Reilly 11 - Case of Lies (16 page)

“Why don’t you just stay over?”

Her blue eyes appeared to hold nothing but a friendly welcome. He wished, as always, that he saw more in them. “Your couch is hard.” He had a new apartment across the river on Marlborough Street near the Esplanade, a new Jeep, and a new attitude, thanks to the change in his financial circumstances. It wasn’t just the money, though-being around the others, being part of their group, gave him a confidence he had never had. He saw cracks between Silke and Raj-his family’s dislike of her, her disdain of his extravagance, the arrogant way he had noticed that Raj treated her.

“On the other hand,” he said, “it’s not that late.”

***

Silke wore her dark hair tamed into a braid tonight except for some shorter strands that brushed against her ears, shining like loose satin threads. Unable to resist the impulse, Elliott reached toward her and undid the braid. “That’s better,” he said, stroking it free. “Your hair’s getting long.”

She ran fingers through her curling hair, stretched, and shook her head, sighing with pleasure. “I forget how good it feels, letting it go,” she said.

He admired how the line of her browbone extended in a curve at her temple beyond the delicate brows. She had no pretensions, no artifice. He loved these things about her. “What are you thinking, Silke?”

“About you, Wakefield.”

“Why? Do I want to know?”

“Of course you do. I would have nothing but the most pleasant thoughts regarding you. In Heddesheim, where I grew up, a farmer lived outside town. He had a little boy named Kristof. This kid was so shy, he had a hard time at our little school. I think he was the unhappiest boy in the world, but he was so smart. I heard he went away to a private high school in Darmstadt and then, in the summer we were sixteen, I ran into him at a street market. He wasn’t the same. He was really happy. Really happy, Wakefield.”

“How come?” On his third whiskey since they had returned to Cambridge, Elliott did not feel intoxicated, just hot. Just a little aggressive.

Silke leaned forward. Her nightgown, basically a long T-shirt of gray cotton, tightened over her breasts. Elliott noted the outline of her nipples, that she was unconscious of her effect, and didn’t mean to make him crazy. She wasn’t coming on to him. She never did. She was so damn proper, loyal to her man, monogamous. As if Raj, with his family’s millions, big houses in India, and condo on Riverside Drive, would ever marry her. One fine day Raj’s parents would introduce him to a nice girl from Madras with the dowry of a maharani’s daughter. Silke would be history. How could this smart woman not realize that?

“Let me guess,” he said. “Uh, your boy had found a girlfriend. She loved and respected him. He adored her. They stayed together, got married, took over the farm. Bought sturdy furniture. They have two kids, a boy and a girl, both excellent students. He’s happy. Ecstatic. Is that what you want for me?”

“What do you want for yourself?”

He set his glass down carefully and thought. What to say? The truth? She already knew how he felt; why not come out with it? No, too aggressive, wait for the right time. He said, cravenly, “Immortality. Nothing else counts.”

“Oh, Elliott.” Her voice scolded him.

“You think there’s something more important?”

“Love, of course.”

“Oops. Forgot about that. Of course you’re right.”

“You’re teasing me, Wakefield,” she laughed. “You need a relationship. You deserve happiness. You’re not unattractive, you know.”

“Oh, don’t push Carleen again,” Elliott said, tracing his finger along the carving they had made, then he lifted his hand to her hair, as if to straighten it over her shoulders, stroking it. “We won’t happen.”

Silke didn’t push his hand away. Two red spots appeared on her cheeks. “Too bad. She cares for you.”

“Listen. I’m not attracted to her. I’d rather sleep with a Gila monster. She’s fine as a friend, but stop pushing her on me.”

Silke looked behind him, her eyebrows up high, so he turned around, sloshing the whiskey in his hand. Of course Carleen had come downstairs just at that instant. Her tartan robe was hanging open and she was wearing just underpants. Elliott’s eyes went to her pale rib cage, her short, skinny legs; he couldn’t help himself.

Carleen made a strangled sound and turned and ran. Rolling her eyes at him, Silke went after her.

Elliott drank down the whiskey. He would sleep on the lumpy couch and leave early. Silke did not come back down. It seemed his chance had fled, and just for a minute there, when he said, “Immortality,” he could have said, “You,” and Silke might still be talking to him. Now Carleen was mad and complications would ensue.

All external thoughts fled, and he fell gratefully into the rutted byways of his theories, like a junkie who knows it’s dangerous but can’t fight it anymore.

Back, back to Cantor’s Continuum. The central difficulty lies at the intersection of linguistics and math analysis, he thought, the intersection of what is discrete, like the integers, and what is continuous, like infinity. What is that intersection? Where is that intersection?

The Greeks had such a horror of infinity, and it still afflicted number theory, this need to make the infinite finite, these tortured reciprocals, these sequences that lead to the infinitely small, this strange reversal of the kingly truth…

The primes are discrete, but extend into infinity like any set of integers. They are discrete in some qualitatively different way. The integers are at equal intervals from each other by definition. What if I make a number line putting the primes at equal intervals… how is that function constructed… no damn imaginary numbers, not even reciprocals to make the series converge, forget the zeta function, I’ll invent my own…

“ Wakefield!” Whiskey-tinged breath blew into his face. He lay on his back on the couch, his neck at an impossible angle. His eyes refused to open. It was very late, or maybe very early?

“You have to go home. Carleen can’t see you here in the morning.”

He reached up and around Silke’s body, finding her waist. He drew her down to him.

“ Wakefield, no…”

“It’s you. It’ll always be you.”

“Stop!”

“You, not immortality.” He squeezed tighter. He loved holding warm, soft Silke against him. He felt hot tears on his face. Hers or his? She stopped struggling and lay exhausted on top of him.

“Please,” he said. “Just this once. I need you so much.”

“Idiot,” she said. “No.”

“Then kiss me. That’s all I ask. Silke, I need you more than he does. Please.” His lips already lay against her cheek. She turned her head slightly and her mouth caught his. He drank her in.

His arms relaxed and she rolled off the couch onto the floor and went away. He turned onto his side and went back to sleep.

Sun came through the curtains. “Old man,” Raj was saying, and shaking him none too gently. “Up you go.”

“What time is it?” Elliott mumbled.

“Eight-thirty.”

“I have class at nine.”

“The bathroom is clear. The women are upstairs, but the atmosphere up there is what my mother would describe as overspiced. Get up.”

Elliott borrowed Raj’s toothbrush and splashed cold water on his face.

Raj awaited him in the kitchen. “Drink.”

Elliott drank the hot coffee, Raj watching him curiously. “What happened last night?” Raj asked.

“Nothing. I dreamed about a function to factor large numbers. Over two hundred digits.”

“Only God can do that.”

“The discrete has to be made continuous first. Cantor was close. Grothendieck…”

“Later. You have your car keys?”

Elliott felt them jingle in his pocket.

“Go.”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever come back,” Elliott said. “I think I’m going to lose all this.”

After that Elliott worked on the Riemann Hypothesis, staying at his apartment.

He ate his cold cereal and drank a lot of coffee. He sat at his kitchen table twisting bits of paper into dough.

His father called claiming to be fine, always a bad sign. He only talked of his health when he’d had an episode, but Elliott’s probing yielded no further information about any deterioration in his condition. Every few days Raj came by. Once he brought lentils and rice in a big pot. Elliott lived on that for a week, spooning portions into a bowl each night, no longer caring that it was cold food.

The problem with Raj was that he didn’t love math enough, not like Elliott did. Raj didn’t
need
math. As a result-his loss-he’d never be an immortal. And Silke… Elliott was glad now that she had rejected him; what a huge distraction.

With a few thousand in the bank, his tuition and rent paid, he closed the blinds. He stopped answering his phone.

Raj brought Professor Braun to see Elliott. Braun had contributed several original papers on differentiable manifolds before the age of twenty-two, and at the age of twenty-nine had been made the youngest full professor in the history of MIT. He taught the advanced number-theory course.

“You’re wet,” Elliott said as Raj and Braun took off their jackets and hung them on chairs.

“It’s pouring outside,” Braun said. “Didn’t you notice?”

“Did you come to see my work? Because it’s not ready yet. You know Erdös’s proof that a prime can always be found between an integer and its double? It has to do with the number One. The Stick. One is an integer. I don’t care if you won’t call it a prime number, you have to admit it’s an integer. Why doesn’t the proof work with One? There is no prime between One and Two. How can it be said that Erdös proved anything? Have you thought about this problem?”

“We want to take you out to lunch,” Raj said. “And Professor Braun wants you to return to class.”

“Wait, I want you to think about it. The way there’s no integer between One and Two, but where the prime should be, there is one-half. What does that remind you of, Raj?”

“Real part one-half,” Raj said softly. “Riemann’s critical line.”

“Yes! Yes! The Riemann Hypothesis! There’s a link, but I haven’t been able to prove it. Shall we talk about that?”

“We’ll talk about anything you want if you’ll come have a meal with us,” Dr. Braun said.

“Okay. I’m out of food anyway.”

They walked out into the rain, to a grubby pizza place on Mass Avenue. Drinking beer fast, eating a large salad, Elliott talked about his new suspicion that the Riemann Hypothesis was undecidable, unprovable either way. He talked about Cantor, about the discrete integers and the continuum. He explained how he had tried the algebraic approach through finite fields; how he had used Cramer’s model, treating it as a perturbation problem, trying to get a set of wobble frequencies. He talked about Sarnak and Wiles and Bump.

But mostly he talked about Cantor, the master of infinity. “I need a math that will operate with divergent series,” he explained, “comfortable with infinity. That happens if you permit division by zero.”

Raj groaned.

“Yeah, that again,” Elliott said.

They pumped him, or did they? Maybe they were just curious. He couldn’t tell. They wanted to know about his work on factoring large numbers, and he told them he had been trying a variation on the Pollard-Strassen method on his computer. He told them that Dixon ’s method using the quadratic sieve was inferior. He talked, because he hadn’t talked for so long, he had no choice. He knew he had no perspective anymore, but drunk or not, he didn’t go into detail.

He didn’t talk about his new idea, for a function that seemed to predict the location of large primes. He had to work alone. The function had some flaw he couldn’t find yet, some error in the calcs. If his idea got around the campus, it might be stolen, published half-baked in some journal under someone else’s name.

He promised Dr. Braun that he would return to class the next morning. The professor gave him some class materials and said he’d pass Elliott if he turned in some work. Raj kept talking about eating better. The two of them and the other people in the restaurant seemed to be talking in some other universe, their minds occupied with all the wrong things.

“Carleen moved out of Everett Street,” Raj announced. “She claims she’s forgiven you, but she won’t hang with us anymore.”

“And Silke?”

“Did Silke have something to forgive you for?”

“Are you and Silke still taking trips?”

Raj cast a glance at Braun. “Sure,” he said. “You’re always welcome to join us again.”

“When I finish my work.”

“Do you sleep at night?” Professor Braun said, his blue eyes intent.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty,” Elliott said. “How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

“What have you discovered lately?”

“Don’t,” Raj said.

“You have to watch your health. I don’t like the look in your eye,” the professor went on.

“I don’t give a shit about my health.”

“Remember what happened to Cantor?”

Elliott thought of Cantor, alone in wartime at the asylum in Halle, begging his daughter to bring him home. She wouldn’t. He had always wondered how she put it: “Sorry, Father, but you’re too much trouble,” she must have said. Cantor had died swiftly after that.

“Don’t squander it,” the professor repeated, pushing the last piece of pizza away from himself. “ Wakefield, you have to pace yourself. It’s a question of balance. You should see people. Your friends are worried.”

“No, no,” Elliott said, draining his mug. “Accomplishment requires sacrifice, even pain. You have to set priorities. Right now, my work comes first. Friends, family, romps in the park, children, lovers, these things have to wait.” He stood up, carefully placing his chair under the table. “Thanks for the vitamins. I need to go.” He felt pressure to flee from their slowness and their compromises before they infected him.

“See you tomorrow, then,” said Dr. Braun.

“See you.” He gave them a friendly wave. He could afford the ten seconds it took to make them happy.

He didn’t go back to class the next day, or the next.

***