The view through the windshield swam. My grandfather pulled over to the curb, blocking someone’s driveway, and cut the engine. He fought against the tears. They were nothing but tears of panic, and of all the emotions there was none more contemptible. He closed his eyes so that he would not have to see his breakdown witnessed by a world that had the strength to make him cry. After a minute he opened his eyes again. He lit a cigarette, and the nicotine seemed to organize his mind. Aughenbaugh’s lighter was cool against his palm, and from its engraved face a comforting gaze seemed to stare back at him through the pince-nez of maltose, the imperturbable gaze of the man who had passed the lighter on to him, two glucose rings hooked together by a glycosidic bond.
He lit another cigarette and began to conduct a review of methodology, as if it were not a lost woman he sought but simply a better means of seeking, a heuristic against loss. The effectiveness of a search of this kind depended on the amount of information available about the area to be searched, the number of searchers, and the cost in time elapsed. He knew Forest Park and the surrounding neighborhoods well enough, but he was alone and in a hurry. Was it best to start at some arbitrary perimeter and work inward toward an indefinite center, or to proceed by quarterings? The grid of streets to be covered was a mishmash of orthogonals and diagonals, and searching it posed interesting problems in topology. Clearly, any useful algorithm for maximizing the number of individual blocks searched at the lowest cost in time would have to integrate a Euclidean metric of distance as covered by transverse streets with a non-Euclidean metric of the zigzag distance imposed by square city blocks. In this instance the topological problem was complicated by the likelihood that the goal was not stationary and, indeed, at this moment might be riding the 33 streetcar or getting into a murderer’s Pontiac or lying like a smashed kite at the foot of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower or sunken, drowned, tugged along the bottom of the Patapsco River by the tide. In the meantime it was almost eleven p.m. He had been driving around uselessly for hours.
He decided to head toward the studios of WAAM. Even when she was struggling with her moods, he thought, the woman never lost sight of her duties and commitments. In a dark period, her pain was usually intensified by the consciousness of falling down on the job as a mother, a wife, an employee, a friend. Sometimes knowing that she had someplace to be or someone depending on her was enough to lift her above the darkness for an hour, for a day, for as long as the job was not done or the errand unaccomplished. However near to the edge of the map she might have sailed today, it was always possible that her Friday-night gig was beacon enough to turn her back. Maybe she was there now, whitening her skin with a sponge of pancake makeup, painting ragged feathers along the ridge of her eyebrows.
As he drove, he lit another cigarette with the flare of the lighter and his thoughts found their way back to heuristics—algorithms that offered shortcuts to solutions of complex problems—and an article he had read in Scientific American about a problem in the mathematics of graphing.
You were a traveling salesman whose territory obliged you to cover n cities, with your heavy sample case and your fallen arches and your weariness of diner food and hotel beds. Because you missed your wife and your daughter, you wanted to visit each city in your territory only once and then return home, having traveled the shortest distance in the least amount of time. There were (n-1)! possible routes, and if n wasn’t too big, say five towns, you could sit down with your map and your distance table and your pencil and your incipient case of heartburn and add it all up and see which of the twenty-four possible routes was the shortest. But once n got up into even the low two digits, the job of calculating the distances for each possible route, even if you were superhumanly quick with a sum, might take hundreds or thousands of years. With only fifteen cities, there were a trillion possible routes. What you wanted, poor wandering and footsore salesman, was some kind of algorithm, an operational shortcut that would let you find the most efficient route without doing a thousand years of math.
So far, it turned out, there was no such algorithm. But my grandfather had read that a cash prize was being offered by the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to the first person who came up with a workable heuristic that would solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. Its solution, RAND felt, would open up all kinds of possibilities in the burgeoning field of operations research, a field that, as it happened, overlapped with the work he and Weinblatt were doing. He felt the faint stirring of an idea then, an approach to inertial navigation systems that would involve the heuristics of topological algorithms. It was a marvelous idea, and he backed away from it, giving it space; you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out.
He headed up into Woodberry toward the studios of WAAM. He imagined that he was the one who solved the Traveling Salesman Problem and collected the cash prize. Clearly, the answer lay in the mathematics of linear functions. He might brush up on his Hamiltonian mechanics, dust off his knowledge of set theory. He saw himself accepting a check for the prize winnings and then—it was not at all unreasonable to imagine—a job offer from his awestruck fellow boffins at RAND. Please, they would beg him, come out to Santa Monica, we need you. Come and work on this application of topology to navigation. Would he go? He pictured them, my grandmother, my mother, and himself standing on the wooden deck of a house near the ocean. California. Nothing but sunshine and horizon, a place without shadows, far from the darkness of Europe and its history, that endless Halloween. He saw them, walking down the beach with their trousers rolled. A child, their child, ran ahead of them, a brash little boy scattering seagulls. His heart swelled. It was all very pretty. It was as pretty as the solution to a problem in topology that would never be solved.
He had reached the television studio up on its hill at the heart of town. It was a composite building, two boxes shoved together, a windowless stucco packing crate that held the studio floor next to a brick shoe box built in the style favored at the time for public schools and libraries, the bricks in long horizontal courses, the windows a horizontal strip. At this hour most of the windows were dark. There were only two cars parked by the entrance; the crew parked in a garage at the back.
In the lobby the night man, Pat, ignored a banquette sofa and a coffee table shaped like a footprint with no toes. A selection of trade publications and magazines lay scattered across the coffee table. Pat was dressed like a policeman but in gray, with a peaked cap and a black necktie. With his blue eyes, gin blossoms, and dignified bearing, he reminded my grandfather of a seedier Bill Donovan. Pat took his job very seriously, believing, according to my grandmother, that when the local cadre got the word from Moscow, they would have orders to seize control of WAAM. To repel the attack, poor Pat had been entrusted with only a letter opener in a leather pen cup, a flashlight, and a key ring (though tonight his arsenal had been supplemented with a pumpkin and a sheaf of Indian corn), which likely explained why he was always kind of a sourpuss.
“I’ve been at my post since eight o’clock, sir,” Pat informed my grandfather. “I have not seen your wife. And you are not the first to come asking. Mr. Roberts been out here twice, see if she got here yet. Mr. Kahn, too.”
My grandfather asked Pat if maybe he could speak with Mr. Roberts (the floor manager) or Mr. Kahn (the director) or, seeing as how they were busy men who already had enough to worry about, if maybe he could just have a look around. Maybe his wife had come in earlier, to find some prop or a music cue in the record library, and fallen asleep in a chair in the artists’ room. He believed in this possibility as he offered it, but as soon as it left his lips, it sounded unlikely and Pat’s face told him that he was talking nonsense. My grandfather had not only come here expecting to find his wife, he reminded himself. He had also come, complementarily, to strengthen the case for her having really disappeared. My grandfather remembered the book.
“She’s going to need this,” he said. “When she gets here. She’s on her way. Be here any minute.” He held up the collection of Poe.
“Yeah?” Pat said. “What’s on tonight?”
“‘Metzengerstein.’”