One Plus Two Minus One (9 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“
I don’t
know.
You’re upset, and I don’t want you
to be.”

“Not upset.”

“
It’s like I
showed you something you can’t ever have, and that’s a bit
unfair.
Showed all of you that. All the
students.”

He shrugged.

She didn’t
know what to do.
It was all getting too
personal, was turning into more than great sex with a random man
she’d found at a party. First talking about Robert, now
this.

“
You really
like that I’m smart?” she said.
“Not
just… available.”

“I really like that you’re smart.”

She thought
about that.
She didn’t think anyone had
before, not really. They all said they did, even Robert, but what
they really meant was they’d put up with it. Like small tits.
They’d accept her with that flaw, but wouldn’t miss it if it
suddenly disappeared. She hadn’t realized before, but smart was
everything she was, the most important part of her. Maths was
everything, a secret part she very rarely shared, and only
tolerating that, only putting up with that, meant they didn’t
really know her at all.

Like her
tits.
Exactly like her tits. She liked
them being small, liked how she fit into clothes. She always had,
and actually pitied girls with big tits who couldn’t wear what they
wanted, right up until some asshole made her feel inadequate. But
if someone was really into her, they should want her exactly as she
was, not have this mental catalogue of shit to change. Ethan was
into her tits, and her mind, and it was starting to seem like he
might really be into her.

After a while
she leaned over and kissed him.
She had
to climb up a bit on the bench to reach across.

“
Thank you,”
she said.
“I think that’s rare, and I
really fucking like that you do.”

He looked at her for a while.

“Liking me smart,” she said.

He smiled.

“
I don’t see
software,” she said.
“Some people do, I
know people who do, but I can’t see what software is meant to be by
looking at the source code. Not like I can a function.”

“That’s just knowing the language well.”

“
No
shit.
Same with maths. Just a bigger
language. But it’s also thinking a particular way, and I can’t. And
I think you can.”

He was
nodding slowly.
He seemed unsure, and for
a moment she had a horrible feeling he was remembering her wanting
to know his grade and thinking she might not fuck him again if he
said he couldn’t, and came across as stupid. She didn’t know what
to say, but in the end he nodded, and said yeah, that made sense.
She was relieved. She hadn’t meant to put him on the
spot.

She started
cutting an onion.
She didn’t cry, never
did, because she used a sharp knife, and Amanda was the only person
who’d ever believed her when she said that made a difference.
Amanda had said, yeah, dick, because bruising the flesh releases
sulfuric acid, which irritates your nose. So somehow that didn’t
count.

She chopped,
and thought, and after a while said, “So I sound like a total
wanker saying this, but maths is like seeing into the mind of
god.
All that Bertrand Russell, supreme
truth and beauty, cold and austere and all that shit.”

He was looking at her.

“If you want to know me you have to know
this.”

“I know,” he said.

“This is important to me,” she said, feeling
a little defensive.

“
Yeah,” he
said.
“I know. You said it last year,
in…”

Her first
lecture.
Trying to get them interested.
“Yeah, I did. And stop.”

He grinned.

“Did I say about Hardy and his
inevitability?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Oh.”

She cut a little.

“Can I again?” she said.

“Please.”

“
You’re
sure?
I don’t want to be
boring.”

“
I’m
sure.
This is you, right?”

She nodded.

“I want to know you.”

She kissed him again, and almost cut herself
leaning over.

“Tell me,” he said.

“You remember Hardy?” she said.

He nodded.

Hardy thought
a good mathematician could see a result and just know it was right
before they started on all the tiresome proving, and that this
ability was important and powerful and what maths really was, what
made maths an art.
You used intuition to
discover things, and reason merely to confirm what you already knew
was true.

“
Just once,”
she said.
“I got that thing he was on
about. A couple of years ago. And honestly, it was like being
fucked on a beach at midnight by someone whose name you don’t
know.”

He grinned.

“
Hey,” she
said.
“I mean it. Number theory’s sweaty
dirty fucking, not some symphony floating around the rafters of a
cathedral.”

He was grinning.

“What?” she said.

“You said that last year.”

“
Oh.
Did I?”

“Twice.”

She looked at
him, tapped the knife on the board.
After
a minute, “I was trying to make an important point.”

“And everyone heard it.”

“Yeah?”

“
Oh
yeah.
You know you said sweaty dirty
fucking, right?”

“Fucking is sweaty.”

“And the second time you said good sweaty
dirty fucking.”

“
Shit,
really?”
She probably had. “I mean, fuck.
I shouldn’t talk like that in lectures.”

“You only do when you get excited.”

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“But still. Try and, I don’t know,
wave or something if it starts happening again.”

“Okay.”

She pushed onions into the pan, started
frying.

“You know I fell for you because you swear in
lectures about important things, right?”

“
You didn’t
fall for me,” she said, not turning around.
Trying to be cool, to keep him at arm’s length.

He didn’t say anything.

“
You hardly
know me,” she said.
“You can’t fall for
me.”

“Not yet.”

She turned
around.
“Hey,” she said. “Be a bit
careful....”

“Got a crush, I mean.”

She
nodded.
“Just…”

“I know.”

She fried for
a while, wondering if this was a bad idea after all.
She needed him, really needed what he made her
feel, but he seemed to be falling hard, taking this too seriously.
At least for what it was at the moment.

“
I can tell
you it,” she said.
“The maths. I’ll tell
you all of it, if you want me to. It’ll take years. But if someone
does, properly, you might understand.”

Another
promise, she thought.
Another long-term
commitment if he went for it. But it didn’t seem to bother her as
much all of a sudden.

“
Yeah,” he
said.
“You’d probably lose
me.”

*

Beth started
chopping tomatoes for the pasta sauce.
She thought. She wanted him to understand. She wanted to
try, even if it meant she was making implicit promises she wasn’t
really ready for. While the onions were frying, she looked at him
and thought. She looked across the room. She had two big framed
pictures on the far wall. Dots arranged in grids, looking random
but not. The one on the left was all the primes from one to a
million. A dot was a prime, with white space left where a non-prime
would go, and different colors to show different types of primes.
She liked to look at the internal structures within the primes, and
know there was a deeper structure she could describe if she wanted
to. That picture told her that the universe had order, down to its
most fundamental, basic, level. Derivatives of order, in that the
underlying structures had structures of their own.

The other picture was similar, a spiral
rather than a grid, black dots on a white background.

She pointed to it.

“
That’s an
Ulam spiral.
If you write numbers in a
spiral out from one in the centre, the primes are black dots and
the non-primes are white dots, all the primes line up along
diagonals and axes. No-one knows why, but it works out to huge
numbers. That picture graphs all the numbers up to two hundred
thousand.”

“You showed us that last year.”

“
Yeah,” she
said, looking at him.
“I did.”

“And I shouldn’t point that out each
time?”

“Probably not.”

He grinned. “Sorry.”

“
You remember
the rest?
No-one can explain it. It just
works. The guy who discovered it was doodling on a pad at a meeting
and realized there was a pattern. Seriously.”

“
I
remember.
And that’s kind of
cool.”

“That’s completely awesomely fucking cool,
actually.”

He grinned at
her.
“Yeah.”

“
Just
saying.
It’s fucking brilliant. Just the
random chance in that. Welcome to the chaotic universe.”

“I get it.”

“
I have a
book somewhere that lists all the numbers from one to a thousand
and their significance.
Odd patterns and
unusual factors and all. If you’re interested.”

“Maybe another time.”

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“Right.” She stood there for a
while, thinking. “Okay, so abstract algebra is simple. And elegant.
It’s one thing, no bullshit with real numbers and limits. Like…”
She ran the tap and dabbed spots of water across the bench, in a
line. “Just simple, neat, tidiness. Like prime numbers. They’re so
clear and obvious what we’re talking about, you can explain it to a
child, and we can start counting them off, work it out in our
heads, but you never stop. Never.”

He nodded.

“
If you think
about the sequence of primes for too long, you start realized how
fucking big it all is, compared to you, and you come face to face
with… eternity.
Mortality.” Not infinity,
because that meant something different. “With life and death and
everything. Because you suddenly realize it’s so big you can’t
count up to the biggest prime we know of even if you did nothing
else for your whole lifetime.”

He was looking at her.

“
We’re tiny,
against the universe.
But we can think
about anything we want to, with the right symbols, because
underneath it all, anything is just a language, and that’s
something we know how to do. Once you have the language in your
head, you have the symbols to describe reality. And so much more.
You can think your way into universes that can’t possibly exist,
and that’s very fucking cool.”

They looked at each other.

“
You being so
passionate,” he said.
“Really turns me
on.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

She stood
there for a moment. “So last year must have been fun.
Sitting funny. Not standing up until ten minutes
after I finished.”

He smiled at her, and she smiled back, and
she was pretty sure there was something here.

“
Thank you,”
she said.
“For letting me
talk.”

“I want to hear you talk.”

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“I mean, thank you for that. For
wanting me to.”

He shrugged.

“No-one has before.”

“
Not even the
guy?’
Ethan glanced over at the face-down
photo.

“
Don’t talk
about him,” Beth said.
Then, after a
moment. “Not even him. But don’t talk about that, okay?”

He nodded.

She stood
there for a while, thinking.
“Listen,”
she said, and put down the knife. “I know I already said this, and
I don’t really know for sure, but I think I could get in shit if
anyone find out about this. It looks bad, you know?”

“I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“
No-one?
Not even your best
mate?”

“I’ll say I hung out with someone, but I
don’t have to say anything about you.”

“Okay.”

“
I
swear.”
He sat there for a while, and
started to smile, looked like he was trying not to.

“Just say it,” Beth said, resigned.

“I’ll tell everyone I met you in a lecture,
and went home with you.”

She looked at
him for a moment.
“Dickhead.”

He grinned.

“
What’s weird
is I think people would think it’s worse than the other way
around.
If I was a guy and you were a
woman it feels like no-one would care. But by fucking you I’m
being…”

“Unladylike?”

“
Yeah.
It’s fucking stupid, isn’t it?”

He nodded and looked at her tits through her
shirt.

She dumped the tomatoes in a pan and started
stirring them.