This semester, in lieu of an actual class, I was developing a strategy to get a degree. To that end, I’d acquired a counselor, Mr. Pinneo. Although it was our third appointment, Mr. Pinneo had not invited me to address him on a first-name basis. Probably this was a sound tactic with normal college freshmen, as Mr. Pinneo, like Dr. Theodora Zagan, looked about twenty.
“More transcripts, Wollie?” he asked, scratching his nose ring. We were in a tiny cubicle he shared with several people.
“Yeah.” I handed him the envelope. “I remembered an astronomy course I took eight years ago through DuMetz Community College. We met in the desert in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers. As you see, I got an A.”
Mr. Pinneo studied the document. “I’ll run it by my supervisor. I’m not sure it meets the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum requirement for your physical science. It might. Then again, it might not. Best thing to do meanwhile is sign up for a math class. Any of those in your past you might’ve forgotten?”
“No,” I said. “I barely took any in high school. But I’ve been studying the course-sequence chart in the catalog, in itself pretty challenging, as some course numbers go backward, meaning that Math 81 precedes Math 20-but anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Pinneo, and I hope I am, because by my calculations, I need to take Math 81 or 81T, then Math 84, then Math 31 or 31T, then Math 20 and 21 or 41 and 52, at which point I’ll be caught up with normal college juniors.”
Mr. Pinneo took from me the weighty catalog and peered at it. “You’re right.”
My heart sank. “And I have to take these courses one at a time, in sequence.”
“Unless you test out.”
“You mean the math-assessment test. I did that, remember? You have the results.”
Mr. Pinneo shuffled through a file that was extensive, considering I had not yet registered for classes. He withdrew a sheet of paper. “Yeah. Not real good at math, are you?”
“No. But after that test, I got a math tutor.”
“Good. How’s that going?”
A vision popped into my head of Annika, with her mechanical pencil, drawing for me Galileo, Newton, and Einstein as happy faces: Quantification, Gravitation, and Relativity. “It’s-it was going well,” I said. “So how long before I should take the assessment test again?”
Mr. Pinneo glanced at my test scores. “Maybe you just sign up for Math 81. Basic Arithmetic. That’s for people who haven’t-”
“-done long division since the Reagan administration. I know. But I can’t afford to stay here taking math, one class at a time, for the rest of my natural life. I’m hoping to transfer to UCLA.” UCLA had a beautiful campus. Equally important, it offered the graphic arts degree I was seeking. It would not admit me, though, until Santa Monica College had certified me, according to the terms of the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum.
“Okay,” he said. “Take the assessment test anytime before your registration date, which is”-he typed into his computer-“two weeks. You get one more shot, then you have to wait three months to retest. Meanwhile, might as well do the math. Without math, you won’t do squat in science. Good luck, Wollie.”
I walked out into the sunshine, squinting. The campus no longer seemed the symbol of possibility it had been a half hour earlier. I felt old, stupid, and poor. But I had to make this work, because my other dreams weren’t panning out. Marriage and children were remote possibilities, people were fleeing my life with alarming frequency-college was the one thing under my conscious control. It wasn’t cheap, but instead of three or four classes at a time, I’d take one. One per semester. But not if it was math. Not for the next seventy years. I’d had a better attitude when it looked like Doc would be around to help with homework. Maths 21 through 82 wouldn’t have fazed him; he’d gone to MIT.
They hadn’t fazed Annika either. “You are missing out on this fun!” she’d said, hearing of my math phobia. “Did you play with puzzles when you were small? This is geometry. In school, did you have code words with your girlfriends? This is algebra. Music, language, baking cookies, stars in the sky, everything is mathematics. It is just that no one has shown this to you, but I will show it to you and then everything will connect to everything else and you will be so happy.”
She’d done this. Annika had opened a window onto a world, just a crack. Enough to peek through. But now she was gone.
I missed her.
An hour later I was at Westside Pavilion, replaying my conversation with the blue-eyed guy. “The more I think about it,” I said to Fredreeq, “the more I’m sure he was talking about Annika.”
“No,” she said, leading me past the food court. “I’ve been thinking too, and I’m thinking industrial sabotage.”
“Industrial-? What industry?”
“How many industries are you involved in?” She took a left, heading to a boutique called Plastique, which was having a going-out-of-business sale. “Television, you nut. This isn’t just a show we’re doing, it’s a contest. People bet money on contests, which means other people are making money on the people betting money on this contest. Vegas people.”
“What people? Fredreeq, I’m not going to find anything in here.” I stopped in front of a Plastique Boutique mannequin. She looked like a heroin addict, her face featureless except for deep pink eye sockets, her emaciated torso wearing a shirt made of shoelaces.
“Never mind that. It’s a big bad world out there, with scams going down you’ve never even- Hello,” she said to a girl at a sale table, stacking sweaters in a desultory manner. “Can you tell me if Kim Karmer’s working?”
The girl didn’t look up from her sweaters. “No.”
“No, you can’t tell me, or no, she’s not working?” Fredreeq asked. A salesclerk at the register, I noticed, stared at us as she picked up a phone.
“I don’t know her schedule,” the sweater stacker said.
“Well, who might know her schedule?” Fredreeq asked. When the girl gave a world-weary sigh, Fredreeq grew frighteningly polite. “I’m sorry, am I bothering you? I’m not asking you to go out on a limb here and make eye contact-”
“What am I, a Web site?” The girl blinked spiderlike eyelashes. “You people come in wanting to know all this stuff, you could at least buy some clothes.”
Fredreeq put her hand on her heart. “Oh, are these clothes? I thought they were something that fell off the space shuttle. You know, sweetie, frown lines are not as sexy as you probably think. Another ten years and a laser’s going to have to remove those.”
I pulled Fredreeq to the door. “Why do you want to meet Kim Karmer?” I asked. “Is it even kosher for me to talk to another contestant?”
Fredreeq pointed at Robinson-May and made a beeline for the cosmetic counter. “The question is, Who else wants to know about Kim Karmer? What did that twit mean by ‘you people’? This fits my saboteur theory. Vegas is backing Savannah Brook to win the vote, and they’re nosing around you and Kim to come up with some dirt. It’s exactly like politics.”