III
Penrose wasn’t stupid. Well, no. He was pretty stupid. But he did have a philosophy – one insightful enough that if it was the only thing you knew about him, you would be forgiven for thinking he was smart.
Here was Penrose’s philosophy:
“Have a Goal, Not a Plan.”
Pretty good, right? To the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t stolen it from anyone, and it had remained both true and useful for so long that it was one of the few things he bothered to remember, other ideas being allowed to just kind of flutter away right after being burped into existence – probably useless against the day, anyway, so why not just let them go a’floatin’ free?
Anyway, this philosophy – which will become more important later, so please remember it! – helped him bounce back from that night with Delphine. Waking up back on Puerto Rican soil, apparently without the use of a plane, next to an elderly piragüero currently serenading and/or accosting passersby with sweet arias about both the availability and unbeatable prices of pork and snow cones would be enough to throw anyone, but because The Philosophy urged him not to think too much about any one concern, Penrose stuck the landing better than most.
“That’s disgusting,” Penrose told the piragüero while righting himself and dusting off his pants. “Who would want a pork-flavored snow cone?”
“No one. They’re two different things that you can buy.”
“Oh. That makes sense. But they’re in two different carts, right? So the flavors don’t mix?”
“Yes, the snow cones and the pork are in two different carts.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Penrose checked for his wallet, an empty stomach being one of the few bad things he was currently capable of making go away.
“Find the zero, Penrose.”
Penrose looked up.
“What?”
“I said, ‘What flavor of snow cone would you like?’”
A beat here, maybe two.
“I was… just going, actually.”
“Of course, señor! Where to, might I ask? Home?”
God, he hoped so.
–
The same wind that had been blowing in Le Lamentin was now blowing in Puerto Rico, and Penrose was starting to wonder if it had something to do with him. Sure, sure, vanity, God complex, whatever, whatever, but how else could you explain people turning and watching him as he passed, s-sometimes even nodding in silent approval of actions he had yet to perform?
He headed down to Paseo de la Princesa. Old San Juan was as good a place as any to be confused, and he needed an excuse to keep walking.
It was always a little bit weird, there.
All those tears in the sky over Princess Izzy’s walkway, background hiss to something that almost was – a hidden variable here, a miscalculation there, and suddenly there are abscesses on the body excreting poisons worse than chemical – time without reference finally confirmed but eternally out of reach, because there were just too many people with too much invested in that most precious of trade secrets never getting out, or at least never falling into the hands of those who might use it – God forbid – democratically…
“Hey-hey, Penrose!”
“Penrose, my man!”
“¡Es mi mejor amigo, Penrose!”
“We’re rooting for you, ‘rose!”
He was pretty sure he didn’t know any of those people.
He came to a stop across the way from Antigua Prisión La Princesa.
He stared at it for a while.
Like any prison, La Princesa was trying so hard to appear normal that it only came across as more grotesque. It’s the same feeling you get when talking to a sociopath – that something is off, that you’re in the presence of a person only here to seek out things it can control, it can kill…
… and soon every emotion revealed to be anger… smiles all the more hideous for having nothing behind them… the insistence that civilizing requires pain, constant pain, and that you should be thankful for it… the realization that these aren’t people at all..
… and all the while, pacing back and forth inside that cell, decades left on a sentence whose terms were never made clear, wet towels wrapped around the head, anything to combat the heat… being told this is what civilization looks like, feels like, requires… black tumors running up and down the legs, body rotting a little more with each step…
Penrose stood there for a while, feeling useless.
–
Well, there he was. Child-like antiquarian of all things stupid, caught in the throes of a wind he couldn’t begin to understand, somehow managing to be essential to all this while just fucking standing there.
Why was he just standing there?
Oh. He was looking at La Princesa.
Guess he’d never seen a prison before.
“I don’t understand why you have to do it,” his wife had said, after the teletypewriter whirred to life and punched out Penrose., followed by At the promenade. Go. Observe. Collect.
“Because it’s important.”
“It’s a message from a self-typing typewriter. Who are these people?”
He thought about it.
“I guess I never really thought about it.”
“Every bad person I ever worked for, I at least knew who they were. So I can draw lines when I need to.”
“If I draw a line, they’ll just draw a better one. Besides, I don’t think these people deal in lines. At least, not parallel ones. And when we got married you told me it was important we continue to maintain separate professional lives.”
“That was before your professional life made me start fearing for my biological one. And yours, too. This is a team effort, my love. We can’t move to Kütahya and become opium farmers if we’re both dead.”
“I know, I know.”
“Good that you know, better that you act. Why do you have to do it?”
He didn’t like to talk about that. It was just… listen, man, we all have our itinerant years and weird fucking follies, induced as they must by the realization that the long-abandoned structures of youth were never as false nor as fleeting as you were led to believe – solid, in fact, as the forces they eventually fell to. I mean, fuck, how would you feel if spaces supposedly beyond description had been knowable the entire time, that the words needed to feel their grace had simply been withheld by cruel and smiling interests? Not just a language, man, but an entire manner of being, a whole ‘nother kind of light, just… not there anymore, because someone decided they liked you better broken.
It was too late now, of course – the sensitivities required to walk inseparable horizons tend to snuff out when you’re still awful young. But, maybe, if he could instead learn their equations, the lost rooms of his childhood would become coherent again, rejoined into that big ol’ happy clubhouse, instead of… out there, somewhere, cold with unused meaning…
It made sense at the time. You have to remember, this was the age of Hamilton leaping into higher dimensions, of Gibbs and Heaviside giving him someplace to land, of Möbius generating mirror images of three-dimensional objects by rotating them in four-dimensional space, of that goofy cat Boolean feeding the human mind itself into his logical machines, of Cayley realizing that everything, even the structures that contain numbers, are really numbers themselves… the world was looking into a mirror and seeing, for the first time, objects visible only by their reflection, traceable only in the outline of their meaning.
Meanwhile, he was on a farm in Iowa, shoveling shit.
So you really can’t blame a guy for getting caught up in such – let’s just call a spade a spade, here – transcendental winds, for finding himself pushed across the country by hands he couldn’t quite describe, searching for the weird unseen, chasing ideas only the more scintillating for the fact that everybody knew many of them were wrong, absurd, only partially true, only true in certain lights, actually flipping back and forth between being true or untrue, wrong or absurd, true and absurd, sometimes depending only on the mood you’re in when you look at them – the luminiferous aether, maternal impression, caloric, frigoric, the balance afforded by Terra Australis… a world somehow growing and shrinking at the same time, unsure of its own size, or even basic reality…
UPDATE ON THE RACE FOR FARTHEST NORTH
Blasts of static, then an announcer’s eager voice, trilling as only a true huckster’s can.
ANNOUNCER: W-Well, there it is folks, a crack across the sky – literally! We’ve got defending champions England, historical powerhouse Norway, the upstart Americans, t-they’re even letting Italians play now (how’s that for progress?)! Belgium told us they’re sitting this one out – too much work to do on that fixer-upper over there in that Congo! Hey-Hey-Hey, we try not to ask too many questions where that King Albert is concerned!
Anyway, let’s look at those scores!
… 82° 45′N, Parry, 1827…
… 83° 24′N, Greely, 1882…
… 87° 45′N, Peary, 1909…
B-But we all know what the real race is, don’t we, folks? What about those Hyperboreans? Who will be the first to see them? Just how far north are they?
(Olav Johannessen, pounding more akvavit than seems advisable: “Are the damned pygmies inching ever-farther north, or are the English having a laugh at us?”
(“It’s the honor system, Olav. We have to take Peary’s word for it,” Sven Johannessen (no relation) reminding him. “And you can’t tell me it doesn’t add a little merit, all those reports of a timeless civilization bathed in endless summer being so consistent. What would it benefit these men to lie? It’s the honor system, Olav. No, no, they’ve seen something…”)
A production assistant hands some copy to the host, who reads it, then nearly spits his out his coffee.
ANNOUNCER: Folks, it’s happened! We’ve done it! Beyond the zero! We’ve gone Beyond the Zero! Farthest North! Oh, boy, there have been some false starts along the way – don’t even get me started on that bird, Byrd – but it’s no matter, because we’re there at last!
Yes, Amundsen and the boys pulled it off – or should I say, Norge and the boys pulled it off, a-and now there’s one less dark spot on the map! I’m actually getting word that Roald himself is here, to tell us what it’s like sailing through a self–imposed singularity!
ROALD AMUNDSEN: The sky is wrong.
ANNOUNCER: Ha! Haughty stuff, Roald! Tell us, at what latitude did you finally make contact with Hyperborea?
ROALD AMUNDSEN: 90°N should be written as 90°N → ∞.
ANNOUNCER: You cad! You absolute cad! And the Hyperboreans?
ROALD AMUNDSEN: There is too much. The more we sailed, the more we found. Land was created by our search for it. Land anticipated our arrival. Nothing can erase the First Lands – they are still there, buried under our trail, learning from it. We passed continents that do not exist, climates that do not happen. We sailed forever. We did not know how to get back. This is not the world from which we departed.
ANNOUNCER: You and your anecdotes, sir! You should be on the stage! N-Now, hold on, I-I’m being told we have a caller! How exciting! Sir, you are on the air!
HYPERBOREAN MALE CALLER: Yeah, I have a comment for Roald Amundsen?
ANNOUNCER: Of course!
HYPERBOREAN MALE CALLER: Imagine how we must’ve felt, motherfucker.
–
He tried school, briefly. Everybody else was doing it, and some curation might have been the thing he needed to help straighten out all those knots in his brain.
“The zero was discovered,” his professor began one day while still descending the stairs to the front of the class, not even giving the door time to latch shut behind him, “in India, by some dirt-monkey named Brahmagupta. Six-hundred Anno Domini. Now, there have been plenty of good, strong, white, virile, Christian mathematicians throughout history, many of them tough as Sherman and sturdy as a howitzer, so why did we need some mud-fucker from nowhere to hand us the keys to eternity?”
He waited for an answer.
“Śūnyatā, motherfuckers. That’s why. We were unable to condense math into a straight line, or even orient it in a propitious direction, until it was first realized that lines and direction do not, strictly speaking, exist. Something from nothing, boys. Something from nothing.
“Natural numbers, integers, rationals, irrationals… we were turned away so many times, constrained by our Christian propriety, our inherent decency… numbers just keep going, no matter where you look. Nothing is supposed to just keep going. Not if we can’t. It’s not fair. Anything that tries to grow outside the light of our love is supposed to die, otherwise what’s the point of our love?”
A deep sigh.
“It was all just too much to accept. Pythagoras himself took one look at the irrationals and fled back to the safety of geometry. Can you blame him?
“But Diophantus, Brahmagupta, al-Khwarizmi, al-jabr and al-muqabala… we needed those deformed minds to wander away from the light, wander to whatever dark place their sickness might take them, so that in seeing what purity wasn’t we could better clarify what it was. And it was, ever as always, direction unencumbered, inevitability confirmed. I guess the mud-donkeys were good for something after all, eh?”
He dropped the class later that day, and formal aspirations shortly thereafter. I mean, if academia was even more distraught over all this than he was… how are you supposed to learn from that? From someone even pettier than you?
So back to Iowa it was.
One night, watching the darkness in Loess Hills, he realized he was not alone.
“Hope I’m not ruining your condition,” the stranger, sitting with both a considerate and appreciated amount of this-is-all-on-the-level distance between the two of them, said.
A friendly shrug.
“No condition to ruin.”
“Oh, that’s good. Well, no, not so good, but, well… you know. Listen, I, um… I don’t suppose you’re a fellow… chaser of… The Numbers?”
The stranger quickly waved his arms, no, no, no.
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to pull some swami nonsense on you. I just… know a fellow Man of Numbers when I see one. I was hoping to commiserate, if you don’t mind. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, and I’d… I’d like to pass some things on. Is that what I want? I think that’s what I want.”
The first time you meet someone more fucked up than you is the first chance you get to put on your big-boy pants.
He put on his big-boy pants.
“Lay it on me.”
A grateful smile.
“Thanks. Did I ever tell you about my daughter?”
“We just met a few seconds ago.”
“Oh, that’s right. I just… back when I was your age, there was nothing I loved more than The Numbers. My God, it was… art for productive people. Art that helps, can solve real problems – and every little scratch it makes against the surface, every light extra blade of light it gives us… even its accidents are thrilling.
“My only regret was that I started learning it too old. You miss the critical period if you wait too long. Your mind has the machinery to learn something, anything really, but if those pathways aren’t activated by a certain age, your mind doesn’t see point in maintaining them anymore. The thing I regretted being locked out of most was non-indexicality. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“‘I’ – that’s an indexical word, because its meaning is context-dependent. ‘I’ means something different when I say it, or when you say it.
“By the time I realized the very language we’re taught locks us into an indexed perspective, a frame that even the most robust understanding of mechanics can never undo, I… I felt like there was no meaning anymore. So when my daughter was born, I… I didn’t want her to be shackled into the same paltry existence as the rest of us. I-I thought that, with such freedom, she could…
“Only proper nouns, points on a map, Cartesian coördinates, scientific truths… only things true in all frames of reference. She wasn’t allowed to say, ‘That’s my house,’ because that sentence means something different if someone else says it. I made her identify our house by its coördinates only.
“I didn’t allow her to say, ‘That’s our house. My dad and I live there.’
“I didn’t tell her what I was doing. I thought it would work better as a natural part of her upbringing. I didn’t even want to force her to learn math, to share my passions. I just didn’t want her to be trapped.
“It worked. One day, she was still in the house, but she wasn’t. She had turned onto – been turned onto, as consequence of her language – a plane orthogonal to the others. It loosed her from this world. She was still there. But she was gone.
“She called out from wherever she was, called me by my full name, followed by date of birth, like I always taught her.
“I panicked, told her to tell me where she was. She responded like I always taught her, with precise coördinates. But coördinates on a plane outside of my comprehension are meaningless. I planned for years to send her out, and never bothered concocting a way to get her back.
“I imagine time passes differently out there, if it even exists at all, because when I heard her voice again moments later, she sounded so old, so much older than me, and she must’ve learned all the language I didn’t teach her, because she said:
“‘There are so many places out here, dad, but none of them mean anything to me.'”