Visiting Professor (9 page)

The morning after
they have their first quarrel. On the surface, at least, it seems to be about nothing.

Rain cracks two eggs into a frying pan. “Sunny-side-ups over easy, with a side order of recently swiped smoked clams, are
a specialty of the house,” she boasts.

“What does it mean, ‘over easy’?”

“At the last second I flip the sunny-side-ups over and cook the yolk. That way the sun doesn’t run into the clams.”

“If you please, skip the over easy. I prefer yolks that run.”

“The specialty of the house isn’t sunny-side-ups,” Rain announces stiffly. “It’s sunny-side-downs.”

Lemuel scrutinizes her. He is smiling the thin smile that is mostly thoughtful. “Who gets to decide which side is up?”

“Like it’s my kitchen, right? It’s my eggs. It’s my frying pan. I get to decide.”

“You do not give a centimeter.”

Rain turns on him. “My dad, who was the hangar boss of a B-52 bomber ground crew, brought me up to defend my territory at
the goddamn frontier. Sometimes it means making a big deal out of a small deal.”

“We come at this dilemma from opposite ends of the spectrum,” Lemuel tells her. “My father raised me to give ground, to live
and fight another day, to make my stand at major rivers or cities. The Russians who stopped Napoleon, who stopped the Fascists
in the Great Patriotic War, followed this formula with some success.”

“Hey, do I look like a fascist?” Mayday, curled up under the table, follows the argument with her eyes. “Does this look like
a major river or city? Do me a personal favor, eat the eggs over easy.”

Rain flips the eggs in the frying pan. Lemuel shrugs philosophically. “When we come to a major river, a city,” he says quietly,
“you will discover another L. Falk.”

Lemuel starts off the day with a brisk walk through the aisles of the E-Z Mart
. On his way out he drops off a note in Dwayne’s in box pointing out which items are in dangerously short supply. “There were
many more low-calorie yogurts yesterday than today,” he writes. “Ditto for the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, also Mrs. Foster’s crumble-proof
chocolate-chipped cookies.”

As the bell in the steeple of the freshly whitewashed Seventh-Day Baptist church on North Main strikes nine, Lemuel turns
up at the Institute, flirts for a moment with his girl Friday, a large-bodied woman named Mrs. Shipp, who blushes when he
grazes the back of her hand with his lips. Inside his office, he adjusts the Venetian blinds until he gets the lighting right,
paces off the distance between the walls to confirm what he already knows, that the space allotted to him is twice as big
as his old office in Petersburg. From a shelf he plucks one of the books he brought with him, thumbs through it to check out
variables dealing with the slow wheeling of galaxies and the wild flight of electrons, then calls in Mrs. Shipp to take dictation.

“The paper should begin,” Lemuel intones, his head tilted back, his eyes closed, his ear tuned to the scratching of the fountain
pen on her pad, which reminds him of the needle going round and round in the
end grooves of Schubert’s Quintet in C Major, “with the definition of principal eigenvalue and eigenfunction in the classical
case, then should go on to discuss what I mean by the Max principle. Here I ought to insert a footnote saying that in the
classical or smooth case, I am using Krein-Rutman theory for the principal eigenvalue.”

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Shipp interrupts. “How is the professor spelling ‘eigenvalue’?”

“K, V, A, double S.”

“I’m sorry …”

Lemuel comes up with the idiom Rain used when she was trying to explain the G-spot. “I was … pulling your leg, Mrs. Shipp.”
He spells “eigenvalue” for her, resumes dictating. “I must remember to specify that the smooth domain requires the Hopf lemma
at the boundary—”

“Excuse me …”

Lemuel opens his eyes.

“How is the professor spelling ‘Hopf lemma’?”

“D, O, O, R, followed by a new word, K, N, O, B.”

Mrs. Shipp scratches it on her pad, then looks up. “That’s another witticism, isn’t it?”

Lemuel swivels in his chair and gazes out through the Venetian blinds. He can make out students at the foot of the carillon
tower riding garbage-can covers down the icy slope into the library parking lot. If he strains, he can hear their shrieks.
He longs to drop what he is doing and climb the hill to the tower and ride a garbage-can cover down the slope. He wonders
if it is possible, given the weight and configuration of the garbage-can cover, given the coefficient of friction of ice,
given the topography of the slope, to predict the trajectory of the cover on any given run. He wonders what keeps him from
joining the students howling deliriously on the hill.

He wonders what is wrong with him that he turns every earthly pleasure into food for chaos.

“I can say you it is a poor example of Russian humor,” Lemuel finally tells Mrs. Shipp over his shoulder.

Later, while his secretary is typing up her notes, he copies some software from his personal floppy disks into his office
workstation, then networks with the Institute’s Cray Y-MP C-90 supercomputer. At the Institute, there is stiff competition
for supercomputer time; Lemuel has been asked to limit himself to four hours a day so the resident scholars and visiting fellows
can also access the Cray. Working
quickly, he types in some variables and a few lines of computer code, runs a program, paces the room while the Cray plays
with the numbers, darts to the printer when the results start to come though. He studies the paper as it runs through his
fingers, shakes his head in frustration. He is convinced there is a missing variable, but where is it? How is it possible
to find a variable when it is missing because it is variable? How is it possible to be passionate about something that does
not exist?

“Oy”—he hears the Rebbe’s refrain in his ear—”my head is spinning from all these questions without answers.”

At mid-morning Lemuel joins the Rebbe for a tea break in his vast office, which is diagonally across the corridor from Lemuel’s.
The Rebbe’s desk, at one end of the room, is awash with magazines and unanswered letters and unfinished essays and pages of
The Jewish Daily Forward
in which sandwiches have been wrapped. There are two telephones and a jar of mustard and Elmer’s Glue-All and several spare
light bulbs and an old portable Underwood and a box of tea bags and a Scotch tape dispenser without tape in it and a pair
of opera glasses and a mug filled with sharpened pencils and a tin of Petrossian caviar filled (Lemuel learns when he gets
to know his housemate better) with Procurator coins and pottery shards the Rebbe himself scavenged from the dunes of Caesarea
on his first trip to the Promised Land a lifetime ago. Waist-high stacks of books are propped against the walls and the sides
of chairs. Towers of books rise above the windowsills, partially blocking out the light. On the far end of the Rebbe’s office,
the stacked books form alleyways, the alleyways form a labyrinth. More books are piled on a table in a corner or jammed into
the bookshelves on the wall facing the window.

The Rebbe reads Lemuel’s mind. “You are overwhelmed by the disorder. You are asking yourself how I can find anything.” He
holds two cubes of sugar over his cup and, squinting, releases them one by one like bombs, splashing his desk with tea. He
stirs the contents of the cup with a letter opener. “Disorder,” he says, blowing loudly across the surface of the tea, taking
a first noisy sip, “is the ultimate luxury of those who live in order. We create a chaos. We go slumming in disorder.”

For a moment Lemuel is sucked against his will into a sinister fiction. Out-of-focus images of disorder press like a migraine
against the backs of his eyeballs; a tidal wave of faceless men spills out of doors
and windows; thick-soled, steel-toed shoes kick at figures on the ground.

“In St. Petersburg,” he tells the Rebbe, shivering like a dog emerging from water, shedding the fiction, “we lived in a kind
of permanent chaos and went slumming in order when we could find any.” He adds moodily: “Which was not often.”

The Rebbe nods reflectively. Lemuel shrugs. After a while he gestures with his teacup toward the stacks of books. “How many?”

“At home, here, I maybe have twelve, fifteen thousand.”

“You have read them all?”

“I haven’t read any of them,” the Rebbe says with pride. “Jews have been depositing books on my doorstep like a Moses in swaddling
for years. I take them in because they refer to God—it is against Jewish law to destroy a book containing the sacred name
of God.”

“Some day you will have so many books they will bury you alive.”

“What a way to maybe die … the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh, crushed to death under an avalanche of books containing
the sacred name of God. From such a death Christian saints are made.”

“I did not know Jews could become Christian saints.”

The Rebbe’s face lights up in a lopsided smile. “And Simon called Peter was what?”

Lemuel takes a gulp of tea and blurts out the question he has up to now not dared ask. “If you please, how does a Jewish rabbi,
a holy man from the heart of the heart of Brooklyn, wind up at an institute devoted to chaos?”

The Rebbe regards Lemuel. “Which version do you want?”

“How many versions are there?”

“There is the official version, which is available in the Institute’s glossy, three-color catalogue. Then there is the more
or less genuine story.”

Lemuel grunts, indicating a preference for the genuine story.

“I will begin in the middle,” the Rebbe announces. “I was teaching at a yeshiva in St. Louis, but was obliged to resign when
my students got it into their thick skulls I maybe was Messiah. I tried laughing it off the way Jesus of Nazareth laughed
it off, i.e. by telling them, ‘You say that I am.’ Ha! Being a Messiah is like being a spy. People keep asking you: ‘So are
you or aren’t you?’ When you point out the obvious—’If I am, would I tell you?’—it only convinces them you are.
Which I am not, though if I were I’d still say I wasn’t. Anyhow, I went and bought a brownstone on Eastern Parkway in the
Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and founded my own yeshiva. Things went well for the first few years, but who could have
predicted the neighborhood would turn into a
shvartzer
ghetto? You are probably not aware of it, but there is a lot of competition in the yeshiva business. I began having difficulty
attracting students. The hardy few who were willing to brave streets filled with unemployed Negroes were not, to say the least,
the cream of the crop. Some of them could barely read and write Hebrew, much less Aramaic. I gave remedial reading and writing
courses, it was like spitting on a fire. Pretty soon I was having trouble meeting the mortgage payments. I made ends meet
by selling kosher wine out of the yeshiva’s basement and held off the Nazi-bastard bankers—some of whom were Jewish—by accusing
them of being anti-Semites. But then I brought the world down on my head with the talk-show interview. …”

“I thought in America you could say whatever came into your head.”

“In America you can
think
whatever comes into your head. Some things you don’t say out loud. What I said out loud was: We had to face the music even
if we did not like the melody, the music being that in a million years goys would not forgive Jews for the Holocaust. Ha!
If I had a dollar for every time my phone rang I could have paid off the mortgage. The Jewish organizations howled like wolves
at my door.
The Jewish Daily Forward
castrated me in an editorial. The lending institutions smelled blood, assumed a wound and foreclosed. I lost my beloved yeshiva.”

“Which brings us to the Institute …”

“Which brings us to the Institute. I remembered reading, maybe it was in
Scientific American
, a story about the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies. On an impulse I wrote a proposition—what did I have to lose?—pretending
a lifelong passion for the traces of chaos in Torah. Since physicists and chemists and mathematicians dominated the Institute’s
selection board, I calculated they would not know enough Torah to refute a Rebbe, not to mention the Brooklyn Or Hachaim Hakadosh.
Just as I thought, they accepted my candidacy.”

The Rebbe unscrews the cover on the jar of mustard, takes a whiff of the contents, screws the cover back on again. “To tell
you the honest-to-God truth, I did not at first swallow my own blah-blah-blah.
But as I went through the motions I came to see there really were traces of chaos in Torah. Ha! I have been a Torah junkie
since I was a child, prying open oysters of wisdom in search of the Pearl with a capital P, which I took to be God with a
capital G. And what did I find? I found a curio with a small c that turned out to be chaos!”

The Rebbe sinks back into his chair. His lids closed tiredly over his bulging eyes. “As your friend Rain says, go figure.”

Just before the
lunch break, Charlie Atwater shows up in Lemuel’s office carrying several pages filled with measurements of the surface tension
of teardrops. He doesn’t specify how he got the raw data, but it is common gossip at the Institute that he is having an affair
with his secretary and giving her a hard time. As it is before noon, he has not yet taken his first drink, so he talks without
slurring his consonants. He is very excited.

“I’ve never put teardrops through the hoop before,” he says. He points a slightly trembling finger at neat columns filled
with figures that, to the naked eye, appear to have no order, no repetitiveness. “The numbers start out exactly as they do
with room-temperature water dripping from a faucet, but then”—Atwater flips to the second page—”they go wild. I went fishing
in teardrops, but I’m not sure whether I caught fool’s randomness or pure randomness.”

Lemuel, for the first time patrolling his Pale on this side of the Atlantic, networks with the Institute’s Cray Y-MP C-90
supercomputer from his office workstation. Using a software program he devised back in the former Soviet Union, he runs Atwater’s
numbers through the computer looking for the telltale traces of order. The initial results are inconclusive, so he extrapolates—he
extends Atwater’s experiment by nine to the ninth power. Before the hour is out he stumbles across a faint trail and heads
down it. By early afternoon he discerns on a horizon the almost imperceptible shadow of a pattern, the mathematical portrait
of the order at the heart of a chaotic system, which chaoticists call a strange attractor. Lemuel points out the pattern,
by then clearly distinguishable, to Atwater, who slurs his words. “Sho tear dropsh are chaosh-related after all. I badly need
a drink.”

A brittle darkness is blanketing Backwater by the time Lemuel calls it a day. “Have you heard the latest?” Mrs. Shipp asks
him as he strides
past her desk on the way out. “Everyone’s talking about it. The random killer has struck again.”