by James Gunn
“At Nagasaki?” Lisa asked.
“Of course. That's where they met—the young Jewish doctor who concealed his race behind a Protestant name and the victim or near-victim or possible victim of the world's second atomic bomb dropped in warfare. The one that everybody forgot. Afterwards they wrote to each other, and when my father set up his practice and my mother was eighteen, they married. My father, ashamed perhaps of earlier concealment or determined that his children would not live his lie, combined my mother's name, Ng, with his."
“Your mother was Chinese and yet she was in Nagasaki when it was bombed?"
“Her parents were Chinese diplomatic personnel interned in Japan when the Sino-Japanese war began."
“What a romantic background!” Lisa said.
She was sitting to Smith-Ng's right, Calley to his left, as if they had responded to his secret desires. By leaning to his right Smith-Ng could press himself against Lisa's magnificent breast. By allowing his hand to drop casually from where it rested at the edge of the table, he could touch Calley's slender thigh.
He did neither. “Romantic, maybe. Catastrophic, certainly. If my heritage could be turned into equations, it would match the equations that describe the end of this ill-omened year. Even my name says it: Smith-Ng. Catastrophe!"
“I think it's romantic!” Lisa said. “My parents met at a supermarket."
“How can you complain when you have done so well?” Calley said. “The Jews and the Chinese produce more brilliant people than anybody else. You must have got the best of both races."
“Oh, I wasn't complaining,” Smith-Ng said. He leaned over to pick up the nearest pitcher of beer. His shoulder pressed into Lisa's breast. She didn't move away. As he brought the pitcher to his glass and began to pour, his left hand dropped to Calley's trousered thigh. She didn't flinch.
He put down the pitcher and picked up the glass with his left hand, feeling strangely bold and light-headed. “I was explaining my commitment to catastrophe theory. After people have fulfilled their biological imperatives, they try to make sense out of their existences. Who are they, what are they good for? Where are they, how did they get there? What does it all mean?"
Smith-Ng felt another foot touch his. He glanced to the right at Lisa. Her smile revealed nothing. He looked at Calley. She was staring at her nearly full glass. Lyle was leaning toward him across the table. “Do you feel as if you have fulfilled your biological imperatives?” Lyle asked.
“I'm married and have two children,” Smith-Ng said, “if that's what you mean."
“Is that what you mean?” Lyle asked. He smiled.
Smith-Ng realized that the foot touching his belonged to Lyle; its nudge seemed knowing. Smith-Ng felt uncomfortable; he thought it was his bladder. “That's what I mean,” he said, getting up. “I'll be back in a moment."
He realized as he walked toward the back of the room that he had waited too long, immersed in his drinking and his fantasies, and now his bladder was jiggling painfully with every step. He joined the line of post-adolescent males waiting to use the one-time closet that had been converted into a men's room. Young women, close enough to brush shoulders with the men, lined the other side of the hall, and when men and women emerged from their respective restrooms, they had to make their way through a kind of gauntlet, bumping and being bumped in turn like a fertility rite.
The men, Smith-Ng noticed as he shifted impatiently from foot to foot, turned toward the person squeezing through, while the women turned away, toward the wall. Perhaps the women wanted to protect their breasts from unwelcome contact, or perhaps they didn't want to appear as if they were offering themselves for such attentions. Smith-Ng turned away so as not to endanger his sensitive bladder.
When at last he had relieved himself in the cracked and dirty stool that had time only after every other use to refill its tank and flush, he felt human once more, able to face the world and all its temptations and potential catastrophes, even the Lyles. Blessed, sanity-producing relief! But as he made his way back down the corridor, squeezing between the fertile young bodies and trying not to be aroused, he felt a hand on an unexpected part of his anatomy.
The evening had started at another table. From his position at the head of it, Smith-Ng had looked around at the members of his seminar. It had been a good class. The level of effort had been high and the class was talented as a group, but there had been no individual genius of the kind he had displayed when he was a graduate student.
Well, he had realized he could not expect greatness. Like a catastrophe, greatness was an unusual event, a sharp break with what had gone before, not simply a bit more talent. Unless, he thought, it was the bit more talent, like the bit more fissionable material, that created a new condition, like a chain reaction. His equations could handle both: the mutation and the critical mass.
Greatness could be a catastrophe, too, in the traditional sense, both to the person who had it and the world in which it appeared.
The class had started with nine students, and only one had dropped out. Four of the students were men, eager, mostly thin, bespectacled, and bookish, and all but one still pimply, even though three of them were in their mid to late twenties. The exception was an older man, returned to graduate school after some community-college teaching to work on his doctorate and attempt to upgrade his situation to a four-year college or university. He was a plodder, but he would plod his way through, doing everything that was required of him; he was capable of little more.
The other four members of the class were young women. Women were uncommon in the mathematics graduate program, and rarer yet in his seminar on the practical applications of catastrophe theory. Two of them were earnest and hard-working, one tall and thin and dark-haired, the other short and blonde and a little plump, and neither was attractive according to his tastes, which were, to be sure, particular. The tall one was perhaps the best student in the class. Elizabeth was her name, though no amorous young man would ever call her Betty. But the life of the mind had its consolations.
The other two, Lisa and Calley, were unusual, too, but for other reasons. Not only were they young, they were nubile. Lisa was red-haired and full figured. She had freckles and large blue eyes and a pouting mouth that looked as if it were waiting to be bruised by eager male lips, hips that curved as much behind as at the sides, and large breasts that she showcased with tight sweaters, thin blouses, and even thinner brassieres that scarcely diminished the shape or color of her pink nipples. “Showing the roses,” one coed had described it knowingly to a colleague, who had immediately passed it along to his fellow professors, suffering as they were from the same kinds of coeducational provocations.
Calley, on the other hand, was small, slender, dark-haired, and beautiful. Her hips were boyish and her breasts little more than dents in her tailored shirts, but her legs were slender, her skin and features were perfect, and her brown eyes were always wide and always looking at him.
Lisa and Calley. Twin distractions. Sometimes as the class ran on automatically while students reported on their research, he had imagined himself making love to one or the other. Lisa would be hot blooded and responsive; she would make love to him, pressing her breasts into his mouth, his hands between her legs. Calley would be cool and reserved, requiring much patience and amatory skill until all her banked passion would come spilling out, like lava breaking through a dam of ice.
Sometimes he had imagined himself in bed with both of them, enjoying first Lisa's hot abundance and then Calley's cool reserve.
Of course he had known it was all daydreaming. What would these magnificent creatures see when they looked at him? A man who was too fat, too old, too ugly for them to think of as more than a teacher. Perhaps, if he were lucky, they might think of him as a brilliant teacher. Even if it had been otherwise, he did not have the courage to suggest by word or touch his improper desires. What if they turned him down? What if they laughed at him? What if they accepted him and he disappointed them; if they were angry or scornful? What if th
ey changed their minds afterward and accused him of seduction? Or rape? What if they fell in love with him and insisted that he divorce his wife and marry them, on pain of public exposure? What if he were discovered with them, in embarrassing disarray, by a boy friend or a colleague or a janitor, and he was beaten, or, even worse, exposed and forced to give up his position, perhaps even his career?
He dealt with catastrophe on a professional basis, but that didn't mean he wanted any in his personal life.
Lisa was a good student, almost as promising as Elizabeth, in spite of her appearance, which might have led her into more social areas of study—education, say, or business or theater. Calley remained in the class only because he made excuses for her, carried her, provided her with answers. But he couldn't bear to part with her share of his fantasies.
“Since this is the last class of the semester,” Smith-Ng had said, “I'm going to leave the last few minutes for general questions. Anything.” He had waited. “Don't any of you have anything in your heads that I didn't put there?"
Calley had given him a smile. Ordinarily her face was serious and perfect in its controlled way, but a smile transformed her features into something so angelic it almost melted his reserve.
“How much can we trust catastrophe theory in ordinary life?” Elizabeth had said carefully.
“As much as you would trust other mathematics,” he had said, nodding approvingly but unwilling to bypass the opportunity to appear brilliant. “If you're building a house or surveying a piece of land, or even estimating probabilities of success or failure in business, you'd better use mathematics. It's the same with catastrophe theory."
“A lot of people are saying that this year, since it is the last year of the second millennium, may end in catastrophe,” the young man named Lyle had said. It was a question that had been lurking, unasked, the entire semester and maybe bore some responsibility for the substantial enrollment. Smith-Ng had been surprised that it hadn't come up earlier.
“What do you think?” he had said. He got up and moved to the portable blackboard behind him. Quickly he scribbled an equation on it and then another and another.
“According to those,” Lyle had said hesitantly, “the possibilities of a sudden change of state are twenty to one."
“But what kind of change?” Smith-Ng had said. It was a trick question, and he had looked first at Lyle and then, when Lyle had looked puzzled, around the room.
“It doesn't say,” Lisa had said.
“Exactly,” he had said. “We'd have to identify the unknowns and develop equations for each of them. The overall possibility of catastrophe wouldn't change, but we'd come up with individual possibilities that would add up to the total. But what about this part of the last equation?"
“That's a variable,” Calley had said. She rarely spoke, and when she did Smith-Ng encouraged her.
“Yes,” he had said. “Go on."
She had hesitated, apparently having exhausted her knowledge.
“In what direction is this variable moving?” he had asked.
“It's increasing,” she had said, as if making a wild guess.
“Exactly,” he had said, nodding, “and what does that mean? It means—.” He had looked at her expectantly. “It means that—."
“The possibilities of catastrophe are increasing,” she had said desperately.
“You've just made an ‘A,'” he had said. “The possibilities of catastrophe increase as the year approaches its end until they reach almost total certainty at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Is that correct?"
“I don't believe it,” Elizabeth had said. “It's too much of a coincidence. And if it's true and we knew it to be true, we wouldn't be sitting here."
“We'd all be out eating and drinking and making love,” he had said. “Or maybe praying. Of course the equations are only as good as the information that went into them. They describe a state of catastrophe, but they can only be applied to the real world insofar as we can factor the real world into them.
“Now we must factor ourselves into the real world,” he had concluded.
After he had issued the usual compliments on the performance of the class, urged them to continue their studies, invited them to come in for a personal conference or with any problems they might have during their remaining student days, and said goodbye, they still sat in their chairs.
“Dr. Smith-Ng,” Lyle had said finally, “since this is the last class meeting, we all decided to go out and have a few beers. We thought you might like to come, too."
He had looked at their faces without expression, enjoying their various emotions from timidity to embarrassment to fear, and then he had smiled. “That's the best idea anybody has had all semester. I'd be delighted."
With less caution than he customarily displayed, Smith-Ng had driven home rather than confess to his students, by calling a taxi, that he was inebriated. Home was a ranch house along a row of almost identical buildings, distinguished one from another by color or landscaping or by the placement of the two-car garage and its accompanying driveway. At night such discriminations were more difficult, particularly after as many pitchers of beer as Smith-Ng had helped consume, and he was guided more by instinct—and by the response of the garage door to the coded radio waves from the garage door opener.
The house was dark as he let himself through the door, with some skill, he thought, considering his condition. He turned on the light and looked at the kitchen clock: 12:45. That wasn't late. His wife must be asleep. No doubt she had been asleep for hours. But 12:45 wasn't late. He often stayed up that late working on a paper for some journal or meeting, watching television, or reading. The only thing remotely unusual was that he had been drinking with his students, and that was not truly unusual if done on special occasions such as this.
Nothing was remotely catastrophic.
Until he found the note.
It was propped up against the tea kettle on the stove and it told him that one part of his world had ended. “I'm leaving,” it said. “Frieda called me to say that she'd seen you drinking with a bunch of students at the hangout just off campus. Some of them were girls. I know what you're like, fantasizing about those girls. I know what they're like too, those young women with their loose legs. Well, they're welcome to you, fat lot of good you'll do them. As if you'd have a chance with any of them. You keep telling me that some catastrophe will happen at the end of the year. If the world is going to end in a few months, I don't want to spend them with you and your equations. Don't try to get in touch. This time I'm really through.” It wasn't signed, but Smith-Ng finished it in his head: “Angrily, Elly."
Smith-Ng squinted at the paper in his hand, suddenly sober. What could she know about Lisa and Calley? What could she know about his fantasies? Then he realized that all that didn't matter any more. His world had come apart in a way that he might have anticipated if he had been paying attention, but his theories could not have predicted. The years of emotional security, of a castle to which he could retreat after battling the dragons of uncertainty in the outside world, of meals always waiting for him, of clothing and towels washed for him and put away neatly in drawers, of all the little things that consumed the time and thoughts of other people—all these services that he had taken for granted now were things of the past. He knew he had neglected many obligations that he should have taken care of; he was guilty of other sins of commission or omission; but he had not expected it to end like this, suddenly, without a chance to explain or justify or plead for forgiveness.
He shook his head, trying to clear away the last of the alcoholic fog, trying to shake off, as well, the feeling of depression that had swept over him. He would cope. Certainly he would cope. Now he would be free to do all those things from which a sense of obligation had restrained him. Right now, though, he couldn't think of any.
He thought about their years together, he and Elly, the way the years had passed, had slipped away, had made their unnoticed alterations in everythin
g, the world, the way people thought about the world, the way he felt about the world and himself. Once they had been young and eager and adventurous, and the world lay before them like an unknown landscape waiting to be explored. There was apprehension, sure, but they were strong and adaptable, and they could handle whatever happened. And life had happened, given them children, settled them into routines that enabled them to cope with difficult times, made them older and tireder and looking for comfort instead of excitement. Occasionally one or the other got restless, wanting a return of what had once been so abundant, youth, passion, and adventure. But usually the feeling passed, sometimes leaving behind a dull ache that was difficult to pin down, that lasted for weeks.
Life had changed him. Life had made him fat and fifty. But he was still optimistic, still open to what might yet happen; life had made him cautious but not bitter. Life had given him his professional accomplishments, his position, his satisfactions in teaching and publication.
But part of his life was over, and it was a part that was more important to him than he had realized. His stomach contracted. All the beer he had consumed seemed as if it were lying in the pit of his stomach, congealed into a solid, indigestible mass.
Elly always had known him too well. Why couldn't he have understood her? He didn't understand women at all. Tonight, after he had felt that hand grasping him so intimately, he had looked into the face of the cool and beautiful Calley. As he had turned sideways to squeeze past, she had turned toward him instead of away, and someone had pressed him from the other side so that for a moment their bodies had been molded together. He has been sweating, apologizing, holding out his hands so that they clearly were not touching her, and he had sidled away, still feeling the imprint of her flesh on his, almost as if they had been lovers, and the memory—surely it was not an illusion—of a small hand squeezing, squeezing, like a promise of unspeakable ecstasies to come, his now embarrassing erection. Offered the chance to indulge his wildest fantasies, to feel sexual excitement once more engorging his organs and pounding through his arteries, he had mumbled his excuses to the table of his students and stumbled off into the night.
