Visiting Professor (7 page)

Holding a wineglass by its stem, Rebbe Nachman, sitting across the parenthesis from Matilda Birtwhistle, carefully swirls
the liquid around in the glass, then watches as it seeps back down the sides. “You maybe want an independent opinion,” he
calls across the table, “it was
mis en bouteille
, as we say in Yiddish, in the basement of the E-Z Mart on Main Street, after which it did not travel well.” Flashing a lopsided
grin, he calls
“Bolshoi le’hayyim!”
and treats himself to a healthy swig.

Later, as the coeds clear dessert dishes from the tables and serve coffee and mints, the Director climbs to his feet and clangs
a spoon against a glass. “Gentlemen, ladies?” The luncheon guests are so busy talking to one another they don’t notice that
he is trying to get their attention. “First off,” Goodacre pitches his voice higher, “I want to welcome you all to this faculty
luncheon.” Gradually the guests simmer down.

“Let me tell you,” Charlie Atwater, mimicking the Director, whispers to his neighbor, “how impreshive it is to shee sho much
chaosh-related brain power in one room.”

“Let me tell you,” Goodacre continues, “how impressive it is to see so much chaos-related brain power in one room.”

Matilda Birtwhistle snickers appreciatively.

“As Albert Einstein once noted,” the Director goes on, “the most incomprehensible thing about this universe of ours is that
it is comprehensible. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome into the Institute’s ranks someone who has done more
than his share to make the universe comprehensible. He needs no introduction. You are all familiar with his work on entropy,
as well as his search for pure randomness in the decimal expansion of pi. Many of us suspect that if there were a Nobel Prize
awarded in the field of mathematics, he would surely have received it by now for pushing back the frontier of
randomness. Let’s have a welcoming hand for the visiting professor from St. Petersburg. Gentlemen, ladies: Lemuel Falk.”

The permanent scholars, visiting professors and fellows are on their feet now, applauding. Lemuel, his head bowed, his cheeks
burning, stares at his briefcase, which is leaning against one leg of his chair. Old habits die hard. At the V. A. Steklov
Institute of Mathematics faculty luncheons, especially the ones with foreign guests, were occasions to steal onion rolls and
tins of caviar and half-liter bottles of Polish vodka. Lemuel has abandoned any hope of appropriating one of the wine decanters,
which are surely counted before and after the luncheon, but he has his heart set on transferring the seeded roll that has
been overlooked on the small plate in front of him to his briefcase. But with everyone gazing at him, how is he to pull it
off?

The applause dies down. The guests settle back into their seats. Lemuel, at the head of one curving parenthesis, thrusts himself
to his feet, adjusts his eyeglasses, surveys the three-piece suits, the sport jackets with suede elbow patches, the potbellies,
the bifocals, the balding crowns, the thumbs pressing tobacco into the bowls of pipes. He nods at several of the Institute’s
professors whom he knows from international symposiums. He notices Rebbe Nachman smiling encouragingly.

“I can say you—” Lemuel begins.

“Can you speak up, Professor?” someone calls from the back of the room.

Lemuel clears his throat. “I can say you, you may not want to hear it,” he starts again in a stronger voice, “that I have
arrived to Backwater armed with more questions than answers. I will not bore you with the easy ones—how is it possible to
wear your heart on your sleeve? In what respect can a lady barber be compared to a number? What does ‘Nonstops to the most
Florida cities’ really mean? How can one city be more Florida than another? Concerning which side is up, who gets to decide
that in America? I will not occupy your time even with the tantalizing question Rebbe Nachman posed me last night, namely,
if God really loved man, would He have created him? I will, with your permission, move right on to the question which keeps
me awake nights. …”

Lemuel glances at the plate to make sure the seeded roll is still there, then looks up at the audience. “What is chaos? It
has been variously defined—as order without periodicity, for instance; as seemingly random recurrent behavior in deterministic
systems such as ocean tides and temperatures, stock-market prices, weather, fish populations
in ponds, the dripping of a faucet. I would suggest you these definitions do not cut to the bone, I would like to offer another
way of looking at chaos, here it is: that systems too complex for classical mathematics can be said to obey simple laws. Let
me give you a for instance. Using the tools of classical mathematics, we can more or less calculate the long-term motion of
the fifty or so bodies in the solar system. But trying to comprehend the short-term motion of the hundred trillion or so particles
in a milligram of gas is beyond the competence of the most powerful computer, not to say the most brilliant programmer. Yet
we can understand a great deal about the motion of the gas particles if we grasp that the incredibly complex world contained
in this milligram of gas can be said to obey simple laws.”

Lemuel’s mouth is suddenly bone dry. He takes a sip of water. When he looks up he discovers the luncheon guests leaning forward,
hanging on his words. Encouraged, he plunges on. “The science of chaos can accordingly be seen as an effort to come to grips
with the essence of complexity. In my view the traditional sciences, which is to say physics, chemistry, biology, et cetera,
have become ‘tenders to.’ They are the small boats servicing the yacht, which is the science of chaos.” This elicits a titter
from the audience, all of whom at one time or another have visited Rain’s Tender To. “The only really original, and in some
cases elegant, work around today is being done by chaoticists, who have demonstrated that complex systems obey simple laws,
and in so doing act in seemingly random ways. Which permits us to conclude”—Lemuel is speaking slowly now, selecting his words
warily—”that deterministic chaos is the explanation for most randomness. But … but is it the explanation for
all
randomness?”

Several people in the audience whisper excitedly to each other. “Vat is he telling us?” demands the visiting professor from
Germany.

“He is suggesting chaos should play second fiddle to randomness,” grumbles his neighbor, an astrophysicist on loan from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Several people within earshot nod in agreement.

Lemuel looks directly at the Rebbe. “Excuse me if I say you my question is more critical to our understanding of the universe,
and our place in it, than the one you posed last night, Rebbe. Let me phrase my question another way. In paring away layers
of seeming randomness we arrive at a terminus, which up to now has turned out to be chaos. But the real quest is only beginning.
Is it not within the
realm of possibility that this terminus, chaos, is really only a way station? Is it not equally within the realm of possibility
that the
real
terminus, the theoretical horizon beyond which there is no other horizon, is pure, unadulterated, nonchaotic randomness?”

There is an angry buzz in the room. “You are not really a chaoticist,” Sebastian Skarr exclaims from his seat. “You are a
randomnist exploiting chaos—”

The Rebbe reluctantly agrees. “In your heart of hearts, you admitted it yourself last night, you do not love chaos—”

“Chaos is not God,” Lemuel defends himself. “In any case, I am basically a randomnist who stumbled into chaos—”

“You admit to being ein reluctant chaoticist,” the German professor blusters. “Conzider ze pozzibility zat you have stumbled
into ze wrong institute.”

The Rebbe throws up his arms. “Pure, unadulterated randomness does not exist. You are chasing rainbows.”

Lemuel is startled by the storm he has stirred. “My approach to pure randomness,” he defends himself, “is chaos-related.”

Matilda Birtwhistle raises a finger. “Mind a question, Professor?”

“This is getting out of hand,” the Director announces. “It’s not supposed to be a working session.”

“The chaoticists are waxing chaotic,” Charlie Atwater notes wryly.

“If you please,” Lemuel tells Matilda Birtwhistle.

“You are widely known for your assertion that all randomness is fool’s randomness, and that this fool’s randomness is a footprint
of chaos.”

“Up to now it has unfortunately always turned out that way,” Lemuel agrees.

“If I understand you correctly,” Birtwhistle continues, “you seem to be suggesting that chaos could turn out to be a footprint
of randomness—”

“Of pure, unadulterated randomness,” Lemuel corrects her.

“Of pure, unadulterated randomness, of course. But if this proves to be the case, where will it end? Perhaps the pure, unadulterated
randomness that comes after chaos is, in its turn, merely a footprint of something else—”

“Maybe it’sh a footprint of pure, unadulterated chaosh,” Charlie Atwater interjects.

The visiting professor from Germany scrapes back his chair in
disgust. “You ask me, he iz looking for pure randomnezz—okay, vy not? Everyone haz eine ax to grind—but vat he found iz pure
ridiculouznezz.”

There is a ripple of nervous laughter, which quickly subsides. The luncheon guests gaze expectantly at the speaker at the
head of the parenthesis.

Lemuel collects his thoughts. “When it was discovered, the molecule was, in a manner of speaking, a footprint of the atom.
The atom turned out to be, among other things, a footprint of a nucleus, the nucleus a footprint of protons and neutrons,
which we now think are footprints of mesons and quarks. But what are quarks a footprint of? Who can say you they are not a
footprint of something buried deeper inside them?”

“Matilda is right,” Sebastian Skarr calls from his seat. “If what you say is true, the voyage will never end. There is no
terminus.”

“We are not chaoticists,” Matilda Birtwhistle informs her colleagues, “so much as space travelers condemned to spend eternity
exploring an endless universe.”

Lemuel shrugs. “We will reach a terminus when we discover a single example of pure, unadulterated randomness. At which point
we will know that everything under the sun is not determined—that man, woman also, is the master of his fate.”

“And if there is no such thing as pure, unadulterated randomness,” Matilda Birtwhistle retorts, “what then?”

Lemuel, suddenly exhausted, mumbles, “You are all doorknobs.”

“Speak up, Professor,” someone calls.

Charlie Atwater belches into the back of his fist. “Thish is all very depresshing,” he groans. “I badly need a drink.”

The guests gaze silently into their coffee cups for a long while. Lemuel’s head bobs uncertainly several times. He glances
at the Director, who appears to be having a conversation with himself, then manages to sink into his seat so awkwardly he
upsets the plate containing the seed roll. Scrambling under the chair, Lemuel slips the roll into his briefcase and surfaces
with the empty plate.

A coed carrying a tray of after-dinner mints passes behind him and drops one onto his coffee saucer.

“I thank you,” Lemuel says.

The girl smiles engagingly. “I welcome you,” she shoots back with a giggle.

“You may be the only one here who does.”

Staring out at his colleagues at the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies, watching them as they push back their chairs and
drift away from the parenthesis, Lemuel wonders if this vision of a never-ending cycle of randomness and chaos is not simply
another one of his convenient fictions, something that satisfies parts of himself he has not been to yet.

Dejected, he bumps into the Rebbe outside the Institute Center. “Where did I go wrong?” he asks him. “What do I do now?”

Rebbe Nachman dances on the ice to keep his toes from turning numb. “A smart-ass goy once offered to convert to Judaism if
the famous Rebbe Hillel could teach him the entire Torah while the goy was standing on one foot. You have maybe heard the
story? Rebbe Hillel agreed, the goy balanced on his one foot, Rebbe Hillel said to him, That which is hateful to you do not
do to your friend. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and study.’ “

Rebbe Nachman’s smile seems more asymmetric than usual. “I don’t believe you will ever find randomness, I’m talking pure,
I’m talking unadulterated, for the simple reason it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, you certainly won’t find it if you don’t
look for it. Go and study.”

“I was wrist-cuffed to a lady movie reviewer who also signed the petition
,“ Lemuel shouts over the noise he refuses to acknowledge as music. “I heard she spent three years in a Siberian gulag, sucking
frozen sticks of milk over open fires at mealtimes.”

“How did you worm out of it?” hollers a fraternity brother wearing a tie and jacket and football helmet.

“Hey, how did you?” Rain, sipping wine, smiling whimsically, wants to know.

“Lem here signed the petition, the fuzz picked him up and took him in for questioning,” Dwayne, the E-Z Mart manager, recapitulates
in a loud voice, “but they didn’t charge him. He had to have a wrinkle.”

“A wrinkle?”

“A gimmick,” Dwayne’s girlfriend, Shirley, explains.

“A stratagem,” Dwayne adds. “A ruse.”

Lemuel smiles sourly. “I had a wrinkle—it was two signatures,” he shouts. “One I used to sign my internal passport or my pay
book or my applications for exit visas. The other signature I used to sign documents I might want to deny I signed. When they
finally got around
to interrogating me, I said them someone had forged my signature. They verified it with a handwriting expert and let me go.”

“Like it must have been goddamn dangerous, living in a Communist country and not being a Communist,” observes Rain.

“In Russia we have a proverb: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

Lemuel turns to watch the couples in the next room. In the half light, they appear to be jumping up and down, their heads
hanging off to one side as if their necks are broken. He leans closer to Rain and shouts into her ear, “Looks like—” The noise
ends as suddenly as it began.”—communal hiccups,” he hears himself shout. Heads swivel. Lemuel blushes.

The three musicians in a corner of the room strike up a slow foxtrot. Shirley sinks into Dwayne’s arms and they start to shuffle
around in time to the music.

“Hey, in Russia they must dance, right?” Rain tells Lemuel. He feels her breath warm his ear. “Let’s you and me …” Her forefinger
describes a circle.

“I do not know if I know—” Lemuel starts to protest, but Rain, polishing off the wine, dangling the empty glass by its stem,
pulls him into the other room and melts into his arms. He feels the wineglass against the back of his neck, he feels her breasts
against his chest, he feels her thighs against his legs, he smells her lipstick. He hears the Rebbe’s “Oy” seep between his
lips.

Rain presses her mouth against his ear. When she speaks, her words actually tickle. “The business with the two signatures—when
did that happen?”

“Eight years ago.”

“I remember something that happened twenty-three years ago,” she says lazily. “I remember my birth.”

“You are inventing this up? I do not even remember my childhood, mainly because I never had one.”

“Honest to Christ, I’m not inventing. I was very young at birth, who isn’t? but I remember every detail. I remember the dampness
and the darkness and then the coldness and the blinding light. I remember being held upside down and whacked. You want me
to give you the dirty details?”

“Another time maybe.”

They shuffle around the floor in silence. After a while Rain’s voice tickles his ear again. “So are you married?”

“I was married. I am divorced.”

“How many times in your life have you been in love?”

Lemuel tries to shrug, but finds it difficult because Rain is hanging on his shoulders. “Perhaps once. Once, perhaps. Yes,
once.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I am sure. I was in love once.”

“With your wife?”

“I showed up in the Leningrad Palace of Marriage to sign the book under the photograph of Lenin because my wife’s father was
the rector at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where I would have given my right arm to work. Also his daughter
had a sixty-square-meter apartment all to herself.”

“So who were you in love with if it wasn’t your wife?”

“A girl … I never knew her name, I never spoke with her.”

“You fucked with her, right?”

Lemuel tosses his head in embarrassment.

“I don’t get it. If you never talked to her, if you never fucked with her, then even if she existed it’s the same as if she
didn’t exist. She was a figment of your imagination.”

“She was real,” Lemuel insists, but Rain is following her own thoughts.

“I don’t see how it’s possible to be passionate about someone who doesn’t exist?”

Lemuel tries to change the subject. “I suppose you have been in love many times.”

Rain laughs. “More than many. I have been briefly in love dozens of times. Hundreds even.”

“What does it mean, briefly in love?”

“Thirty seconds. Two minutes. Ten.”

“How much time must pass before your love affairs become serious?”

Rain is insulted. “For the thirty seconds or two minutes or ten, they are very serious. While I am making love, I am in love.”
She crushes her miniskirt into Lemuel’s crotch. “And when I am in love, I am usually making love.”

“What about a love affair which lasts for a month or a year? What about marriage?”

“Tried marriage,” Rain smugly informs him. “Didn’t like it. Tried divorce.”

“You were married how long?”

“It seemed like an ice age, but it was only two months.”

“What was it about marriage you did not like?”

“My ex was good in bed, but not with me.”

“He was unfaithful?”

“He was fucking his friends, if that’s what you mean. So was I. Fucking my friends. But that wasn’t why I quit him.” She tells
Lemuel the story of how her ex supplied rice instead of birdseed at her wedding. “I ought to have seen the handwriting on
the wall,” she adds. “I ought to have left him then and there.”

“You did not divorce because of the rice,” Lemuel insists.

Rain leans back and searches his face. “Like you think the birdseed story is for the birds, right?” He lifts his eyebrows
in a shrug. She smiles anxiously as she drifts back into his arms. When she speaks again her voice is thicker. “I kept trying
to figure out what Vernon wanted me to be, and then I tried to be it. After a few weeks on this merry-go-round I lost track
of who I was. I lost track of me.” A high-pitched laugh catches at her throat. “I don’t program myself anymore. I don’t try
to be what some dude wants me to be.” She takes a deep breath. “I am what I goddamn am.”

Lemuel says very quietly, “You will be when and where you will be.”

Rain is startled. “Yeah, that’s it exactly. What you see is what you get.”

Lemuel remembers the Rebbe’s description of Eve in the garden of Yahweh. “What I see,” he mumbles awkwardly, “is a saving
grace— originality.”

Rain stops in her tracks and scrutinizes his eyes. The freckles on her face burn. “Yo,” she says quietly.

A barefoot young man wearing a djellaba comes hurtling into the room and whispers to the musicians. The music breaks off abruptly.
The musicians stack their instruments and follow the young man out of the room. Dwayne tries to talk Shirley into going downstairs
with the musicians. They have a whispered argument. Shirley shakes her head stubbornly. Lemuel hears her say, “I just don’t
feel in the mood tonight, angel.” Annoyed, Dwayne stalks off by himself. Shirley, eyeing Lemuel across the room, slides a
stick of gum into her mouth.

Rain folds herself back into Lemuel’s arms and continues dancing.
“They must be starting the cassettes downstairs,” she tells him. Still dancing, she presses her mouth against his ear and
imitates the rat-a-tat-tat of a drumroll.

“What is that?”

“Drums.”

“Drums?”

“The drums I hear in my head, right?”

“It is probably not serious.”

“Can’t you hear them?” She leans her head against Lemuel’s ear. “Listen up. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. I hear them. They’re
sending me a Morse code message. Right in my goddamn ear.”

“What do they say?”

“They say, ‘You’re getting old.’ They say, ‘Pretty soon you’ll wear see-through shirts and nobody’ll wanna look.’ They say,
‘You haven’t done anything with your life besides wheel and deal. You are so obsessed with safe sex,’ they say, ‘all you get
is no sex.’ Like some days I don’t notice the goddamn drums, right? But they’re always there. If I close my eyes and concentrate,
I hear them. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.”

“You seem a little young to worry about growing old.”

Annoyed, Rain backs away from him. “Like you’re never too young to worry about growing old. I’m taking D.J.’s Russian Lit
404, which is mostly L. Tolstoy, to fill a humanities requirement. So you’ve heard of L. Tolstoy, right? He once said something
about how one thing in life was certain, namely, you live, therefore you are dying. The only time your body’s not dying is
when you’re fucking. That’s me talking, not L. Tolstoy. Don’t smile that smug smile all men smile when they don’t understand
something—it happens to be a goddamn scientific fact. When you’re fucking, time stops dead. When you’re fucking, there is
no such thing as time.” Rain pitches the empty wineglass into a wastepaper basket. ‘That’s a three pointer,” she mutters.
“I need to pee.”

As Rain disappears through a door, Shirley meanders across the room toward Lemuel. She is wearing high heels and a flared
miniskirt and shoulder padding under a sweater.

“Great party,” she says.

Lemuel nods in vague agreement.

She holds out a stick of gum. Lemuel shakes his head. “I recognized you from the supermarket,” Shirley says, adding the fresh
stick
to the one already in her mouth, chewing away, “but I don’t remember seeing you around a Delta pour before.”

“I have never attended a Delta pour before.”

“You’re a gate-crasher,” Shirley exclaims. “I like men who aren’t invited. Do you dance or anything?”

Backing against a wall, Lemuel clears his throat. “There is no music.”

She pouts. “No music didn’t stop you from dancing with the Tender To.”

She collapses into Lemuel’s arms, giving him no choice. “My name’s Shirley,” she announces. “I’m Dwayne’s main squeeze. Pleased
to make your acquaintance.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other in a lumbering dance. “That was some story you
told before, about having two signatures. I can write my name backwards. Yel-rihs.”

Lemuel, flustered, looks around. He sees the Rebbe, in the next room, rolling his head from side to side in mock admiration.

Hanging from Lemuel’s neck, Shirley says, “Dwayne and me, we smoked some of the Tender To’s dope before we got here. I’m so
high I’ve had this pain for two hours, but I don’t know where it is.”

Lemuel gently pries Shirley’s wrists loose from his neck. She grabs his sleeve. “You talk with an accent,” she notes. “I like
men who aren’t invited and talk funny. I like men who have two signatures.” When Lemuel jerks his arm free she says urgently,
“I could teach you to write your name backwards. Oh, shit,” she moans as Lemuel backs away. “I never seem to get it right
like Rain.”

Lemuel wanders over to the Rebbe, who is talking animatedly with D.J. but breaks off to greet Lemuel.
“Hekinah degul
. This is your idea of study? On the other hand, who can say there is nothing to be learned about chaos at a fraternity party?”

D.J., absorbed, aims a civil smile at Lemuel over the Rebbe’s head. “Go on about Sodom,” she prompts Nachman.

The Rebbe picks up the thread of their conversation. “I was reading into Genesis 18 this afternoon. That’s where Abraham tries
to argue Yahweh out of killing everyone in Sodom. ‘Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?’ Abraham asks. Abraham’s
all for getting rid of sin, but not at the expense of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yahweh destroys Sodom anyhow.
He kills the righteous along with the sinners. The riddle is, Why?”

“He’s lazy,” D.J. suggests. “He doesn’t want to bother sorting.”

Rain joins the group. “Who’s lazy?” she asks D.J. “Your sideburns look fantastic,” she tells the Rebbe. “When are you going
to break down and give me the secret?”

“Hekinah degul,”
says the Rebbe. “My sideburns are classified.”

D.J. smiles coolly at Rain. “Good evening, dear.”

“Why
does
Yahweh kill the righteous along with the sinners?” Lemuel wants to know.

“I’m glad you asked,” says the Rebbe. “Because Yahweh is high on randomness. Randomness is in His blood, in His bones, in
His head. Randomness is His modus operandi. When He punishes, He punishes randomly. Which is why we never really know until
the end of the saga whether His chosen people are maybe going to wind up alive and well in the land of milk and honey, or
dead as doornails in the desert. Take for instance the story of Yahweh hanging out on Mount Sinai, I’m talking Exodus 19.
He instructs Moses to warn the Jews sweltering in the burning fiery furnace of a desert down below not to gaze on Him lest
many of them perish. Okay, He was maybe having a bad day—a toothache, indigestion, diarrhea, you name it. Sinai wasn’t your
average Club Med. But is this a reason to make looking at you a capital crime? What we can deduce is that He’s being capricious.
He’s being His old random Self. One day He threatens to kill Isaac, another time He dispatches an angel of death to do in
Jacob, on still another occasion He personally tries to murder Moses, His anointed gofer. I’m talking Exodus 4:24–26. Ha!
With Yahweh on our side, what do Jews need enemies for? He threatens as often as other people fart: Take one bite out of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge and you’ve had it; look at Me and you meet your Maker; lay a finger on My ark and you get electrocuted—I’m
talking 1 Chronicles 13.” Angling his head, transported by his text, the Rebbe recites in a singsong voice. “ ‘And they carried
the ark of God in a new cart out of the house of Abinadab: and Uzza and Ahio drave the cart. And David and all Israel played
before God with all their might, and with singing, and with harps, and with psalteries, and with timbrels, and with cymbals,
and with trumpets. And when they came unto the threshing floor of Chidon, Uzza’—the poor son of a bitch, that’s me talking,
not King James—’Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against
Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark.’ “