A Map for the Missing(84)
“Yes. All real numbers are complex numbers.”
It was an obvious insight that the rest of the class quickly moved on from, but Yitian had continued to ponder this model for the rest of the day. In it, he discovered a language to explain all the people he lived with, those who followed him and seemed cleaved off from his very self, invisible to the eye. As if another axis itself rose from him, extending far off into the past, and would continue to extend forever toward the future. He walked with their knowledge and weight, so that if he were to think of himself, it would be something like this:
The model satisfied him. In the years since he’d come to Beijing, studying math had slowly cemented itself into his life and become an unchangeable truth of it, one he no longer fought against. At times he wondered who he would have become had he been allowed to continue studying history, but by now this fantasy seemed so far away that he couldn’t imagine the details of how it would manifest. In his years at the university, he’d heard stories about the history department, of how certain events were left out of classes and professors dodged questions they didn’t have the official language to answer. He understood what the dean had meant when he’d refused Yitian’s request to join the department.
There had been no moment in which he discovered he loved math, not at all like the night in his youth when he became enraptured with his grandfather’s stories. The steady accumulation of knowledge simply settled to become the factual sediment of his mind. He often caught himself thinking of everyday things within the mathematical frameworks he’d been taught, and then he would be surprised with how instinctual it had become to him.
He’d also found a certain relief in the numbers. Putting the pieces of these equations together was so different from anything he’d ever done before that it was as if he were entering into a new, fresh room of his life, one with its door closed against all the mistakes of the past. His math classes allowed him to create knowledge of his own—writing proofs, designing models—in a way that he’d never experienced in any other discipline, not even history. History had been his grandfather’s knowledge, passed down to him, but mathematics felt like stumbling upon an ancient text in a library, one that no one else had ever seen before.
He reached the end of his cigarette. He stamped it out onto the ground and noticed that the group of girls was staring at him.
“Excuse me, comrade . . . ,” he heard a voice call out. One of the girls from the circle was walking toward him. She marched with purpose, as if he’d taken something from her.
“You were leaving. Can I walk with you for a bit?” she asked. She had the rolling accent of a Beijinger, so he’d been right that they were locals. Her voice was loud, as if she were performing in a play. The two girls behind her laughed hysterically with their hands over their mouths, gripping each other’s arms to manage their shaking bodies.
So her friends had sent her to make fun of him for their amusement. Normally, this would have embarrassed him—a reminder of his fundamental difference, that he was still an unmannered country boy teased by the city dwellers—but tonight the mood left by the dance made him too calm to care.
He was surprised when she continued to speak, her voice quieter this time as she turned toward him and said, “They dared me to come talk to you. But there’s something I want to ask you about. Will you say yes?”
There was something different in the way she said this sentence, her voice stripped of the act, which made him agree.
“He’s asked me to go on a walk with him,” she announced, turning her head back to face her friends. He was wondering if he’d been tricked into some elaborate game, when she turned back to him and added, again in the low voice he was not sure why he trusted, “Sorry. I have to say something to explain to them.” And then back to her friends. “Don’t wait for me! We’ll pass by my home.”
This final statement made the girls’ laughs ascend to their highest pitch yet. As they walked away, the sounds of their squeals reminded Yitian of the way cats screamed in heat.
“Should we go by the lake, then?” she said briskly, as if there were no question about it. He liked how Beijingers reminded him of the people from his village in how straightforward they were.
They walked quietly by the lake for a while. During the daytime, the paths and benches around the water were busy with people exercising and students studying, but this late on a weekend the only others were lonely wanderers and couples who’d snuck out together. It was the singular time of the week he could access quiet, so he looked forward to these evenings when everyone else went to the dances and he walked around the lake alone. In his dorm room, no word could be spoken without inhaling the thick air of so many young boys’ bodies cramped together; no feeling, even loneliness, could be experienced in solitude.
The remnants of music from the dances, the drawn-out strings of the waltzes and dull thumping of the discos, floated to them, but the notes seemed like those of a faraway world. While they walked, they could hear, seated at the benches or tumbling from the bushes, the low, suggestive mumbling of boys and the flirtatious pitch that girls’ voices took on in response. To sneak out on a cold night like this would have required a particular amount of determination.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” the girl asked after they’d walked for some minutes. Her breath formed a cloud in the air.