Prayers to Broken Stones (58 page)

No …
Gail opens the book again and taps long fingers against the page.
You teach them. You move them into the world of ideas.

I can barely move them into the hall at the end of the class period.

Jerry, you know what I mean. Your removal from things … from people … it’s more than shyness. It’s more than your work. It’s just that people who spend most of their thinking time on anything lower than Cantor’s Incompleteness Theorem is boring to you … irrelevant … you want things to be
cosmological and epistemological and tautological, not the clay of the everyday.

Jeremy sends,
Gödel.

What?

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It’s Cantor’s Continuum Problem.
He chalks some transfinite cardinals onto his blackboard, frowns at what they have done to his wave equation, erases them, and scrawls the cardinals onto a mental blackboard instead. He begins framing a description of Gödel’s defense of Cantor’s Continuum Problem.

No, no,
interrupts Gail,
the point is only that you’re sort of like Bobby Kennedy that way … impatient … expecting everyone to be interested in the abstract things that you are …

Jeremy is growing impatient. The transforms he holds in his mind are slipping slightly. Words do that to clear thinking.
The Japanese at Hiroshima didn’y think that ? = mc
²
was particularly abstract.

Gail sighs. I
give up. You’re not like Bobby Kennedy. You’re just an insufferable, arrogant, eternally distracted snob.

Jeremy nods and fills in the transform. He goes on to the next equation, seeing precisely now how the probability wave will collapse into something looking very much like a classical eigenvalue.
Yeah,
he sends, already fading,
but I’m a
nice
insufferable, arrogant, eternally distracted snob.

Gail does not comment, but gazes out the window at the sun setting behind the line of woods beyond the barn. The warmth of the view is echoed by the warmth of her wordless thoughts as she shares the evening with him.