The Visiting Professor Page 6

  Later, as the coeds clear dessert dishes from the tables and serve coffee and mints, the Director climbs to his feet and clangs a spoon against a glass. “Gentlemen, ladies?” The luncheon guests are so busy talking to one another they don’t notice that he is trying to get their attention. “First off,” Goodacre pitches his voice higher, “I want to welcome you all to this faculty luncheon.” Gradually the guests simmer down.

  “Let me tell you,” Charlie Atwater, mimicking the Director, whispers to his neighbor, “how impreshive it is to shee sho much chaosh-related brain power in one room.”

  “Let me tell you,” Goodacre continues, “how impressive it is to see so much chaos-related brain power in one room.”

  Matilda Birtwhistle snickers appreciatively.

  “As Albert Einstein once noted,” the Director goes on, “the most incomprehensible thing about this universe of ours is that it is comprehensible. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome into the Institute’s ranks someone who has done more than his share to make the universe comprehensible. He needs no introduction. You are all familiar with his work on entropy, as well as his search for pure randomness in the decimal expansion of pi. Many of us suspect that if there were a Nobel Prize awarded in the field of mathematics, he would surely have received it by now for pushing back the frontier of randomness. Let’s have a welcoming hand for the visiting professor from St. Petersburg. Gentlemen, ladies: Lemuel Falk.”

  The permanent scholars, visiting professors and fellows are on their feet now, applauding. Lemuel, his head bowed, his cheeks burning, stares at his briefcase, which is leaning against one leg of his chair. Old habits die hard. At the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics faculty luncheons, especially the ones with foreign guests, were occasions to steal onion rolls and tins of caviar and half-liter bottles of Polish vodka. Lemuel has abandoned any hope of appropriating one of the wine decanters, which are surely counted before and after the luncheon, but he has his heart set on transferring the seeded roll that has been overlooked on the small plate in front of him to his briefcase. But with everyone gazing at him, how is he to pull it off?

  The applause dies down. The guests settle back into their seats. Lemuel, at the head of one curving parenthesis, thrusts himself to his feet, adjusts his eyeglasses, surveys the three-piece suits, the sport jackets with suede elbow patches, the potbellies, the bifocals, the balding crowns, the thumbs pressing tobacco into the bowls of pipes. He nods at several of the Institute’s professors whom he knows from international symposiums. He notices Rebbe Nachman smiling encouragingly.

  “I can say you—” Lemuel begins.

  “Can you speak up, Professor?” someone calls from the back of the room.

  Lemuel clears his throat. “I can say you, you may not want to hear it,” he starts again in a stronger voice, “that I have arrived to Backwater armed with more questions than answers. I will not bore you with the easy ones—how is it possible to wear your heart on your sleeve? In what respect can a lady barber be compared to a number? What does ‘Nonstops to the most Florida cities’ really mean? How can one city be more Florida than another? Concerning which side is up, who gets to decide that in America? I will not occupy your time even with the tantalizing question Rebbe Nachman posed me last night, namely, if God really loved man, would He have created him? I will, with your permission, move right on to the question which keeps me awake nights. …”

  Lemuel glances at the plate to make sure the seeded roll is still there, then looks up at the audience. “What is chaos? It has been variously defined—as order without periodicity, for instance; as seemingly random recurrent behavior in deterministic systems such as ocean tides and temperatures, stock-market prices, weather, fish populations in ponds, the dripping of a faucet. I would suggest you these definitions do not cut to the bone, I would like to offer another way of looking at chaos, here it is: that systems too complex for classical mathematics can be said to obey simple laws. Let me give you a for instance. Using the tools of classical mathematics, we can more or less calculate the long-term motion of the fifty or so bodies in the solar system. But trying to comprehend the short-term motion of the hundred trillion or so particles in a milligram of gas is beyond the competence of the most powerful computer, not to say the most brilliant programmer. Yet we can understand a great deal about the motion of the gas particles if we grasp that the incredibly complex world contained in this milligram of gas can be said to obey simple laws.”

  Lemuel’s mouth is suddenly bone dry. He takes a sip of water. When he looks up he discovers the luncheon guests leaning forward, hanging on his words. Encouraged, he plunges on. “The science of chaos can accordingly be seen as an effort to come to grips with the essence of complexity. In my view the traditional sciences, which is to say physics, chemistry, biology, et cetera, have become ‘tenders to.’ They are the small boats servicing the yacht, which is the science of chaos.” This elicits a titter from the audience, all of whom at one time or another have visited Rain’s Tender To. “The only really original, and in some cases elegant, work around today is being done by chaoticists, who have demonstrated that complex systems obey simple laws, and in so doing act in seemingly random ways. Which permits us to conclude”—Lemuel is speaking slowly now, selecting his words warily—”that deterministic chaos is the explanation for most randomness. But … but is it the explanation for all randomness?”

  Several people in the audience whisper excitedly to each other. “Vat is he telling us?” demands the visiting professor from Germany.

  “He is suggesting chaos should play second fiddle to randomness,” grumbles his neighbor, an astrophysicist on loan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Several people within earshot nod in agreement.

  Lemuel looks directly at the Rebbe. “Excuse me if I say you my question is more critical to our understanding of the universe, and our place in it, than the one you posed last night, Rebbe. Let me phrase my question another way. In paring away layers of seeming randomness we arrive at a terminus, which up to now has turned out to be chaos. But the real quest is only beginning. Is it not within the realm of possibility that this terminus, chaos, is really only a way station? Is it not equally within the realm of possibility that the real terminus, the theoretical horizon beyond which there is no other horizon, is pure, unadulterated, nonchaotic randomness?”

  There is an angry buzz in the room. “You are not really a chaoticist,” Sebastian Skarr exclaims from his seat. “You are a randomnist exploiting chaos—”

  The Rebbe reluctantly agrees. “In your heart of hearts, you admitted it yourself last night, you do not love chaos—”

  “Chaos is not God,” Lemuel defends himself. “In any case, I am basically a randomnist who stumbled into chaos—”

  “You admit to being ein reluctant chaoticist,” the German professor blusters. “Conzider ze pozzibility zat you have stumbled into ze wrong institute.”

  The Rebbe throws up his arms. “Pure, unadulterated randomness does not exist. You are chasing rainbows.”

  Lemuel is startled by the storm he has stirred. “My approach to pure randomness,” he defends himself, “is chaos-related.”

  Matilda Birtwhistle raises a finger. “Mind a question, Professor?”

  “This is getting out of hand,” the Director announces. “It’s not supposed to be a working session.”

  “The chaoticists are waxing chaotic,” Charlie Atwater notes wryly.

  “If you please,” Lemuel tells Matilda Birtwhistle.

  “You are widely known for your assertion that all randomness is fool’s randomness, and that this fool’s randomness is a footprint of chaos.”

  “Up to now it has unfortunately always turned out that way,” Lemuel agrees.

  “If I understand you correctly,” Birtwhistle continues, “you seem to be suggesting that chaos could turn out to be a footprint of randomness—”

  “Of pure, unadulterated randomness,” Lemuel corrects her.

  “
Of pure, unadulterated randomness, of course. But if this proves to be the case, where will it end? Perhaps the pure, unadulterated randomness that comes after chaos is, in its turn, merely a footprint of something else—”

  “Maybe it’sh a footprint of pure, unadulterated chaosh,” Charlie Atwater interjects.

  The visiting professor from Germany scrapes back his chair in disgust. “You ask me, he iz looking for pure randomnezz—okay, vy not? Everyone haz eine ax to grind—but vat he found iz pure ridiculouznezz.”

  There is a ripple of nervous laughter, which quickly subsides. The luncheon guests gaze expectantly at the speaker at the head of the parenthesis.

  Lemuel collects his thoughts. “When it was discovered, the molecule was, in a manner of speaking, a footprint of the atom. The atom turned out to be, among other things, a footprint of a nucleus, the nucleus a footprint of protons and neutrons, which we now think are footprints of mesons and quarks. But what are quarks a footprint of? Who can say you they are not a footprint of something buried deeper inside them?”

  “Matilda is right,” Sebastian Skarr calls from his seat. “If what you say is true, the voyage will never end. There is no terminus.”

  “We are not chaoticists,” Matilda Birtwhistle informs her colleagues, “so much as space travelers condemned to spend eternity exploring an endless universe.”

  Lemuel shrugs. “We will reach a terminus when we discover a single example of pure, unadulterated randomness. At which point we will know that everything under the sun is not determined—that man, woman also, is the master of his fate.”

  “And if there is no such thing as pure, unadulterated randomness,” Matilda Birtwhistle retorts, “what then?”

  Lemuel, suddenly exhausted, mumbles, “You are all doorknobs.”

  “Speak up, Professor,” someone calls.

  Charlie Atwater belches into the back of his fist. “Thish is all very depresshing,” he groans. “I badly need a drink.”

  The guests gaze silently into their coffee cups for a long while. Lemuel’s head bobs uncertainly several times. He glances at the Director, who appears to be having a conversation with himself, then manages to sink into his seat so awkwardly he upsets the plate containing the seed roll. Scrambling under the chair, Lemuel slips the roll into his briefcase and surfaces with the empty plate.

  A coed carrying a tray of after-dinner mints passes behind him and drops one onto his coffee saucer.

  “I thank you,” Lemuel says.

  The girl smiles engagingly. “I welcome you,” she shoots back with a giggle.

  “You may be the only one here who does.”

  Staring out at his colleagues at the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies, watching them as they push back their chairs and drift away from the parenthesis, Lemuel wonders if this vision of a never-ending cycle of randomness and chaos is not simply another one of his convenient fictions, something that satisfies parts of himself he has not been to yet.

  Dejected, he bumps into the Rebbe outside the Institute Center. “Where did I go wrong?” he asks him. “What do I do now?”

  Rebbe Nachman dances on the ice to keep his toes from turning numb. “A smart-ass goy once offered to convert to Judaism if the famous Rebbe Hillel could teach him the entire Torah while the goy was standing on one foot. You have maybe heard the story? Rebbe Hillel agreed, the goy balanced on his one foot, Rebbe Hillel said to him, That which is hateful to you do not do to your friend. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and study.’ “

  Rebbe Nachman’s smile seems more asymmetric than usual. “I don’t believe you will ever find randomness, I’m talking pure, I’m talking unadulterated, for the simple reason it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, you certainly won’t find it if you don’t look for it. Go and study.”

  Chapter Three

  “I was wrist-cuffed to a lady movie reviewer who also signed the petition,“ Lemuel shouts over the noise he refuses to acknowledge as music. “I heard she spent three years in a Siberian gulag, sucking frozen sticks of milk over open fires at mealtimes.”

  “How did you worm out of it?” hollers a fraternity brother wearing a tie and jacket and football helmet.

  “Hey, how did you?” Rain, sipping wine, smiling whimsically, wants to know.

  “Lem here signed the petition, the fuzz picked him up and took him in for questioning,” Dwayne, the E-Z Mart manager, recapitulates in a loud voice, “but they didn’t charge him. He had to have a wrinkle.”

  “A wrinkle?”

  “A gimmick,” Dwayne’s girlfriend, Shirley, explains.

  “A stratagem,” Dwayne adds. “A ruse.”

  Lemuel smiles sourly. “I had a wrinkle—it was two signatures,” he shouts. “One I used to sign my internal passport or my pay book or my applications for exit visas. The other signature I used to sign documents I might want to deny I signed. When they finally got around to interrogating me, I said them someone had forged my signature. They verified it with a handwriting expert and let me go.”

  “Like it must have been goddamn dangerous, living in a Communist country and not being a Communist,” observes Rain.

  “In Russia we have a proverb: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

  Lemuel turns to watch the couples in the next room. In the half light, they appear to be jumping up and down, their heads hanging off to one side as if their necks are broken. He leans closer to Rain and shouts into her ear, “Looks like—” The noise ends as suddenly as it began.”—communal hiccups,” he hears himself shout. Heads swivel. Lemuel blushes.

  The three musicians in a corner of the room strike up a slow foxtrot. Shirley sinks into Dwayne’s arms and they start to shuffle around in time to the music.

  “Hey, in Russia they must dance, right?” Rain tells Lemuel. He feels her breath warm his ear. “Let’s you and me …” Her forefinger describes a circle.

  “I do not know if I know—” Lemuel starts to protest, but Rain, polishing off the wine, dangling the empty glass by its stem, pulls him into the other room and melts into his arms. He feels the wineglass against the back of his neck, he feels her breasts against his chest, he feels her thighs against his legs, he smells her lipstick. He hears the Rebbe’s “Oy” seep between his lips.

  Rain presses her mouth against his ear. When she speaks, her words actually tickle. “The business with the two signatures—when did that happen?”

  “Eight years ago.”

  “I remember something that happened twenty-three years ago,” she says lazily. “I remember my birth.”

  “You are inventing this up? I do not even remember my childhood, mainly because I never had one.”

  “Honest to Christ, I’m not inventing. I was very young at birth, who isn’t? but I remember every detail. I remember the dampness and the darkness and then the coldness and the blinding light. I remember being held upside down and whacked. You want me to give you the dirty details?”

  “Another time maybe.”

  They shuffle around the floor in silence. After a while Rain’s voice tickles his ear again. “So are you married?”

  “I was married. I am divorced.”

  “How many times in your life have you been in love?”

  Lemuel tries to shrug, but finds it difficult because Rain is hanging on his shoulders. “Perhaps once. Once, perhaps. Yes, once.”

  “You don’t sound sure.”

  “I am sure. I was in love once.”

  “With your wife?”

  “I showed up in the Leningrad Palace of Marriage to sign the book under the photograph of Lenin because my wife’s father was the rector at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where I would have given my right arm to work. Also his daughter had a sixty-square-meter apartment all to herself.”

  “So who were you in love with if it wasn’t your wife?”

  “A girl … I never knew her name, I never spoke with her.”

  “You fucked with her, right?”

&nbs
p; Lemuel tosses his head in embarrassment.

  “I don’t get it. If you never talked to her, if you never fucked with her, then even if she existed it’s the same as if she didn’t exist. She was a figment of your imagination.”

  “She was real,” Lemuel insists, but Rain is following her own thoughts.

  “I don’t see how it’s possible to be passionate about someone who doesn’t exist?”

  Lemuel tries to change the subject. “I suppose you have been in love many times.”

  Rain laughs. “More than many. I have been briefly in love dozens of times. Hundreds even.”

  “What does it mean, briefly in love?”

  “Thirty seconds. Two minutes. Ten.”

  “How much time must pass before your love affairs become serious?”

  Rain is insulted. “For the thirty seconds or two minutes or ten, they are very serious. While I am making love, I am in love.” She crushes her miniskirt into Lemuel’s crotch. “And when I am in love, I am usually making love.”

  “What about a love affair which lasts for a month or a year? What about marriage?”

  “Tried marriage,” Rain smugly informs him. “Didn’t like it. Tried divorce.”

  “You were married how long?”

  “It seemed like an ice age, but it was only two months.”

  “What was it about marriage you did not like?”

  “My ex was good in bed, but not with me.”

  “He was unfaithful?”

  “He was fucking his friends, if that’s what you mean. So was I. Fucking my friends. But that wasn’t why I quit him.” She tells Lemuel the story of how her ex supplied rice instead of birdseed at her wedding. “I ought to have seen the handwriting on the wall,” she adds. “I ought to have left him then and there.”

  “You did not divorce because of the rice,” Lemuel insists.

  Rain leans back and searches his face. “Like you think the birdseed story is for the birds, right?” He lifts his eyebrows in a shrug. She smiles anxiously as she drifts back into his arms. When she speaks again her voice is thicker. “I kept trying to figure out what Vernon wanted me to be, and then I tried to be it. After a few weeks on this merry-go-round I lost track of who I was. I lost track of me.” A high-pitched laugh catches at her throat. “I don’t program myself anymore. I don’t try to be what some dude wants me to be.” She takes a deep breath. “I am what I goddamn am.”