I DIDN’T THINK he would be the type to write letters — especially under the circumstances — but he did: they appeared every week or so in my new PO box at OSU.
I knew he was writing to Paulie, too, back home in Tapington, but Paulie wouldn’t even open the envelopes.
Or so she told me. She said she threw them out as soon as they arrived.
As for me, I read them over and over.
He was a surprisingly elegant writer. The sentences were scrupulous — short, lucid descriptions of the changing seasons and the animals he saw as the woods progressed through the cooler days of autumn into the true cold. He came across porcupines and weasels. He befriended the same family of beavers that I’d befriended myself, and in the winter, after I’d mailed back the first of my responses, he began reporting on their doings. They obviously understood the predictability of fulcrums and levers, he told me, and had evidently mastered the majority of man’s own mathematical innovations up through the Renaissance. As soon as it’s warm enough, I plan to teach them the remainder, at least the geometry and trigonometry. Although I worry that like my students they have an eye only for the necessary.
In his seclusion, I suppose, it was natural that he began to pay attention to the theater of nature, the way he had as a boy. Am I wrong to think that all of us — if left alone — would return to the same comforts?
Sometimes he was philosophical. In one letter, he wrote, Certain categories of thinkers cross canyons. Before the same canyons, a mathematician — a scientist — takes only the smallest, most measured steps.
There were drawings, too, on the backs of the letters or folded inside them. Truly remarkable renderings of the tiny lake as the fall came over it. Then the winter. Then the spring.
On the back of one envelope, in a loop of tiny cursive that twined around the postage, he’d written, I come into the presence of still water.
—
IN COLUMBUS, WHEN I first read about the effects of MDA, I realized how lucky I’d been. Around the country, kids were dying — regularly enough to notice, if you were paying attention. In every college town and big city by then, an army of basement chemists had added the methyl group and turned MDA into MDMA, which first was called window but before long became known as ecstasy. Kids began passing out at raves. They began dancing and hooking up and jabbering in the glow of their own body heat, forgetting to drink at all, communing with the theological verities and releasing into the ether their instinctive commonality until the rising potassium in their blood stopped their hearts.
Somehow, I’d avoided such a fate. And by the time I arrived at Ohio State, at the age of most eighth graders, I’d somehow made up my mind to quit. I’d had an earlier start than my father, and I suppose this allowed me an earlier exit.
But still, I couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said: I guess it’s over for both of us.
Well, was it?
My first week in Columbus, I joined NA. Going cold turkey was easier than I would have imagined, although later, when I mentioned this to my sponsor, he stayed to talk to me after the meeting. He was a man my father’s age, a night watchman who, like my father, reminded me of one of the Ford-plant occupants back home. “Folks like us,” he said, pointing at himself first, then dropping his voice. “Easy stand. Easy fall.”
In fairness, the jury remains out.
With my father removed from the picture, my soup of anger, sorrow, and bewilderment had finally found a place to cool. That first semester, I dabbled in art history and political science. The art history, at least, was interesting — and of course I’d had a head start. Sometimes I imagined my mother standing behind me in the classroom, smiling her insistent smile, and my father standing behind her, turning his head to snicker.
By the end of the fall, though, I’d declared mathematics.
Applied mathematics, anyway — which to my father might as well have been Himalayan transcendentalist studies. Because of my high-school curriculum, I went straight to the upper-level courses. My first day in Mathematics 5702, Curves and Surfaces in Euclidean Three Space, the professor took attendance and stepped to the blackboard, then turned to me and said, “Well, Hans, how is the great man?”
6. Summation
Salads
IT WAS FIVE years later — by which time, at barely nineteen years old, I was already the owner of a four-story brownstone in the West Village and a hundred-acre estate near Litchfield — that the envelope arrived in my office. The word PERSONAL, in heavy pencil, slanting down both sides. No return address.
Inside was a mathematics journaclass="underline" The Northern European Review of Enumerative Combinatorics, volume 13, number 2. September 1999.
The fall I’d left for college.
Otherwise, nothing: not even a business card. Just an old rubber band around a poorly glued binding. On the cover, a single title had been circled in the same heavy penciclass="underline" a paper by Benedek Fodor, a mathematician I’d revered in graduate school. But the paper had nothing to do with Shores-Durban equilibria — in fact, when I glanced at it, I saw that it had nothing to do with my work at all — so I didn’t read it. And I’d never even heard of the journal.
I was busy in those days.
If I’d already known of Earl Biettermann, of course, I would have read the article with great care; but Dad hadn’t yet told me any of those stories. In fact, if it weren’t for the esteem in which Fodor was held by just about everyone in my field, I would probably have just thrown away the whole thing.
But something must have stopped me: it might have been the rubber band. I’m no topologist, but I still have my feelings about stretchable curves. This one, drawn tight where it doubled around the binding, was beginning to crumble. Along one edge, as all such shortened annuli must minimally be, it had been twisted exactly twice. Whoever had sent it had taken care to minimize the twists and to migrate them to a single segment.
That was interesting.
But all kinds of my quant colleagues were in the habit of sending me all kinds of interesting quant things, and I usually had no time to even glance at them. I remember pulling the stretchy little noose off the binding and playing with it a little in my fingers. I might have even thought for a second about giving the article another look, but it was at that moment that my Southern Hemisphere terminals began chiming — the three rising low-pitched bongs that signal the opening of the São Paulo exchange — so I dropped the journal on a shelf, brushed off my desk, and sat back down to work.
—
BY THE END of that year, the rubble from the Trade Center had been cleared and most of our competitors had high-tailed it for either Connecticut or New Jersey, where they were running their tired old algorithms out of glass-and-brick low-rises with lawns around the parking lots. But not Physico. Over at 40 Wall Street, where I’d been employed since the morning they’d airlifted me out of graduate school, we’d kept our noses tight against the grindstone. For people like us, those were the halcyon days. The private equity markets on the West Coast had already made and lost their billions. The Dow had recovered. Bin Laden was on the run. The weak hands had folded, and now, apparently, we were all moving on.
The quants in particular were surfing a wave. At Physico, I was developing a strategy to capitalize on a certain species of put/call mismatch that existed fleetingly across a whole host of currency platforms worldwide. Didn’t matter if those markets were headed up or down, of course. That was the point.