Life After Genius

by M. Ann Jacoby

  Mead drops the postcard into his sock drawer and heads off to class.

  DR. ALEXANDER’S TEN-WEEK COURSE ENDS, leaving Mead hungry for more. As the other students race out of the room, in a hurry to begin their four weeks of freedom before the fall quarter gets under way, Mead lags behind. Approaching the professor as the man erases the chalkboard, Mead says, “So when do you think would be a good time for me to meet with you to discuss what I should do next?”

  Dr. Alexander does not answer, just keeps erasing. So Mead asks again. Louder this time. “Excuse me, professor? You said we could meet after I finished this course to discuss my curriculum. That you’d advise me.”

  Still nothing. What is wrong with the man, is he deaf? He never seemed to have trouble hearing any of the students’ questions in class but then no one ever asked that many because the professor was always so precise in his explanations.

  “Dr. Alexander?” Mead yells. “When should I come by your office?”

  The professor turns around. “Tell me, Mead, how would you apply the basic prime-finding process to all real numbers up to 701,000?”

  “That’s easy,” Mead says in a quieter voice. “With a pen, a pad of paper, and a list of the primes up to 829.”

  “That is correct,” Dr. Alexander says and sets down the eraser. “Meet me in my office next Monday at two and we’ll discuss the young Mead Fegley’s future.”

  THE PROFESSOR’S DOOR IS OPEN but his chair is empty. Mead checks his watch to see if perhaps he has arrived early but he hasn’t, he is right on time. Well, Dr. Alexander has to be around here somewhere. Mead saw his bicycle locked to the rack outside so he can’t have wandered far. Maybe he’s in the men’s room. Or up in Dr. Kustrup’s office turning down another request to retire. Uncomfortable with entering an empty office —with seeming propriety —Mead strolls down the hall to get a drink of water from the fountain, then glances at his watch again. Perhaps this is the wrong day. Maybe Mead is supposed to meet with the professor tomorrow. But even as he thinks this, he knows it isn’t true. This isn’t Mead’s fault; it’s Dr. Alexander’s. He probably forgot all about their meeting, seeing as how the man does not appear to be very fond of his advisory-type responsibilities. Maybe that’s why Dr. Kustrup assigned Mead to him: to put one more thorn in the old professor’s side, to try and annoy him into retirement.

  The phone on Dr. Alexander’s desk rings, startling Mead. It chimes four times before an answering machine picks up. “I’m not here right now,” the professor’s voice says, “which means I’m elsewhere. Leave a message if you must, or better yet, send a fax.” A loud dial tone is followed by a click as the machine shuts itself off.

  Mead is beginning to wonder if he should do the same. Send a fax. “I showed up at two and you weren’t here,” he could write. “So tell me, which paper do you think more strongly influenced Bernhard Riemann, Chebyshev’s First Result or Chebyshev’s Second Result? And why?”

  Mead glances at his watch a third time. It’s now ten after the hour. He’ll give the professor five more minutes and then he is leaving. The man may be a brilliant teacher but he sucks as a faculty advisor. Besides, Mead has better things to do with his time than stand around waiting for some head-in-the-clouds aging mathematician, who may or may not show up because he has little interest in being an advisor and even less interest in whether or not Theodore Mead Fegley of High Grove, Illinois, becomes a mathematician, to make an appearance. But then what? Mead will have no choice but to go back to Dr. Kustrup and ask for another advisor and Mead would rather switch majors than ask Dr. Stuckup Kustrup for any more help ever, and so he continues to wait.

  Someone inside of Dr. Alexander’s office coughs. Mead peers in through the open door but the chair behind the professor’s desk is still empty. Maybe Mead just imagined it. The cough. But then he hears it again. “Professor?” he says. “Is that you?”

  The old man’s head pokes up over the far side of his desk. A pale white crown sprouting a frazzled outgrowth of gray hair. “Mead. It’s about time you got here.”

  “What are you doing down on the floor? Are you all right?” Mead asks. “Do you need help getting up?” But when he steps around the desk, he sees that the professor is sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat, a pair of headphones wrapped around his neck. A portable tape player is sitting on the floor next to him.

  “I’m fine, Mead, but I was beginning to get worried about you. You’re late, you know.”

  “No, I’m not. I’ve been here for twelve minutes, standing outside your office. What is that, a relaxation tape?”

  “I guess you could call it that, or you could call it inspirational. I listen to it whenever I get in a rut trying to solve a problem. When I need to push my thinking in another direction. It’s Brahms. Are you a fan of Brahms, Mead?”

  “He’s okay, but I prefer Bach.”

  “Ah, Bach. He would’ve made a great mathematician.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he had an intuitive mind. All great men have intuitive minds.” Dr. Alexander rolls up his mat and stashes it behind the door, then gestures for Mead to take a seat in his guest chair. “Next time, Mead,” he says, “knock.”

  ANOTHER POSTCARD ARRIVES. From Detroit, Michigan, this time. With yet another photograph of yet another baseball stadium. “The weather is great,” Percy has scrawled across the back. “The fans are great. I pitched two more no-hit innings today but my shoulder is beginning to show some wear and tear. Thank god the season is almost over. My arm could use a rest. I could use a rest. Love, Percy.”

  The guy seems to be showing his first signs of stress. Mead tries not to get too excited about it though. Next season the golden boy will probably come back stronger than ever. Like always. Mead drops this postcard into his sock drawer, along with all the others, picks up his book bag, and heads over to Dr. Alexander’s office.

  ADDICTED. THAT IS THE ONLY WORD Mead can think of to describe what he is feeling. Stoned on math. Every time he discovers another theory or argument or conjecture related to the Riemann Hypothesis, he gets a head rush. Lately he has been forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, and he has been losing all track of time. Days merge into weeks merge into months. He has even missed a few classes. He showed up for philosophy only to find the classroom empty, the door locked. That’s how he discovered that it was Friday, not Tuesday. So he came back to the dorm to study. It’s quiet here during the day when everyone else is off to class, quieter even than the library. Plus, it never closes.

  The phone rings but Mead ignores it. The caller is probably trying to contact his new roommate. Pete’s replacement. Some vulgar boy by the name of Dave. The first time they met, the guy made a really original observation about how young Mead looks, then proceeded to brag about how many chicks he banged over the summer. They haven’t spoken since, except to say “Hey” when their paths inadvertently cross.

  The phone continues to ring, to the point of annoyance, so Mead finally picks up the receiver and says, “He’s not here.”

  “Teddy?” his father says. “Is that you?”

  “Oh. Hi, Dad. I thought the call was for my roommate. What’s up?”

  “I just got back from the railroad station. Did you miss your train?”

  “What train? What’re you talking about?”

  “Do you even know what day it is?”

  “Of course I do; it’s Thursday.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Should I be worried about you, Teddy?”

  “No, I’m fine. Why?”

  “It’s Christmas Eve, that’s why.”

  Addicted. That’s the word, all right. High as a kite on math.

  DR. ALEXANDER IS TAPPING HIS CHALK against the blackboard, deep in thought, relating a message in Morse code. “The field of Number Theory,” he says to Mead, “arose out of the sheer complexity of Riemann’s zeta function. It studies the statistical properties of the spacings between non-trivial zeros o
f the zeta function. That is, all zeros which sit on the critical line.” He studies the board some more and the matrices he has written on it along with their characteristic polynomials. He taps his chalk. “It is theorized,” he says, “that if one cannot discover exactly what is going to happen, that perhaps one can discover what on average is most likely to happen. It is more a physicist’s approach to problem-solving than a mathematician’s —less precise, but an area of study worth investigating because in Bernhard Riemann’s time there was no distinction between math and physics. He would have used both disciplines in his work.” The professor writes out an equation then hands the chalk to Mead. “I want you to generate some zeta zeros using this —it’s called the Riemann-Siegel formula —so you can familiarize yourself with his thought process.”

  It takes several minutes, and a good chunk of board, for Mead to calculate his first zeta zero, but he does it successfully.

  “Do another one,” Dr. Alexander says.

  And so Mead fills another chunk of board.

  “And another.”

  Mead calculates a third zeta zero along the bottom edge of the board, a fourth along the top edge.

  “You can use the eraser, you know,” Dr. Alexander says.

  And so Mead does and fills the board again. And again. And again.

  “It is theoretically possible,” Dr. Alexander says, “that the Riemann Hypothesis will one day be disproved by this very process, by discovering a zeta zero that does not sit on the critical line. That’s all it would take, you know. One zero. But attempting to find that zero, by the process you are now undertaking, will take more than your lifetime and mine put together.”

  Mead stops writing and turns around. “There must be a faster way to calculate them than this,” he says, “than doing each one by hand.”

  “As a matter of fact, there is. Tell me, Mead, are you free this evening?”

  DR. ALEXANDER GIVES MEAD DIRECTIONS to his home, puts him on a bus, and then, despite the below-freezing temperature, pedals off on his bicycle. Ten minutes later, Mead arrives at the address he wrote down. The professor’s green Schwinn is leaning against the side of a small Tudor house, a rusty old Volkswagen diesel Rabbit is sitting in the driveway, and a fresh layer of snow coats the front yard. Mead follows the professor’s footprints to the front door and knocks. A stout woman with a broad smile answers. “It’s so nice to finally meet one of my husband’s students,” she says, takes Mead by the arm, and leads him into the house. “You must be very special. My husband never brings his work home with him. You’re the first.” She then pats Mead on the hand and offers him a cup of hot chocolate, as if he were nine, and Mead accepts. A potbelly stove sits in the middle of the living room, which is pungent with the smell of cats, three of which are sleeping on a chaise longue upholstered in their fur. Mead’s mother would be horrified. A pigsty, she’d call the place. A house unfit for living, let alone entertaining. But Mead isn’t here to socialize.

  “It’s this way,” Dr. Alexander says and motions for Mead to follow him down a set of stairs to the basement.

  The smell of cat is even stronger down here where a litter box sits next to the furnace. The rest of the basement is crammed full of old furniture, like the second floor of Fegley Brothers, like the shed behind Uncle Martin’s house. “The wife’s hobby,” Dr. Alexander says, dismissing the furniture with a wave of his hand as he leads Mead past an armoire and a chiffonier to the far end of the subterranean room where, sitting on top of a workbench, is a contraption that looks vaguely like the inside of a watch, only much bigger and more complicated. Like something out of a mid-century science fiction movie.

  “This is it,” the professor says. “This is my zeta function machine.”

  On the wall above the machine are several mechanical drawings. The paper they have been drawn on is yellow with age, the transparent tape holding the paper in place edged in brown and bubbled in spots as if the drawings have hung here for years.

  “This looks a lot like the mechanical computing device Alan Turing set out to build back in the 1930s,” Mead says.

  “I see you’ve done your homework, Mead. But this isn’t simply like it, it is it.”

  Mead stares at Dr. Alexander, thinking the old man is trying to pull a fast one on him. A pop-quiz kind of thing. “It can’t be,” Mead says. “Alan Turing never finished it. He abandoned the project when World War II broke out.”

  Dr. Alexander sits down at his workbench. “Did I ever tell you where I was in the spring of 1938?”

  “No, but I read your entry in Who’s Who in America. You were at King’s College in Cambridge that year.”

  “That’s exactly right. Listening to a lecture given by Alan Turing. The man was convinced that the Riemann Hypothesis was false and had set out on a mission to find a zeta zero off the critical line. This machine was going to speed up his computing time exponentially. I was twenty-eight at the time and completely drawn in by the man’s charisma and enthusiasm. Spent two months of my life in the engineering department at King’s College cutting gear wheels for the Turing machine. When I later learned that he had abandoned the project, I decided to build one myself.”

  “Your secret project,” Mead says and Dr. Alexander raises his eyebrows. “Dr. Kustrup happened to mention that you were on sabbatical last year working on a secret project.” He runs his index finger over a gear wheel. “Does it work?”

  The professor scratches his head. “I’m still working out a few kinks.”

  “But there are electronic computers now, you know,” Mead says. “And they are said to work much faster.”

  “I know,” Dr. Alexander says. “It’ll be a race to the finish.”

  IT ISN’T UNTIL MEAD FINDS ANOTHER POSTCARD in his mailbox that he realizes six months have passed since the last one arrived. Not since last August. He’d forgotten all about them, quite honestly, and all about Percy. The photograph on this postcard, however, is not of a baseball stadium. It is a photograph of the Fegley Furniture Store taken several decades ago, shortly after Mead’s grandfather, Henry Charles Fegley, first opened the place. That’s him standing by the front door with his two young sons, Lynn and Martin. They are both wearing knickers —Mead’s dad and uncle —and squinting against the bright sun. Mead knows the postcard well, Fegley Brothers has been printing them up and giving them away as promotional pieces for decades. Mead flips the card over. “Looks like this is the team I’ll be playing with from now on,” Percy has written. “Missed you over Christmas. Try and make it home this summer!!! Love, Percy.”

  Mead calls home immediately. “What happened?” he asks his mother.

  “They didn’t re-sign him,” she says. “It had something to do with his being a free agent. Apparently they picked some lesser player over Percy because the boy was an officially sponsored player. Or at least that’s the way it was explained to me. No one talks about it. It’s kind of a sensitive subject.”

  “So how is he handling it? Being back home, I mean.”

  “He mopes around a lot but he’ll be fine. You should give him a call.”

  Mead knows that he should but, the thing is, he’s glad his cousin failed. Finally. He feels bad for Percy —he really does —but at the same time he doesn’t. And he’s afraid it might come across on the phone. That he’s glad. And so he doesn’t call.

  MEAD DOES NOT GO HOME over the summer either. It isn’t a conscious decision. He actually considers the option of taking a break, going home, and relaxing for a few months. Especially when he realizes that he has not been home in nearly two years. How did that happen? How did so much time go by so fast? Here he is, ready to commence on his third —and final —year of undergraduate study, his eighteenth birthday just around the corner, and yet it feels as if he just left home last month. As scary as that is to think about, at least Mead knows he has put the time to good use. He has studied hard, finding his true vocation in life and focusing on it to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps he should go home and vis
it with his cousin; let his mother show him off to all her friends. It has an appealing ring to it. But when Mead next thinks about it, summer has come and gone and the dorms start filling up with students once more.

  A CHEESEBURGER LANDS ON MEAD’S DESK with a thump, startling him. He looks up from his ruled legal pad and sees Forsbeck standing over him. “I brought you something to eat,” he says. “You haven’t been away from that desk all day. Did someone forget to tell you it’s Sunday? The day of rest?”

  “I’m not religious,” Mead says.

  “Forget religion, you need to kick back and relax, man, or you’re going to burn yourself out.”

  “I’m fine,” Mead says. “Thanks for the burger.”

  Forsbeck sits down on Mead’s bed. Shit. The guy wants to talk, to be friends. It happens every fall: new school year, new roommate. This time Mead has been stuck with a guy by the name of Charles Forsbeck, a transfer student from another university who is so far proving to be no different from Mead’s other roommates: a young man pumped up on testosterone who seems more interested in using his newfound freedom to explore the workings of a brassiere than the shelves of the library, who somehow manages to find the time to attend and pass all of his classes despite a weekend habit of beer-drinking, pot-smoking, and girl-chasing.

  Mead had a choice. He could have elected to take an apartment off campus. His father would have footed the bill. No problem. Only Mead had nobody with whom he wanted to rent this apartment. And he wasn’t about to get a place all on his own. He has no time —let alone any interest —in cooking and cleaning up after himself. As a matter of fact, if the campus cafeteria were not located between Epps Hall and the dorm, Mead might very well have succumbed to starvation months ago.