Excerpt
I was never a bad student, but it wasn’t like I was particularly outstanding at math. As a kid, like any good mother mine made me memorize my times tables, and we practiced around the kitchen table after the crockery was cleared drilling the multiples of eights and nines and twelves into my malleable brain as Dad put on a record (not literally, of course, but on his phone and channeled through the Bluetooth speaker) from his youth and whistled while he worked away at the sink and the smell of the dishsoap and the vestiges of the smell from the cooking dissipated, subsumed into the neutral smell of the household that was the conglomerate of nights’s-cooking past and dishsoap past and our black lab Bo and all the other smells both active and vestigial that were as invisible to us as an atom and that a household make… at first, I would guess, and occasionally, I would surprise myself by spewing out a number that happened to be the correct one. “Seven times six.” Forty two? I’d know I was right because she’d move right on to the next one instead of pausing to correct me, and I would be surprised, and my mother would be quietly pleased; but little by little, through these little games of inquisition, which exasperated young me and quietly pleased my mother, almost despite myself I had grasped the rhythm of the game, the certain word (and not the number) that was expected after my mother said certain of her words, like learning the lines of a play. It was by rote, like the little man in the thought experiment who is passed back and forth chits marked with Chinese ideograms, and is tasked with sifting through a file-cabinet containing the correct English translation, and who in this way can be said to have “learned” Chinese as time goes on and he grows more nimble at his task. Little by little, by rote he learns to recall the certain file that corresponds to the certain chit, and he no longer needs to resort to the filing cabinet. Little by little I no longer required my mother to pause and correct me, the pauses and the corrections and the rhythm they held with the question had been ingrained in me. I started to spew out the right number more and more often. It was everything she hoped would have happen with the piano, which she similarly stood over my shoulder to practice so often, ready to tell me to not whenever I threatened to stop. So often, I’d throw up my hands! For so long we did this until all of the natural keys in the middle of the claviature got glommed up with the snot I’d let run freely down my face as I sobbed and I sobbed (willful sobs, sobs of protest!) and as my mother told me to not. This—the dampening of the keys—was my miniature revenge against the piano—whose own rhythm, I never did learn. Eventually my mother gave up.
This was in third grade, when it was required that all students learn their times tables, and when time came for the progress assessment I passed with flying colors even where other of my peers floundered completely, completely thanks to my mother. But too, even where I had succeeded many others in my class succeeded equally well. No, I wasn’t outstanding at math, but I wasn’t sinking behind, either, my mother made sure of that. This, though, isn’t “real” math—not “really.” These were the times tables.
An important lesson was learned, however—though I didn’t yet know it—and that was the lesson of rhythm, a key element not only (and only inadvertently) in my mother’s instruction, but which comes in handy in the higher forms of math as well. Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe, said Galileo. Thus math, in its syntax, syllables, the turns of its phrase, is not ever enforced on the young like memorizing a times table, but is already ingrained in them, like it is in all the universe’s inhabitants. God reads the line—he pauses, and corrects. And the history of mathematics is the history of many fine men and women getting a hang of the rhythm of God’s pauses and corrections. No matter how far we sputter forward—no matter how smoothly everything went that preceded us, already honed and precise—it will always be God there in the offing ready with the next line. God is the “script-girl,” so to speak. That we can’t always make out his prompts is the anxiety of performance. But always and forevermore, the show must go on.
Anyone can habituate themselves to the rhythm of the math; and once you do, everything matrices and dimensional and proofs will become like a breeze. You’ll always do well for yourself in the lecture hall. You let it wash over you, and will always be able to spot the atonal or the syncopated rhythm. That’s what happened to me, I found I was veritably tearing through all the math that the school was prepared to give me, just from sounding it out, and never was eagerer to move onto the next regimen, the next one, the next one… My mother, of course, was always very pleased, in her own way. Yes, I should say I boasted my parents’s fulsomest support. I had come a long way from fully reclining on our kitchen table’s benches trickling wanly this figure and the next, wanly hoping that I would occasionally hit one on the mark. I should say that the mark and I became as one. I could feel its every feint, and every faint oscillation. The mark would move and my nose would move with it, I could develop, I found, a sniff for where the mark would be hiding—and always in the most ingenious of places… It could be challenging, but what a satisfying challenge! I began chasing the rush of sniffing out that mark, of perceiving the textbook and the practice book and the old-timey “puzzle” circulars, with their fun little tests and problems and exercises designed to keep old men sharp in senectitude but which I gobbled and poured over, my dad used to give them as gifts, from the ages of, oh, about ten to about fourteen, some of my most beamish memories from youth are of scratching away whole hours, whole days, whole weekends and in the summertime, whole weeks, gobbling, and pouring over, just such circulars—I wonder if they still make them, they were a rarity even then… I began chasing the rush that came from perceiving these exercises’s every next move, every nook and cranny of its ambit, and juking out them before they could juke me out. Yes, in exactly the same way that I never could juke out any of my defendants on the football field—and yes, while all the other kids were still outside, still juking, during those whole hours and summers and weekends that I was inside doing extracurricular math homework. But I was finally a habile opponent. Unlike I was at the piano… and why was it I never got a hang of that piano the same way I conquered my times table and next, the whole world? The whole world at my feet, at my feet! So why was it I couldn’t bring an audience to theirs? There for the taking! All those grueling piano recitals my mother used to drive me to, followed in our car by Oomah and Oompah in theirs… and the stupid way I had to dress up! My whole family, and not just my family but my extended family, putting on collared shirts and nice dresses to watch me stuffed in a little monkey suit bumbling through the banalest of Mozart airs—right after Little Johnny from down the block had done his own interpretation, and then right after me will come Little Suzie with her “Ode to Joy” routine. I was never a wunderkind, never was it expected of me to somehow suddenly “blossom” into a virtuoso overnight, but still, Mom made me do it! Even if she knew genius would never come from it, at the very least there’d be torture! The music school used to put on pageants like this—certainly not to let the parents know their hard-earned money wasn’t going to waste, so I don’t know why they did it.
Why was it I always felt like I was the worst of the bunch? Just like in school, I wasn’t bad, wasn’t great, but especially in front of that dreaded, faceless audience, I’d seize up with fright. Trust me, I know performance anxiety. The two of us are intimately acquainted. I wasn’t great to begin with but stuff me in a monkey suit and face me against the faceless void, and I was just terrible. I was hitting all the wrong keys and all the wrong keys at once. Stage fright. Stage fright can make you forget many things—your lines—how to read sheet music. Hop on that stage and it all is suddenly incomprehensible.
Wasn’t mathematics not only the language of the universe, but also its music? Why couldn’t I ever break into music… maybe the difference was that with math—which for me was embodied most crystallately in the puzzles and brain-teasers found in those books my dad always bought for me—I had all the time in the world. With math, I could afford to spend a whole weekend on one puzzle. I could set the book down—whether a book Dad had given me or one given to me by the school—and pick it up fifty years later and only then solve it and it would all be just as well. No so for my performance at the recital.
With math I could lay down and really put the time in learning all the intimacies and contour, almost by touch, almost as you would a lover, as though my assignment was not calculus but pleasure, her pleasure and mine. With math things didn’t come to a head. I was to be subjected to no recital. There was only a silent communion in the night—canoodling, in other words. Whereas with that damn piano you’d plonk hit the key, and plonk the key would sound. No interim between the doing and the appraisal, tacit or no (with Oomah and Oompah it was tacit, with my mom it wasn’t)—even that most tacit of appraisals: the plonking of the key and the sounding of the note and somewhere, maybe even in the resonation of the sound waves themselves, or in the particles in the air in which they resound, a judgment is made, and you have either struck the right note, or, not.
Even if you’re playing piano to an empty room the fact indelibly remains that you were either right or you weren’t. If you make a mistake on a math puzzle—if you follow the wrong lead on a theorem you’re working on expounding—you can throw the scratchpaper away and start again. You can erase the past (quite literally—with an eraser). You can take your time. Whereas with the piano, once you’ve hit the key, it’s too late. The noise has been released. There’s no taking it back. At the piano, all is irrevocable. In mathematics there is only the patient give-and-take of two generous lovers. All can be forgiven, forgotten. There will be no rush. You emerge at your own pace.
Past a certain point, mine just happened to be a particularly fast one.
Or precocious might be a better way to put it. It didn’t take long for my academic talents to be recognized.
Of course, at group piano lessons at the music school—where I was the laggard, the dullard of the lot—so disheartening, compared to being the precocious one!—we were able to practice. We were able to take our time. But at the recitals everything came to a head, and you needed to perform, now, and not later. I suppose we are also living in the time of recorded music, but the music school I was sent to was not in the business of letting a bunch of youngsters mess around with recording equipment and patiently, nigh painstakingly producing a finished product we could actually be happy with; for us, everything centered around the recital, the live performance. Maybe if it was otherwise, I might have grown to like piano, and perfecting my playing with all the time in the world at my disposal, beholden only to the solitary play of practice, and the result that had already been personally revised and satisfactorily mended by me. As it stood, however, there were the long hours of practice, going almost every day after school to my “other” school—or, during the summertime, when regular school wasn’t in session, literally everyday, including Sunday—culminating with me plodding onto the boards in my starched shirt and groping clumsily at the keys while (literally) everybody and their mothers watched—culminating, in other words, with a final ten minutes of just, more practice. For that’s what they were, these recital pieces: another chance for me to practice! No polished finished product in sight, no, far from it!
The worst part of the lessons themselves were the breaks. That was when everybody in the class would gather around in self-selected circles with each other and they all chatted and laughed and oh, how they laughed; meanwhile I was always left alone in the corner trying to think of anything I could to appear busy—to come up with a “cover,” as it were, for why I was in the corner by myself, and not with one of the groups in one of their circles and chatting and laughing; but also this cover was an extenuating one, so that the other kids wouldn’t feel “bad,” or uncomfortable, that they hadn’t invited me to join them in one of these circles—so they could say to themselves, oh, no need to worry about Peter, he seems occupied already, he probably just prefers to be alone, no need to invite him to join us. It was enough already to feel excluded—I didn’t need to feel I was pitied as well! I used to take my puzzle books with me, with an eye to these breaks, so I’d have something to work on, and something quite readily perceptible to everyone else at that. Then one day—who knows, maybe the piano teacher said something to her, expressed concern that her child didn’t appear to be “mingling” well enough with the other kids in the class—Mom took my puzzle book away from me before letting me out of the car when she was dropping me off at music school: “Why do you need to bring that, here!” she said, wrenching it away from me—and don’t think I didn’t put up a fight! “If you don’t want to talk to anyone else you should be using the break times to practice your piano!” That was her answer to everything: more practice. What a relief, years later, when she gave up on the idea of her son as a piano player and finally embraced my new passion for mathematics! It made life a lot easier. If she ever said, you should be practicing your math more!, I would only have been too happy to oblige. Though of course, she never needed to say anything like that, not to me. I never needed an excuse or any other outside exertion in order to study more math. It was all I could think about! Later, she’d get on my case about not eating enough at dinner, or letting my other assignments drop because I was so invested in my traveling mathematics troupes I had gotten roped up in. “Just because you’re going away for the Math Bowl this weekend doesn’t mean you can turn in your history assignments late!” Now, she was foisting textbooks onto me, to bring in my carry-on so I could work on an essay about Christopher Columbus on the flight to Saint Louis for my team’s big mathematics tournament—we had made it to the finals. Just trivia, really, mathematical trivia, for precocious middle-school kids, like me. I did it mostly just for fun—and to try and meet people. In fact, my more serious work, that I started embarking on later, in high school, I only got interested in from playing in these math-themed competitions designed for adolescents… But anyway, funny how now she was actually giving me books, where once she’d take them all away before sending me off. Now, she wouldn’t dream of taking away one of my cherished math books! Not ever! She was proud of her son, the math wizard. It was just that, she would’ve been prouder if he were a little well-rounded, is all.
I used to lay down in bed, twiddling my footsies around like antennae, one of my math tracts lying open on its spine with the pages spindled out on either side, and I’d lay like that for hours—prone, pouring over a supine book. I developed a sort of intimacy with the words and ideas on the page, like I could penetrate them just with an intent enough gaze. So much warm fluid gushing around in between my ears like a low hum… I’d even hum along sometimes, the way Glenn Gould did playing piano… this was my piano, not the piano piano, but this: the numbers and symbols that became for me a second language, one more solemn, more golden than the everyday. This would be, I decided, implicitly or not—this would be how I would make my music.
I did the things that let the numbers know I liked them, understood them, saw them. Like any good relationship, the numbers gave as good as they took, and the more I understood them and grew to really like them, the more they liked me back. And if I had any friends at all, it was them. I sat on them and felt them squelch on my anus, and the lassitude they afforded me was very similar to the gorgeous patience of time you spend as a child, though probably as a younger child than I was then, refraining from making a bowel movement so you don’t have to stop whatever it is you’re doing that’s more pleasurable than stopping everything and running to the bathroom. And, logged with shit, you carry on playing, only now with that lassitude, that slows everything down, and waddles your walk.
I’d stage the most elaborate conversations, with these, my “friends”—call it a courtship. Everything was to be danced around before that final thing, what later I came to know more deliberately as the conquest of sex. I was always so rushed to get to sex, I wanted to ditch all the preliminaries in a rush to that ultimate rush, but with math, I was the perfect picture of a gentleman, and I took solace in all the preliminary affairs, the sweeping of the breadcrumbs, the wheedling of the night, the aura of solace, but also, even, a dread, as soon as the topic was breached, when I realized the night wouldn’t last forever and that, very soon even, I might be prevailed on to mount that final stage. The brain liked being teased, and unlike the penis, was afforded no release when the penultimate chime of the clock reaches that hollow, and the next one begins, sounding the victory of your impulses but the vanquish of that foe that was so like a friend to you, the conclusion of a struggle that was more like sex than unlike it—the wrastling of two forms that was an ecstasy of touch while it lasted, and not a scrape or a drain on the vigor. The brain danced around victory that was so pyrrhic in this way. It relished in the bloodshed. Maybe that’s why us mathematicians are drawn to the insoluble problems. There’s something pleasant about devoting your whole life to a defeat. Maybe it’s just something dumb and romantic, but it appeals to me nevertheless. My dream—well, or it used to be—was to sit in the same white cell through the years and cast about in the nothing; the brief glimpses that branch out and dissolve, never to reappear; the white-hot longings that, when really held to it, you couldn’t certify even exist. It’s like a mystic granted a vision of God…
In the fifth grade is when the teachers started to take notice. I remember Mrs. Joy calling me out in the hall and my heart must have been pounding so hard it was audible, because when I followed her out there and she got down on her haunches to talk to me on my level she gasped and put a matronly hand on my breast—“I can feel it pounding!” I thought I was in trouble… The only reason any teacher ever sent anyone to the hall was because they were in trouble! Like a good, multiple degree-program trained childcare provider, she instructed me to take a couple of good and deep breaths to calm myself down. “What’s wrong, Peter?” It didn’t even enter her consciousness that I could be feeling guilty, I was such the diffident student—always alone to my side of the classroom, not dissociating, but certainly not present—and only a cause for concern as far as any good, multiple degree-program trained school instructor might be concerned when one of her pupils seems disengaged from reality and lost in the world of the purely internal. Now, I was in the hallway, and I was in trouble, and the fact of what wrong I had done to deserve this state of purgatory of the deep breaths and the matronly hand was beside the point of the more fundamental fact that in trouble I most certainly was, and though I was at pains to understand the charge that was being leveled against me in that moment, I was also firmly, if not comfortably resigned to that latter fact, that regardless of my innocent guilt, the price for a wrongdoing needed to be paid, and I was going to have to pay it. I took the deep breaths as I was instructed, not wanting to worsen the weight of my transgressions by disobeying a direct order—but the pounding of my heart did not cease and there was nothing Mrs. Joy could have done to make it cease, because I had been wrongly accused, or otherwise was ignorant of some law, and now I was getting my comeuppance.
Actually, she explained, I had been fingered to partake in a local mathematics exhibition put on by the university—my future alma mater. I was having so much fun with Dad’s math books, that when one of them advertised a tournament being hosted at colleges across the country, including (somewhat strangely, I thought then [though this was before I knew about how involved in national mathematical outreach University of Montana was, because of how strong the math department there is]) in little ol’ Montana, in its back pages, I decided to apply. The advertisement consisted of a concisely stated, but relatively hairy if you knew what to look for, puzzle. In order to apply, you had to submit (to the address listed—some corporation or another, incidentally, in New York, that was sponsoring the series of events) a solution to the problem; if yours passed muster, you were in. It didn’t matter where you were from: Missoula was the site which was to host all participants in the event from the entire Northwest region—that meant I rubbed shoulders with people from Washington, Idaho, even Nevada (which is strictly speaking, southwest) and even Hawaii (they just lumped Hawaii in there for convenience’s sake). The other legs of the exhibition were in New York (of course); Davis, California (UC Davis’s math department had similar ambitions to the University of Montana; and Miami, Florida—along with Missoula, the four corners of the nation. Participants from all over were sent free airfare to the closest city where the event was to be held.
Well, it turned out, my application was so strong, so eloquent, so cleverly supported and proved, that the chair of Montana’s math department was reaching out to me personally—shocked that such a strong submission could have come from one so young. Technically, he had reached out to my school; and it was for that reason that Mrs. Joy had dragged me out into the hall. No, I wasn’t in trouble, far from it. I didn’t experience relief quite yet—would need to simmer down a little first—but I was no little elated.
Next thing I knew, I was being sent to the principal’s office—not because I was in trouble, but so I could arrange a meeting with Professor Thorngood at the University of Montana, with the principal—the head of my entire school!—acting as my liaise! Now, my relief was complete. To top it all off, the class that Mrs. Joy had dragged me out from was my least favorite, history. So not only was I getting to spend more time talking about math, and not only were people talking to me about what I was most interested in, and more than that, not only were they recognizing my talent and potential in what I was most interested in as they were talking to me—I got to skip history. My relief was double.
The whole miniature meeting—mostly just a formality, and an excuse—what pleasure I took in this fact!—for the principal to congratulate me—to congratulate me!—the whole time the meeting was going on, I just kept thinking I can’t wait to go home and tell Mom and Dad… Nothing, I knew, nothing could give me more pleasure, than, not just my principal, but my mother congratulating me, my mother, finally, countenancing the one thing in my life I took pride in and the one thing at which I wished to excel and the one thing I was desperate for her to countenance—for the two major figures in my life (but really, the one) to enter and take part in the secret universe I had cultivated all these years twiddling my footsies in the air and thinking about theorems and hypotheses and axioms and voluptuous curves… True, Dad encouraged my interests by buying for me all those puzzle books, and eventually math periodicals (some with their own “puzzles” included—open problems, with awards upon solution), in the first place; but now, I’d get the chance to tell him all those books and all the money he’d drained on them had paid off. Now, he’d see what I had achieved, actually achieved for once. (“For once,” I was already saying—eleven years old, and already I was saying to myself, for once!) Mostly it was Mom I concerned myself with, in these gloatings of mine in the principal’s office as she (the principal) typed up in my presence the email she was to send to “that man from the university,” whose stature was assumed to be very large indeed by that fact, casually chatting with me in the most effusive of terms as she did so—more than Dad, it was Mom I was thinking about, wholly absent from the proceedings taking place in front of me, barely listening as Mrs. Bicandi (my principal) remarked her surprise, her pleasant surprise, at discovering this quiet student in Mrs. Joy’s fifth grade was actually a whole math superstar!, why, she never would have believed it! I thought how now, finally, Mom would have the over-achieving son she always believed she deserved. It was with her, more than Dad, that I wanted to be able to share that immense satisfaction, and no little personal pride, I experienced when completing a particularly challenging puzzle (at this point I had yet to ever actually solve one of the open problems from any of the professional mathematics periodicals—if I had, a check in the mail would have been sure to catch my mother’s attention, even more than an ‘A+’—dollars and cents).
“Mom,” I was breathless to say, practically having ran to her car as it pulled up, fifteen minutes late, after school that day and I hopped into the backseat—“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
“There is no way you are going to that competition at the university.”
At least she had to decency to wait until I’d barely finished the sentence before she dealt the finishing blow.
“What?,” was all I could muster, aghast…
Apparently the principal sent the email out to my parents as well. Well, to hear her tell it, my mom thought that a weekend spent piddling about with a bunch of lowlife academics—an effete, ineffectual, vile and useless and slovenly and slatternly and socially-parasitic and economically-draining and bleeding-heart and corrupt and (perhaps most vile of all) cash-poor group of individuals if ever there was one—was just about the most unproductive use of my time she could possibly imagine (and her imagination was a far from limited one, she added). And, most offensive to her taste, not just a weekend, but also a Friday, a school day. “Just what do you expect to do about your classes on that day? Do you suppose you could stand to miss them—just, skip out, every time you think”—extra emphasis (and extra hurtful to me) on that word think—“you have something better to do? What type of wishy-washy person am I raising? You can’t go, you have a prior commitment.” My tireless—no, scratch that—my truly exhausting, and, as much as I could manage, exhaustive treatise of reasons for why she should change her tune fell upon ears all but deaf, on the part of my mother. The car ride home—what was supposed to be my victory lap!—I spent in tears. These were the years when I could still do that.
Could still cry.
Now, I don’t think I’ve cried since I was about eighteen. Now, all my tears get backed up and my spleen has to deal with them, like the kidney does with piss, or the liver with blood.
The dinner, too, passed in tears.
“You’re not eating! Look, he wants to go to a math festival, but he won’t even eat! You spend too much time on math already! It’s disrupting your eating—and you think I’m going to let you go to a math festival! Thinks I’m going to let him skip school, just to go to a math festival…” I didn’t know if she was directing the tirade at me (as when she used the second-person), my father (as when she referred to me in the third-person), to herself or to no one in particular, to the air around her head. “What, are you training already to be an academic? You’re training for the type of diet you’re gonna have to eat on a math professor’s salary? Eat! You’re not a math professor yet, not in my house! In this house your father works hard, because he’s no math professor, so that you can eat, now EAT!”
I went to bed crying, and I probably cried in my sleep, too. There was no use arguing with her—I’d say, reasoning with her—her position would not falter. She refused to falter. It was the practicing the piano with her all again—it was the Amaia Nichols interrogation—she sat right over my shoulder, at the edge of my bed where I lay facing away from her, and like a voice in my head she carried on her monologue, her endless harangue against the corrupt institution of the academe, and the impudence that I should wish to “skip” school, and the idiocy of Mrs. Bicandi and of Mrs. Joy, that they should be in support of a corrupt institution like the academe and of the impudence of one of their students, who should be punished for skipping school, not supported! And just like when she used to “help” me practicing the piano, the same gobs of snot and gruel came in torrents out my nose, staining the bedsheets—just like the old days, soon, I began to rail against her “help,” to tirade back at her: “GO TO BED! LET ME GO TO BED! GO TO BED! LET ME GO TO BED!” “Stephen!” my mother yelled—my father’s name. “Stephen, get in here! Our mathematical prodigy of a son has finally gone truly insane!” “GO TO BED, LET ME GO TO BED, GO TO BED, LET ME…” and so on and so on I kept on repeating, the same sentence over and over, at the top of my lungs. “He’s insane! Stephen! Get in here! Help! We need to get you tested for autism. You know all those mathematicians are all autistic? They don’t know how to relate to other people, they don’t know how to connect with the world. It’s just like when you were in piano lessons. All the other kids would talk to each other before the recital and you would always cling to your grandparents. It would be one thing if you were ever nice to your grandparents! You always made Oompah so uncomfortable! You’d always just stand there! Your Oompah always said you were autistic, we needed to get you tested. Now I guess he really is! Steve! Stephen! Help! He’s gone crazy! We’re going to sign you up for an appointment, you’re getting tested—as soon as is possible! STEPHEN!” “GOTOBEDLETMEGOTOBEDGOTOBEDLETMEGOTOBED…”
Until eventually my dad came up, practically wrestled my mother out the door, and then, a minute, a half a minute later, once I was sure the coast was clear, I gradually began to diminish the violence of my mantra, until eventually, I was no longer screaming the words but muttering them—like I actually was crazy!—and hey, maybe I was!, I could’ve been!—and until finally, I could no longer have been said to be issuing words out of my mouth at all, it was only tears and snot and spit—stained parti-colored by my dinner, which had only been partially cleansed from my mouth during a cursory brushing, at which my mom was present, haranguing me as I scrubbed my molars and canines—and who knows what else. My sheets were soaked. Until eventually, I fell asleep. I awoke the next morning and went down to breakfast which my mother had already prepared and the three of us ate as if nothing had happened the previous night. Strangely—Dad usually had so many early-morning procedures, or cases he had to work on—it was he that drove me into school that morning.
“Peter, I talked to your mother, and you’ll be participating in the… mathematics exhibit.”
“Exhibition.”
“Peter, this is no time to correct me, I’m doing you a favor. Are you happy.”
I was crying again.
“Yes.”
I was happy—I was so happy. I felt surging with pride. I quickly began to try and shake myself out of it, to make sure nobody at school would be able to tell I’d been crying, even tears of pleasure, not of pain. I was rubbing my eyes with the sleeves of my sweatshirt and making them red.
We shared no other words the rest of the car ride. “Thank you,” I told Dad, when he dropped me off.
The “mathematics exhibition”—sponsored by some corporate “health-care technology” firm, of which I had never heard, and whose name still means absolutely nothing to me—and headquartered, again, in the very city I was to move to some decade after the events I am describing—the exhibition was an interesting experience for me, and certainly worked to broaden the horizons of a shy kid who had only occupied a suburban Montanian bubble up to this point. (Although I remember feeling a tinge of disappointment that the exhibition was still hosted in Montana, not even a thirty minute drive away from our house; I was jealous of the kids who got to fly out—who got to come from excitingly exotic locales, like Sacramento, or Walla Walla, Washington.) Not that I was rendered any less shy by the experience, just that I was shy to begin with, and, being insular by nature, probably occupied a bubble even smaller than your average kid of my background. Shyly, the weekend of the exhibition I increased the radius of my little-kid world—through no effort of my own save to show up and look pretty—to include the student union building of the University of Montana. And the dimensions of this world would remain unchanged from this early quantum leap I took in fifth grade until I later came to attend that very university, at age eighteen.
The event was structured in three parts, for the three days over which it took place: the first day—an ignominious Friday, a school day, and though my mother may have relented and let me take part, she still begrudged my absence, and it was my father who dropped me off and took me back home for the whole weekend, while she sulked and groused over dinner every evening, not just that whole weekend but every evening for some time after, too—but that first Friday was to lead off with the dreaded “social hour,” which was like break time at piano lessons, only worse, because I was the youngest person there by far and, alone for the first time in my life, sans parents, even for just a few hours, ten in the morning to three in the afternoon, I discovered I was not the type to bloom—followed by a series of “breakout” sessions—the lot of us separated into smallish groups, approximately five people per, designated by a number on the nametags provided to each participant (a ‘1’ signifying “Group 1,” etc.)—some more dreaded “getting to know eachother” business, and then a group powwow discussing, finally, what we had all come there for in the first place—math. Finally! Each session, each group, I mean, being helmed by a member of the department—the department I was one day to join, University of Montana Math; and mine, of course, was helmed by Professor Thorngood, who was decent enough to sort of lead me by the hand throughout the whole weekend (though it was apparent he had more on his mind than chaperoning the lone child at his department’s big event, even if the lone child was only there at his behest—of course, at the time, I couldn’t see that he couldn’t possibly devote all his energies to making shy me more comfortable, and I just took his distance for coolness, I took it to be “setting the tone” for how our interactions would in fact go, as opposed to how he had so warmly described his plans for working with me in his emails sent to Mrs. Bicandi; but I was pleasantly surprised, then, after the exhibition, on future trips to visit the department, that he was to live up to his word after all, and the first impression was just a fluke). And each group was given a number of—I guess you could call them “puzzles”—was given a number of prompts, which were the same for each group, and the real thrust of the thing was not, just, arriving at a satisfactory “answer” or “solution” to any given prompt, but there was to be some light-hearted “competition” among the groups as to who had the cleverest solution—who went about arriving to that solution, in the cleverest, most elegant way—yes, either the most succinct, most efficient means to the end, or the cleverest—but this whole part of the exhibition was rather free-form, and, yes, was mostly just another form (or another excuse) for the dreaded socializing and intermingling that was supposed to be happening between all us young (some of us younger than others) mathematical minds—who, who knows, might one day end up working in the field of, say, health-care technology! Who knows!
Anyway. Day two was more my speed—truncated meet-and-greet period, for one—followed by a series of lectures; I imagine the leg of the exhibition in New York got some hotter shots to come speak, but us in Missoula, we just got Professor Thorngood and a few others. Maybe one or two guys who worked in the private sector—though in Missoula, Montana, (I don’t think they took the trouble to fly any speakers out for the occasion) there isn’t much of a flourishing “private sector” in any field that might apply to mathematics—maybe a low-level engineer or something might’ve spoken, I don’t quite remember; and the rest were academics: physics, one algorithms guy, who I remember captured my imagination, Professor Thorngood the statistician, and of course, the big kahuna—pure math. I don’t know if he was a local professor, or if maybe they did fly him out, but this last speaker—was he actually last in the order of lecturers? I don’t know, but to me, he may as well have been—changed my life. Maybe he was just before my time at the University of Montana. In the arrogance, the diffidence, of youth, I never had the wherewithal to ask after him during all my time there. But the pure math guy they brought up on that lonely Saturday long past galvanized me (and I’m sure many others present—did I ask any of the others, all of the age of fifteen to eighteen or so, if they shared in that enthrallment I experienced, listening to him speak? Of course I didn’t)—me, who was so shy, whose small bubble enclosed him with the brute weight and the swaddling, smothering smugness of a bullet-proof vest, me who was apparently so ungalvanizable—and did more to set me down the path I’m on now—tentatively, nominally—or at least, the path I was on, and very vigorously, until quite recently, I’m afraid—than anything else during my mathematical gestation.
He—for his name is lost to history—was a tiny, hirsute man, who spoke not tersely, but rather in mealily clipped phrases, which had just so happened to trade in their ellipses for declarative full-stops. Never, I don’t think, did he linger on a sentence, terse or otherwise, until its conclusion. I remember he wore a sweater—tucked into his khaki pants. This, I remember thinking—now this is what a mathematician is supposed to look like!
Did he hold the room in the hollow of his hand? Far from it! He looked as though he himself was in the thralls of a more ultimate hand (perhaps that invisible hand of the audience—that same “performance anxiety” I knew so well), as if himself fundamentally hollow. He looked ill at ease, as though his leather belt was buckled too tight and the sweater tucked into his khaki pants was chaffing. And—how far a cry from the engineer, the physicist, trafficking in their “applied mathematics”—how far from encouraging, how alien to him was the role of “motivational speaker” for tweens and teens—he told us, outright, how he would not champion the life of the mathematician, for, if anyone present today truly wanted to become one, no “championing” would be needed—they—the mathematician in wait—would heed the call of their own powers, their own volition. He saw his role rather as to dissuade us; for the aspirant mathematician in the audience today, if their calling were true, would heed this calling even in the face of all dissuasion.
Yes, I took it as a personal challenge. Did I have what it takes—to make it in the face of every dissuasion? To charge wildly forward, despite the many pitfalls the pure math speaker himself wildly enumerated?
Then, the weekend ended, and I returned to my bubble.
From that point on, my closeness to Professor Thorngood—the same department chair that fingered me—only grew, as did that of my relationships with the rest of his staff. Not only was I a “cute” addition to the stolid halls of a drab and fluorescently-lit bureaucratic Middle American university building, but—“hey, that kid’s actually got some chops!” (a common refrain, clearly marked by surprise on behalf of the refrainer). But while I can’t say I wasn’t treated nice, or that the higher-ups didn’t do a good job looking after me, now that I was making frequent trips to the campus pursuing what was effectively an apprenticeship in the field I loved—being groomed, them with an eye to one day naming me their intellectual successors and looping me in on all their current subjects of research—I will say that my stature, and how quickly, relatively speaking, I had achieved it, inspired no little resentment around the doctoral candidates and even some of the less experienced post-docs. I should say I was regarded with no little suspicion, even mistrust—even terror. If I was only cute, they would have loved me—if I was only an exceptionally multifaceted talent, with a nose like a bloodhound for the unconventional, nigh cabbalistic workaround or subversion to any problem they put in front of me, they would have admired me. Instead, since I was both, they hated me. I represented to them everything they weren’t and would never be. I was four-foot-something and I represented to them their inadequacy personified.
But, I was so effective, what could they do? Only stand to the side and shake their heads quietly and bitterly and they watched—watched as I made progress on dusty problems long since filed away as insoluble—often unwittingly, as in, I would find some solution or another to a problem I had no idea had even been abandoned, on the side, as it were, while conducting more primary research on an entirely separate and only obliquely related one—watched, as, even bereft of the necessary social skills and life experience of an adult, I became the trusted confidant of no few of these (relatively) young aspirants’s advisors and the more prominent of their peers—who couldn’t talk much to eleven, twelve, thirteen-year old me about their wives or any part of their existence outside of the math building, but who did appreciate greatly my understanding and my insights into their existence inside of it—watched, as, they felt, they were being replaced—by a little snot, no less. No, totally, I understand where they were coming from. At first, I even just thought their standoffish-ness and (more than usually) active aggression, which I doubt they would have ever made so bold to exhibit around me if I were older—at first, I just thought all of it was part of the scholarly temperament, as it were. I thought that that was how all those great men whom I read about so voraciously in math periodicals and more, whom I couldn’t read enough about, about whom I read every single holily-emanating word I could find on the internet and after whose lives I planned to model my own—I thought, well, if this is how the mathematicians I know behave—precipitously, peremptorily, coldly—that must be how all those gods of math I was obsessed with behaved, too. I thought it was just the mathematical way of interacting with others. I mean, it didn’t not make sense… Mathematicians were anti-social by nature, they were men—men and women, of course, but mostly men—who shut themselves off from the world, who disdained the world at large, the world of people, the world as it existed outside of perfect symbolic representation. I was perfectly at peace, in a word, with the way I was treated, and even considered it an honor. I told myself that one day, I’d be in their shoes, and I’d have to remember to behave similarly. And all those who treated me differently—them, I figured they must have been bureaucrats, empty suits, clerks—not real mathematicians, I would scoff, even as I worked with them and saw firsthand the commendable research they were performing. It was only later, maybe by the time I got to high school, and discovered all those “peers” of mine whom I considered “real” mathematicians had dropped away like flies from the program, that I realized the error in my thinking. They were embittered burnouts, not reclusive geniuses. I thought the reason they never showed me their work was because they were so reclusive! No, it was really because they would have been loath to show it to me, young, twelve or thirteen-year old me, and find out that I had a better grasp on their specialty than they did! I realized they were standoffish because of their pride. And rude, and mean, to me—well, because they were mean people.
Professor Thorngood, for so many years my mentor—yes, a father figure to me, the father I wish I had, and not the one I actually did have, who got bug-eyed every time I tried in that childish way to implicate those closest to me (i.e., Mom and Dad) into that all-encompassing topic of interest that was closest to my heart, and was always more endeared by my mathematical pursuits than genuinely engaged or fluently interested—which I don’t hold against him, but is only to say, it was a time in my life when a more like-minded man was the father I (felt I) needed—Professor Thorngood did have occasion to talk to me about life, despite my inexperience on that count, at least once.
“How are things at home?”
This wasn’t how our sessions usually went. And, I noted—wasn’t how they were usually supposed to go. Usually Professor Thorngood, out of respect for my “tendencies”—how I usually responded, which is to say, my catatonia, in the face of all niceties—rather cut to the chase. No niceties, and certainly no personal questions about my homelife. I believe I responded, at first, with the rubescent glow. Although Professor Thorngood probably knew from the offset that he would need to play the main driver in this conversation, so he proceeded.
I was given to understand that my mother had recently deposited an “autism-spectrum quotient diagnostic” test with the professor, in the hopes he, such a trusted confidant of mine as he was, would have a better chance surreptitiously administering it to me, so then she could send it in for results.
“I took the liberty of telling her I wouldn't do it. Besides, the kind of questions they ask there—the aptitude portion of the test, let alone all those mushy psychological parts—would’ve been too easy for you. You would’ve known something was up in a heartbeat! I’d never give something of that tier for you to work on. They were all of the level of an IQ test. You know about IQ tests, by the way? Have you ever taken one?”
I told him I did, and that I hadn’t.
“Huh. You should take one.”
The reason I am relating this story is because nothing could underscore better the experience of the freak of nature in its juvenescence—of, “the prodigy” (though it’s a word I hate). From all sides, this ambivalence, either reverence masked in contempt, or contempt masked in reverence. At no point are you considered a human being. Only an idea, a project—something dead. Yes, an idle curiosity. No more, no less.