The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  As the bell in the steeple of the freshly whitewashed Seventh-Day Baptist church on North Main strikes nine, Lemuel turns up at the Institute, flirts for a moment with his girl Friday, a large-bodied woman named Mrs. Shipp, who blushes when he grazes the back of her hand with his lips. Inside his office, he adjusts the Venetian blinds until he gets the lighting right, paces off the distance between the walls to confirm what he already knows, that the space allotted to him is twice as big as his old office in Petersburg. From a shelf he plucks one of the books he brought with him, thumbs through it to check out variables dealing with the slow wheeling of galaxies and the wild flight of electrons, then calls in Mrs. Shipp to take dictation.

  “The paper should begin,” Lemuel intones, his head tilted back, his eyes closed, his ear tuned to the scratching of the fountain pen on her pad, which reminds him of the needle going round and round in the end grooves of Schubert’s Quintet in C Major, “with the definition of principal eigenvalue and eigenfunction in the classical case, then should go on to discuss what I mean by the Max principle. Here I ought to insert a footnote saying that in the classical or smooth case, I am using Krein-Rutman theory for the principal eigenvalue.”

  “Excuse me,” Mrs. Shipp interrupts. “How is the professor spelling ‘eigenvalue’?”

  “K, V, A, double S.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  Lemuel comes up with the idiom Rain used when she was trying to explain the G-spot. “I was … pulling your leg, Mrs. Shipp.” He spells “eigenvalue” for her, resumes dictating. “I must remember to specify that the smooth domain requires the Hopf lemma at the boundary—”

  “Excuse me …”

  Lemuel opens his eyes.

  “How is the professor spelling ‘Hopf lemma’?”

  “D, O, O, R, followed by a new word, K, N, O, B.”

  Mrs. Shipp scratches it on her pad, then looks up. “That’s another witticism, isn’t it?”

  Lemuel swivels in his chair and gazes out through the Venetian blinds. He can make out students at the foot of the carillon tower riding garbage-can covers down the icy slope into the library parking lot. If he strains, he can hear their shrieks. He longs to drop what he is doing and climb the hill to the tower and ride a garbage-can cover down the slope. He wonders if it is possible, given the weight and configuration of the garbage-can cover, given the coefficient of friction of ice, given the topography of the slope, to predict the trajectory of the cover on any given run. He wonders what keeps him from joining the students howling deliriously on the hill.

  He wonders what is wrong with him that he turns every earthly pleasure into food for chaos.

  “I can say you it is a poor example of Russian humor,” Lemuel finally tells Mrs. Shipp over his shoulder.

  Later, while his secretary is typing up her notes, he copies some software from his personal floppy disks into his office workstation, then networks with the Institute’s Cray Y-MP C-90 supercomputer. At the Institute, there is stiff competition for supercomputer time; Lemuel has been asked to limit himself to four hours a day so the resident scholars and visiting fellows can also access the Cray. Working quickly, he types in some variables and a few lines of computer code, runs a program, paces the room while the Cray plays with the numbers, darts to the printer when the results start to come though. He studies the paper as it runs through his fingers, shakes his head in frustration. He is convinced there is a missing variable, but where is it? How is it possible to find a variable when it is missing because it is variable? How is it possible to be passionate about something that does not exist?

  “Oy”—he hears the Rebbe’s refrain in his ear—”my head is spinning from all these questions without answers.”

  At mid-morning Lemuel joins the Rebbe for a tea break in his vast office, which is diagonally across the corridor from Lemuel’s. The Rebbe’s desk, at one end of the room, is awash with magazines and unanswered letters and unfinished essays and pages of The Jewish Daily Forward in which sandwiches have been wrapped. There are two telephones and a jar of mustard and Elmer’s Glue-All and several spare light bulbs and an old portable Underwood and a box of tea bags and a Scotch tape dispenser without tape in it and a pair of opera glasses and a mug filled with sharpened pencils and a tin of Petrossian caviar filled (Lemuel learns when he gets to know his housemate better) with Procurator coins and pottery shards the Rebbe himself scavenged from the dunes of Caesarea on his first trip to the Promised Land a lifetime ago. Waist-high stacks of books are propped against the walls and the sides of chairs. Towers of books rise above the windowsills, partially blocking out the light. On the far end of the Rebbe’s office, the stacked books form alleyways, the alleyways form a labyrinth. More books are piled on a table in a corner or jammed into the bookshelves on the wall facing the window.

  The Rebbe reads Lemuel’s mind. “You are overwhelmed by the disorder. You are asking yourself how I can find anything.” He holds two cubes of sugar over his cup and, squinting, releases them one by one like bombs, splashing his desk with tea. He stirs the contents of the cup with a letter opener. “Disorder,” he says, blowing loudly across the surface of the tea, taking a first noisy sip, “is the ultimate luxury of those who live in order. We create a chaos. We go slumming in disorder.”

  For a moment Lemuel is sucked against his will into a sinister fiction. Out-of-focus images of disorder press like a migraine against the backs of his eyeballs; a tidal wave of faceless men spills out of doors and windows; thick-soled, steel-toed shoes kick at figures on the ground.

  “In St. Petersburg,” he tells the Rebbe, shivering like a dog emerging from water, shedding the fiction, “we lived in a kind of permanent chaos and went slumming in order when we could find any.” He adds moodily: “Which was not often.”

  The Rebbe nods reflectively. Lemuel shrugs. After a while he gestures with his teacup toward the stacks of books. “How many?”

  “At home, here, I maybe have twelve, fifteen thousand.”

  “You have read them all?”

  “I haven’t read any of them,” the Rebbe says with pride. “Jews have been depositing books on my doorstep like a Moses in swaddling for years. I take them in because they refer to God—it is against Jewish law to destroy a book containing the sacred name of God.”

  “Some day you will have so many books they will bury you alive.”

  “What a way to maybe die … the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh, crushed to death under an avalanche of books containing the sacred name of God. From such a death Christian saints are made.”

  “I did not know Jews could become Christian saints.”

  The Rebbe’s face lights up in a lopsided smile. “And Simon called Peter was what?”

  Lemuel takes a gulp of tea and blurts out the question he has up to now not dared ask. “If you please, how does a Jewish rabbi, a holy man from the heart of the heart of Brooklyn, wind up at an institute devoted to chaos?”

  The Rebbe regards Lemuel. “Which version do you want?”

  “How many versions are there?”

  “There is the official version, which is available in the Institute’s glossy, three-color catalogue. Then there is the more or less genuine story.”

  Lemuel grunts, indicating a preference for the genuine story.

  “I will begin in the middle,” the Rebbe announces. “I was teaching at a yeshiva in St. Louis, but was obliged to resign when my students got it into their thick skulls I maybe was Messiah. I tried laughing it off the way Jesus of Nazareth laughed it off, i.e. by telling them, ‘You say that I am.’ Ha! Being a Messiah is like being a spy. People keep asking you: ‘So are you or aren’t you?’ When you point out the obvious—’If I am, would I tell you?’—it only convinces them you are. Which I am not, though if I were I’d still say I wasn’t. Anyhow, I went and bought a brownstone on Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and founded my own yeshiva. Things went well for the first few years, but who could have predicted the neighborhood woul
d turn into a shvartzer ghetto? You are probably not aware of it, but there is a lot of competition in the yeshiva business. I began having difficulty attracting students. The hardy few who were willing to brave streets filled with unemployed Negroes were not, to say the least, the cream of the crop. Some of them could barely read and write Hebrew, much less Aramaic. I gave remedial reading and writing courses, it was like spitting on a fire. Pretty soon I was having trouble meeting the mortgage payments. I made ends meet by selling kosher wine out of the yeshiva’s basement and held off the Nazi-bastard bankers—some of whom were Jewish—by accusing them of being anti-Semites. But then I brought the world down on my head with the talk-show interview. …”

  “I thought in America you could say whatever came into your head.”

  “In America you can think whatever comes into your head. Some things you don’t say out loud. What I said out loud was: We had to face the music even if we did not like the melody, the music being that in a million years goys would not forgive Jews for the Holocaust. Ha! If I had a dollar for every time my phone rang I could have paid off the mortgage. The Jewish organizations howled like wolves at my door. The Jewish Daily Forward castrated me in an editorial. The lending institutions smelled blood, assumed a wound and foreclosed. I lost my beloved yeshiva.”

  “Which brings us to the Institute …”

  “Which brings us to the Institute. I remembered reading, maybe it was in Scientific American, a story about the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies. On an impulse I wrote a proposition—what did I have to lose?—pretending a lifelong passion for the traces of chaos in Torah. Since physicists and chemists and mathematicians dominated the Institute’s selection board, I calculated they would not know enough Torah to refute a Rebbe, not to mention the Brooklyn Or Hachaim Hakadosh. Just as I thought, they accepted my candidacy.”

  The Rebbe unscrews the cover on the jar of mustard, takes a whiff of the contents, screws the cover back on again. “To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I did not at first swallow my own blah-blah-blah. But as I went through the motions I came to see there really were traces of chaos in Torah. Ha! I have been a Torah junkie since I was a child, prying open oysters of wisdom in search of the Pearl with a capital P, which I took to be God with a capital G. And what did I find? I found a curio with a small c that turned out to be chaos!”

  The Rebbe sinks back into his chair. His lids closed tiredly over his bulging eyes. “As your friend Rain says, go figure.”

  Just before the lunch break, Charlie Atwater shows up in Lemuel’s office carrying several pages filled with measurements of the surface tension of teardrops. He doesn’t specify how he got the raw data, but it is common gossip at the Institute that he is having an affair with his secretary and giving her a hard time. As it is before noon, he has not yet taken his first drink, so he talks without slurring his consonants. He is very excited.

  “I’ve never put teardrops through the hoop before,” he says. He points a slightly trembling finger at neat columns filled with figures that, to the naked eye, appear to have no order, no repetitiveness. “The numbers start out exactly as they do with room-temperature water dripping from a faucet, but then”—Atwater flips to the second page—”they go wild. I went fishing in teardrops, but I’m not sure whether I caught fool’s randomness or pure randomness.”

  Lemuel, for the first time patrolling his Pale on this side of the Atlantic, networks with the Institute’s Cray Y-MP C-90 supercomputer from his office workstation. Using a software program he devised back in the former Soviet Union, he runs Atwater’s numbers through the computer looking for the telltale traces of order. The initial results are inconclusive, so he extrapolates—he extends Atwater’s experiment by nine to the ninth power. Before the hour is out he stumbles across a faint trail and heads down it. By early afternoon he discerns on a horizon the almost imperceptible shadow of a pattern, the mathematical portrait of the order at the heart of a chaotic system, which chaoticists call a strange attractor. Lemuel points out the pattern, by then clearly distinguishable, to Atwater, who slurs his words. “Sho tear dropsh are chaosh-related after all. I badly need a drink.”

  A brittle darkness is blanketing Backwater by the time Lemuel calls it a day. “Have you heard the latest?” Mrs. Shipp asks him as he strides past her desk on the way out. “Everyone’s talking about it. The random killer has struck again.”

  Rain, her bare feet resting on Mayday, is listening to the news on the clock radio in her kitchen when Lemuel turns up. The body of a graduate student at a nearby state university has been discovered chained to a pipe in a subbasement, a plastic bag over her head, a .38 caliber bullet hole in her ear. Rain is so terrified she forgets she has put a slice of whole wheat bread in the old-fashioned toaster with the sides that come down like flaps. She remembers when the bread bursts into flame. Mayday staggers to her feet and watches the smoke billowing from the toaster.

  “I can’t even do goddamn toast anymore,” Rain wails. “From now on,” she vows, beating at the flames with a kitchen towel, “anybody I don’t know comes into Tender To, he gets a shot of laughing gas in the kisser.”

  Suddenly the towel in Rain’s hands is ablaze. With a shriek, she flings it across the kitchen. It lands on a carton filled with paper towels and napkins. In an instant the carton is aflame. Rain grabs the container of milk on the table and tries to pour milk on the fire, but the container is almost empty. She darts to the sink, fills a glass with water and in her panic flings both the glass and the water in it at the carton, but the fire only spreads to some newspapers piled nearby. The kitchen begins to fill with smoke.

  ‘Jesus Christ, do something!” Rain cries.

  Lemuel opens his fly, takes out his penis and urinates on the fire. The flames subside, then sputter out. Rain throws open the window. Cold air invades the kitchen, which smells of smoke, urine and burned paper. She hugs herself and regards Lemuel with something akin to admiration.

  “On second thought,” she remarks, “your equipment leaves nothing to be desired.”

  Lemuel mops the kitchen floor with ammonia while Rain douses the walls with rose-scented toilet water. Later, they both collapse on the couch. Lemuel mentions an advertisement he saw in the Backwater Sentinel for a Nikita Mikhailkov film being shown that night in the original Russian, with English subtitles. He remarks that he longs to hear the sound of Russian again, but Rain says she absolutely has to attend a meeting at the Seventh-Day Baptist Church, there is no question of not going; likewise there is no question, with a random killer stalking the county, of her strolling down North Main Street without an armed guard.

  Lemuel dryly points out that he is not armed.

  Rain’s face is drawn and serious as she tells him, “Hey, I know you don’t actually go around with a goddamn pistol in your pocket. When I was a parole officer I hung around cops a lot, which is how I discovered that dudes who are armed look at dudes who aren’t in a peculiar way. The first time I saw your wild head of hair pushing through the curtain into Tender To, I knew right off you weren’t armed, right?”

  Her eyes open wide in discovery. She is thinking about how he put out the fire. “With the usual weapons,” she adds thoughtfully.

  D.J. Starbuck removes a shoe and pounds the high heel on the lectern, but nobody pays attention.

  “We’ve signed petitions until they’re coming out of our ears,” Matilda Birtwhistle shouts over the din. “We owe it to the next generation to escalate.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Rain yells, clutching Mayday under an arm. “We need to draw the line.”

  “This far and no farther,” the Rebbe cries into one of the remote microphones. His voice booms from the two loudspeakers attached to the wall on either side of the wooden Jesus Christ crucified.

  Shirley, sitting on Dwayne’s shoulders, shrieks, “If they come sucking around Backwater looking for trouble with a capital T, let’s give ’em trouble with a capital’T!”

  Lemuel shouts into Rain’s ear, “Who
is coming to Backwater? And what kind of trouble with a capital I are they looking for?”

  An elderly professor of art history with a neatly trimmed gray goatee snatches the microphone from the Rebbe. Brandishing his cane, he shouts in a frail voice, “We must declare war. We must transform Backwater into the front line.”

  “Carpe diem, Professor Holloway,” cries one of the football players standing under the stained-glass window. The other football players pick up the chant: “Car-pe di-em, car-pe di-em.”

  Half a dozen cheerleaders, fresh from a practice session and still wearing purple tights and short, pleated, gold-and-crimson skirts, scramble onto benches at the back of the church and begin chanting, “Roll ‘em back, roll ‘em back, roll ‘em waaaaay back!” The hundred and fifty people jammed into the Seventh-Day Baptist Church take up the cry. “Roll ‘em back, roll ‘em back, roll ‘em waaaaay back!”

  “Roll who waaaaay back?” Lemuel demands plaintively.

  “The bulldozers,” Rain shouts into his ear.

  “Can we pleeeease have some order here,” D.J. cries shrilly into the lectern microphone.

  “Simmer down, for Chrissake,” bellows Jedediah Macy, the balding Baptist minister sitting on the organ stool to the right of the altar.

  Gradually the bedlam subsides. The cheerleaders climb down from the benches. People settle into their seats.

  “I move we put the question to a vote,” D.J. shouts into the microphone.

  “I second the motion,” the Rebbe, his eyes bulging dangerously, calls into the remote microphone.

  Word Perkins, the Institute’s factotum, leaps to his feet. “I third the motion, huh?”

  “All those in favor of militant action indicate same by saying aye.”

  A babble of delirious “Ayes” echoes from the rafters.

  “All those against?”

  D.J. surveys the suddenly still church. A leer overpowers her usual sardonic expression. “The ayes have it,” she announces jubilantly.