Linear

It was a joke to take math, but he was not laughing. In high school, he had had some success with the work in his classes, textbooks and assignments. He was confident then; now, it seemed as though the material professors put on their black or white boards was some sort of secret code he could not break. He was not laughing.

It was more calculus, this time for a math course related to the computer science seminars that he was also struggling with that semester. His grades were good enough to slip him just above the minimum average required by the university. He remembered how proud his mother had been when he found her in the kitchen reading the letter of acceptance addressed to her son. His father, an engineer specializing in bridge construction, came home late and studied the letter in his private office. He was sure that his father thought it was some sort of clever forgery (not one made by his son, of course; from a wise and gifted friend, perhaps). After an hour had passed, he finally accepted that his son had made it into the math and computer science program of one of the newer universities built for just such students. There was talk of a possible job after graduating and he thought about what kind of work he could do as his eyes swam over the equations in his notes.

His father’s change of attitude was the real surprise. He remembered the shouting, the pounding of fists on the desk in his bedroom and his mother pleading for calm when they received report cards rich with C’s and D’s in all the math and science courses. His father could never understand why his son found it difficult to work with numbers. His great-grandfather and grandfather had both worked as mechanical and civil engineers. Even his older sister found her way into engineering (again, bridge construction work with a government agency). His own son was not following the path cleared for him and it left him feeling cheated.

It began in elementary school. He was in the third grade and the teacher was introducing the class to fractions. He thought it was interesting how any object could be divided up into pieces that were labelled with paired numbers above and below a line. He could not have been thinking of it then, but he admired the order involved. Every piece had its place in the whole.

The teacher asked them a question about the size of the pieces. Which one was bigger? He looked straight at the numbers on the board, raised his hand and, when the teacher nodded at him, selected ¼. He never forgot the laughter of his classmates and the intense scowl of his teacher. She pointed angrily at the board with her metre stick and told him to pay more attention to the lesson: ¼ is less than 1/3. Her advice would not help. A pattern had been set.

There was a glimmer of promise in high school. By grade eleven, he had given up hope of ever becoming successful with math. His teachers had long talks with his parents every Parent-Teacher’s night and he had to attend them and listen to the back and forth of their worries. The teachers always recommended tutors and extra textbooks. His father told them, without taking the time to listen, that his son would be just fine with the books they had now. His mother was almost ashamed to look at any of his teachers during these discussions. He never understood why she did not speak, or why his father refused their suggestions. He understood their pride, but he thought they would have felt prouder to have him pass the courses with good grades. Tutors and extra textbooks were never mentioned at home.

But that glimmer… In grade eleven, he had a course in geometry that he thought would be another humiliation. His classmates always groaned when he raised his hand to ask a question (even the teacher seemed to be rolling her eyes when he spoke). They had their final exam on a Thursday and it would count for 50% of their mark. There was a chance that he would pass if he got at least 70% on the exam (his marks were low during the year, but his teacher had given him make-up assignments which pushed his grades up into the high-C range). He did not feel nervous about it. He had spent enough headache-filled weeks in his room, the local library and his father’s study to know that he could only do his best. This was privately encouraged by his mother. His father never said a thing during the cramming sessions.

He was allowed to see his final exam before it was handed out. And it was the moment when his problems with math became even worse. He passed, his teacher had said. A shock of sorts, but what really surprised him was the final grade. There it was, in hard blue wax pencil: 88%.

When he finally brought it home, his father began to look over the exam carefully while his mother laughed, cried and held his face in her warm hands. There was a lot of happiness for one night over this one mark of real success. This did not improve things for him, either at home or in school. His year ended and he knew that he would have to pick colleges or universities. His father, now confident that “the page had been turned” (a phrase that would linger in his head), had found him some summer work in their office learning about building stresses and weight distribution. He felt lost in all the talk about stresses, ratios, material choices, square-footage per acreage. His mother, happy to see him close to his father, never stopped asking about his days at the office and always prepared dinners and desserts she knew he liked. It was three months of confusion, pasta and homemade pastry.

This made him stubborn. He was more determined to get answers about what was wrong with him. A guidance counselor, ignoring the official school policy on matters of psychiatry and psychology, arranged an appointment for him to meet privately with a Dr. A. Delson. Dr. Delson was a very attractive woman in her early forties and he could not concentrate on his own problems when they talked. After a few weeks of these sessions – he had told his parents that he had tutoring after school, his father no longer minding this extra effort made at seeking extra help – he had begun to take some verbal and visual tests, and Dr. Delson became someone he could trust. So, it was very uncomfortable for him to be told that “his was not a mind that could follow the natural logic of mathematics” (he would never forget that phrase, either). It was not right for him to ignore his artistic skills. And – the one thing he already knew without needing an explanation – he was not a linear thinker. He did not analyze a problem from point A to point B; he did not follow a straight line to get the right answer. He looked at the world as a series of possibilities and wanted to try as many of them as possible. He just sat there as she spoke over her clipboard and paused when she stopped. He then thanked her for all her help, paid her by cheque, and never went back to her office. Two weeks later, he applied to the computer science program of a college two days’ drive from his parents’ home. That was two years ago.

*

He had his own apartment off campus, paid for with money from work in a college bar and a loan from the government. He had found it odd to be accepted; it was even odder getting the loan. He had heard that the government was concerned about the number of graduates in science and technology, but the generosity of the loan was out of proportion to his grades or interest in the courses he was taking. He had enough for tuition, rent and most of the food that he would eat his first two years.

It was a struggle to get through the lectures, most of them, anyway. The professor for calculus, Dr. Maltius, was a kind and very upbeat woman. He enjoyed his Mondays and Thursdays because of her lectures. It was the course in logic that disappointed. Dr. Goelnicht was a tall, sharp-featured, humorless man who seemed to have an unconscious desire to be a preacher. Those lectures, beginning at 8 am every Tuesday and Friday, were two hours of exhaustion and agony.

He was not alone. Study groups quickly formed for these lectures. The calculus group – four people from his lecture and two people in the business mathematics course – actually helped him (a steady B on all of his papers). In the logic group, he knew after their first meeting that it was a mistake. They were all studying the sciences, but none of them was especially gifted in their disciplines. They needed someone who could tie things together for them; someone who knew how to make things connected; someone to make things linear.

On a particular Thursday, he had to look over a problem with his people. He would head over to one of the empty rooms in the main campus building and there he would find Shauna, a thin and hard-faced woman whose family came from Sri Lanka (or Indonesia; he always forgot). Also, there was Henry, a round-faced guy he liked for his ability to make a joke out of the math problems giving them renewable headaches every week. The others would probably skip this meeting (they had exams in other courses).

At six-thirty, he opened the door labelled with a torn sheet of paper covered with the names of his fellow crammers, and he fell in love. It just happened and he could see no way past it. Shauna and Henry were on either side of a woman in a purple turtleneck who was pointing out some formulas on a yellow legal pad (it was the logic material). They had not looked up when he stepped in. He saw something curved and wooden in her straight black hair. And there was perfume (not something Shauna would bother with for a study session).

Henry looked up first, grinning and pointing. Shauna and this new woman followed his finger and smiled. She had dark-framed glasses that were actually coloured with fragments of brown in the fluorescent light. He loved that. Without his “Hello,” Henry decided to begin the introductions. This was Lilith, a computer-science major who was not in their lectures (she must be in the advanced group, he thought). Lilith decided to speak. She said “Hello,” smiled brightly – slight gap in her teeth – and told him that they were looking at a proof that he had spent the last three days trying to solve. She had done most of it and was explaining it to the others. He sat down opposite her and stretched over the textbooks and papers to see what she had done.

The next session would be on Wednesday after five (no point choosing a set time for so many people). He came early with a stack of notes from different lectures and two heavy textbooks. Shauna was there with Naguib, another computer science major in his level; Jesse (math major); and Julie (intense-looking girl he never saw smiling – did that matter?) They were all gaping at the latest assignment on the board. He would have understood if they had been weeping openly when he got there.

Dr. G (now Dr. Crow, Dr. Scarecrow, Dr. Death, Dr. Strangelove; even Dr. Mengele to those who thought he was German and wanted for war crimes) had assigned them five pages of review for Friday’s lecture. The abbreviations, figures and formulas swam in front of their eyes.

They had tried. They tried even harder now. Jesse, scratching the pimples on his forehead, reminded them of the theorems they had done the previous week, right up to the point when he realized that his logic statements were now completely wrong. Julie and Shauna caught this (he truly wished that Henry was here), but added nothing to mess on the board. He wisely let Jesse handle their complaints without interrupting them.

And then Lilith walked in, smiling, went up to the board, and explained the statements in about ten minutes. He wondered if the others could actually hear him catch his breath. Shauna was open-mouthed (a lot of breath caught right there); Jesse could not look Lilith in the eyes (well, he’s no problem); Julie was silent. They were all done for the week (most of the month, too), and they actually understood the work.

Things did not stay the same. More students began to appear in the study group. They were people he had never spoken to before and he had to admit that he resented them. He walked into another study session to find three people laughing and gesturing at the textbooks on the tables. Lilith saw him and smiled; the others laughed, paused to look at him, and went back to their private joke. Henry came in ten minutes later to study and introduce him to these new people (he immediately forgot their names). Shauna, Julie and Jesse also arrived, tagging along with four more people. He thought the group was becoming too large, but he accepted this because he finally understood most of the work. His grades improved. Logic finally made some sense to him.

The weekly phone calls home were happier rituals. He reported brightly on his marks for his last assignments (Bs and Cs) and the reason why he had the grade. His mother, hearing the name, wondered out loud if he had asked her out. He almost hung up on her. She should have known better, he thought. Where were the girlfriends in high school? Where was his prom date? There were no “special people” in his life (his mother loved that phrase). He learned early on that his temperament did not allow him to have a girlfriend (a word that sounded harmless but lead him into many suspicious thoughts about that other gender). He ended the call, went back to his notes and thought about Lilith’s smile.

*

Logic statements… There was nothing logical about how he felt. Lilith was in his head all the time. He would be working on his calculus assignments in his room and regretting that she was not in that particular study group so that he could see her perform at the board. Her perfume stalked him when he was asleep. And the glasses… Was that a fetish? He had to admit he wanted to see her wearing those frames all the time. Now that had to be love, or lust (he was fine with both ideas). But he was thinking of logic now. A goes to B. A belongs to B. A arrows B…

And Lilith… Lilith goes to… He knew that he was not focused. He had another assignment to work on and he would be meeting the group again later that week. They were up to about six people on average. There were only two guys in the group and one was Jesse. The other, Mike (he thought that was the name), clearly had a thing for Lilith, but also could not make eye contact. She smiled at his shyness, always trying to get him to look up. He felt like punching Mike when she did that. He knew it was a serious thing to care so much and went back to his statements. Here there was logic and form. A straight line…

And he really knew nothing about her. Lilith was in the advanced group that often met in a different part of the same building where he and his friends had their math lectures (he found this out when he checked on some posted grades next to the math department’s main office). She was in the upper-tier of the level (not a shock) and on the dean’s list, (an asterisk drew his eyes down the sheet to see this footnote). He started to feel his first real doubts about what he had planned. She would know what he was up to and be unforgiving. His mother would also not appreciate a sudden drop in his grades. He walked down the hallway wondering which woman he was more worried about disappointing.

And then there was an important and happy accident. After another meeting with members of a group he had no interest in meeting again – Student Vegetarian Supporters – he decided to pass through a building that housed an indoor running track (easier than walking around two connected buildings to get to his apartment). He heard the runners and jocks before he saw them. There was a separate exercise area in the centre of the room ringed with rubberized floor. He wondered about how many collisions took place between runners and weightlifters walking across the lanes, annoying their routines. He smiled at the thought of this. And that was the exact moment when he felt two warm hands embracing his eyes.

Her perfume gave her away. Lilith was in grey shorts, a loose black T-shirt, and no glasses. A dark patch of sweat triangled down her back. She had done three laps, she explained, when she saw him walking by and decided to stop. She grinned again and he, with love, once again noticed the gap in her front teeth.

It helped that she had no one else with her at the track. She lived off campus and came in three or four times a week to use the weights and run for half an hour. He noticed her muscle tone and told her that he always wanted to come here to run but preferred the outdoors, even in the snow and ice. She made a face and had a mock-flinch away from him. He felt a few drops of her sweat touch his face. That was it; he would try to come inside for his runs (very, very soon).

He did tell her the truth. He did enjoy running. In the mornings when he could manage it, he would take one of the main sidewalks or roads around the campus as a guide and run with the sun edging around the buildings and signposts leading traffic downtown. At first, he could only cover one whole route around the main building (Avri Hall) before he felt the air leave him under protest and his body rebelled. Now, he ran for at least thirty minutes in the cold, snow, rain or rare heat. It helped him make it through to another day of doubt and confusion.

It was not a date. They decided to meet and compare their stamina on the track three days from now (it would be Wednesday night). Lilith punched him on his shoulder, told him not to forget, and bounced back to the dark orange and white of the track. A few of the weightlifters noted her return and stopped their routines. Some of them actually looked at him with blank faces. Lilith did not notice them. He took their stares with him all the way to his apartment.

He was still floating through his math lectures, computer science lectures and time working at the bar. The meeting with the study group went as well as it could have (only Mike and Jesse showed up). They talked about the lecture and never approached the assignment. Jesse, in a rare moment of absolute clarity, said something that they were all thinking, something that needed to be said: “What the fuck?” He explained himself.

It was a question about how they were going through this school, taking courses they could not understand, to get jobs that they would probably not enjoy. There was a long silence. And then the stories came out.

They had ended up where they were for different reasons. He explained his father to them, and Mike had the same sort of story. No father, but two older brothers and many “uncles” who understood math and science but could not understand why anyone else would find them difficult. They had pushed him into the sciences when he was in high school. The real dream was law (maybe a prosecutor bringing polluters to court). By the time he graduated, the decision was no longer his. The family paid his way into university and wanted him to be “in their particular orbit”.

Jesse’s story was different. He and Mike never guessed how long the particular trip to higher learning had been for him, and how deeply disappointed he was. There was no father, either, but a mother, an aunt and many female relatives that he never bothered to title (not more aunts or cousins; just relations). They did not really encourage him. In school, he did well with math, although his family never bothered to notice. Jesse learned early in his childhood that all of the “uncles” (always “uncles”) his mother introduced him to would never be there for more than a week (amazing what you can hear down a hallway when your door is just slightly ajar and everyone thinks that you are deep into your own dreams). He would go out for any team and club that would be a distraction (rarely the ones he really cared for: chess and French conversation). His mother finally noticed this and made him her conversation piece with those “uncles”, his real aunt, and any of the female relations he saw with drinks in the kitchen when he came back from another meeting. By the time he had finished high school, he was determined to go anywhere that was not close to his hometown (he never gave them the name). Jesse took a post office box as an address for the responses he expected from various schools. He could not have let his mother or any other relative see his letters, especially one from a school so far away. The last time he saw his mother was in the rear-view mirror of a car. She was at a window, in her faded robe, stirring a drink with a finger. Jesse did not go home for holidays (there was work tutoring private students in the summer) and he preferred Christmas and New Year’s Day with friends off campus. He never gave his mother his new address or phone number.

This made him think about Lilith. It was Tuesday and he still knew nothing about her. Would they really have time to talk after the run (he had a shift to cover at the bar that night)? He wondered if she would be able to compete with what he heard from Mike and Jesse. It almost led to resentment. That made no real sense.

Was she too perfect? There was her body, her smile and her intelligence. Even her wardrobe worked for him (the first time he ever thought about this with a woman). There had to be something that was off, something that took away from the whole.

He knew the phrase and it bounced around in his thoughts: “Be careful what you wish for.” Shauna and Henry were in the main cafeteria. No books were on the table, so he decided to ask them where they had been. He was too late and too close to them before noticing that they were sitting very close together and holding hands.

Shauna kept smiling; Henry looked disturbed and wanted to leave. He put them both at ease by pretending to be uncomfortable with their affection. It was not really much of a shock to him and he knew just how often they both missed their study group sessions at the same time. They all had to laugh at this.

Shauna told him that they had been together for a month-and-a-half, but that they did not want to say anything about it. They would both be graduating in a year and had plans to live together before really settling down (Henry did not say much, but he did roll his eyes at this last point). They wanted him to come to their place when things were ready.

There was one other reason for skipping the study group: Lilith. Shauna, staring at the table with a hard face, told him she did not like her. Henry kept silent, so he sat down across from her and listened as Shauna grinned, laughed and explained her feelings.

Lilith was too perfect. There was a separate study session – something he had guessed at – for students in the first-year calculus group. Shauna was a volunteer and helped them when she could. The last session was interrupted by a knock on the open door and Lilith’s offer of assistance. Shauna was still grinning as she explained how the group – all male and confused – called to her and let her take over the blackboard. Shauna managed to sit through this and even smiled when Lilith looked over and asked if there was anything she could do. Henry took a long pull on his diet soda.

He felt both good and ashamed by what Shauna was saying. She had echoed his thoughts about the woman. Lilith was someone unattainable yet very present. He could not help but think of a carrot on a stick and he had to smile.

He was there quite early. At seven in the morning, security guards who took pity on him standing and shuffling in the cold opened the doors. He was dressed for his outdoor run but wanted to see the track once again before he met her. It did not touch the inside walls of the gym and he again noted the gap between the five lanes and the walls that were covered with crash mats, carts with other equipment and pull-up bars. The smell of iron and grease was sharp and delicious. Part of the lane was marked off for short bursts of 100, 200 and 500 metres. A wall illustration explained the distances reached at 4, 8 and 12 laps per lane. The lane closest to the walls would take only four laps before reaching a kilometre.

It was a distracting thing to think about as he jogged around the campus. He decided to take the main path to the front of the main hall and then cut through the building to walk back to his room. The buses from downtown were dropping off the early-morning students and staff workers as he walked through the silo-like building. The sun was sharp in the glassed-in middle section that held several skylights in its ceiling. He breathed in deeply with closed eyes and smiled. His legs felt loose and warm.

By 6:30 that night, he had reviewed the material in the calculus course and written to his family about the lectures. His mother preferred letters to email. His father never responded to their shared names on the envelopes. At the track, he noted some of the same people he had seen when Lilith snuck up on him. He even smiled and nodded at those who had noticed his luck.

She had said Wednesday night, right? Had they agreed on a time? They met at seven the last time they were both in here. He walked over to a dismantled pummel horse and sat down. The rhythm of the weightlifters was comforting. There were only two other runners on the track, and they had taken the shorter inside lanes. It was a woman moving ahead of a shorter man. He had to smile when he recognized them.

There are things that are never planned out. It was Jesse, grinning and beaming with body heat. He stopped, hopped across the tracks, and introduced him to Nadira. She was taller than both of them and walked slowly across the tracks with a growing smile. She had long dark hair held inside her baseball cap. Its logo matched the one on her stretch pants and T-shirt. She said hello and he noted her dimples and slightly freckled cheeks and nose. Jesse kept grinning through their small talk, so she said that they had to go and walked off to the fountains. Jesse ran up to her, turned back to look at him as Nadira took a long swallow of water, and winked. They both looked back with a smile as they left.

How long had that been going on? How long had they both been with the other? Was it some sort of sign? Enough, enough, he thought. It was not another logic statement; not something that could be analysed. Just let that go…

Lilith came in ten minutes later and he felt oddly comforted by the fact that she did not see Jesse with his new love (is that what he is calling it?). He kept wondering how they met and briefly considered the idea that she was one of the private students he had mentioned. It was as good a reason not to go home for the holidays.

Lilith was not smiling. He got up and did not try to embrace her when he saw her pouting slowly towards him. She came from the doors on the left of where he sat. Her arms were crossed. He asked her what was wrong and, in the brief silence that existed, he could hear the buzzing of the large overhead lamps that ran in long angled motions along the ceiling. It was something he had not noticed before.

She had met Shauna earlier that same day outside of another lecture. Henry was not with her and Lilith wanted to ask him about some homework they had in a shared lesson. Shauna, from what he was told, interpreted this as a come-on and yelled at Lilith to stay the fuck away from him if she knew “what was not too good for her” (a great quote, he thought). It was funny and he made sure not to laugh.

Lilith was truly shocked, as were the people in the hallway. This included three students she was tutoring who did not know anything about Shauna, Henry or any of their past sessions in their study group. It was in the Williams building, which meant the main offices of the math department were nearby. A professor came out of her office at the sound of Shauna’s retort, but saw only a departing woman in hard boot heels walking through a glass vestibule and Lilith’s still open mouth and stunned face.

He would think about the run for a long time. He wondered what kind of change it had produced and could not make sense of what happened. He looked at her, tried to think of something that was not too silly, and shifted his weight from foot to foot. She, like a sign, uncrossed her arms, took a deep breath and began to do some stretches.

There was still no one on the outer track lanes. He noted that they were marked 1 and 2 and asked her which one she wanted to lose on. And there was a smile. She punched his left arm and headed down the first path.

It was halfway into the first lap when he turned to look at her. She was running with her tongue out. Her hair had the same sort of wooden object in it he had seen the first time they met, but there was also a purple plastic thing holding her hair in a ponytail. She caught him glancing at her and picked up momentum.

They were near the end of the second lap when he realized that they had not decided on the number of laps they wanted to complete. He felt he could do four more. He slowed his pace and Lilith, looking back for him, sped up and entered his lane.

After the fourth lap, they both slowed down and began a slow trot. Then they were walking side by side. He had a small white towel hanging out of his waistband and pulled it out. Lilith, with a motion he thought was too fast for her, grabbed it from his hands, wiped one side of his face, and then repeated the act with the other side of the towel on her own face. She put it around her own neck and grinned. He had to ask her, again, how she really felt.

There were no tears. Lilith wiped her face again. She was disappointed with Shauna and confused about what she was going to do in the tutorials and study groups. He tried to assure her that Shauna would leave a lot of space between her and any building with Lilith in it. Maybe she could build a Shauna detector? His comic flow was working. Her face lightened; the smile returned; and it broke into a wonderful chiming laugh. He had heard her laugh before but not like this. The melody of it lingered in the air and he could almost set it in a musical key (A major?)

Lilith put her arm through his as they were near the end of this walked-out lap. Without thinking about it, he looked over at the weight room. There were three people on machines and two on the free weights. A woman with dumbbells was staring at them as she flexed. She was not attractive.

She leaned her head against him on their second slow walk around the track. There were two other people in front of them and he noted how they stayed in the shortest lane. They were two women dressed like Jesse’s girlfriend (Nadia? Nadine?)

They walked over to the fountain. Lilith still had his towel around her neck as she took a drink. He noted the damp triangular patch of sweat on her back and had a thought about the distance they covered. A kilometre and a half would cover part of the run he took around the campus. He liked these coincidences and wondered if she cared about the number of laps. He perfume was new.

She had to get her thermal fleece from the change room. He had a lined running jacket in a locker. As he came out of the men’s change room, Lilith looped his right arm in her left and gave him a light slap with the towel (she still has it). She was sweating in her fleece. And in one move, he wiped her faced with his sleeve, moving slowly around her forehead. She closed her eyes.

It was a simple kiss. She kept her eyes closed for a moment after he pulled away. That made him smile. Lilith, looking him over, pulled him close and kept him in her arms; she was laughing and grinning. She admitted that she had wondered how long she would have to wait. She still had his towel.

She liked him. That would mean telling her all about his childhood, his family and his experiences with school. He would share all of it; this was a promise. They were now out in the cold, walking to the bus stop. And then something changed. He wondered why he felt uncomfortable, even with her on his arm and her perfume in his head. He wondered where he had to go next.

*

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