The name on the booklet was Earl Biettermann.
He saved Earl Biettermann’s test for last. He’d already asked the math-department secretaries about him. At the rear of the classroom, the young man sat sprawled in a chair, his scuffed motorcycle boots crossed at the ankles.
“You’re a mathematics major,” Milo said, slipping his exam booklet onto the desk.
“So?”
“So what are you doing in a class like this? You’re taking PDEs and real analysis.”
“And?”
Milo felt a prick of anger. “So, why are you taking Calculus for Poets?”
“Because I happen to be a poet,” said Biettermann.
—
“THAT’S SOMETHING EARL would say,” Cle Wells said, again at the Lime Rose. “That’s definitely something he would say.”
“You know everybody, I guess.”
“I guess everybody knows Earl.”
“The commutative property.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I would call it the associative.”
“Well, no,” he said. “I don’t know him, and I don’t really want to know him — so it’s not associative.”
At this she smiled. She reached across and tapped him on the end of the nose, a gesture she might have made with a child. “Well,” she said. “It’ll be associative soon enough.”
The Newton of North Oakland
BY FALL SEMESTER of his second year, he had his habits. Berkeley had grown familiar to him by now — the stand-up sandwich counters and the head shops, the cars and buses and all the milling crowds. He spent evenings in the library at Evans, working on the Malosz conjecture. A good part of this time was spent poring over papers by other mathematicians. A professor in Kyoto. A graduate student at McGill in Canada. An amateur topologist in Kiev. None of their papers mentioned the Malosz specifically, but he could see what they were doing. They were positioning themselves around its edges.
By now he’d spoken again to Borland, and the problem had become the official topic of his dissertation.
At Evans, the topology journals arrived wrapped in paper, like purchases from an expensive department store. At the circulation desk, the librarian handed them across the counter to him. As he opened the covers he imagined his competitors doing the very same thing at other libraries around the world. Not just the rivals he knew about but the ones he could only imagine: graduate students in Bombay and Moscow and Taipei. Men as focused as he was — or more focused — on unearthing the bones of the universe.
Sitting in the warm quiet of the reading room, he would scan the journals, then settle himself into his work. Into the precise, incremental logic of geometries. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes the hours themselves became numbers, in turn fractionating into other numbers. Minutes. Weeks. Onward he pushed. At this early point, the problem didn’t seem impossible. It was like a great mountain that he was still seeing from a distance.
On the way home one night after a successful evening of work, he found himself stopping at the bar at the end of his block, a dark, windowless place called the Shed. Only a sawhorse marked it from the sidewalk. He climbed down the steep stairs and took a seat at a table in back. Caught off guard when the bartender approached him, he stumblingly ordered a dry sherry. He’d never bought a drink in his life.
Whatever the man brought back, though, it wasn’t a dry sherry.
A few minutes later, moving to a stool by the cash register, he ordered another.
—
THERE WERE BEGINNING to be rumors. Cle reported them. He was an eccentric. A savant from the woods. Isaac Newton in North Oakland. “That kind of thing, anyway,” she said, stirring a hot chocolate with the tip of her finger. Another café, another afternoon. “Your name’s around,” she said. “I keep hearing it.”
Later, as they were buttoning their coats to leave, she said, “I flattered you, didn’t I?”
He reddened. “Hardly.”
She smiled, then reached up and tapped him with her finger on the lips. “Yes,” she said. “Hardly.”
—
THE NEXT TIME he saw Earl Biettermann, they were in a car together. Biettermann was driving. Milo sat in the rear, watching the hair swing from Biettermann’s cap when he dipped into the curves. He was driving too fast. The road was wet from a storm and glinted like ice. But this was California, and warm air was whipping through the windows. They were in the hills, on the way home from a party above campus. An old stick-shift GTO without a muffler. Biettermann sluiced into the curves like a skier, accelerating as he came into the straightaways. Milo was in the backseat, pressed against the door alongside a line of girls he didn’t know. Cle was in front of him, next to Earl. Milo’s gut tightened. It tightened again when the car upshifted. Biettermann wasn’t looking at the road. He kept turning his eyes to Cle, who was throwing back her chin beside him and laughing.
“You didn’t like that,” Cle said the next day when he found her at the Lime Rose. He shouldn’t have gone in, but he did. He should have been at the library.
“Didn’t like what?” he said.
“The way Earl was driving.” She looked across the table at him.
“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t notice.”
She smiled. “Ah,” she said. “I could see that you didn’t.”
—
SHE WAS RIGHT about the rumors. Before long, he overheard someone in the lounge call him a savant.
People knew about the quatrant, but nobody had seen it, and nobody seemed to know about his real work. Nobody saw him alone in the stacks reading Akira Kobayashi’s abstruse deductions on the Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem. As he made his way through the paper, his face grew hot. Kobayashi was preparing an assault on the Malosz. That much was clear. Milo looked up at the heads of the other graduate students, bent to their work in the carrels around him like rows of oil derricks. Later, he tried to make his way through Marat Timofeyev’s densely reasoned preprint on algebraic isotopy. Another assault.
His rivals were all unseen. At any time, any one of them could render all his work useless.
And yet the talk about him persisted. His untrained brilliance. His rogue ambitions. The quatrant was the subject of steady questions from his undergraduates, who were eager for the diversion, and sometimes even from his peers, who nodded with pursed lips when he answered, turning away to exhale smoke. All of them were competing for the attention of the faculty. Dissertation topics were discussed like the movements of armies.
He’d become known by now as Hans Borland’s protégé.
It wasn’t from Borland himself that he gathered this information but from another comment he overheard one evening in the department lounge. He didn’t even recognize the graduate student who said it. Again, the sideways turn. The exhaled cigarette.
—
HER FATHER WAS a professor at Carleton College. She told him this the first morning she woke up in his bed.
“Never heard of it,” he said.
“That’s because you’re basically an illiterate.”
“Well, thank you.”
“It’s in Northfield, Minnesota. Kids ride tractors to class.”
He looked over at her.
“It’s a half hour from Minneapolis, you idiot. It’s an excellent school. You can’t get away with the things you can out here.”
“You think I’m illiterate?”
“Yes, basically. You really are an idiot, you know. Socially speaking. That’s one of the things I like about you.”