If my life were following the path indicated by a dozen Hollywood films, then this would be the moment when I should be making my great, life’s-work breakthrough. I think I’m meant to be sketching the solution for the Riemann hypothesis on my windows with magic markers, unshowered and dishevelled. Sometimes I wish I were a character in a movie. Christ, I’d even settle for being a character in one of Ms Heller’s plays, safe in the knowledge that even though I am behaving absurdly, I am still following someone’s script.
I shower, because I really don’t see the point of wallowing in my own dead skin cells. And I avoid writing on walls or windows. It doesn’t seem all that conducive to good work, and anyway, there are plenty of crisp pages in my perfectly functional notebooks. They feel like just about the only place where I can park my disquieted brain.
He has called me on the hour, every hour, since I left him standing on that stairwell. I know this because I have spent most of Sunday working through the Vector Calculus syllabus from my university course, my heart palpitating every time the Doctor Who theme sings from my phone. Needless to say, I have not solved the Riemann hypothesis. I have made a total of three really obvious errors in my Lagrange multipliers homework, which is disturbing enough to send me back to bed for almost an hour.
In between, I have watched two documentaries on the frogs of Costa Rica, and invented a new flavour of iced chocolate by accidentally mixing Milo with Mum’s antacid medication instead of soy milk. My stomach already felt horrible. Mylanta-Milo did not help.
I have visited the IMDb page of every romance movie Elsie has ever given me, and created a table in my notebook listing relevant themes and plot points. It’s the only non-mathematical study I can think of that could possibly be of use. My research methodology may be flawed, but I do manage to draw some broad conclusions: that the adult women in these movies read nothing but Jane Austen, and are required to spend all their waking moments discussing their feelings. And that all resolutions must involve emotional speechifying, extended soliloquies that I am convinced no person could construct on the spot, no matter how many improv classes they’d taken.
I even made myself re-watch The Lake House. It persists in being awful and offensive. The thing that bothers me most? The fact that not one person is curious enough to investigate a miraculous time-travelling mailbox, instead using a staggering anomaly of physics to exchange letters about the smell of flowers in the rain. Despite knowing how it ends, I remain disappointed that Keanu does not get hit by that bus a second time. Even on repeat viewing, Elsie’s adoration still makes no sense. The fact that I can’t see what I’m missing, no matter how hard I try, makes my stomach hurt even more.
Elsie always did tell me that I wilfully missed the point. She never explained how to fix that, though. What if my problem isn’t determination or willpower, but some innate defect there’s no fix for?
I have sent half a dozen emails to the St Petersburg Steklov Institute of Mathematics, and one letter to Playboy, after I stumbled on an article about Grigori Perelman in an online magazine. A hand-drawn portrait sits alongside the feature, Perelman’s face sketched in scribble like some cheap pencilled Picasso, the pieces warped and disjointed. I guess that’s how most people would see him – the broken genius with the crazy eyes, a quirky aside in a magazine primarily devoted to half-naked women. I’m not sure what my mum concluded when she walked into my room with a sandwich only to find my screen filled with breasts. I’m not exactly operating on full capacity, and have zero means of interpreting her malleable expression, or the hand that lingers for a moment too long on my hair.
I’m plagued by this urgency to talk to Perelman. What made him retreat from the world? What happened to his work? Did the one thing he was passionate about let him down in the end? Did he ever find someplace where he belonged, other than inside an equation? Or did his messy, ill-fitting pieces prove impossible for anyone else to understand? Did he discover, finally, that there was nowhere at all in the world where he fit?
Is he happy? Does it even matter if he is?
If nothing else, my Cyrillic improves a lot. But no-one responds. I do receive an automated response from Playboy, however, telling me that an autographed print of Miss August has been sent to me in the mail.
I sit at my desk, surrounded by books. A cup of tea materialises beside me, delivered by my father, I think. It’s in a novelty mug that Dad bought me a couple of years ago. It has a picture of a guy and a girl on it, vector graphics like the ones on public toilets, and underneath is the caption: Statistics. The discipline that proves the average human has one testicle. I think it’s supposed to be funny. At least, Dad has a good chuckle whenever he’s making his Milo.
I catch my parents exchanging a few furrowed glances as they rush from work to family events and back again, but neither of them asks me anything but the most perfunctory questions. I don’t know; I think maybe they see what they want to see. I’ve always suspected that they gave up trying to decode the inner workings of my brain a long time ago. Or perhaps they truly do think that I’ll be okay? Maybe I’m a much better actor than I’ve been giving myself credit for.
At some point I pick up my Drama homework. I’m meant to be working through some exercises aimed at ‘demechanising physical and emotional behaviour’. From what I understand, this primarily involves me spending an hour trying to pick up a shoe. The thought of attempting to untangle it all makes my insides feel scraped. I don’t think I can cope with any more uncertainty, not one more fragment of failure.
So I curl up in bed with my books, and I stick to maths. That – at least for now – I understand.
And then, just like that, the calls stop.
Of course. It makes sense. Given time to weigh up the evidence, what else could he conclude? It’s what I wanted – space, and time, to unscramble and reset. It doesn’t explain why I keep staring at my screen, though, thankful for its silence and dismayed by it too.
This is why I avoid people. There are too many things I should be focusing on; staring at my phone, unable to decide whether or not I want it to ring, should not be one of them. Christ, maybe I am Sandra Bullock. Constantly frazzled, unable to manage the simplest of life decisions – disregarding the mailbox that transcends space and time, while being obsessed by shitty love letters and a dog.
But the fact is, outside of my family, there are only two people who matter to me, just two people who have ever bothered trying to see the me that I am afraid of. And somehow, I have failed them both.
Maybe Perelman had the right idea.
Maybe retreat is the only option.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Good timing is invisible. Bad timing sticks out a mile.
– TONY CORINDA