I’m an addict. I’m told I always will be.
Scrivener’s Errors
THEN, JUST AS I was ejecting myself from the flame-spewing launch of my own blazing mathematical career, my father decided to rededicate himself to the dying embers of his old and desiccated one. For as long as I’d been alive, he’d been teaching his subject and going to his dismal faculty meetings at Fabricus, recycling his hoary tests and quizzes, and perfunctorily assigning the lowly semester grades that in time would keep his students out of veterinary schools and pharmacy schools and nursing schools across the Midwest; but in all the years that I’d been even marginally aware of his life — and though I’d always been cognizant of his early renown — I’d never known my father to engage in any of his own research.
I’d gone with him many times to his office at the college. It was on the top floor of the sciences building, at the end of a short corridor that housed a single physicist and the three members of his own department. His name, typeset in white on a rectangle of brown plastic, was screwed to the door. Inside, a small steel desk stood below a faded wall calendar that read, for the whole length of my childhood, GO WOOD DUCKS! — MARCH 1984. Next to the desk was a blackboard, but in none of my visits had I ever seen anything written on it. In fact, I’d encountered absolutely no evidence in that tiny room of anyone actually thinking about the field of mathematics. There wasn’t even chalk in the chalk holder.
Somehow, the fact of this had never puzzled me.
Now, though, upstairs in our house, Dad established a work space. One afternoon not long after I’d witnessed his final drink, he pulled into the driveway with the rear door of the Country Squire propped open. He wedged out a wooden door and a pair of old metal filing cabinets, then lugged them up to the guest room, where he set the filing cabinets a few feet apart on the floor and laid the door between them. A desk. On it he placed a Tensor lamp, a coffee cup filled with pencils, a half-dozen pads of paper, and a bowl of caramels wrapped in cellophane. On the carpet below it he lined up three cardboard boxes, which closed with tight-fitting tops. On the first one he printed the word RIGHT; on the second WRONG; and on the last ??.
Then he sat down to work.
I’d never seen him do anything like this before. In all the time I’d known him, his job had been something he drove off to in the morning and returned from in the midafternoon, sucking on a cigarette and reaching for a drink (or for another drink, I realized later). But now, as soon as he got home, he went upstairs to his desk, where he sat until dinnertime. The door was usually closed, but now and then he left it open, and on those days I would stand in the hall and watch him. His back was to me, and his head was bent so low over the paper that I could see the vertebrae on his neck. Every few minutes he might straighten a little and make a mark with a pencil, or sometimes a small drawing, and every once in a while he would tear a sheet from the pad, glance at what he’d written on it, and, reaching below the desk, assign it to one of his three categories. Of course I was dreadfully curious about what he was putting into each of those boxes.
Yet, somehow, even then, I understood that I would never allow myself to open them.
Perhaps this was because, despite the turn my life had taken, I, too, was already a mathematician. Not that I would ever have claimed to be. Not even — strange as this may sound — that I had so much as thought of myself as one at any time during my short existence, despite my obvious precocity and my deep love for the subject. My life was still nothing more than the world that had presented itself to me. And what had presented itself in the recent months seemed no more significant to my future than what I had experienced for all the years before. (I realize now that I wasn’t even sufficiently curious about my own psychological nature to know that I lacked psychological curiosity.) During that time, I was rolling pretty much every weekday afternoon, and on the weekends I was doing it four or five times.
To be fair, I might have been somewhat more aware of my father than most kids my age — if only because of his inturned but nonetheless imposing personality, or perhaps because I’d twice nearly witnessed his death — but I still had not yet reached cognizance of the very basic idea that he, Milo Andret, was a human being in his own right, that he was separate from me.
That he’d pursued his own ambitions, for example. That he still harbored them, even. That he’d endured his own failings, too. That he was living a life, which included my sister and my mother and me, that might not have been the one he would have chosen.
And being almost entirely unaware of him as a person, I was almost entirely unaware of myself as well. (My wife believes this to be a marker of the Andret family line.) Yet I somehow knew enough about him — because I somehow also knew enough about myself — to understand that his uncompleted thoughts were the lifeblood of his being. This was why I stayed away from those boxes. His thoughts were the ship on whose prow he stationed himself while the ice-strewn seas leaped and dived below. They were matters of calculatedly outrageous assumption, elephantine diligence, missilelike prophecy, and an unending, unruly wager regarding their eventual worth; they were going to be attacked with branching, incremental logic, and met after months of toil — if not after years of it — by either the maniacal astonishment of discovery or by the shame-tipped dart of folly. The fact of all of this was like genetic information inside me. I knew it even as a teenager. I knew it even as a teenager on a substituted, entactogenic amphetamine. I had probably known it as a child. And I knew equally well that the risk of the toil he now began performing every day upstairs in his new office, despite the apparent risklessness of his quotidian life, might at any time overwhelm him, even more so in his fragile state. I knew that these mortal risks were hidden away each evening, that they were held at bay till the following afternoon by the cardboard tops that he placed over his boxes.
I understood, even at the age I was then, and even in my newly altered condition, that the work was to be hallowed.
I would come upon this revelation again, just a few years later, when I was a graduate student myself in mathematics and making my own initial forays into a dissertation. (No, I never finished.) The dissertation I’d embarked upon involved Shores-Durban partial differential equations, which — at the time, at least — were still a relatively ignored branch of probability theory. They were ignored, I quickly discovered, because they were so goddamn baffling, even for a mathematician. And yet at sixteen years old, which was the age I was when I began my research, I set out to master them. Not only to master what was already known about them, but to develop their conclusions further than they’d ever been developed, by some of the most prominent mathematicians of the century. I was standing on the shoulders — really, I was attempting to jump off the shoulders — of Bachelier, Osborne, Black and Scholes, and the great Benoit Mandelbrot.
By then, I was living full-time in Columbus, in a moldy-smelling, subterranean two-bedroom apartment that I shared with a couple of OSU undergraduates majoring in sports communication and sports psychology. The place was as clean as you’d expect such a place to be. My bedroom doubled as the living room, which opened through a front door into the public hall of the building. Although everything else in my quarters, from my sleeping bag on the floor to my clothing tossed in either the clean pile or the dirty pile, reflected the adolescent disarray of my life, I nonetheless kept my desk elegantly bare — just the cup, the paper, and the bowl of wrapped caramels — in order to focus my thinking. And I kept the three boxes near at hand, in order to archive it. Of course, I kept them closed.