“I...” Fielder had no words. “Yes.”
“Then we’re all set. I’ll be back in a week.” The guy grinned. Then he nodded darkly toward Fielder’s pocket. “Have it, okay?”
Fielder wanted to look at the paper, but he didn’t have the nerve. So he just nodded.
“Atta boy. I can see we’re gonna get along fine.”
Stephen nodded again. He felt a rough hand clap him on the shoulder.
“Now how about that burger?” the collector said.
~ * ~
The morning after began inevitably.
With telephone calls.
The first came from Fielder’s brother-in-law, Ned, managing owner of six Bronco Burger locations citywide. Fielder let Ned harangue the answering machine while he fed Rhombus, the Labrador he’d owned since his undergraduate days.
Renee rang in by 8:30, close on her brother’s heels.
Hello? Are you okay? Oh, no. Not Renee. The first words out of his ex-wife’s mouth were, I don’t know what you’ve done this time, but you’ve definitely got a hell of a lot of nerve. I told Ned it was a terrible idea, hiring you.
Stephen decided to let the answering machine take that one, too.
Finally, around 10:30, Fielder heard the answering machine pick up for the third time. By now he sat at the folding card table in the kitchenette, reading yesterday’s newspaper and sipping today’s first Stoli.
“Dad? You’re screening, aren’t you?”
This time, he snatched up the cordless receiver the minute he heard the voice on the other end of the line.
“Andrea?”
“Dad. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, sweetie. Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”
“I’m between classes. And don’t dodge me. What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“My friend Derek told me you got beat up.”
“Who?”
“Derek. You worked late shift together last night. He just told me some guy came in and clobbered you! Dad, is that true?”
Listening to her, Fielder felt something collapse in his chest. He thought it might have been the last of his pride. “The kid with all the earrings? I thought his name was David.”
“Dad!”
Fielder sighed into the phone.
“Everything’s fine, sweetie. Really. There was a guy, but it was nothing. Some lunatic, that’s all.”
“Derek said he heard the guy say you owed somebody money. Are you in some kind of trouble? Tell me the truth.”
“I’m fine, Andie. Okay? Do me a favor. Tell your friend Derek to mind his own goddamned business.”
“I’m coming over during lunch period.”
“We’re on opposite sides of town. Don’t waste your gas.”
“I’m coming over. Do you even have anything to eat in the apartment?”
“Andie ...”
“Never mind. I’ll stop and get something on the way.” She paused theatrically. “Bronco Burger okay with you?”
“That’s not funny.”
“Who’s laughing?” Andrea said, and hung up the phone.
For the next hour or so, Fielder sat at the crappy folding table, listlessly watching the ice cubes melt in his booze. At some point, Rhombus padded over and stood with his big doggy head in Fielder’s lap. Fielder scrubbed him between the ears. They looked at each other. So. What’s new with you?
When Andie finally knocked around 11:30, Stephen drew himself together and prepared himself to play the role of World’s Most Disappointing Dad.
It was demoralizing, but Stephen could live with that. Since the divorce became official seven months ago, any moment he was able to spend in his daughter’s company was a happy gift. Despite the mess he and Renee had made of the family, Andie just kept on growing into this extraordinary human being who never stopped impressing or delighting him. Stephen could live with her disappointment a thousand times more easily than her absence.
So he dumped the last of the Stoli down the sink, rinsed out the glass, stowed the bottle in the cupboard above the refrigerator, and hustled to the door.
Only it wasn’t Andie.
“Stephen Fielder?” said the guy with the tool belt.
Fielder sighed, propping an arm on the edge of the door. “Now what?”
The guy pointed a finger at the manifest in his hand. “Fielder?”
Stephen recognized the cable company logo stitched on the guy’s shirt. “Yeah. But I think there’s been a mistake. My cable’s working fine.”
“Hey, great,” said the dirty imposter, grinning cheerfully as he handed Stephen a fat business envelope embossed with the corporate seal of the university’s law firm. “It’s been a pleasure serving you.”
~ * ~
Sometimes Stephen thought back to last year, just before the holidays, when one of his oldest friends had gone in for a routine physical that turned up brain cancer. Jesus, he’d thought then. How do you handle a thing like that ? The poor damned guy had been dead by New Year’s Day.
On the bright side, at least a cerebral lesion the size of a silver dollar was an explanation. Stephen had stopped seeking explanations for his own condition months ago. Each day he simply woke up, took a shower, dressed himself, and shambled off into the same waking dream his life had become — each day a vast Mobius treadmill that began where it ended and traveled nowhere in between.
Was this his mid-life thing? Fielder had heard of guys his age getting impotent or religious. He’d heard about guys who got earrings and sporty convertibles. He didn’t know about any of that.
All Stephen Fielder knew was that one morning last November, he woke up to find he couldn’t do math anymore.
It was a morning every bit like the last. All seemed normal; everything occupied its regular place. Except that when he went to warm up his oatmeal in the microwave, he just couldn’t manage to decipher the keypad, somehow.
Later, standing in front of his undergraduate calculus seminar, he simply went. . . blank. Grease pen in hand, Fielder stood there in the echoing auditorium, staring at the empty whiteboard until one of the regular front-row students actually approached the stage to inquire gently if everything was okay.
The rest of that day was a warp in Stephen’s memory. He remembered sitting in his office for three consecutive hours, unable to make heads or tails of the same scientific calculator he’d been using now for more than half his lifetime; the pressure-worn numbers and symbols inscribed on the keys appeared to him as impenetrable hieroglyphs.
He’d finally given up and turned to work. But his own research notes from the previous day mystified him.
Later, in the car on the way home, he’d tried quizzing himself with rudiments, just to get the juices flowing. But it was as if even the multiplication tables had simply fallen out of his brain while he wasn’t looking.
Fielder had gone to bed early that night, somewhere between concerned and amused.
Because he had been working inhuman hours for weeks on end. He hadn’t been eating well, and he hardly ever exercised. Hell, his marriage of twelve years had recently crashed and burned, and the smoke hadn’t even cleared.
Stress, he’d begun to think. Sometimes you just didn’t notice when your own levels crossed into the red zone. A good night’s sleep could do wonders.
But then he woke up the next morning. And the next morning, and the morning after that. He was not restored. Two plus two did not equal four. And Fielder started to worry.
He made appointments with his physician, who found nothing wrong with him and wrote a referral to a neurospecialist. They threw the full battery of acronyms at him: PET, CAT, MRI. He was discovered to be thirteen pounds overweight but otherwise shipshape for a fellow his age.
Meanwhile, Fielder’s amusement gave way to panic. On the recommendation of his physician, he began twice-weekly sessions with the nearest psychiatrist on his PPO list. The shrink prescribed a powerful test-market antidepressant t
hat gave Fielder chronic diarrhea and made him dizzy all the time. But that was all.
Final diagnosis: Nonspecific Acalculia. Nonspecific Acalculia!
Translation: Beats us, chum.
Citing divorce complications, Stephen put in for emergency personal leave from work, letting his graduate assistants cover his classes for the remainder of the term. He was already scheduled to spend the following semester on a paid research sabbatical, funded by a prestigious annual fellowship sponsored by the university’s Burkholder Foundation.
So he had time, Fielder had reasoned. Time to sort this thing out on his own.
Because no matter what else plagued him in life, he could not remember a time when numbers did not make sense. As a youth, Fielder had reveled in them. While the other guys in his class drew fart balloons in the margins of their textbooks, Stephen constructed elaborate Fibonacci sequences that went on for pages at a time.
As an adult, suddenly trudging toward middle age ankle-deep in the rubble of a wrecked marriage, numbers seemed to be the only thing in Stephen Fielder’s world that still added up. They fit and resonated; they created mysteries and revealed unassailable truths. Unpredictable yet consistent, fluid yet fixed, intractable yet endlessly recombinant. People were somehow beyond him. But numbers he could understand.
And suddenly, inexplicably, just when he’d needed them the most. . . even the numbers had left him.
It was Gudder who said, “The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.” For years, Fielder had used that quote in the introductory header of all his class syllabi.
But these days, the only quote he felt he understood was Darwin’s: “A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.”
Fielder’s world had become a dark, dark room. And all he had was a dog.
He began drinking heavily, late into the nights. He slept through most of his days. He couldn’t work. And he found himself adrift, without strength to paddle, as the tide of his own malaise carried him farther and farther from shore.
The final slide began by accident. Or perhaps it was an inevitable point in some cause/effect chain. Fielder didn’t know. Personally, Stephen Fielder had ceased to acknowledge order in the world.
All he knew was that one night, on a bender, he found himself at The Nugget, across the river. Only because the bar there stayed open two hours later than any place in town.
But it was here, amidst the color and lights and carnival noise, that Fielder experienced the kind of shimmering insight only clinical depression and vast quantities of alcohol can reveal.
For here — before him and above him, around him on all sides — was the essence of mathematics. Here was the complicated wonderment of odds and order. All reduced to the simplicity of a toss of dice, a spin of a wheel.
Stephen remembered sitting back on his stool, turning his face to the light, and experiencing a strange sense of peace.
Because if the odds still thrived in a place like this, by god, maybe there was still hope for him in this orderless world.
~ * ~
“That feels about right,” said Happy Joe King’s collector, hefting the envelope containing the five-hundred-dollar paycheck advance Fielder had secured from his ex-brother-in-law. “I don’t guess I need to count it, huh?”
“It’s all there.” Stephen had asked Ned to count it in front of him, just to be sure.
“You know what? I trust you. Good faith goes both ways, am I wrong?”
“Trust is important,” Fielder agreed.
“We speak the same language, my friend.” The collector smacked Fielder on the shoulder. He wore the same suit as last week. “Future reference, you can call me Shorty. Nickname I sorta picked up on account of my height.”
Fielder looked down at the parking lot. “Okay.”
“Call me Shorty, but don’t short me. That’s what I always tell ‘em.” The collector’s laugh sounded like a diesel engine shifting gears.
Fielder turned toward the Bronco Burger’s back door, but a firm hand fell on his shoulder just as he began to move.
“Cool your heels a minute.”
Stephen felt his blood chill. “It’s all there.”
“Easy, Professor. I got a little surprise.”
Fielder tensed.
Shorty the collector just laughed again. “Buddy, you are one jumpy bag a nerves, you know that? You should learn to relax.”
To Fielder’s bewilderment, Shorty reached over to tuck the envelope full of cash into his apron strings.
“Let’s take a little walk.”
Fielder looked at Shorty and went numb.
“Don’t worry, Professor,” Shorty said. “I think your luck’s about ready to change.”
~ * ~
Shorty led him to a dark gravel lot in back of a secondhand furniture store. Amidst a shadowed clutter of scrap springs and broken wood frames sat a dusty black limousine. The big car’s engine was silent, headlights off, dark glossy windows raised. Shorty opened one of the rear doors; no interior light came on.
“After you,” he said.
Fielder didn’t move.
“Will you calm down? I swear.” Shorty nodded toward the open door.
“I should get back to the restaurant,” Fielder said. “I think I left the broiler on.”
“Get in the fucking car, Professor.”
Fielder gazed at the dark portal waiting from him. He looked at Shorty. He released a ragged breath and sagged.
Shorty followed him in and slammed the door. Leather creaked beneath him as Fielder scooted over in the seat to make room. Shorty reached up and flicked a switch above their heads. On came an overhead light, yellow and blinding.
“You two smell like french fries,” said the voice from the seat across from him.
The voice belonged to a slim man. Gray hair, impeccably trimmed, an angular face with shallow crow’s-feet at the corners of the eyes. The man wore a western-cut suit with ostrich boots. He sat with one arm draped across the back of the seat, a drink in a cut-glass tumbler resting at his knee.
“Professor Fielder,” the man said, leaning forward to extend a hand. “My name is Joseph King. How do you do?”
Fielder looked at Shorty, who tossed him a wink.
He shook the man’s hand and said, “Mr. King.”
“Call me Joe. My father was Mr. King, as the saying goes.” King grinned and gestured toward a cabinet built into the side panel of the limo. “Care for a drink? Whatever you like, we probably have it around here somewhere.”
“No, thank you.” Stephen cleared his throat.
“Professor, I sense that you’re uncomfortable. I’d guess you’re probably wondering why we’re all here.”
“How do you people know I’m a professor?”
“Actually,” said Happy Joe, “if I’m not mistaken, that verb is now past tense, isn’t it?”
Suddenly Fielder felt supremely conscious of his filthy apron.
“I know a fair amount about this and that,” Happy Joe King said. “For example, I know you are forty-four years of age. I know you fared poorly — let’s face it — in a divorce settlement some months ago. You have one child, a girl, sixteen, name of Andrea, goes to Northeast High. Straight A’s. College prep.” Ice clicked against glass as King sipped his drink. “As for college, you were tenure track yourself, but are now in breach of your contract with the university here. I infer that you’re too proud to let the utilities get shut off but not too proud to take a job flipping burgers for minimum wage. You’re also being sued over some money. Burkholder Foundation, is it?” King glanced at Shorty.
Shorty nodded. “Right. Burkholder.”
“I understand they’re less than pleased with the product of some research they funded. Or lack thereof, as the case may be.”
Stephen felt a cold knot behind his breastbone. “How do you know all of this?”
“Let’s just say I make it
a point to thoroughly background all potential employees.”
“I’m sorry,” Fielder said. “I don’t understand.”
“It would seem,” said Happy Joe King, sipping again from his glass, “that you and I are in a position to help each other.”
Fielder said nothing.
“On the one hand,” King continued, “you’ve managed to accrue a somewhat unfortunate debt to me. On the other, it so happens that I find myself in need of a person with your specialized skills.”
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