Dear Edward(19)
He looks over his shoulder. Jordan is slowly making his way down the aisle, his head bouncing to a beat.
“You should push harder in your career,” Jane has told Bruce during fights. “Why do I need to carry us? Why is college tuition—probably three hundred and fifty thousand freaking dollars, you know—my responsibility while you make up mathematical constellations and hang pretty beads from them?”
Jane has no understanding of his work, but he doesn’t blame her for that. Only about seven people in his own field understand what he’s doing. That’s the way of pure math; you need a PhD in the subject to even have a hope of crawling into the specific rabbit hole that a mathematician inhabits. And an individual project—a lifetime of work—may very well appear to non-mathematicians to be pointless, a piece of exquisite but inapplicable math work. It could turn out to be extremely valuable but not until years after your death, in a field you couldn’t have dreamed into existence. Pure math is the stuff of dreams, strands of gossamer built to be thrown to smarter men in the future.
One example Bruce sometimes cites, when non-mathematicians ask about his work, is Sir William Hamilton. The Irish mathematician had a revelation while out for a walk in 1840 and carved the resulting equation into Dublin’s Broome Bridge with a penknife. That equation marked the discovery of the quaternion group, which proved useless in his lifetime but one hundred fifty years later helped to create video games. The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s “Little Theorem,” as it was known, served little purpose when it was developed in 1640 but became the basis of RSA encryption systems for computers in the twenty-first century.
“Why not just do normal math?” Jane said. “The kind that has actual applications. The kind that helps scientists build things.” The kind, she might as well have said out loud, that makes money.
Tenure at Columbia would have solved a lot of problems. It would have kept them off this plane, in New York. Bruce sighs and checks over his shoulder again. He knows Jordan is taking his time on purpose. The boy thinks it’s good for his father to sweat a bit.
Jordan schzoom-schzooms and zump-zumps down the aisle. The music in his ears tells him to tump-tump, so he does that too. There is a girl with a peace sign drawn on the back of her hand, probably around his brother’s age, watching from a window seat. He offers her a wave. He wants to enjoy this brief unleashed moment. Buckled in beside his father means they’ll argue, and he’ll start thinking about L.A. and wondering what that will be like. And he’ll miss Mahira.
It had started from nothing. One day, he’d been in the deli buying a soda, and she’d given him an unhooked smile, one that told him she liked him and had liked him for some time, and he smiled back, and before he knew it, he was kissing a real live girl in real live time. Every time he went in the store and her uncle was out, they would go to the back supply room. They stood among cans of beans and boxes of toilet paper and kissed, kissed, kissed. They barely spoke. Their language was composed of smiles and welcoming looks and brushing the hair off her cheek and about twenty different kinds of kisses ranging from hello to I want you (though I don’t really know what that means) to I want to figure out what your lips taste like. He never would have guessed that kisses could be so variant: in speed, depth, ferocity. He could have kissed her for hours and never been bored. He saw Mahira only once outside the deli, in a Chinese restaurant; his father was with him, and her uncle with her. They had to limit their communication to smiles.
When he told her he was moving, Mahira looked away for a second, then turned back and met his lips differently. And for his final three visits to the storeroom, they shared a new kiss, one that said, I’ll miss you, and I’m scared that we’re growing up, and I wish this could continue forever, but I know that even if you weren’t leaving, it could not.
Jordan sighs, tump-tump, and says, “Excuse me.”
His father slides out so he can slide into his seat, and he is back to being a term in the equation that states Eddie + Jordan = Bruce. Jordan tips his head back and closes his eyes, the music still playing in his ears. He’s pleased that he never told anyone about Mahira. She is his alone. His secret history. He figures that the more times he opts out of security machines, the more girls he kisses, the more of himself he will own, the more of an unknown quantity he will become, and the equation, the one his father has built his life around, will no longer be true.
Directly across the aisle from the Adlers, Benjamin slides the free magazine back into the seat pocket. He tries to change his position, but there’s not a lot of room to do so. He’s uncomfortable; his side aches where the bag is taped to his skin. After surgery, the drugs were the only upside to the weeks spent in the hospital. Benjamin had never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen before, but while pumped with pain medication during the day and sleeping pills at night, he was able to exist in a delicious haze. He thought about the fight with Gavin, but his thoughts were not tethered to reality. He watched it like a play: a massive black guy circling a skinny blond white one.
This flight, the final one home, has unfortunately woken him up. He’s drug-free, and the return to sobriety makes him feel painfully aware of every niggle in his body and every thought in his head. He has flashes of panic, even reaching to his belt to see if he’s armed. How is he supposed to bear himself nonstop?
He’s being sent back to L.A. for one more operation, and then he’ll be assigned a desk job. He is no longer allowed to work in the field. He catches himself hoping, now that the drugs have cleared his system, that he will die on the next operating table. That would be better, far better, than folding himself into a desk chair every day. Besides, he is a stranger to himself now, and he’s not at all sure that this stranger deserves to live.