Mathematicians in Love

by Rudy Rucker

  I threw the newspaper away. It was nicer to think about Alma, to relish the delightful memories of last night. And she was coming back to me this afternoon! With a song in my heart, I followed Paul into Pearce Hall.

  “You have the nerve to show up here?” shouted Haut as soon as he saw my face. He was almost at the breaking point. I was tempted to nudge him over the edge.

  “Take it easy, Roland,” said Paul, stepping in between us. “We’ve got really good news.”

  “Good news? The fascist earth rapers have stolen another election!” Haut pushed past Paul and shoved his face in mine. “Kis here told Van Veeter just how many votes he needed to swing the deal. My prediction might have been correct if it hadn’t been for that fire. I’d registered that prediction, Kis, it was time-stamped. Designing and running it cost eighteen thousand dollars worth of billable research time. So first of all I’m losing credibility, secondly you’ve wasted my grant money and thirdly, I’m losing my representative in Congress. You’re out of here, boy, your career is over.”

  “We proved the Morphic Classification Theorem!” said Paul, brandishing his printout.

  Haut wasn’t hearing him. He dragged us over to look at a university regulation that he’d accessed and highlighted on his screen. He read it out loud in a strident tone.

  “Any student making unauthorized access to university com­puter accounts is subject to suspension or other sanctions. In cases of legally actionable offenses, the sanctions may include expulsion.” Haut paused to glare at me, then poked me in the chest. “And yes, Kis, your stealing my paper is legally actionable. I’ll be talking to the UC legal staff today. How does a midterm transfer to San Quentin sound?”

  “Please, please look at this,” said Paul, holding our paper right in front of Haut’s face, its bottom edge precisely parallel to the floor.

  "Morphic Classification, by Paul Bridge, Bela Kis, and Roland Haut? If you think I’m sharing a credit with a jackass like—”

  “Just look it over, Roland,” said Paul. “Skim it. We’ll wait in the hall.”

  When Haut emerged, his face had relaxed. “The Bridge- Haut-Kis Morphic Classification Theorem. Good work, boys.” He was chuckling with pleasure. “A landmark in the history of mathematics. The BHK theorem. I can see it in the textbooks.” I noticed that he’d moved his name one notch closer to the front.

  “Bela gets his thesis?” said Paul.

  “Oh, all right. That frost-vote work of mine—maybe I can still use it after all. And, listen, I’ve got some ideas for making our joint paper better. I’ll earn my credit fair and square. Come into my office and let’s get down to it. With a little focus, you two can graduate next month. There’s definitely enough here for two separate dissertations. I’m going to announce the result by e-mail today before Cal Kweskin and Maria Reyes over at Stanford beat us to it.”

  Haut was smiling, albeit not at me.

  2

  Cone Shell Aliens

  Paul and I spent the next five weeks preparing our theses and the joint research paper, Alma living in my room all the while.

  Everything was more complicated than I’d expected.

  For one thing, I was noticing some sexual tension between Paul and Alma. Paul was not above accidentally opening the bathroom door when Alma was showering so as to get a look at her. Often Alma just laughed. For her part, she’d become in­creasingly concerned with improving Paul’s personal habits, as if prepping him for some future role. She found him both too tidy and too messy.

  Alma’s increasing interest in Paul might have related to the fact that he was doing so well in his job search. We’d both been sending out letters and e-mails, and mine were disappearing into the special limbo reserved for Nobody from Nowhere. Paul, on the other hand, was getting interviews: UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, Washington State, and even, god help me, Stanford.

  Meanwhile of course our glorious rake-cake-fish-dish- teapot proof had any number of holes. One by one we patched them, but some of the patches introduced second-order holes of their own, and a few third-order holes cropped up in the margins of the patch-patches.

  I was good at finding the holes; if I read through the proofs quickly, I could hear their music, and the holes would sound like pops and clinkers.

  When the holes were all patched and we’d fully solidified the statement and proof of the Morphic Classification Theorem, Haut weighed in with five freaking anomalies that we character­ized as the fish with legs, the teapot with an infinite spout, the rake with no tines, the cake with a hole in the middle, and the dish with only one side. Each of these led to additional special cases in the proof, which meant more holes, more patches, and so on.

  In the past I’d sometimes visualized the corpus of mathe­matical knowledge as an ample goddess, a Mamma Mathemat- ica who nourished her adepts with perfect hemispherical teats. But now I saw the goddess in another aspect: wrinkled, queru­lous, vindictive. Mamma Mathematica had become a warty cackling witch, her cold bony finger poking the soft spots be­neath my ribs, testing if I might be ready for the oven.

  There weren’t enough hours in the days; I longed for some way to veer off into perpendicular time and live a year in the space of an afternoon. Lacking that ability, I drank very much coffee. And Paul began using methedrine.

  “They wouldn’t like that in Saint Matthews,” tut-tutted Alma, seeing Paul taking tight little snorts from the tiny yellow glass vial he’d begun carrying. “Filthy street drugs. I thought you were a finer person than that, Paul. You should at least be using Ritalin.” It was a Thursday afternoon, a little over a week before commencement. Paul and I were very nearly done. Haut was scheduled to sign off on our theses on Tuesday, and we were supposed to get our diplomas next Friday.

  “Many Kentuckians are amphetamine enthusiasts,” answered Paul, laying a finger along the side of his nose. He was wearing bottle-blue clip-on shades over his glasses. Although the clip-ons were just a cheezoid item he’d found in the tourist-trap head shop where he’d bought his little meth holder, they had the effect of making Paul look quite demented, especially as combined with his unvarying short-sleeved white shirt and loop undershirt.

  “Think of carnies and truckers,” he continued. “Jockeys and fiddlers. Crystal keeps Kentuckians lean and mean. And, yes, I know the dangers full well. Don’t worry, Alma. I’m only using speed for three more days, and then I stop. A localized degen­eracy, you might say. Home stretch. We’re almost done. You should snort some too, Bela. And then we could arrange all our books in order of size.”

  “It’s not funny, Pauli” cried Alma. “I grew up with an addict in the family. My big brother Pete. He’d get violent when he was coming down; hed start breaking up the house, punching holes in the walls. My Mom would have to call the sheriff. I’d hear the police loudspeakers crackling and whining outside, and the cherry ball on their car would be flashing red and blue light across our curtains, and they’d come in and take Pete away. And Mom would be like, okay let’s have supper. She and my father wouldn’t ever talk about it because they’re addicts too. You’re playing with destruction.” The main message I took from this rant was that Alma cared about what Paul did. And that was bad news for me.

  Paul grinned, basking in Alma’s attention. He was a little proud to show he could be a bad boy, too. He held the little yellow bottle out towards me, shaking it invitingly. “Crank ’er up, Bela.”

  “Nah,” I said loftily. This was all about posturing for Alma. "Everything seems too important when I’m stoned. And all we’re really doing is writing a math paper.”

  “We?” shot back Paul. “It’s me who’s actually writing it.” He bent over his laptop, peering though his blue shades at the sym­bols on the screen. "Crankity-crankity-crankity-crankity-crank,” he said, with a sly glance at Alma.

  “I saw Haut today to set up our thesis defenses for Tuesday,” I said, changing the subject. “And that’s all fine. But he’s stonewalling my requests for letters of recommendation. I fi­nally got a nibb
le from Chulo State and when I asked Haut to write them a letter he said—stop looking at your screen and listen to me, Paul!—He said he got up last night and saw a pair of cockroaches reflected in his bathroom mirror, running around on the floor, and that the patterns told him that he shouldn’t help me get a job at all. I tried to act like it was a joke, but he said, no, it was an instance of the Morphic Classi­fication Theorem at work, and that the cockroaches were emu­lating him and me. And I said that was complete bullshit, and he said, yes it was, but that now he'd tell me the real story, which was that the cockroaches in the mirror had been human-sized, and they’d been telepathically communicating with him by beaming rays at him, telling him that Bela Kis should work for a certain high-tech company instead of be­coming a professor. And then he holds up his fingers like little antennae and he wiggles them at me and sticks out his tongue. And tells me to get out of his office. He’s losing it, Paul. He’s an evil madman.”

  “Cockroaches?” said Paul, cocking his head. “We have cock­roaches too.”

  “Haut was teasing Bela,” said Alma. “Don’t you two have any common sense at all? What is it with you and Haut, Bela? Did you do something new to piss him off?”

  “I bet he did,” said Paul. “You talked against his consulting gigs, didn’t you, Bela?”

  “So?” I admitted. “I’m right! Listen to me, Alma. Haut wants to start marketing a prediction service based on our new theo­rem. I say it’s way too early. Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts.”

  “Can’t you stop fighting him?” said Alma gently. “You’re just transferring your old issues with your biological father. It’s self­destructive, Bela.”

  “Alma’s right,” said Paul. He’d turned his attention back to his screen now. He was in the math zone.

  I was indeed pained by my memories of how my father had treated my family. If only I could forgive my old man and let go. Maybe then I wouldn’t always be starting fights with father figures. I needed to be working on my thesis instead of stewing and arguing. I was bad and wrong.

  So of course I lashed out at Paul the more. “You’re so wired that you haven’t bathed for a week and you’re giving me advice? Not everyone has it easy like you, fair-haired boy. Teacher’s pet. Ass kisser.”

  “Call me Professor Bridge,” said Paul, closing his laptop and picking up his neatly aligned papers.

  “Paul got the letter from Stanford today,” said Alma. “His job offer. Cal Kweskin wants to have Paul there working with him. We didn’t want to tell you. To spare your feelings. But you’re acting like such a—”

  “Loser,” said Paul, getting to his feet.

  “You’re a sellout,” I snapped. “A bullshitter.”

  Paul shook his head and went into his bedroom to work in peace. It was always tidy in there: all the clothes folded and stacked, the bed made, no litter to be seen.

  “Stanford?” I said forlornly to Alma.

  “An assistant professorship,” she said. “He can start on salary right after graduation. He gets summer research money. And they have a slot in faculty housing ready for him. They even gave him a big advance to help him move. He’s going to use it to buy a camper van.”

  “Only one school has even written me back, Alma. And you heard what I said about the letters of reference. Haut’s black­balling me. It’s not all my fault.”

  “Poor Bela. I never knew math was so political.” She stepped over and gave me a hug.

  I looked down at her shag hair-do with its three stripes of blonde. We’d been living together for about five weeks, and she’d become very familiar to me. It was like she was with me even when she wasn’t with me. I had an emulation of her inside my mind. But, wonderfully enough, she actually existed outside of me, and I could look at her and soak up her endless happy sur­prises for free. I ran my hand down the side of her face, ending at her precious dimple. But she broke away before I could kiss her.

  “Don't give up,” said Alma, shaking her finger at me. “Finish the thesis, no matter what. Who knows, you just might be in my long-term future. But now I’m off to the library.”

  Although Alma had already passed her final exams, she still had to finish her Rhetoric of Science report on universal dy­namics. She was arguing that universal dynamics was a male strategy for decontexualizing reality, a kind of scientific porno­graphy designed to isolate natural phenomena from their social and emotional matrices—her paper was a “biology good, math­ematics bad” rap. Although I felt that Alma was neglecting the really interesting aspects of universal dynamics, her argument was cleverly constructed and beautifully written. It made things more interesting to have this woman disagree with me. I just hoped I could keep her in my life. Whenever I focused on my affection for Alma, it helped me calm down.

  After Alma went out, I walked over to Paul’s closed bed­room door. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I called. Somewhere off in Mathland, Paul made a friendly pig noise. No need to bother him any further. I made another cup of coffee and got back to mathing. What else was there to do?

  Sometime late Saturday night Paul and I finished. We posted our theses to the math department website. And without even bothering to check again with Haut, Paul went ahead and sub­mitted an electronic copy of our joint paper to the prestigious Annab of Mathematics. We were all set to become published Ph.D.s—Paul a Stanford professor, and me unemployed. It was time to cut back on coffee and drop the meth.

  We went to bed and slept right through till Sunday evening. When we awoke we were still pretty sketchy. And very hungry. Alma was done with her report and she was hungry too. We headed up to Telegraph Avenue.

  Some local Buddhists had opened an Italian gelato-style ice cream parlor. It had a glowing electric sign in the window with a divine eye and an “Om Mane Padme Yum” mantra in pastel neon script. The three of us went in and had an eating contest. The idea was to keep doing rounds, and see who lasted the longest. We took turns picking the flavor.

  Banana, anise, pistachio, espresso—and Alma was out. She probably could have eaten more, but she wasn’t into pointless contests. Paul and I went head-to-head with ginger, violet, cin­namon, pear, chardonnay, and green-tea gelato, which was the one that shut me down. Paul ordered a victory scoop of vanilla and somehow forced most of it out through his nostrils, mak­ing two gnarly, dripping tusks.

  “I am cleansed,” said Paul, wiping his face with a towel that the disgusted counterman threw to him. “Om shanti."

  Vibrating with the sugar rush, we walked the warm spring Humelocke night, seeing morphic parallels all around. The leaf-shadows and our thoughts, the car headlights and our emotions, the sounds of the night and our beating hearts. Alma walked in the middle, holding hands with both of us. And that night she slept on the couch. I was losing her.

  Monday around noon we went over to Pearce Hall to check with Haut and make sure he was all set for the thesis defense tomorrow. Some maintenance trucks and campus cops were busy outside the building; a tense buzz filled the hallways. Haut’s tenth-floor office door was sealed shut with yellow tape. We hurried to the departmental office.

  “You didn’t hear yet?” asked Lupe the attack secretary. “I was about to phone you. Professor Haut went on sick leave. 5150.”

  “He’s in the hospital?” I asked.

  Lupe sighed and rolled her eyes. “They’re evaluating him.” She was a basically pleasant woman who’d been toughened by her years of dealing with demanding, out-of-it mathemati­cians. But if you came out of the fog enough to achieve some minimal level of socialization, Lupe could be quite humane.

  “He has to sign off on our dissertations tomorrow1.” said Paul.

  “Yeah, Professor Kitchner and I were talking about that,” said Lupe. She gestured towards the chairman’s dark, empty office behind her. “He’s out for lunch interviewing a temporary for summer school. He thinks maybe you two can visit Profes­sor Haut with the signature sheets today and it’ll be okay. We still have yo
ur defense scheduled for tomorrow. But it’s better if you can get those signatures. The grad school doesn’t like to make exceptions.” Her face darkened, recalling past battles with the grad school administrators.

  “Where is Professor Haut?” asked Paul.

  “Thataway,” said Lupe, pointing a finger. “Summit Psychi­atric Center. It’s up the hill past the botanical garden. I already phoned, and you can see him this afternoon between one and two. They can only hold him for seventy-two hours, but we’re kind of hoping he’ll stay longer. The K bus goes straight up there. I’ve got your signature pages ready for you.”

  “He knows we’re coming?” I asked.

  “I think so,” said Lupe. “When the ambulance came for him Friday afternoon, the last thing he said was to make sure that Paul came to see him. And you too of course, Bela.”

  "What did he do?” asked Paul.

  Lupe lowered her voice. “He broke the glass out of his win­dow with his desk chair. It’s a good thing the chair and broken glass didn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “The tenth floor. Was he going to jump?”

  “Just go see him,” said Lupe, cutting off the gossip and hand­ing us the signature pages. “And don’t fold or wrinkle these or the grad school won’t accept them.”

  We found Roland Haut in a room on the first floor of the psychiatric hospital, overlooking a red dirt hillside overgrown with shiny green poison oak.

  “I went ahead and sent our paper to the Annals,” said Paul.

  “I could have improved it,” said Haut. He wasn’t in bed or anything, he was just sitting there in his usual yuppie-type clothes: white linen knickers, a yellow silk shirt, a purple bow tie, yellow-and-purple leather running shoes. “I proved some­thing new on Friday,” added Haut in a monotone. Presumably they’d sedated him.

  “Save it for the next paper,” said Paul.

  “I hope you’ll be feeling better soon, Roland,” I added.