A Universe of Sufficient Size

by Miriam Sved

  Illy and her mother and daughter are left in a reverberant silence. Illy forces herself to look directly at Eszter, to gauge the level of betrayal. She’d had no intention of telling her mother that they’d actively scouted out the retirement home; that reality level was meant to be eased into: first the brochure she left in the guest room, which her mother has no doubt studied, then perhaps a prearranged ‘accidental’ drive past the leafy grounds of Tranquillity Gardens, then a ‘first’ visit together.

  Eszter meets her eyes but her face is shuttered, closed for business, the wrinkled seam of her lips pressed firm. Silence: the betrayal will earn Illy more silence.

  Zoe stretches deliberately and says again, ‘I’d better go,’ but Eszter is the one who stands up in a series of creaky unfolding movements. She shuffles slowly out of the room without looking back at Illy, and a minute later they hear the soft click of her bedroom door. No slamming histrionics for Eszter; she is a pro.

  Zoe looks at her mother. ‘Oops, did Dad just drop you in the shit?’

  Illy forces a laugh. ‘It’s fine. She just needs time to get used to the idea.’

  Zoe raises her fine eyebrows. ‘Maybe if everyone in this family was a little more open about everything people wouldn’t get hurt.’

  Illy considers her daughter – her broad, dramatic face, all Russell’s and her own features somehow rearranged with so much expressive potential. The thought comes to her that even if Zoe is right about this cult of openness, everyone sharing everything including each other, it is too late for the rest of them. The secret keepers, the shadow dwellers. The thought is weighted with melancholy, and something else: a syrupy gut-level longing. The image of bare-chested Carrum is there suddenly, emerging from the haze of her dream consciousness. Her face feels hot; she starts moving around, clearing away breakfast dishes.

  Zoe shrugs and says, ‘See you later, I guess,’ and leaves her alone in the kitchen.

  When Illy goes back to the bedroom the notebook is still there; she has not dreamed it. Its musty solidity radiates some half-legible message of failure. The notebook is the only remaining unmentionable in the house. Illy doesn’t even know what it contains, but she feels obscurely as though her mother has already won with it. With a sense of defeated resignation, she sits down to read.

  No-one shall expel us from this paradise!

  Sydney, 2007

  The text from Max reads, What did the bitch DO to you?

  The guy at the next desk swivels his body to give Josh a dirty look: they are in the quiet study section of the library. Which is why Josh has the phone set to buzz rather than ring.

  What do you mean? he writes back, and stares at the phone for further signs from the mysterious nebula of his friend. He assumes Max is talking about Bethany. Bethany dumped him, that’s what she did; but Max already knows that.

  When no further signs are forthcoming, Josh turns back to the computer and tries to find where he was up to in the article about small world networks. It’s not the kind of thing he is used to reading: all about who did what when, a historical review. He reads fast, scanning for Kalmar’s name. It doesn’t take him long – early on, before there was even a discipline called small world theory, there were random graphs, and the article mentions a paper by Pali Kalmar. Josh is only hazily aware of what he is looking for; he’ll know it when he finds it. His pulse picks up as he runs through the reference list for Kalmar’s paper.

  The phone buzzes again. I mean, Max writes, it’s clear that Bethany has sapped your vital strength. Drained your juices. Flattened your fro. Dude, wtf are you doing at the LIBRARY?

  Josh’s hand goes to his hair, which is, as usual, flattened to within an inch of its life. He looks around furtively, wondering if anyone he knows has seen him at the LIBRARY. Then he considers the message, unsure how to play it: there are too many flanks to defend. Eventually he decides to ignore the library one (he hasn’t told Max anything about his Pali Kalmar project and doesn’t plan to) and focuses on the part that seems most crucially undermining. No way, man, he writes, I’m not even thinking about Bethany anymore. I’ve got bigger stuff going on.

  He sends it off on its circuitous route to Max, who is just a stone’s throw from campus at his apartment; Josh could stand outside the library stacks and shout messages to him.

  He goes back to looking for his link to Kalmar. He finds the paper in the reference list and clicks into one of the library databases: ‘On the Evolution of Random Graphs’. It is remarkably easy to excavate through sixty years of research and pull up this relic; it loads instantly on his screen.

  He scans through the article – the formation of a random graph as a stochastic process, edges and vertices floating free, all abstract applications – until he finds this: The evolution of random graphs may be considered as a (rather simplified) model of the evolution of certain real connection communication-nets, e.g. the railway-road or electric network system of a country or some other unit, or of the growth of structures of inorganic or organic matter, or even of the development of social relations.

  There it is: the development of social relations. Pali Kalmar and his old guard looked for order in abstractions, or maybe electricity grids or railways systems or even cellular networks. Josh will carry the search forward into the new universe; he will find, or make, beautiful patterns of interconnecting nodes on the internet. He feels something expanding beneath his skin; he would like to call it destiny. He is linked through the generations, intellectually and maybe in other ways, to Pali Kalmar.

  Max texts: Tell me of these bigger things, my big-thinged friend. Come over.

  Josh feels the disapproving stare of his desk-neighbour. After a moment of indecision, he gives himself a little shake. He saves a copy of the random graphs paper to his uni email, stuffs his things into his backpack and flips the bird to the guy’s back on his way out.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ Max says, packing the cone of the bong pinioned between his knees, ‘that bitch Bethany is cold.’

  Josh makes a noncommittal noise.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Max goes on, ‘there’s something wrong with her.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Josh says. He wants to stop talking about Bethany. ‘I’m not playing her games anymore.’

  ‘Amen, brother. Bitches.’

  One of the many student groups that Max attends and holds functionary powers within is the Feminist Student Collective. Josh once heard him make an impassioned case to an avid circle of listeners, mostly women, about the need to dissolve the imprisoning structures of patriarchy. Josh, not understanding the rules, is able to observe and assimilate many contradictory variables about his friend, like his enthusiasm for both Marxism and the stock market. He suspects that feminists shouldn’t say bitches and fucking bitches as much as Max does, but there is something thrilling about having the full picture, the uncensored inconsistent mass of Max that the Feminist Student Collective is blind to, and the Queer Coalition on Campus, and the student arms of both the Greens and the Labor Party.

  Max is doing uni in a completely different way to Josh, a way Josh wasn’t previously aware could be done. Josh doesn’t know if he attends any classes for his arts degree – they never seem to get in the way of his regular work of joining student groups, fucking and networking. He knows everyone; he seems to have made a serious name in student politics by orchestrating the run for SRC president of Fuzzypants, an unidentified engineering student permanently dressed in a bear costume. He claims to already have the Labor Party – the real-world off-campus one – courting him to do ‘youth policy stuff’. And, of course, there are the girls. And, of course, the girls include Jasmine.

  ‘I’ve tried to make Jaz see that there’s something NQR about her mate,’ Max goes on, still packing the cone fastidiously. ‘Probably a lesbian. But you know what Jaz is like: no idea when someone’s taking advantage of her. And they’ve been friends forever and ever an
d ever,’ in a high, mocking voice. ‘So my opinion doesn’t count for shit. It’s only precious Bethany’s feelings that matter. Doesn’t matter how she’s treated you, my good mate. She was probably just using you to get to Jasmine or to me.’

  There is much in this that Josh is not sure he agrees with – even if he were a hundred per cent comfortable with the characterisation of fucking bitch Bethany, he is not sure about the version of himself tied up in it, the hapless deer in her headlights. But there is also Max’s collusive tone, and the good mate bit, and the fact that while he was speaking he handed Josh the bong to take the first hit – not necessarily a great thing in itself (Josh has been unable to convince himself to enjoy smoking; the first drag still comes with a rasping oesophageal pain that he has to push through quickly to prevent an embarrassing coughing fit), but poignant as a gesture. Josh spends almost as much time thinking about Max’s rising esteem for him as Bethany’s waning, and sometimes the seesawing relation between the two seems almost like a good deal, regular sex aside. Of the eight months that he and Max have been proper friends (Josh can date the beginning precisely: an evening a few weeks after he started seeing Bethany, a party all four of them attended where a particularly nasty fight took place between Max and Jasmine that Josh was on hand to bitch to about), only the last three months have heralded this kind of progress.

  Josh punches the bong, pulling past the first convulsive spasm of resistance, holding on and hoping his face isn’t going too red.

  ‘Good weed?’ says Max, and Josh grunts in the affirmative and immediately plays the exchange over in his head, where the world is already starting to scatter and refract. Good weed? As though Josh’s opinion of the weed matters. Josh is a person with opinions about weed. These are moments with Max that need to be savoured, because you never know how long they might last or when they might come again. The social world of geeks that Josh has been raised up out of was much more boring than the aubergine-coloured cave of Max’s apartment, illuminated by Max’s charisma and by the changing energy of whole different crowds, whole zeitgeists that blow in and out. (Last week there was a heavy metal band that Max invited over for beers after they played at Manning. Another time there was a group of role-players in exacting medieval costume whom Max said he needed for some student council political manoeuvring; he plied them with red wine and mocked them mercilessly after they left.) The geek social milieu was also, it has to be said, a lot less confusing. The rules were pretty basic – the main one was just to show up to provide safety in numbers – and, the members being sticklers for process, they never changed the rules without first letting everyone know (when it was decided, for instance, that Game Boy usage at school would be rotated among the group, to diversify the risk of bullying-related property theft, or when they decided that the Classics Society was worth joining, a merger of the maths geeks with the gay geeks for common OHS benefits). In Max’s social world, conditions can change overnight, or sometimes multiple times over the course of the day, without anyone bothering to tell you how or why the change has come about. Josh might start the day as Max’s official good mate whose opinion on weed is valued, and by lunchtime he’ll be invisible, a non-person whom Max will consider with surprise and bemusement if Josh tries to get his attention. Something about this inconsistency drives Josh wild with platonic desire. He basks in the fickle rays of Max’s attention. Good weed? He lets go of the noxious breath he has been holding on to.

  Max is packing the cone again. ‘So, I figured I’d help you out with Bethany,’ he says. ‘Put in a good word with Jaz. You know how the two of them are always, like, yada yada yada.’ Gesturing in the air, his two hands gossiping snappily at each other. ‘This was last night, we were hanging out at Manning and there was some kind of terrible folky band playing. I spent the whole night – or, like, at least half an hour – trying to talk to Jaz about you. I’d say something about how you’re such a brainiac, how you know all this obscure stuff about the internet or whatever. I even said something about how awesome your Jewfro is.’ (Josh reaches up again in reflex nervousness.) ‘And she kept shutting me down. She’s pretending to be listening so closely to this awful band, or she’s suddenly so interested in the bar menu and what do I think about the chips, do they come with chicken salt, and maybe she should go vegetarian anyway. And eventually she says she has to go home to study.’ His face twisting with exaggerated incredulity. ‘What the fuck, right? Jasmine literally never studies. In all the time I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her study. I’m not even sure if she’s actually officially studying anymore. So I was like, What is going on with you? And she said – get this …’ He breaks off to smoke, eyebrows raised over the bong, holding Josh in the moment as the buds sizzle. When he speaks again it is in a crackly falsetto, little gusts of smoke coming out with each word. ‘She says, I don’t really want to talk about this. Bethany is my oldest friend and you’re putting me in an invidious position.’ He blows the last of the smoke out with an incredulous little pah. ‘An invidious position. She actually said that.’

  He stops and looks at Josh, still holding the bong in one hand. Josh makes a knowing noise, a smokeless imitation of Max’s pah, and Max says, ‘invidious,’ again, as though the word is loaded with horrors. Then he says, ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

  Josh laughs. ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m saying, it’s pure Bethany. You’re putting me in an invidious position?’ The squeaky falsetto sounds nothing like Jasmine (whose speaking voice is quite lovely and lilting, unlike her singing voice). ‘Does that sound like Jaz to you? I’ll tell you who it sounds like: your fucking ex. So I’m, like, That girl is in your head, you know? They’ve gotten together and Bethany, knowing that you and I are tight’ – he holds up two fingers twined around each other in illustration of their tight brotherhood, which sets off a flicker of elation in Josh’s brain and an urge to giggle in his chest – ‘Bethany has been in Jaz’s ear, like, Don’t say anything to Max ’cos we don’t want it getting back to Josh, and they’ve probably had a good bitch about us, like the guys this and that. Fucking man-haters.’ He sits back into the curvy depth of the armchair and, still holding the bong, makes a flourishing motion in the air as if to say, You see how things stand.

  Josh can see a number of different angles on how things stand. The most compellingly attractive one is that Max and Jasmine have fallen out – Max, in fact, has actually picked a fight with Jasmine – over him. Sort of, in a way, defending him, his bong buddy, his good mate. This interpretation is illuminated from within by a warm glow, but glowering alongside it is a darker, semi-articulated thought, an itchy unease about the whole situation with Jasmine and Bethany. He is more than happy to take this gift horse and ride it all the way into a broad and generalised bitching session with Max, but on the other hand he doesn’t really want to get into the specifics of the break-up, and of the actual fight he’d had with Bethany, the subject of which he has to assume that Bethany has passed on to her friend. Obviously it would be less than ideal, and might jeopardise this new plain of mateship between himself and Max, if his friend found out that Josh got dumped partly because Bethany suspects him of having some sleazy obsession with Jasmine. Jaz. Although Josh would actually quite like to talk to Max about this – the injustice of the situation, the sheer bloody-minded wrongness of Bethany (his interest in Jasmine is purely academic, mostly purely academic): one of those supportive guy conversations that Max seems quite open to. The confusion of these contradictory impulses, combined with a dangerous weed-driven tidal rippling through his neural network, is perhaps what makes Josh sit back into the dark crevices of the sofa and say ponderously, as though this has been his plan all along: ‘Whatever, it doesn’t matter anyway, I’m sort of celebrating something. I’m actually pretty sure that I’m the secret grandson of one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century.’

  Even as Josh says it he is surprised and a bit alarmed at himself. He is not, in fac
t, pretty sure about this secret heritage. He hopes it might be true, of course, and feels like the idea has received a somewhat mystical bolster through his easy linking of himself and Kalmar in mathematical history. But really it’s just a theory he’s been toying with since the funeral; one of a few. And even if he was sure, it’s not the sort of thing he would normally bring up with Max. He’s not sure Max would understand the significance, not even confident that his friend – a public intellectual of a different breed, a streetwise humanities-type genius that Josh didn’t know existed until recently – would know who Pali Kalmar is, which Josh would find obscurely humiliating. And Josh has been scrupulous in keeping a safe distance between Max, along with everything Max represents, and his family with all its intrinsic weirdness.

  But Max sits forward, right on the edge of the velour armchair, and says, ‘Tell me more, my secret intellectual friend.’

  And Josh finds himself telling Max more. Telling him, in fact, everything he can think of, an uncensored stream of information that he can see from some corner in the engine room of his mind is inappropriately detailed. His grandmother’s early mathematical ambitions in Hungary, her detours through war and immigrant poverty, late-night scribblings about abstract geometry that eventually, finally, found their way into a late-life doctorate; and her husband, Josh’s official grandfather, and how he seemed able to keep her in some kind of indentured domestic servitude, despite the fact that she was more than capable of standing up for herself with anyone else, and actually was something of a bad-arse old lady in general. And then the old man’s decline into a nasty-tempered stranger and eventually a grunting vegetable, a decline that Josh’s whole family seemed unnecessarily involved in for the last couple of years, his sister Zoe showing off by going every week to the urinal-smelling old folk’s home to hold the old man’s unresponsive hand. Despite which it was Josh, the kind-of black sheep of the family (there is a slight hitch in his narrative drive when he says this, aware that even in the last year, with everyone on his back about ruining his future, he hardly qualifies as black sheep material, especially next to his freaky flaky sister), it was Josh, not Zoe, whom Nagymama opened up to at the funeral. A detour for narrative colour into what he hopes is the funny story of getting drunk with a geriatric in a stairwell, and then he gets to the part about Nagymama’s strange request, which is really the part of the story he should have started with, the only part that matters, and Max by now has pincered the final tiny buds of weed and is studying them intently, still nodding occasionally but not really into the story anymore. And Josh, who’d felt vaguely panicky at the beginning about the intensity of Max’s attention, has a needy urge to reclaim his place in Max’s spotlight, and gets all dramatic when he comes to the part about Kalmar and about Nagymama’s request.