars t
ransport prize to hand out—let’s hope that this time the winner won’t try to superglue himself to the Prime Minister.

  (“Why should we hope that?”—Simon.)

  Simon might have been lonely once, but politics and buses have dispensed with that: he rarely takes a journey without making a few temporary friends. Simon’s lack of dejection is exhausting.

  English is a bad language for gentle contentment. A glance in the thesaurus reveals smile, smirk, grin, twinkle, beam—five words to cover the full range of Simon’s facial expression; and of those “smirk” is reserved for spivs about to knife you and “twinkle” employed only by novelists who use sugar tongs at tea. But look up “grief”: lamentation, discontent, suffering, pain, melancholia—all the rich language that makes unhappiness so much easier a subject to write about than equanimity—these words go on for five pages.

  Simon and I have nearly finished tidying the front room of the Excavation. I am no longer a biographer, I am a housekeeper. Next week we’re hiring a weekly cleaner. The kitchen sparkles; the chest of drawers with Tango bottles glows with beeswax; the carpet emits alpine smells of Shake ‘n’ Vac; twenty-three six-foot piles of out-of-date timetables teeter in the corridor next to the raised Titanic Toilet, waiting for the carpenter to come on Thursday and put up wall-to-ceiling shelves in my old study.

  The Excavation does not look tidy. It looks desolate.

  Clear up the timetables, run a few loads of clothing through the wash, hand him over to the barber for two hours and (I’m appalled to say) Simon’s character is revealed as sane, sensible and almost within grasp.

  Now, could I please step aside and let him begin his day trip to Boggy Bottom?

  Mathematicians who know Simon are not dismayed by his story. He may not have fulfilled his stellar potential—he’s not the Newton of the twenty-first century—but he’s still a genius. His performance at that recent symmetry conference in Canada was masterful. He has written numerous published and well-received papers since his supposed “collapse.” It is possible the breakthrough may come any day.