Fearsome Magics

by Jonathan Strahan

  I have thought of that friendly, foolish woman more than once in these last few days, for like much of the world, her easy scorn of mathematics must have seemed cruelly short sighted in the face of the fact that humanity will face its demise at the hands of a sum. Or perhaps she and all those despisers of math merely feel vindicated in their loathing.

  At the time, when I disconnected, I wondered a little at my compulsion to speak with her husband. After all I had heard only a little of the math of the sum, rendered by someone who, though a renowned mathematician, had admitted his own inadequacy. And how should a matter of world-shaking mathematical significance be announced on the radio in such a manner in any case? No one would think of announcing the cure for cancer that way. There would be a long period of testing and peer assessment and then the results would finally be announced from some dignified and reputable platform. Dismissing the matter from my mind, I told myself I had fixated on it because I was low in spirits. My disrupted circadian rhythms were affecting my sleep and appetite. With this in mind, I took a long, pleasant walk and then ate sardines in a rooftop tavern before finding the doctor whose name I had been given, to deliver to him my medical papers.

  But even sitting in the doctor’s office listening to him talk tediously of palliative care and what would have to be done in this or that exigency, and of the need to consider removing myself to Athens at some critical moment, the memory of the math I had heard recurred in my mind in the strong Scottish brogue of the young mathematician. I was struck anew by his dogged seriousness despite the host’s attempts to persuade him into levity, and the fact that he had suddenly flown to Adelaide to consult with colleagues. Impossible to believe the possessor of that stern brogue would go to such lengths without having reason for it.

  By dusk, which I observed from a small pizzeria on the very tip of Oia, having taken a bus there, I had begun to tweak the threads of my old network of journalistic connections. Those editors and sub editors and journalists who still lived were retired, and having the luxury of time, or so it seemed then, we enjoyed dissecting and lamenting the state of modern journalism and the way it had aided and abetted the rise of corporate capitalism before I finally laid the few pieces of my enquiry before them. Most were bored enough with their leisure to be intrigued. It was not two days later that I began to receive increasingly incredulous confirmation that the sum I had heard in part, had been solved; not by the brilliant young European mathematician with a bad haircut I had envisaged, but by a boy of fifteen living on the outskirts of a genteel Boston suburb—a mathematical savant called Grigori. But he had not come up with the problem—that had apparently been the doing of an elderly spinster; a retired math teacher, herself an immigrant, who had been attempting to solve it for thirty years.

  The news of the sum was beginning to leak out to the incredulous wider world; driblets and drops of it, at least, but too little for anyone to clearly understand its significance. In my opinion it took the math and scientific community an unnecessarily long time to recognize and accept what had been done, let alone to break the news to the world at large. They are not entirely to blame, of course. Mathematicians and scientists are notoriously unable to communicate clearly, especially with the non-mathematically or scientifically inclined mind. And the lay mind is guilty of too readily closing itself to anything requiring more than the most basic digestion.

  I did not understand myself what had been done until after I had finally spoken to the Scottish mathematician, Huw MacLeod. Ironically, after all my attempts to reach him, it was he who called me and, as if continuing a conversation that had already been going on for some time, told me that the math of the sum and its solution were quite simply too advanced for him and his Adelaide colleagues, for all their brilliance and eminence, to fully grasp. But it definitely involved some sort of ground-breaking force of reversion. Unable to help himself, perhaps, he launched into a description of math so esoteric and complex as to be completely incomprehensible to me. Perhaps sensing my bewilderment, he suddenly broke off and apologized for taking so long to call me. He had got several belated messages from me only the previous night, forwarded from the reception desk at the Brisbane hotel where he had been supposed to stay. I knew, of course, that he had cancelled his reservation and guest lecture. He had done so, he told me, in order to return to Charlotteville, to his wife and small sons. He advised me to repair at once to my own loved ones if I was not with them already, for in a very short time no one would have the luxury of choosing where they would meet their end.

  I did not bother to tell the mathematician that I had no loved ones and that I had already made my choice about where I wanted to meet my end. In truth, I supposed he was making some sort of awkward joke whose point eluded me, so I simply asked him to tell me about the retired math teacher responsible for the sum.

  Her name, it transpired, was Adolphine. He had got it and her phone number from a piano tuner who worked in the evenings as a doorman at the hotel where he had been put up in Boston. Discovering Huw was a mathematician on the way to the tenth floor in an elderly and very slow elevator, he had shown him a picture on his phone of a sum on a battered old blackboard, asking if the mathematician could make head or tail of a thing like that, or was it just gibberish? He had taken the picture on impulse during a break from tuning an old woman’s piano, he explained, when Huw asked. It had taken fifty dollars to get the man to reveal the name and phone number of the woman.

  I tried to question MacLeod about his conversation with her, but he cut me off, suggesting I speak to the woman directly, not that it would make any difference. I was pondering this aside, when he said in his brusque kind way that I had better call right away, if I was serious about wanting to speak to her. Then he hung up without saying goodbye.

  Somewhat bemused, and rather unsettled by the things he had said, I called at once.

  Adolphine answered and to my question about her unusual but charming accent, offered the information that she was a native Flemish Belgian. In impeccable if accented English she went on to add that, as she had told the Scottish gentleman and the Australians who had called, the sum photographed by the piano tuner had not been created by her, but by her deceased grandfather. He had spent thirty years attempting to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem and had been on the verge of it when the British mathematician, Andrew Wiles, succeeded. Her grandfather’s outrage had been apoplectic and he suffered an immense and catastrophic stroke that deprived him of his voice, some of his motor functions and, temporarily, his wits.

  She could not say, Adolphine told me softly, if her grandfather had known what he was doing when he had scrawled the sum in the aftermath of his stroke, for he had seemed to her to be possessed of mindless rage. Certainly later, when he had regained his wits, he had no memory of composing the sum and pronounced it unsolvable quackery, yet he had never erased it and sometimes she would come upon him studying it.

  “I always felt that it was not that the sum was nonsense, but that I had not the wit to understand it,” Adolphine added gravely. “I think my grandfather felt the same. It was as if some other darker, more brilliant part of him had been released to a brief life by the stroke, and that part of him composed the sum.”

  Although she had accepted her grandfather’s assertion that the sum was nonsense, the math she could understand was flawless and so she had taken the blackboard upon which it was written after his death and set it up it in the large ground room where she kept her piano. She too had found herself drawn to study it from time to time. “You see, I had begun to have the queer notion that it was a philosophical question formulated as a mathematical problem,” she told me. “And that if I studied it long enough, I would understand it.”

  I asked how the sum had come to be completed, and she answered that one day a woman brought a boy to her for evaluation. She had been gardening, so instead of bringing them up the flight of steps from the front path to the main part of the house, she had ushered them through the piano room so that sh
e could exchange her gumboots for the house shoes she had left by the back steps. All the way, the boy’s aunt volubly proclaimed him gifted and not unteachable as the school insisted. It transpired that she was seeking the grounds to force the local school to allow her to enroll the boy to avoid keeping him home or spending the considerable funds that would be required to send him to a special school.

  Although the gentle Flemish woman did not say it, I fancied Adolphine had disliked the aunt who had complained at length about the cost of feeding the grossly overweight boy, and lamented being saddled with him after her sister and Estonian brother-in-law had been killed in a car accident. This concern about money might have been less repellent had she not been granted free and full control of the boy’s considerable inheritance, which would revert to her on his death, so long as he remained in her charge, save for periods away that would enhance his life either educationally or medically. Given her clothing and jewelry and the car she drove, it was evident that the aunt had been making full use of the sums at her command, and Adolphine conceded that, given this, it was quite possible she did not actually have funds enough remaining to send the boy away.

  In any case, as the two women spoke, the boy wandered back down to the piano room. When they found him, he was at the blackboard furiously scratching numbers and letters with a tiny nub of chalk. Adolphine, intrigued, prevented the aunt from disciplining the boy and erasing his so-called gibberish, giving the boy a fresh stick of chalk and suggesting he remain with her until they saw what he did with his numbers. The aunt had been elated to be able to be rid of Grigori for a time without contravening the conditions of the will. Not the least bit repelled by the boy’s physical grossness or his emotional reticence, Adolphine had been genuinely curious to discover what he would do with the sum, for she had been able to see that he had grasped the math immediately, and was responding in kind.

  The stay of a night had become several nights and then had become a long-standing arrangement where the boy spent a certain number of hours a day and some nights with Adolphine. He had been attending her for some months before completing the formula which he had been working on steadily since that first day. He had gone far beyond her knowledge of math and although the boy seemed to have no further interest in the sum once it was solved, she had tried to interest the local university mathematicians in coming to see it. She had not succeeded and had given up. Then by chance, a photograph of the blackboard taken by her piano tuner had been shown to Huw MacLeod.

  Adolphine’s voice was warm when she spoke of the Scotsman, who had phoned her initially in some excitement before coming to see her to make a recording of her story and to take his own photographs. He had been very excited, saying that he thought some of the boy’s math was so original that it might involve a new number. At the least, the boy and her grandfather, for he had by then got the whole story out of her, were likely to be famous.

  “Not that Grigori would be much impressed by fame, and my grandfather has gone beyond the care of such things,” Adolphine told me sadly. The boy’s greatest pleasure was to sit with her on her porch swing and drink her homemade lemonade. “That was what he wanted to do each day when he set down his chalk, and it was what he had asked to do after he completed the sum,” Adolphine said, during our last conversation.

  He had also asked if he could stay with her.

  “I knew I would not be able to keep him with me, but I said I thought we might contrive for him to remain with me for a week or so and that seemed to content him,” she said.

  Huw MacLeod had called Adolphine again, still excited by Grigori’s Solution but also sounding troubled. She had been unable to get a clear understanding of what worried him, but he said that he might be able to explain better after seeing some colleagues. He had not mentioned the radio program to her and it was not until some days later when he had called from Adelaide, that he had told her what he believed the sum was capable of doing; had been doing, in fact, from the moment Grigori completed it.

  He did not blame the boy, any more than Adolphine did. Indeed she had a strange theory about the sum and the boy’s solution of it. She told me in our last conversation that Grigori had reacted to her grandfather’s equation when they had passed by the board that first day, almost as if he perceived it as having a physical force.

  “He flinched,” she said wonderingly. “As one might flinch from a cry or from a slap.” She added that she had supposed at the time that he had been frightened by the looming blackness of the old board in an age of pristine whiteboards. But she had thought of that reaction since, having noticed that Grigori always approached the board crabwise, leaning into it, rather in the manner of one walking into the teeth of a storm. Right up until the sum was concluded. Then the boy had straightened for the first time and had regarded the sum at length, very intently, before at last heaving a great sigh of relief and setting down his chalk.

  “It sounds silly and fatuous, but I can’t help but feel that Grigori had been trying to solve my grandfather’s equation of rage ever since he saw it, in order to silence it,” Adolphine said, more to herself than to me.

  I had called her because I had become concerned about the old gentlewoman and the boy. In truth I had feared some violent retaliation as the world began to understand what the sum was doing. Certainly the first generalized reaction after disbelief was a kind of mad rage and I had been afraid that it would require a victim. I had tried, when suggesting Adolphine not answer the phone and move to a hotel or even to one of the houses nearby, vacated by people who thought they could flee what could not be escaped, not to frighten her. But Adolphine was extremely bright and understood what I left unsaid as well as what I was saying. She cut me off gently, assuring me that no one seemed to realise that her fat, gentle Grigori was the terrible evil genius that had come up with Grigori’s Solution.

  I might have guessed as much.

  There were so many wildly conflicting and hysterical reports being mooted about at that stage and so much sensational misinformation, not to mention the generally melodramatic responses of various religions to the looming end of humanity, most of which seemed to revolve around how a person might deserve their version of the afterlife. And it was to happen so swiftly. What use were the dead grandfather of an elderly math teacher and a soft, fat savant Estonian boy as scapegoats, for all they had wrought an end between them? They were a strange and accidental Alpha and Omega, and I thought people would far prefer to believe the perpetrator of their end was a vicious and powerful Dark Lord.

  Soon after that final call to Adolphine, even as Huw McLeod had intimated, the phones—both landlines and cell phones—ceased to operate, television stations shut down and soon after, the power went out. There had been wild and incendiary talk of the sum being an act of war, hot or cold, the successor to other attempts by humanity to annihilate themselves; but when the world went dark the orgy of paranoia and speculation petered out. For people finally understood that there was no stopping it.

  They had tried, of course. Teams of experts had been flown hither and thither over the world by various governments to take part in various global think tanks aimed at trying to unmake the sum of unmaking, and there were rumours of corporations preparing to launch a select few into space in the hope that they would dodge the bullet, as the palely beautiful, sanguine young daughter of my neighbors would say.

  But it all came to nothing.

  The last desperate measure was the suggestion that all physical copies of the sum be destroyed. The last time we spoke, Adolphine told me that she had erased the sum from the board when the American government exhorted people to destroy all copies of the formula they might have made in any form, in a last ditch attempt to halt the process of destruction. That was after the astronomers began seeing the winking out of distant stars, or as one woman put it, quoting a children’s film, the approach of the nothing. This seemed impossible, given that the light of stars is approaching us from so far away that many of them have already g
one extinct before their light reaches us. Yet the stars were vanishing. I witnessed it myself, through my telescope. And they continued to be quenched, even after the purging of Grigori’s Solution. Because of course even if every single copy that had been made was erased—and how could that be ensured in any case?—people who had seen it could not unthink seeing it, unremember it. And even if they had tried, how could someone like Grigori be made to unthink what he had created? And perhaps even if every person who had seen it, including Grigori and Adolphine, had been shot, it would still have been too late.

  I saw a final discussion about the matter, just before television ceased. It was a very important program because not only did it feature two presidents, a famous actress and one of the Australian mathematicians who had been first to see the sum, but the pretty older woman hosting the program was herself famous for finding ways to get guests to reveal themselves to their detriment. I believe she honestly thought she was going to expose a massive hoax being perpetrated to some nefarious end, until the mathematician told her bluntly that there was no trick or plot. Grigori’s Solution would and was at that moment, unmaking the world and there was no use in hiding in a bunker or going to the top of a mountain or flying in a plane. There was no safe place because everything was going to cease to exist; not just humanity or all creatures that lived and could die, but all inanimate matter too: the bunker and the mountain and the plane as well as every blade of grass, every grain of sand. All would all cease to be in the same instant.

  For the first time, that pretty, hard mask slipped but a look of cynicism twisted her perfect lips back into place and the mask resettled itself as the hostess asked politely how the stars were being witnessed in their vanishing, if everything was to cease at the same moment. The mathematician shrugged. I fancy he was beginning to wonder why he was wasting his time in trying to explain anything. But he only said that it would require complex esoteric math to be properly explained, however the fact was that the exact process of the unmaking of existence had begun to be understood only after it was discovered that the same rate of disappearance of stars had been recorded at every observatory in the world. That was impossible since different positions of observation should have meant a difference in what was observed. Unless the end was approaching all places from all sides at the same moment.