“About me? That I’m an idiot?”
“You’re charming,” she said. “But it’s an idiot’s charm.”
She kissed him on the mouth. Her tongue had a flavor — the brandied hot chocolate that had been resting by the bedpost since the night before, when they’d come in after a walk from the Lime Rose. As soon as they’d gotten into the apartment, she’d set the cup on the floor, pulled the band out of her hair, and kissed him. “That you even have trouble with the concept”—she said now, pulling back—“this actually proves the concept.”
“It’s kind of thrilling to be called an idiot,” he said. He tried to kiss her again, but she sat up against the headboard and pulled the sheets to her shoulders. He looked at her hidden there in his bed. “It’s not good that your father’s a mathematics professor,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll compare.”
“You to him?” She laughed, in a way he didn’t like. He’d noticed that about her already, how quickly she could turn. “My father’s an asshole,” she said.
Those words actually made him look away.
“Then maybe I shouldn’t mind the comparison,” he finally said.
“Maybe you should.”
Later in the morning, when he returned from the store with doughnuts and coffee, she was out of bed at last, wearing nothing but his Detroit Tigers T-shirt, kneeling on the floor examining the adjustments on the quatrant. “You didn’t move it,” he said. “Did you?”
“I wouldn’t dare.” She was peering along one of the slots. “It’s really incredible, isn’t it?”
“Not bad for an idiot.”
“No, not bad.”
“It’s a distraction. That’s why I made it.”
“No, it’s stupendous. Have you shown it to anyone?”
“Just you.”
“Really? Just me? You know, I was kidding when I called you an idiot.”
“Half kidding,” he said.
“Okay, that’s about right. Half kidding.”
She rose and came to him then. Truthfully, a bother was still inside him, but he was powerless to hold on to it. She took the doughnuts from his hand, walked him to the bed, and leaned in against him.
The night before, of course, he’d been a virgin.
“Is that the truth?” she asked later, as they lay back on the pillows, messily eating the doughnuts. “I’m the only one?”
It took him several moments to realize she was referring to being shown the quatrant.
—
LATER THAT WEEK, a house he didn’t recognize. Big rooms full of tacked-up posters. Velvet couches. He was following her in the hallways. The starry waterfall of San Francisco shivering in the glass. He was hoping to lead her into one of the bedrooms, but he was always a step behind. A dog on a chain.
She was stopping in front of every knickknack. Abalone-shell ashtrays. Incense pots. In the dark stairway he followed the swaying bangles on the bottom of her sweater. Along the back wall of the slope-roofed attic, a dozen other grad-student types were scattered on the cushions and mattresses.
Was that Earl?
It was. He was on a mat beneath the far window, his narrow head resting back. He sat that way during Milo’s section meetings — exactly that way: in the last row, his long hair against the wall behind him, his boots crossed. Sticky little smile on his lips.
When Cle walked up to him, Biettermann tried to kiss her. “Isaac Newton,” she said when she turned, gesturing with her hand. Milo moved up behind her. “I’d like you to meet Gottfried Leibniz.”
It wasn’t funny. She was nervous.
“A pleasure, Gottfried,” said Biettermann.
Milo could think of nothing to say.
Biettermann tilted his head and peered into Milo’s eyes, then offered his hand: the soul shake. He looked stoned. “Earl Biettermann,” he said. “From your calculus section, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. Is this where you write your poetry, Earl?”
—
CLE WAS THE one who gave it to him. Not ten minutes later, after Biettermann was gone. A tiny square on her palm. A little Mickey Mouse in bright blue and red. No bigger than his pinkie nail.
“Open up,” she said.
He was alone with her.
“Come on,” she said, nuzzling him. “Open the hatch.” She went up on her toes and kissed him.
The bite of smoke. The linger.
“Come on,” she said, moving it to his lips. “Open.”
—
A NORMAL DOSE for Berkeley in those days: probably 250 micrograms. Lysergic acid diethylamide. You could buy it in the public parks. Milo’s mood was expansive. His experience was nil. Cle stretched out on the mattress and pulled him down beside her. The gold-bangled sweater, the lemon soap. Biettermann was gone. Time difficult to locate. In his eye, the line of her knees and hips, a black horizon with hills. Everything he’d ever wanted.
Nothing was happening.
The ceiling: stamped tin. Victorian curlicues in repetition, repeating squares within repeating squares. Here was something now, a wave rolling across his vision — his concentration unraveling. Okay, there it was — a long, looping pull. The band downstairs rumbling the floor. Biettermann again now, at the far end of the room. Then gone. A black light vivifying the posters like a hidden sun.
Then he plunged.
At the bottom he found himself. Silence. He was inside something. A shimmering construction. It began to rumble like a buried engine. Immediately: his bearings. He was aware that his mind would burn but that it would survive the fire. All he had to do was climb. A slippery wall of flame steadily increasing its slope. Hanging on to the mattress now: he turned. She was beside him, mummified. Wrapped in gold. The gold smoldered, then began to burn. She was curling away in smoke. He gave in, dropped farther, was aware of a hovering border, stretching and respiring, billowing around him. A tent in the wind. Yellow and orange. The border now a point, now falling away. Gathering slope and velocity until he was stranded at its tip. A man on a boulder in an ocean.
He reached but couldn’t touch her. Then he knew he hadn’t even moved. There was no history to his actions. They disappeared into a maw. The surface of a dark pond that swallowed without a ripple, then grew into waves. The waves cannibalized themselves. Then grew again.
An unseen dimension prodding a boundary.
He was aware then of other shapes, floating away before he saw them. Volumeless interiors. Infolding crenellations. A circle — the two-dimensional cut of a sphere; then the sphere itself — the three-dimensional cut of its encasing sheen. It oscillated. The sheen itself encased. Unseen shapes consuming unseen shapes. Superbounded by complexities darting at the edge of his vision. Animals breathing on the far side of a wall.
He reached again for her hand.
—
“IT WAS MATHEMATICAL,” he said the next day. They were in a bar. “That was the interesting part. What I saw was mathematical.”
She laughed. “It was an acid trip, Andret.”
“No. It was the Malosz conjecture. I’m sure of it.”
“Every artist has thought that kind of thing.”
“I saw mathematical ideas.”
“That’s just what you remember.” She poured a beer. “Because of who you are. If you’d been like the rest of us, you’d be talking about the colors. That’s what I remember.”
He saw them again — the melting yellows and blue-reds.
But he also knew he’d understood something. Something geometrical. It was gone now, though. It was behind something.
—
ONE NIGHT, HE lit two candles and in their flickering light read all the quatrant’s numbers from the month. Then the ones from the previous month. His hands shook as he scanned back through the pages and pages. Something stood up inside him. There was a shape there. He imagined Brahe himself, four centuries before, in a Copenhagen attic, seeing the same shape.