Simple Grifts

by Max Cossack

“There’s a big difference between math and dialectical materialism.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Math has meaning. It’s real. For some reason no one can explain, the physical world follows the rules of math. Like Feynman said, it’s the language God talks. That’s amazing.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “And by contrast, dialectical materialism is…” She shrugged.

  “Is what?”

  “Dialectical materialism is bullshit.”

  The heresy caught Mason off guard. The best he could come up with on the spot was, “You think so?”

  “I know so,” she said.

  “Then what have you been doing at these Struggle Sessions?”

  “At first, I was just curious. I try to keep an open mind on things like that. You never know. But I decided it was bullshit. Then…”

  “Then?”

  She shrugged. “Then my attention gravitated towards you.”

  “Gravitated?”

  “In a sort of Einsteinian space curvature way. Macro physics instead of quantum. The physics of large things.”

  “Me?”

  “I looked you up. Didn’t you win a prize as an undergraduate? For this project you worked on? Even got a patent?”

  “Three,” he said. “But it was no big thing.”

  “A patent is a big thing,” she insisted. “A very big thing.”

  “You like me for my patents?”

  She said, “Well, you’re so cute. And so earnest.”

  “Are you patronizing me?”

  She smiled. “A little. Don’t be offended.”

  He couldn’t help smiling back. “So I’m an earnest patent-hustling doofus, is that right?”

  “In a good way.”

  “And you’re not at all interested in dialectical materialism?”

  “Not at all. Like I said, bullshit.”

  “You want to argue that out?”

  “No. Do you?”

  It came to him, “You got me here on false pretenses. You conned me.”

  She cocked her head. “Sorry not sorry. How about you?”

  He considered for a sliver of a fragment of an instant and leapt back onto the bed.

  The evening passed. He lost track of time. She got up once or twice herself. Once he lay awake and listened to the gentle flutter of Deirdre’s breathing as she slept. Then he fell asleep himself. When he woke up, she was gone. He went back to sleep. When he woke again, she was lying next to him.

  He said, “I’ve got to get up again.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. He stood.

  On his way back from the bathroom he saw something else: a Chanukkiah on the top shelf of a small brown bookcase.

  “What’s this?” he asked her.

  “It’s for lighting candles on Chanukah.”

  “I know that. I mean, why do you have it?”

  “It was my grandmother’s.” She sat up again. “I’m Jewish. Is that a problem?”

  “No. I’m a Jew too. Did you know that?”

  She said, “No. How would I?”

  “That’s quite a coincidence.”

  They looked at each other.

  He blurted, “You’re the first Jewish girl I ever slept with.”

  “You slept with a lot of women?”

  “No, not really. I’ve never been slick about things like that.”

  “Things like what?”

  “You know.”

  She smiled. “I do know.”

  “Part of my doofus charm?” he said.

  “Go with what you got,” she said.

  22 Claude Rivelle

  Professor Claude Rivelle was fed up with the DCA and he had decided to quit.

  After all, he was a scientist—well, not exactly a scientist, but an engineer trained in rigorous scientific thinking, and especially gifted in mathematics. He was a man who valued facts, precision and logic. His own teachers had drilled into him a single fundamental principle: in engineering and in mathematics, there is often only one right answer, and you had better derive that right answer.

  The wrong answer killed people. Whatever you designed would fail: the foot bridge would collapse under its pedestrians or the oil rig would blow up its workers or the airliner and its passengers would fall out of the sky. And because you failed to do your job in the real world, real people would die real deaths.

  Now that he was Professor of Engineering at Ojibwa College of Minnesota, he labored to pass on to his own students his own obsessive attitude towards precision. And each semester it seemed increasingly impossible to get the message through. Only a few students seemed even to know what he was talking about. So many were so absorbed in their own feelings they seemed never to recognize the existence of any objective reality outside the inner space bounded by their delicate eggshell skulls.

  Joining the DCA had been his then-wife Shelly’s idea. Shelly had never been a precision thinker, or even a thinker at all. She was given to enthusiasms, and each new enthusiasm brought new accusations that he didn’t understand her needs.

  One year it was jazz interpretive dance. He was mystified what stories and emotions the dancers were interpreting, except they seemed to require a lot of bending of back and twisting of leg and waving of arm.

  Last year it had been yoga. But a busybody friend cautioned Shelly that a white woman doing yoga was cultural appropriation, so she switched to social justice, which for some reason was not, even though it seemed to require trying to lead a lot of non-Western people around.

  It was Shelly who had urged Claude to look into the DCA. At first, he had been reluctant to hook up with the DCA, but the more he analyzed the DCA platform, the more he found ideas that appealed to him. The DCA platform contained elements as rational and logical as an elegant equation.

  Under democratic communism, instead of relying on an anarchic chaotic marketplace to set prices and determine what got produced and distributed, teams of credentialed experts like himself would analyze the data and make rational decisions about production and distribution and prices. And they would have the power to make sure even the poorest received their fair share.

  Under democratic communism, Claude and his colleagues would operate society as another mathematical engineering problem, although perhaps a bit more complicated. But with modern computers and software, Claude knew he could solve any mere mathematical problem.

  But things hadn’t gone the way Claude hoped. Claude had examined his own motivations as well as he could. He was pretty sure the reason he wanted to quit the DCA wasn’t Shelly’s recent sudden decision to leave him and the quickie divorce that had followed, nor Soren Pafko’s shadowy role in their divorce. Nor was it the concept behind democratic communism.

  No, it was the democratic communists themselves. If their political ideas were rational, why were they personally so crazy?

  DCA people were the most irrational people Claude had ever met. He had arrived at his first Struggle Session hauling a laptop he had loaded with graphs and charts, expecting to collaborate on designing algorithms for economic planning and to explore social mechanisms for implementing a rational society.

  But none of the other members at the Struggle Sessions seemed to care the slightest about the future society they wanted to build. They never talked about the future at all, except in the vaguest terms he could never pin down. In fact, they never talked about any subject in a rational way. They were the most subjective and self-absorbed of all the people he had ever met, even in academia, where subjectivity and self-absorption reign supreme.

  He could hardly get a sentence out of his mouth without someone accusing him. Take the subject of women. What difference did it make how many women studied engineering? How was that rationally related to anything? He supposed under democratic communism women would be free to become engineers if they liked or do something else if they liked to do that instead.

  There was one harpy who hated him on sight, an Advanced Feminist Studies major named Nancy
Stribling. At his first Session, when she found out he was a Professor of Engineering, she peppered him with questions about the “role of women in engineering.”

  When Claude guessed women were still a minority of engineering students, as they had been as far back as he remembered, Stribling blamed him. Somehow it was Claude’s fault so many women were indifferent to the second law of thermodynamics, which by the way it turned out Stribling had never heard of.

  Stribling demanded to know whether his paltry few women students were getting better grades than the male students. Rivelle had no idea; he had never looked for breakdown by sex. Everyone in the room was agog. What about his commitment to inclusion and diversity?

  Then in total sincerity Claude made Stribling what he meant as a supportive offer. If she was concerned about the number of women in engineering, why didn’t she study engineering herself? He offered in all kindness to use his valuable time to tutor her personally. He would make every possible effort to help her. If she applied herself, and with the personal support of a leading mathematician such as himself, there was no way she could fail.

  She burst into tears and jumped up and fled the room.

  Not even his intense exploration of Fourier Analysis had equipped Claude Rivelle to handle Nancy Stribling. Everyone shook their heads and glared at him like he was a wife beater, which he was definitely not, although Shelly had hinted as much in her divorce filings.

  The more Struggle Sessions Claude participated in, the more he came to see them as power trips among competing egos. And the chief power tripper was Soren Pafko, a man Claude had come to hate, not only for his fanatic ideas but for the cruel personal way he expressed them.

  The only permissible precision to which Pafko would admit was precision in personal pronouns, which despite Claude’s adept mathematical mind, had lately begun multiplying to the point Claude couldn’t keep track—which of course gave Pafko ever more blunders to seize on. Which Claude now suspected was the point of the personal pronoun proliferation in the first place.

  After the Stribling fiasco, Pafko sneered openly at Claude and argued with everything Claude said. Pafko denied there were any right answers or even a knowable physical reality at all, which led Claude to ask if Pafko truly believed such a thing, how they could ever hope to plan a real-world economy in the democratic communist future, to which Pafko replied with a quotation from some French philosopher named Derrida, which Claude labeled “gobbledygook,” at which point Pafko immediately pounced on him as a racist for using a term Pafko said was a white supremacist slur against Asians, at which point a confused Claude answered that most of his best students were Asian-Americans, except for a smattering of Scandinavians and one Jewish woman—in fact, the very same Deirdre Katzenberger who had come to a few recent Sessions—although he was so rattled he called her a “Jewish girl,” which drew snickers and hisses and yet more disgusted head-shaking from the room.

  Claude had no idea what word he had used that Pafko was calling racist. It took everybody forty minutes to explain it to him and even then he didn’t really get it. He just pretended to understand and apologized, which somehow only made matters even worse.

  Just yesterday, Claude had discovered that Shelly had been shacking up with Pafko not only before their divorce, but even before Shelly had convinced Claude to join the DCA.

  Shelly had taken alimony and the house. Too defeated for the hassle of renting an apartment, Claude began to sleep on the couch in his office.

  He filled his short nights with dreams of escaping his dismal existence. He spent long days surfing websites about tropical islands.

  When the Administrative Assistant Elinor came by to discuss campus business, she noticed a Barbados website on his computer screen. It turned out she had been to Barbados and was crazy about it. She gave him a colorful glossy brochure.

  Smitten, he began collecting Barbados brochures. He spread them over his desk and leafed through them for hours when he should have been preparing for class or grading exams. The colorful photos enticed him into dreams of palm trees and sunny beaches and fun beautiful women who recognized and appreciated the fact that he was at heart a good and decent man.

  Elinor had wonderful things to say about swimming naked in the Caribbean and the big feasts and the Bajan rum, which she told Claude was the best rum in the world. He couldn’t judge; he had never tasted rum.

  It was now October. Another endless brutal Minnesota winter threatened. If Claude was out of his house anyway, he might as well spend the upcoming months someplace warm and sunny.

  Elinor told him that Bajans—that’s what people in Barbados called themselves—spoke English and were friendly and well-disposed to new arrivals. She gave him a Bajan CD of Soca-Reggae songs, which he played over and over on an old boom box she also gave him.

  At night, when the building was empty, he cranked up the volume and danced in secret in his office. He studied YouTube videos to work on dance moves. He came to admire the precision of Bajan dancing and music, whose polyrhythms reminded him of the Fibonacci Sequence.

  But how could he escape? Where would he get the money? One night, as he practiced his bogle move and heel-and-toe in his office, he recalled an ambition of his youth.

  All mathematicians knew that whoever proved the Grundl Hypothesis would win a five-million-dollar prize. In grad school, Claude had toyed with the venerable math problem and come up with an approach he thought might do the trick, but, discouraged by an advisor and suffering from a lack of self-confidence, he had set it aside. After that, pressures of career and personal obligations had forced him down safe well-worn paths.

  With five million dollars in the bank, Claude could breeze out of Ojibwa City and never grade another innumerate exam answer again.

  Of course, proving the Grundl Hypothesis was incredibly challenging. Hence the big money. But Claude remembered the starting point he had once discarded. It was an unusual idea, maybe even brilliant, maybe too brilliant, he wasn’t sure.

  Claude’s old high-school classmate Boogaard was now teaching mathematics at the University of Chicago. Claude trusted Boogaard’s judgment and discretion. Claude wrote a two-page hardcopy draft—in his world of engineers and mathematicians he couldn’t trust anything electronic—in which he summarized his idea and asked Elinor to overnight the paper document to Boogaard. She did, and Boogaard messaged him back with a discreet thumbs-up and go-ahead to proceed on his idea, which Boogaard assured him really was brilliant and a potential path to the proof.

  All mathematicians know that the path from the beginning of an idea to its final fully elaborated proof is thorny and difficult. With his free time limited by teaching and other personal responsibilities, his quest might take Claude many fruitless years. It had taken even the great Einstein years of struggles and backtracking to develop the equations for his General Theory of Relativity.

  And what if someone else already had the same idea? Boogaard had seemed to hint Claude should hurry. Maybe Boogaard knew something. Claude could be in a race with someone somewhere who might cross that finish line and beat him out of that five million dollars. Something like that almost happened to Einstein.

  Claude abandoned all his Ojibwa College duties and focused on proving the Grundl hypothesis. When Elinor or anyone else asked him anything about any of his job duties, Claude simply nodded and mumbled affirmative things until the person went away. Eventually they did.

  23 Soren’s Hope

  Soren spent the day after he met Abarca in his office, fidgeting and imagining new possibilities. When Elinor asked him a few questions about an upcoming test, he snapped at her. Why was she troubling him with petty details?

  He weighed both his auxiliary phones in his hands and considered calling Flo or Tania, but then put them down. He had an itch neither they nor any of the others could scratch. Out of nowhere, the big chance he craved suddenly loomed as an immediate practical possibility and now, after only one day, it was already taking too long to happen.


  Soren Pafko was never going to satisfy his ambitions for himself just by helping make a revolution. He needed to lead the revolution. Nothing less could appease his sense of his own importance and his own centrality to the universal scheme of things, an awareness that had gripped his thinking since he began to think at all.

  Even back in grade school he had become aware he could get other boys and girls to think what he wanted and to say what he wanted and to do what he wanted.

  With that awareness came a feeling of power. As a teenager, when Soren fantasized masses of demonstrators storming the French king’s Versailles or the Czar’s Winter Palace, he dreamed himself out in front, fist held high, leading the frenzied mob over the barricades and up the high marble steps. When he imagined tens of thousands gathered in some vast stadium to hear the thrilling words that would inspire them to colossal deeds of social transformation, Soren was stage center at the podium, high in front, addressing not only his contemporaries but all the future historians who would marvel at the power of his thought.

  Soren had a way with words and ideas. Better than any contemporary American he knew about, he would explain to his followers how to overturn the oppressive systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and cisnormative patriarchy. Like a captain, he would guide the ship of political revolution through dangerous ideological shoals, hewing to historically tested navigational principles, harpooning ideological opponents with iron wit and skewering them with steel darts of stainless logic.

  The American Lenin. The Great Helmsman. Fidel and Che. Mao and Ho. All in one single man. And because Soren would be the man, the man to lead the overthrow of the United States of America, the greatest superpower of all history and the number one evildoer on the planet, in the end they’d acknowledge him the greatest revolutionary of them all.

  But as Soren’s actual life ambled along the tracks of academic advancement from graduate school to tenured professorship to committee chairs and deanships, the worn ruts down which so many mediocrities preceded him, the gap between his early expectations and his current reality gaped wider each year.