‘Come on, come on.’ He tugged at her hands to get her off the chair, but she pulled away. Carl stood there for a moment, when suddenly she turned and locked eyes with him.
‘You know I’ve been tempted to take barbiturates? I almost wish I were an idiot, so I wouldn’t have to think about it.’
He was taken aback. Uncertain of his bearings, he said, ‘Why won’t you at least try to get away for a while? It couldn’t hurt, and maybe it’ll take your mind off this.’
‘It’s not anything I can take my mind off of. You just don’t understand.’
‘So explain it to me.’
Renee exhaled and turned away to think for a moment. ‘It’s like everything I see is shouting the contradiction at me,’ she said. ‘I’m equating numbers all the time now.’
Carl was silent. Then, with sudden comprehension, he said, ‘Like the classical physicists facing quantum mechanics. As if a theory you’ve always believed has been superseded, and the new one makes no sense, but somehow all the evidence supports it.’
‘No, it’s not like that at all.’ Her dismissal was almost contemptuous. ‘This has nothing to do with evidence; it’s all a priori.’
‘How is that different? Isn’t it just the evidence of your reasoning then?’
‘Christ, are you joking? It’s the difference between my measuring one and two to have the same value, and my intuiting it. I can’t maintain the concept of distinct quantities in my mind anymore; they all feel the same to me.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘No one could actually experience such a thing; it’s like believing six impossible things before breakfast.’
‘How would you know what I can experience?’
‘I’m trying to understand.’
‘Don’t bother.’
Carl’s patience was gone. ‘All right then.’ He walked out of the room and canceled their reservations.
They scarcely spoke after that, talking only when necessary. It was three days later that Carl forgot the box of slides he needed, and drove back to the house, and found her note on the table.
Carl intuited two things in the moments following. The first came to him as he was racing through the house, wondering if she had gotten some cyanide from the chemistry department: it was the realization that, because he couldn’t understand what had brought her to such an action, he couldn’t feel anything for her.
The second intuition came to him as he was pounding on the bedroom door, yelling at her inside: he experienced déjà vu. It was the only time the situation would feel familiar, and yet it was grotesquely reversed. He remembered being on the other side of a locked door, on the roof of a building, hearing a friend pounding on the door and yelling for him not to do it. And as he stood there outside the bedroom door, he could hear her sobbing, on the floor paralyzed with shame, exactly the same as he had been when it was him on the other side.
Hilbert once said, ‘If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?’
Would her suicide attempt brand her for the rest of her life? Renee wondered. She aligned the corners of the papers on her desk. Would people henceforth regard her, perhaps unconsciously, as flighty or unstable? She had never asked Carl if he had ever felt such anxieties, perhaps because she never held his attempt against him. It had happened many years ago, and anyone seeing him now would immediately recognize him as a whole person.
But Renee could not say the same for herself. Right now she was unable to discuss mathematics intelligibly, and she was unsure whether she ever could again. Were her colleagues to see her now, they would simply say, She’s lost the knack.
Finished at her desk, Renee left her study and walked into the living room. After her formalism circulated through the academic community, it would require an overhaul of established mathematical foundations, but it would affect only a few as it had her. Most would be like Fabrisi; they would follow the proof mechanically, and be convinced by it, but no more. The only persons who would feel it nearly as keenly as she had were those who could actually grasp the contradiction, who could intuit it. Callahan was one of those; she wondered how he was handling it as the days wore on.
Renee traced a curly pattern in the dust on an end table. Before, she might have idly parameterized the curve, examined some of its characteristics. Now there seemed no point. All of her visualizations simply collapsed.
She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. Physical entities were not greater or less than one another, not similar or dissimilar; they simply were, they existed. Mathematics was totally independent, but it virtually provided a semantic meaning for those entities, supplying categories and relationships. It didn’t describe any intrinsic quality, merely a possible interpretation.
But no more. Mathematics was inconsistent once it was removed from physical entities, and a formal theory was nothing if not consistent. Math was empirical, no more than that, and it held no interest for her.
What would she turn to, now? Renee had known someone who gave up academia to sell handmade leather goods. She would have to take some time, regain her bearings. And that was just what Carl had been trying to help her do, throughout it all.
Among Carl’s friends were a pair of women who were each other’s best friend, Marlene and Anne. Years ago, when Marlene had considered suicide, she hadn’t turned to Anne for support: she had turned to Carl. He and Marlene had sat up all night on a few occasions, talking or sharing silence. Carl knew that Anne had always harbored a bit of envy for what he had shared with Marlene, that she had always wondered what advantage he held that allowed him to get so close to her. The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy.
Carl had offered comfort in similar situations more than once in his lifetime. He had been glad he could help, certainly, but more than that, it had felt right to sit in the other seat, and play the other part.
He had always had reason to consider compassion a basic part of his character, until now. He had valued that, felt that he was nothing if not empathic. But now he’d run up against something he’d never encountered before, and it rendered all his usual instincts null and void.
If someone had told him on Renee’s birthday that he would feel this way in two months’ time, he would have dismissed the idea instantly. Certainly such a thing could happen over years; Carl knew what time could do. But two months?
After six years of marriage, he had fallen out of love with her. Carl detested himself for the thought, but the fact was that she had changed, and now he neither understood her nor knew how to feel for her. Renee’s intellectual and emotional lives were inextricably linked, so that the latter had moved beyond his reach.
His reflex reaction of forgiveness cut in, reasoning that you couldn’t ask a person to remain supportive through any crisis. If a man’s wife were suddenly afflicted with mental illness, it would be a sin for him to leave her, but a forgivable one. To stay would mean accepting a different kind of relationship, something which not everyone was cut out for, and Carl never condemned a person in such a situation. But there was always the unspoken question: What would I do? And his answer had always been, I would stay.
Hypocrite.
Worst of all, he had been there. He had been absorbed in his own pain, he had tried the endurance of others, and someone had nursed him through it all. His leaving Renee was inevitable, but it would be a sin he couldn’t forgive.