I read the message a third time.
Dear Sonya, it began. There is so much I want to write to you. Ivan was sitting in a tiny room at Caltech. I was describing something like the vertigo of “falling out of language.” He felt it, too. His favorite thing about math was that the relationship between thinking and writing was so direct—you wrote math just the way you thought it.
When I write to you, I feel something similar, as if my thoughts and moods are directly in the keystrokes. I don’t know why I want this, because clearly it is really hard to understand. I understand maybe one-third of what you write, and probably vice versa.
On the other hand, from the third that I do understand, I get more of You than I could ever get from anything down-to-earth and crystal-clear, like an explanation or an essay. Whatever you write with so much care and intensity has an image of You in it. That’s why I fear the triviality of conversations. What if I want to get to You to the same degree as through these letters—and I find out that I can’t?
Of course, it’s just a fear. We could try it anyway. We could walk and walk, and talk only if something comes up.
Toward the end, he turned to the subject of love, which he said was so complicated that he couldn’t write a single meaningful sentence about it. I have been through a lot of things in the past two years, and my thoughts about love have changed. I have a girlfriend whom I only sometimes love. I do think about you a lot. My love for you is for the person writing your letters.
It took a lot of effort to assimilate the meaning of those sentences—to push them through my brain. I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt. He said “my love for you”—and then he said it was for someone else, for the person writing my letters. He went on about the tremendous value of these letters that were really hard to understand; and the difficulty of understanding seemed to be precisely what was the most valuable to him.
The fourth time I read the email, I stopped at the sentence about his girlfriend. Was it possible that that was the most important sentence? But to me, the idea of the girlfriend didn’t carry that same feeling of direness as the feeling that he didn’t actually want to know me, or know anything, he just wanted to guess and wonder and disappear.
Well—at least I knew, now. I wouldn’t write to him anymore, there wasn’t any point. We had done it already, and I didn’t have anything else to say, and anyway he didn’t have time. I shut down the computer and went to bed.
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When I woke up, a song was playing in the hallway about how there was an ordinary world somewhere that some guy had to find. I went out to brush my teeth. Hannah was at her computer.
“Hey,” she said. “Have you had breakfast yet?”
We went to breakfast. It was almost eleven and the ice cream was already out for lunch. Hannah dug into a big bowl of strawberry ice cream, while relating an incredibly detailed dream she’d had about the television show Friends. I mechanically chewed some cereal and sipped black coffee.
Girl Scouts had gotten into the cafeteria. I hadn’t seen a child in months. Two of them came to our table. “Wouldn’t you like to buy some cookies?” asked the one with the most hair. I bought two boxes of Thin Mints and gave one to Hannah. “I took a brownie from your care package,” I said.
“That’s fine! They’re for sharing.” She beamed. Any token of friendship made her so happy.
I had been a Girl Scout once, or rather a Brownie. One afternoon I had taken a rake from the garage and raked old Mrs. Emmett’s yard, to try to get a badge for good deeds. Old Mrs. Emmett reported me to the police for trespassing, and because she said I had poisoned her dog. I hadn’t even known she had a dog. Well, she did—a poisoned dog.
When the time came to sell cookies, my mother, to whom few things could have been more shameful than the idea of my going door-to-door trying to sell anything, sold all the cookies herself, to her own mother. Ten years later, when I was visiting my grandmother in Ankara, I found them in the pantry: thirty unopened boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
“Why didn’t you eat your cookies?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re cookies? I thought they were candles,” said my grandmother.
“Is something the matter?” asked Hannah. “You’re not your usual cheerful self.”
“I’m feeling kind of down,” I said.
“Did something happen?”
“I like someone who doesn’t like me,” I said. I had thought of it as an approximation, but once I said it, it felt like the truth.
? ? ?
I finally went to visit Ralph at the JFK Library. I caught a shuttle from a gray deserted T station, surrounded by howling winds. I was the only passenger. The driver ignored all the other stops and careened straight to the library: a concrete and glass structure reminiscent of both a tombstone and a spaceship. I waited for Ralph in a bleak pavilion overlooking the ocean. I kept saying, “Oh, no,” while snapping and unsnapping my jacket sleeve. Ralph and I laughed when we saw each other. We walked through a simulation of the 1960 Democratic National Convention and saw the pink coat—“radioactive pink,” John Kenneth Galbraith called it—that Cassini made for Jackie to meet Jawaharlal Nehru in. It had a Nehru collar and a matching hat. When Jackie wore it, a Delhi paper likened her to Durga, Goddess of Power.
? ? ?
The next morning, I found an email from Ivan with the subject line: Where are you? He said he needed to hear me. He tended to think he had a lot to say, but first he had to know what I thought. He was at Caltech now, with his high school friend Imre. A Russian statistician, whose facial expression resembled that of a lion tamer who had put his head in the lion’s mouth for only one second and then immediately taken it out again, had lectured Ivan and Imre for an hour about his work. The whole time, Ivan had been thinking about what to write to me.