A Hope in the Unseen (47 page)

Once everyone returns to their seats, Wooten rolls over his stand-up blackboard. “The highest grade was a 98,” he says, writing the number in full-blooded sweeps of chalk. “And the lowest, I’m sorry to say, was a 30,” and that goes up too, as Cedric, slumping in his seat, just stares at his score, huge, up on the board, as he feels nausea rising. An imprimatur of shame. Moments later, an Asian kid, pretending to ask Wooten a question, lets on that he got the 98, and Cedric glares at him, feeling homicidal urges. He decides right there that he has to switch this class to pass/fail—and passing will be a struggle. He must, simply must, get a higher score on the second midterm in a few weeks or he’ll have to drop the class.

But he can’t afford to, because he’ll probably have to drop CS 22—Discrete Math. He decides to wait until after that class’s midterm, but he’s already reconciled himself to abandoning the course. It’s just too much. Where he has killed himself on a few homework assignments he’s done fine, proving to himself he can do the work. But, right now, his mathematical learning is not strong or diverse enough to compete, get a decent grade, and leave time for his other subjects.

Not everything is in crisis. Spanish, this semester like last, is a nonissue. It’s a basic language course, taken pass/fail, and he’ll easily
pass. In the fieldwork seminar, meanwhile, he just has to be thinking of the final paper, still a long way off.

Gradually discovering some confidence in social interactions may be crucial to his sense of self-worth, but a companion measure of self-worth, the one tied to academic performance, will be tested in the coming week’s midterms. This is survival.

As the campus library stacks and late-night eateries fill with midterm studiers, he stops by Discrete Math to pick up the take-home midterm. Walking back to the dorm, flipping the pages, he feels himself shudder: it’s filled with cryptology, systems of decoding numbers for use in a computer, and esoteric mathematical proofs that seem to have no connection with anything tangible. He’d have to work a solid week on this to get an acceptable grade.

He flips the midterm into a wire wastebasket outside the cafeteria and the bold, five-class gambit folds with barely a whimper. It doesn’t feel as bad as he thought, not like a retreat so much as a reasonable fallback position. Far different from the swallow-your-pride, lowered bar of the first semester, he decides a few minutes later over a bowl of ketchupy tomato soup. The five-class charge, he realizes, served a modest purpose: getting him off to a strong start in January. He felt like he was going for it, that he was as good as anyone, and maybe better, that he wouldn’t accept limits or impose limits on himself out of some fear of failure. Sitting across from him at the cafeteria table is Evan Horowitz, the unit’s math whiz whom Cedric has chatted with from time to time about Discrete Math. The guy, after all, is already working as a tutor in the computer science department. Cedric debates whether to tell him he’s dropping the course but opts not to and is thankful that it doesn’t come up as they make small talk.

He polishes the soup, gulps down a pancake-flat grilled cheese, grabs his tray, wishing Evan a sporting “lotsa luck” on his midterms, and slips out, feeling purposeful, focused, and a little short of breath. With his option of dropping one class now exercised, everything that remains must work out, starting with his forte, calculus, his big midterm test.

Any prepatory advantage he had in the subject has been lost, and he has been working increasingly harder as the semester has progressed. At
least here, the effort is bearing dividends. This class has two midterms as well and, a few weeks ago, he scored a 94 on the first. He usually gets 100s on the weekly homework assignments and quizzes.

Last week, Peter Berman, the instructor, told the class they were going to do a project—an involved calculation from a several-pages-long word problem—instead of taking a second midterm, as originally planned. Cedric, who had already started studying for the second midterm, complained. He’d prefer a test, he told Berman, to a long, labor-intensive calculus project. The instructor agreed to let him take the midterm from a section that meets at the same time a few doors away.

Now, with that test two days away, the crunch is on. Arriving back at his room, Cedric packs items into his bookbag like a survivalist bound for the woods—his black calculus loose-leaf notebook, with color-coded pages of notes and carefully filed quizzes and homework;
Schaum’s Outline Series
, a college-level cram book; his Texas Instruments TI-82, with graphing function; a pack of fresh pencils in the bookbag’s front pouch; and the glossy, hard-covered
Calculus
, a thick tome of 480 pages (most of them untrammeled at this point). The text, a painful $89.90 at the Brown bookstore, is required for the course. Some other math professors at Brown have murmured that it’s dense and pedantic almost to the point of being unusable or, as Berman warned some students, “definitely not self-serve.”

Nonetheless, Cedric shoves it in his bookbag, at this point straining at the seams, and then pivots toward the shelves above his bed, snatching an ancient, battered favorite from the row of spines. He looks at it, pursing his lips into a thin line, and runs his hand across the wobbly cover—
Theory and Problems of Differential and Integral Calculus
. He sits on the tightly made bed and flips through the book. It’s beaten to hell, for sure, but concise and accessible, with bold headings, simple prose, and everything lined up in a perfectly logical procession. He bought it at the Indian Head Thrift Store, down the street from Ballou, just before he left last August. Cost $1.04, including tax.

He flips forward to the chapter on series, an odd digression from the mostly tangible issues of calculus dealing with force or velocity or
the trajectory of objects as they bump and bounce through the world. Series, the subject of the midterm and an area virtually never taught in any depth before college, are different, representing a systematic way of getting a numerical value by successive approximations, getting as close as you need to get but not necessarily arriving at a definitive answer. Looking up from that definition, Cedric frowns. He remembers reading this page in the fall. He sometimes does that—just reads ahead in this book to areas he hasn’t yet covered in class. Tries to figure them out himself, like in the old, solitary days, and it relaxes him, making him feel he’s shoring up defenses. He remembers reading this and thinking then, like now, how his attraction to math has always sprung from its conclusiveness, the way you could, on your own, get to a lone, irrefutable answer—something no one could take away—and how this series stuff is something else, how it’s all about just getting close. “Just an approximation,” he murmurs as he wedges the old book into his yawning bookbag and makes for the door, wondering about whether a particularly secluded carrel is free in the Rockefeller Library stacks. “Just getting close. What the hell good is that?”

After two days of junk food and little sleep, Cedric wanders into his regular Wednesday morning calculus session. It’s a few minutes early; only Berman is there. “Cedric?” he says, looking up from some work at the front table. “I thought you’d be taking the midterm now with Mr. Chin. His class meets around the corner.”

Cedric looks ashen. “I’m scared,” he says, managing the miserable words with a weak smile. “I mean, I’m nervous. I want to do well so badly. I need to.” There’s no way he can describe to Berman his unfolding vision of dire warfare—the surrender in CS 22, the imminent rout in psychology, the searing issues that seem to envelop him in education—and how, studying maniacally over forty-eight hours, he felt like he was preparing for a titanic assault on his last stronghold. He knows crippling doubt is on the march. He must turn it back. A draw is not enough. It needs to be a clean victory. Cedric clears his throat, recovering a modicum of poise. “You know, this stuff is tricky, and I’m thinking I should have just stuck with the project … ”

Berman, an awkward, high-strung guy with gaze aversion, comes
out from behind the table. “Listen, just do your best,” he says, looking past Cedric at the wall under the clock. “I mean, I’m sure you’ll be fine, so don’t worry. I mean, just don’t worry.” Cedric looks at him for a moment—how small and nervous he seems—and then nods glumly. No sanctuary to be found here.

In a moment, he enters a classroom in an adjacent hallway and takes a packet of six stapled pages from a table near the blackboard. Kids are already toiling away—same kind of crowd as in his class—and Cedric finds a desk near the wall.

He looks at the clock: 10:06. He has until 10:50. Five questions. Speed is important, and the first one is cake, a straightforward, “evaluate the limit” question. The next two, though, are ticklish—one dealing with various series equations and whether their functions would converge or diverge; on the other, he needs to locate the power series in two functions.

He flips to question four, his hand sweaty and cramping, and reads it with astonishment: “Find the 2nd degree Taylor polynomial and the remainder at A = 0 for the function
f
(x) = 3(x + 1).” His head jerks up. Berman’s barely mentioned Taylor polynomials in his class. This calculus section must be a little ahead of his. He thinks about getting up to mention it to Mr. Chin, but he’s left the room for a moment. A clean miss of one whole question will at best mean a cliffhanging B, and most likely a C or worse. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. No turning back, no plea for mercy. After a moment, something starts to take shape. That’s right, last fall he read a few pages about this in his thrift-store book. While the series, with its system of approximations, closes you in on the actual answer but never gets you there, the Taylor polynomial is a way of figuring out how far you still have to go. He remembers that—he remembers how he liked that idea, that at least you can come out with a number, a remainder, a measurement of the distance yet to travel to the answer. He opens his eyes and bends forward, his pencil racing through a line of
f
(x) functions, until the clenched muscle of his jaw line loosens to make way for an admiring smile.

The next day is Thursday. Tomorrow he leaves to go home for a
week of spring break. He must know the outcome. He spends the day refiguring the problems from memory, racing through functions and equations, looking for his errors and convincing himself that he made several large blunders. He calls Berman three times before he finally picks up.

“Professor Berman, can I still do the project because I think I did really poorly on the exam?” Cedric implores, trying not to make it sound like a plea.

“Let’s just wait and get the exam back and see the results,” Berman says. “It’s not even graded yet.”

On Friday morning, he buys an Amtrak ticket for that night’s sleeper to Washington and trundles off to Calculus. Berman is off on a new lesson about some tricky integration, but Cedric can hardly hear him, feeling the breath enter and leave his lungs, looking up every minute or two at the pitiless clock. The class ends, and he sits frozen at the desk, waiting for the last kid to straggle out.

They’re alone. “I got your exam back,” Berman says, looking at Cedric, then quickly away. Cedric rises with a grunt.

“I think you did a little better than you think you did,” he says, facing a far wall.

“I figured I failed, so I guess that’d be a D,” Cedric mumbles as he floats forward, unaware of his feet.

Berman looks intently at him as he thrusts the test forward.

Cedric spins it in his hand and looks at the cover page’s grid:

His jaw goes slack. “OH MY GAWWWD! A 98. HOW DID I DO THAT?”

He looks up at Berman in astonishment. “That thing you did on the Taylor polynomial question—we hadn’t really done that in class—and you somehow figured it out on your own,” the teacher says, looking at Cedric reverently. “Just amazing.”

Cedric just shakes his head, speechless, and slowly raises his arms toward the drop ceiling, paper clutched in one hand, his eyes closed.

“Sweet Jesus,” he whispers. “Take me home.”

C
edric looks in his dorm room mirror as he’s meticulously dressing on an evening in early April and thinks for a moment about home.

Spring break was last week—the final week in March—but it’s already slipped into idle, indistinct memory … mostly of sleep. Arriving home, he was simply exhausted, wrung out from tension as much as actual exertion and ready to pass a few days doing nothing. Church services on either end framed the intervening spread of inertia—a few phone calls, an outing to a mall in Silver Spring, some psychology reading for the class’s dreaded second midterm in April, and plenty of TV. Barbara gets cable and Cedric doesn’t. So there was lots of catching up to do.

His mother seemed glum and pensive. Slipping on a long-sleeve gray shirt, he remembers that he saw a late payment notice of some kind on the dining room table. But she’s been getting them for years. He steps back and examines himself in the mirror, stands up straight, and smiles, showing off his perfect teeth. As ready as he’ll ever be.