“I really didn't know what that meant. He explained to me that he'd switched the building designation from residential to a city-owned utility structure equipped with running water and a heating plant. He said there were hundreds of such structures around the city. I wouldn't receive any more bills—the city would pay for it directly.”
“What if someone came from the municipal authority to check out their property?”
“Early on there'd be workers dropping by with trucks full of supplies and equipment. Apparently the house was entered somewhere as ‘municipal storage.’ I told them it was part of the library system. Then they'd leave. Once or twice they'd express sympathy over my lack of cleaning and janitorial help. I told them if the library system had any more budget cuts we'd be burning books to heat the buildings. One fellow said that'd be no loss—the world was digital now. And like some kind of lowly collaborator I agreed with him! We all shared a mirthless laugh over it. No one's been back in years. By the time I thought I could pay something Stephen had disappeared. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't just come forward—they would take everything, all my books, Daniel. I keep expecting them to knock on my door. I keep expecting to be arrested.”
“But in the meantime no electric or gas or water bills?”
“Or sewer, or property taxes, or anything else. I've been living here free. I suppose that makes me a criminal, doesn't it?”
Daniel thought about it, shaking his head. “I'm not going to judge. I can see how this would have happened. You just wanted to keep your home. And your books, your things.”
“Daniel, if I lose my things there'll be nothing left of me.”
“Maybe you could donate what you have here to the library system you've pretended to be a part of. Or one of the museums. You could visit your collection there—it would be like housing it in a better place.”
“They're full—they have tons of the same things I have in their basements. They've no room, and no one wants to see what they already have. Besides, how can I trust someone at a museum to have the same priorities I have about what should be kept? These things provide a clear record of who and what we were, how it was for us during that time. A whole world could be disappearing right from under us and most people wouldn't even realize it!”
“But Antonio, I spend my days, and some of my nights, analyzing the data stream, taking in this endless flow of events and implications. I think that's just what worlds do. They disappear.”
There was a loud knock on the door, the splitting wood quaking in the jamb. Antonio jumped up, startled. “No one ever comes here,” he said shakily. “You were the first in such a long time.”
Daniel followed him into the entranceway. Antonio cracked open the door to a uniformed officer from the Health Department. “What do you want?”
“Mr. Ascher? Could you open the door, please? I need to speak to you.”
When Antonio hesitated Daniel whispered, “You'd better do what he says.”
He opened the door. The young man in uniform stood in front of a phalanx of workers in hazard suits and yellow visors. “We've received a notice of concern, sir. We're going to have to come in and look around.”
Antonio looked up at Daniel. “Can they do this?”
“It's the Health Department. All they need is notice from a concerned party.”
As the officer passed him Daniel could see that he was probably only a few years older than Lex. Tendrils of spongy scar tissue ran along his jaw and down his neck, indicating that he had been one of the very lucky ones from the last pandemic. “Who called?” Daniel asked him.
The officer paused, scanning the entrance hall, the rooms beyond. He turned and looked at Daniel appraisingly. “All I can tell you is it was a concerned recent visitor to the premises. And with good reason to call, I would say.”
Daniel came home late and went straight into his office. He was still there when Lex knocked, then entered. “Are you okay, Dad?”
“I'm fine. I did use the mask, and I touched very little. It was just a long afternoon and evening.”
“How about Mister Ascher? Is he going to be okay?”
Daniel looked at his son, who gazed miserably back. “He'll be okay. I'll help him as best I can. And he'll end up in a better situation, I'm sure. Sooner or later, something had to give.” He paused. “I think everybody did their best at what they felt they had to do. He put that educational ephemera for you in a bag, by the way. He didn't forget.”
“Could you hold on to it for me for a while?”
* * * *
Antonio never got back into his house, and the vast majority of his accumulation was disposed of. A few items went to the central library, and Daniel made sure that Antonio got a couple of dozen vintage books returned from the Health Department after a thorough inspection, including a first edition copy of Where the Wild Things Are, in less than Good condition. The books looked very nice in Antonio's new apartment, which he described to Daniel as “where a retired professor from the last century might have stayed, a warm and well-lit place for rest, study, and contemplation of things long passed.”
Daniel never told Antonio about his son's art project. A few months after Antonio had to leave his house Daniel was passing by Lex's room—uncharacteristically the door had been left open. Daniel walked inside, and was reminded again how each new generation will decide on its own what is important, what must be saved, and what will be thrown away.
A reflection inside the still whiteness of the almost barren room caught his attention, and he went to the wall where a large construction had been mounted.
It was the flatware from the People's Mall, stacked and layered and overlapped to make a face: juxtaposed patterns creating curls in the hair, the nose defined by the edge of a spoon, the flatness of knives making planes and shadows, fork tines crossed in intricate cross-hatching. It was evident how his son had weathered the pieces individually, scratching the metal and—a first for this artist—using paints and chemical washes to dull, highlight, and color to create age, the wearing away of decades, and the first symptoms of disease. But also character.
If he took a step back, this was obviously a portrait of the book dealer Antonio Ascher, in all his seriousness, his tendency toward annoyance, and a sadness of long residency. But merely a step to the side made the image of his old friend disappear, and only these cast away objects remained.
Copyright © 2011 by Steve Rasnic Tem
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: THE COUNTABLE
by Ken Liu
Ken Liu has worked as a programmer and a lawyer. He lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and their daughter. More about Ken can be found at kenliu.name. The author's stories have appeared in F&SF, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, among other places. His first story for us draws inspiration from pure mathematics and . . .
This is what most people would consider a rational moment, David thought.
The interrogation room looked the way it did in TV shows: grey everywhere, bare except for the table and folding chairs, harsh, bright fluorescent lights. But on TV they never mentioned the smell of antiseptic floor wash, trying but failing to cover up the lingering odor of all the desperate, sweaty bodies that have passed through the room.
The lady lawyer on the other side of the table was talking to his mother, who was sitting next to him and crying softly. His mother probably thought what they were discussing was very important and the lawyer's advice sensible, but David wasn't terribly interested in what she had to say. From time to time, bits of their conversation fell into his awareness, and he let them drift along, like leaves on a pond.
. . .psychological evaluation. . .keep him in the juvenile system. . .
He didn't look at the lawyer's face. He seldom found anything useful in people's faces. Instead, he was interested in the buttons on her blue blazer. There were three large buttons, all black. The top and bottom ones were
round, the middle one a square.
. . . a little odd. . .quiet, shy, gentle. . .
He was not anxious. He hadn't been afraid when the sirens grew louder and louder and his mother opened the front door and the flashing lights from the beacons spilled into the living room, where he was sitting on the couch, waiting. His mother had been terrified and confused, and the baby, sensing her anxiety, had begun to cry again. He had cradled the baby, and tried to explain to her that there was no reason to cry. Most moments were not rational, he whispered to her, and this moment was no different.
. . . undiagnosed. . .high-functioning. . .pattern of abuse. . .
The designer had probably intended the square button to be the same size as the circular ones. That's an old problem: squaring the circle. He wondered if the design was meant as a joke, but doubted it. Other people's humor had always confused him. Perhaps the designer was interested in the problem the same way he was, as a statement about the beauty of math glimpsed through a veil.
. . .petition. . .pretrial hearing. . .justifiable defense. . .expert witnesses. . .
It was not possible to square the circle, of course. To do that you needed the square root of pi. But pi was not rational. It was not even merely irrational. It was not constructible. It was not algebraic, so it was incapable of serving as the root of some polynomial snaking about the Cartesian plane. It was transcendental. Yet for thousands of years people pursued the fool's errand, trying to achieve the impossible.
He was tired of pursuing the impossible, of trying to make the world rational.
Almost all of the numbers in the world were transcendental, just like pi, but most people paid no attention to them. They were preoccupied with the rational, though they were merely scattered like infinitesimal islands in the transcendental sea.
His mind was drifting away from the present, and he let it. These supposedly rational moments held little interest for him. They made up such a small part of life.
* * * *
As long as he could remember, he had trouble with other people. He thought he understood what they said, but it often turned out that he hadn't, not really. Words sometimes meant the opposite of what the dictionary said they meant. People got angry with him, seemingly for no reason, even though he was listening with all his attention and speaking as carefully as he could. He could not make himself belong. He was angry and frustrated that the world did not seem to be rational, did not make sense to him the way it did to others. And then he would get into fights that he could not win, because he did not understand why he was fighting.
“What does that mean?” Betty asked. “You're saying something is wrong with David?” David felt his mother's hand tightening around his. He was glad that the principal's words did not make sense to his mother either.
“Well, nothing wrong. Not exactly. David has demonstrated difficulty in establishing empathy with his peers. He takes everything so literally that it's—we just think he should be evaluated properly.”
“Nothing is wrong with him,” Betty said. “He's shy. That's all. His father is dead. That will mess anyone up for a bit.”
Gradually it dawned on him that people carried on two conversations at once: one with words, the other with seemingly inconsequential signals—the overtones in the voice, the angle of a tilt of the head, the direction of an eye glance, the crossing of legs, the fluttering of fingers, the pursing of lips and the wrinkling of the nose. He was deaf to this language beneath the language, oblivious to the rules that everyone took for granted.
Painstakingly, he formulated explicit axioms and deduced complex theorems about this other, unspoken language. It took him years of trial and error to figure out a system of rules that seemed to work. Following them, he did not draw attention to himself. He could appear to be trying, but not too hard. This made middle school a safe place, for the most part.
Ideally, he would have liked to get B's in everything so that he would fade into the anonymity of the crowd, but that was very difficult in math. He had always liked math for its certainty, its rationality, its precise sense of right and wrong. He could not bear to make a deliberate error on a math test. It seemed a betrayal. The best he could do was to erase the answers to a few problems on each test after he worked them out.
“Please stay after class, David,” Ms. Wu said as the bell rang. Some of the students looked back at him briefly, wondering what kind of trouble he was in. But the room quickly emptied, leaving David alone at his desk.
Ms. Wu was here just for the semester as a student teacher. Young, pretty, the students liked her. She wasn't yet too cynical to be curious about her students.
She walked over to his desk and put his latest test in front of him. “You had the right answers on the last page, but you erased them. Why?”
David examined the paper. It was empty. He wondered how she knew. He was always careful to write lightly and erase vigorously, leaving as little impression behind as possible, the way he did everything in life.
“When I walked around during the test, I saw that you had written down the right answers. You were done long before the rest of the class. Then you just sat there, staring into space until half the class turned their tests in. I saw you erasing right before you came up.”
David said nothing. He liked the way Ms. Wu's voice washed over him. He imagined it as the graph of a polynomial, smoothly rising up and then falling down. The pauses in her speech were the roots, where the graph crossed the x-axis.
“It's not a bad thing to be interested in something, you know.” She put her hand on his shoulder. She smelled of fresh laundry, of summer flowers. “To be good at something.”
It had been a long time since anyone paid attention to him without something bad happening. He didn't even know he missed it.
* * * *
David had one picture of his father, taken on the day his father was graduating from high school. The cap and gown seemed a few sizes too large on his slight frame. His fine features were still boyish, the bridge of the nose thin and delicate. He was not smiling into the camera. His eyes seemed frightened, focused on something infinitely far away. Perhaps he was thinking about David, then still barely visible under Betty's dress. Or perhaps he was seeing a vision of the truck with failed brakes that would mow him down as he walked home from his job as a filing clerk at night five years later.
Those eyes were blue, with long lashes, just like David's.
Seeing those eyes always enraged Jack, whether he was sober or not. “You're a goddamn wuss and a sneak, just like your dad.”
So David knew not to look Jack in the eye, and he always tried to look away when Jack was around. Some nights that worked. But not tonight.
“Look at me,” Jack said. They were having dinner. Betty was feeding the baby on the couch. It was just the two of them at the table. The TV blared in the corner with the evening news.
“I feed you, put clothes on you, and keep a roof over your head. The least I can ask for is some respect. Sit up and look at me when I'm talking to you.”
David did as he asked. He tried to keep his face expressionless and his eyes focused on something beyond his stepfather. He counted the seconds until Jack would explode. In a way he was relieved. The worst part about each night was the anticipation, the uncertainty of not knowing what sort of mood Jack would be in when he got home and what he would do. But now the wait was over. All he had to do was to endure.
“Don't you dare sneer at me, you little shit. You're asking for a beating.”
Betty took the baby into the bedroom. She always left when Jack's voice took on that particular tone.
David wished that he had his stepfather's height, his thick arms, his fat knuckles and flat nose, a nose that could take a punch. He wished that he had claws and sharp teeth.
* * * *
“Georg Cantor was the first man to think rigorously about infinity,” Ms. Wu said to the room.
The Math Club was David's secret. He took a risk in being here. Joinin
g any club revealed something about yourself, made you vulnerable if your mission was to fade away, to leave no trace. He could imagine how Jack would taunt him if he found out.
“You think you're smart, don't you?” He imagined Jack's leer, wet, yellow teeth, and alcohol on his breath. “Just like your dad. Look how far his smarts got him when he couldn't keep his dick in his pants.”
“He thought about the size of infinity,” Ms. Wu said. “It's difficult for human beings to understand infinity, but Cantor made it possible to glimpse it and hold it, if only for a second, in your mind.
“Which do you think is bigger: the infinite set of all positive rational numbers, or the infinite set of all natural numbers?
“It might be natural to think that there are many more positive rational numbers than natural numbers. After all, there are an infinite number of rational numbers just between 0 and 1. And there are infinitely many intervals between each successive pair of natural numbers. Infinity times infinity must be bigger than just infinity alone.
“Cantor's great insight was that this was not true. There is a way to map each natural number to a positive rational number such that you can see that the sets are the same size.”
* * * *
“A positive rational number takes the form p/q, where p and q are both natural numbers. By following the arrows in the diagram, we can be sure that every positive rational number will eventually be enumerated in our zig-zag path across the plane (skipping over any repeats): first, 1/1, second, 2/1, third, 1/2, fourth, 3/1, fifth, 1/3, sixth, 4/1, seventh, 3/2, eighth, 2/3, and ad infinitum. By counting, we map each natural number to a positive rational. Even though it seems that the universe of rational numbers would be so much bigger than the universe of natural numbers, it turns out that they are the same size.
* * * *
* * * *
“But Cantor's argument is even stranger than that. You can show, by the same method, that there are as many rational numbers between 0 and 1 as there are all positive rational numbers.
Asimov's SF, December 2011 Page 11