Malory glanced in the rearview mirror that gave him a view of the coffin at the altar and the vicar at the pulpit. The vicar gave a nod. It was time for music. The deceased had left it up to him. It was time to play. It was time to play what he had played every time he had cycled out to St. George’s in the past seven months in the hope that Louiza would be waiting for him in the organ loft.
It was time to play i = u.
Louiza = Malory. As set to music, of course.
Bach and Schubert and plenty of less-inspired composers, after all, had turned letters into numbers and numbers into music, into points on the twelve-note scale. Louiza’s own peculiar calculus of names gave Malory a system of composition, an initial theme to rise off the launching pad and into the stratosphere of improvisation. Setting middle C at –1, as Malory did, then –2 equals B-natural. –3 equals B-flat, 4 equals A-natural, and so on.
He believed that if he played his melody, their melody, the melody of unity and identification, Louiza = Malory, Malory = Louiza, the girl of the golden head and the pale chin would reappear from around the Orchard and lift her eyes to the sound of Malory and his organ.
The melody began with Louiza’s name, the drama of a diminished triad in first inversion — B-flat, D-flat (since D-flat equals C-sharp as surely as i = u), G — resolving with a perfect fourth to the key of C, before dropping a half step, with ominous portent, to a cliffhanger of a B-natural. It was a phantom-of-the-operatic bit of drama that promised tears, sweat, more tears, but eventually the full-throttle, stops-out consummation of an entire life of smiles and kisses with his beloved, if Malory only followed Louiza’s name with his own:
Amazing, if he thought of it — as he had, of course, every morning when he awoke and every evening in the tentative hour of dusk — that his name, Malory, was connected to Louiza’s by a perfect octave. And he could even reverse the notes, since identity is reversible.
LOUIZA = MALORY
as sure as
MALORY = LOUIZA
and
u = i
follows absolutely from
i = u.
Malory glanced into the mirror — the few parishioners with their heads bowed in silent prayer or morning exhaustion, the vicar at the pulpit, the coffin immoveable at the altar. Not all melodies, Malory knew, not all science was reversible. Not all toothpaste could be unsqueezed back into the tube. Time, for one, was not reversible. There was a grave in the foothills of the Pyrenees where his mother lay that could not be undug. Even the lid on this particular coffin would not open. But Malory believed in the power of music, in a melodic magnetism that would not only bring back the memory of that afternoon with Louiza, retrace her climb down from the organ loft, her exit from the church, her walk down the flagstone path of St. George’s Church to the Orchard, but would bring back Louiza herself, draw her close enough that he could hold out his hand and lead her into a life of eternal identity.
His improvised prelude led to thoughts of Americans and Antonella’s suggestion that Louiza’s interest in complex numbers might have something to do with codes more useful than the musical ones that generated Malory’s prelude. The thought of Americans reminded Malory that Rix had handed him a note from the Master, an invitation undoubtedly to another duty at High Table. So as the vicar began the first reading — Malory had expected Ashes to Ashes, but the vicar jumped straight to Revelations, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End — Malory winkled the envelope from his pocket and slid open the flap.
It was not an invitation. Rather the opposite.
12 October 1978
Dear Mr. Malory,
I regret to inform you that, according to the provisions of Parliamentary Act #1096 (1954, revised 1976) the term of your doctoral dissertation, which commenced 15 October 1971 and was renewed on the same date severally of 1974 and 1976, will expire 15 October 1978. The College expects your rooms to be clear, your keys returned to the Porters’ lodge, and all bursary charges paid by the end of that day. I wish you success in whatever future occupation you may pursue.
Sincerely,
A.J. Potts
Master
Malory had received letters like this before, full of Parliamentary numbers and historical dates, from a succession of masters before Aubrey. This letter was different. After seven years of working on his dissertation, it was over. Not finished, over.
He wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t as if he were three weeks away from dotting the final footnote and a brief stay of a month or two would mean the difference between doctorate and death. Malory was miles, light years, lifetimes away from finishing his thesis. The reprieves of “the same date of 1974 and 1976” were not the optimistic glimmers of light at the end of a short polish or the obsessive edits of a perfectionist, but the rewards of conversations, friendships, and free organ-tunings for influential vicars in the Cambridge vicinity.
But hadn’t those reprieves also been the fruit of incisive questions he had asked in packed lecture rooms to the Feynmans and the Westfalls of the world, the impromptu disquisitions he had delivered in select colloquia? Weren’t they the postprandial cordials of brilliant High Table epigrams, the perfect demitasses of wit with a dash of wisdom that had sent contemporaries and elders to their rooms with a nightcap of a chuckle and a shake of the head? And his Sunday morning improvisations on the organ, his ability to remember and, even more, improvise upon the full archive of organ music, from Bach to Saint-Saëns to King Vidor, Messiaen, and — if the mood was right for a bit of Rolling Stones — even Billy Preston? Hadn’t they all said, professor, praelector, and priest alike, “Malory, you’re a genius!”
Well, sure. Malory shifted on the organ bench. They’d also said, “Simplex sigillum veri—the simple is the sign of the truth.” They said, “Simplify,” followed by another word: “Write.”
As if it were that simple.
Louiza could simplify. But that was mathematics. And hadn’t Dr. Gödel or Dr. Who proved that maths wasn’t the whole story, that no matter how much you tried to boil the universe into a few mathematical rules, there was always one little spare bit of leek or potato floating in the corner of the pot, running away from your ladle and spitting soup in your face? And then there was the ladle and the pot. They couldn’t be part of the mathematical stew, could they? And what about the Cook?
It wasn’t that Malory couldn’t think, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t talk. Reading — wahaay! Piece o’ cake! There was no reader like Malory, and no corner of the university’s collection of Newtonia that hadn’t seen the thumb and barcode of Malory’s reader’s card. The Gules Collection at the Museum of the History of Science on Lesser St. Giles, the Rankin Collection at the Newton Center itself. The great Wren Library, with its tesseracts of sandstone and Pauline vaults, owed the very organization of its catalogue to Malory’s ingenious system of division and hot-cross-reference. He had read — and he could say this without fear of hyperbole — everything that had been written on the subject of Sir Isaac Newton. But more than that, he had read everything that could be written.