“You have a gift, Louiza,” MacPhearson said. “A gift for solving problems in the realm of imaginary numbers that has had very real results. More,” he chuckled, “than you might imagine. And more than many others might imagine. Which is why, for the immediate future, we need to exercise discretion as to your identity and your location.” And then MacPhearson stopped smiling. “But lately, something is missing, Louiza,” MacPhearson said, taking a bite of shortbread. “Something …”
“Yes!” Louiza turned to MacPhearson. He had said what she had been thinking. Something was missing. There were crumbs on his beard. And in between his upper two teeth, a piece of shortbread was stuck, as big as an apple pip.
“What is it, Louiza?” MacPhearson said. “What happened to your solutions, to your imaginary solutions?”
“The baby …” Louiza whispered. And she saw MacPhearson’s face, with its pip-sized crumb of shortbread looking down on her. Not in that house with the pine tree inside. Not in the cottage, not in the Orchard. In Rome. In a room at the prow of a boat. And she was screaming, and he was talking in his low voice. And then she was screaming in the room at the prow of the boat.
Now she was off the boat, in the house with the pine tree inside.
Louiza jumped up. She ran down the hall. She ran into the bathroom, the kitchen, up the back stairs and into the bedroom and then into the guest bedroom, where Vince slept when she curled up into a ball and refused. Where was it? Where was her baby? Where was her baby? And she screamed. And she screamed. Vince ran up the stairs. MacPhearson looked down on her, his beard full of crumbs, his forehead heavy with sweat.
IT WAS DARK WHEN SHE WALKED BACK DOWN THE STAIRS. MACPHEARSON was gone. Vince was gone. The fire was low behind the grate, but the windows cast a light back onto the tree, the sofa, the lace tablecloth, and the folder of problems, the pencil. Louiza sat in her chair. She was wearing a woolen nightgown, a nightgown her mother had packed for her when she went to Cambridge. Her mother. She pulled her feet up and squatted on the chair below her, and buried her face between her knees for warmth, and rocked. The baby, the baby … where was the baby? What had happened to the baby? Baby, baby …
And as she rocked, she began to hear a sound. A guitar. An electric guitar, a low note, a slow trill, approaching from a distance, like a motorcycle along the Grantchester Road, or the first notes of “Foxey Lady.” She had heard the sound before. But it had always receded, always driven away as soon as she turned her head. Now, though, the sound grew louder, closer. And as it grew closer, it was joined by the treble tattoo of a light stick against a ride cymbal, tinsel and sparks. And then a pulse — not too fast, slower than a heart, but insistent, warming. An electric bass pushing rhythm into song.
It was a group. Not a Galois Group, or a Langlands Group, or any of the groups of higher mathematics she had played with in Cambridge that looked only like Greek letters and played only a tune of pencil scratching on paper. But a group of human performers, four of them, standing around the table — four girls. They were Una and Dodo, Terri and Quatro — their names were as clear as their costumes. Una wore a jasmine PVC mini-dirndl over a black-and-white, horizontal-striped rugby shirt topped by a Funkadelic corduroy cap, and she played a Gibson Flying V electric guitar in shades of cardamom and curry. Terri was more conservative — pinstriped Carnaby Street suit (flared trousers, of course) with a ruffled cream shirt open past her cleavage, just above her left-handed McCartney bass. Quatro was the schoolgirl, which meant she kicked her bass drum and tickled her cymbals in a no-nonsense, Scottish-knee-sock-and-tartan-skirt kind of a way, light years from Japanese anime porn.
And then there was Dodo. From the start, Dodo was Louiza’s favorite. Dodo was the lead singer of the group, camouflaged to the nines in bulletproof Gore-Tex, seven-league boots, and a Kiwi Ranger’s hat that disguised a meter-long plait of raven hair bound up in a double-helix with a jackknife and a bungee stick.
“Unimaginable …” Dodo sang, or said, or said and sang in a way that Patti Smith was beginning to insinuate into the universe. “More than imaginary. Unimaginable …”
“Yes,” Louiza said, stopping rocking, but not moving, except for her head as she looked from Una to Terri to Quatro and back to Dodo. “My loss. My baby. Unimaginable.”
“One over zero,” Una sang.
“Unimaginable!” the other three joined in.
“Two over zero,” Terri now.
“Unimaginable!”
“Three over zero, four over zero-o!” Dodo cried.
Add me to zero
Subtract me from zero
Multiply me by zero
Divide, divide, divide me by zero-o-o.
Ever since she was a small girl, Louiza had listened to teachers tell her, You can’t divide by zero. You just can’t. One divided by zero, they said, just made no sense.
“Six divided by two,” one tall, rock-star of a junior teacher told the class, “equals three. And three times two equals six. There is at least one solution to the problem, therefore the problem makes sense. But six divided by zero equals?”
“Zero?” one small hand suggested.
“But zero times zero?” the teacher asked.
“Also zero.”
“And not six. Therefore, not the answer.” In fact, the teacher stated, there was no answer, no number which, when multiplied times zero equaled six. Therefore six divided by zero, any number divided by zero, made no sense.
And yet, Louiza remembered thinking, and yet — there it is. There is six divided by zero, right up there on the chalkboard, and seven divided by zero next to it — not just a trick of the light. And in later years, ≠ divided by zero and i divided by zero joined their sisters in the very real world of Louiza’s imagination and refused to disappear just because they did not make sense. If the Imaginary System was based on the square root of –1, now she had a new system, a new group of friends. If someone could call the square root of –1 i, then Louiza could baptize one divided by zero as Una, and two divided by zero as Dodo. Una times zero equaled one, Dodo times zero equaled two. Simple. The Unimaginables — in vinyl miniskirts and knee-high boots — and quicker than they could kung fu a dozen gangbangers they divided by zero and multiplied times zero and came up with a whole number and rocked, far better than any junior maths teacher.
Louiza picked up her pencil and opened the folder of new problems MacPhearson had left her. She divided by zero and solved the problems, one and then another and then another. The Unimaginables, her sisters, saving her from the unimaginable.
And Malory.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants”—isn’t that what he said when she opened her eyes in the organ loft? Malory told her that Isaac Newton said if he saw further than others it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. “I’m lucky,” Malory told her, “if I even get a peek between their legs.” She thought of Malory when the Unimaginables first began practicing their particular music in her brain. That March afternoon, waking up in the organ loft of the church with Malory, the infinite was in the air. “When I was a boy,” Malory started, “just when my mother took ill, I had a great need to see things, to stand with the giants. I remember the day Mrs. Bogatay told us about infinity. I asked her, ‘What does infinity look like?’ And she answered, ‘It’s bigger than any other number.’ And I asked, ‘Is it bigger than a quadrillion?’—I was the only nine-year-old in school who knew the word, and it became my signature number. Mrs. Bogatay invited me up to the chalkboard and had me write out a quadrillion — one with fifteen zeroes after it. And then, as simple as cutting off my penis, she erased the final zero and replaced it with a one. She had found a larger number.