A Map for the Missing(83)
He’d only agreed tonight because it was the last Saturday before they’d graduate, and his roommates wanted to spend all their last days together. Even though most of them would stay in Beijing, having taken instructor positions at their university or at others around the city, life afterward wouldn’t be same. In just another week, they would all move out of the cramped room where they’d known each other so intimately—more intimately than they would have desired—for almost four years. What would also end was this period of freedom. They’d had untrammeled reign of the beautiful campus, their only job to sit and ponder questions. Yitian had spent so many evenings by the lake on its small pagodas, having heated discussions about poetry or the future of the country late into the night. Such occurrences would soon be luxuries.
At the dance, there seemed to be an order by which the boys approached the girls who’d lined themselves up along the walls. Those who didn’t dance sat in chairs or stood in circles with their friends, tapping their feet to the music playing over the loudspeakers. Yitian was confronted with a feeling he hadn’t had in some time, of stepping into a world that had already formed rules by which everyone else knew how to behave. In their dormitory preparing, the other boys had joked with him to ask someone to dance. He knew how they saw him, as the studious boy who always stayed in their dorm room, never speaking to or showing any interest in girls, the topic constantly on everyone else’s minds. His roommates talked of wanting to kiss girls or even taking them to the lake, where the students were known to have sex away from the exposed spaces of their packed dorms. With each story, some knot inside him had loosened. He wondered now why Hanwen had been reluctant against even a kiss that year.
He tapped a beat with his shoe against the cement as he searched for Jianguo amongst the dancers. The scene slowly charmed him. His classmates had donned bright white outfits that illuminated them amidst the dim dance floor. Jianguo—his closest friend and bunkmate—had spent the past hour talking himself up in the dorm, declaring that tonight was the night he’d finally ask a girl to dance. He’d pomaded his hair, struggled into a necktie, and spritzed himself with a cologne of unknown provenance. Yitian didn’t understand why Jianguo was so scared. Jianguo was also from Anhui Province, but he was the son of a local cadre and had city habits. He walked with a bearing so regal that Yitian was sure no girl would reject him.
Yitian finally spotted him near the corner of the dance floor and grinned. Jianguo had a girl with him, who looked to be quite attractive. He was spinning her around in agile circles. Soon, however, his excitement got the better of him. When he pulled her deeply to his body, one of the janitors who’d been working at the university for decades stepped between them. Jianguo was caught completely unawares when the old man waved a flashlight between the two and barked at them to break apart.
Yitian brought his hand up to his mouth to stifle a laugh. Jianguo was always so concerned about maintaining proper behavior and Yitian was sure this would mortify him. Still laughing, Yitian went outside to spare Jianguo any further embarrassment.
The cold of the air shocked him pleasantly. He was still warm from inside and he left his coat unbuttoned. The chill of a northern city had been one of the things that most worried him, but he now found that he enjoyed the crisp air on nights like these and that it was useful for work. The frigid and lonely months of winter sharpened his mind and allowed him to think clearly in a way he couldn’t any other time of the year.
A few other girls, who didn’t look like students, gathered under the eaves of the building. These girls seemed more carefree than his classmates, who were always busy either explaining something they knew or trying to cover up things they didn’t. Anyone could buy a ticket for the dances, so it wasn’t uncommon for outsiders to come, wanting to watch what the students of a famed university looked like on the dance floor.
Out of the pocket of his blue jeans—one of the currently fashionable items all the city youth owned, which his mother would surely have laughed to see him wearing—he fished out a packet of Zhongnanhai cigarettes and lit the last one nestled within the crinkled paper. He’d guiltily spent a portion of his savings on the expensive items when his classmates told him smoking helped with their concentration. He portioned out the cigarettes slowly while he wrote his thesis to make sure they would last.
He inhaled and returned to the problem he’d been considering before the dance. He was working in the field of Complex Analysis, which had been his favorite course at the university. On the first day of class, the professor began by writing a quote from Leopold Kronecker on the blackboard:
God made the integers; all else is the work of man.
“Why am I writing this, you might ask? Is this a mathematics course, or philosophy?” the professor asked rhetorically. “Humans have created what we call an imaginary number, i, that is equivalent to the square root of negative one, an expression that has no solution in the real numbers. These imaginary numbers form the basis of complex numbers, which can be written in the following form . . .
a + bi,
. . . where a is the real part and b is the imaginary part. And we can also think of complex numbers as a two-dimensional vector in the plane where the x-axis is the real axis and the y-axis is the imaginary axis.”
“But, Professor”—Yitian’s hand had shot up—“does that mean real numbers are also part of the complex numbers, simply with imaginary part b equal to 0?”