The Mathematics of Change

Chapter Two-2

“Are you kidding? You think I remember?”

“I bet engineering was easier back then. The Wheel 101, right? And they even graded on a curve.” He put his forehead on his arms and chuckled at his own joke.

Mitch said, “Spear Design and Construction 220.”

“Advanced Fire Making 410. I think you remember your GPA and don’t want to tell me.”

Her GPA wasn’t hard to remember: 4.0 over her four years, and not all her late nights could be attributed to insomnia. “I’m not going to help you feel bad about yourself.”

He gave her a look that told her she’d said the wrong thing but slid off his stool before she could determine what it was. “Gotta piss.”

Mitch dreaded the day when Steve would leave the company. He could dig into the parts of research that drove her batty, the piles of easily overlooked details or hours of thankless troubleshooting, allowing her to take a wider focus. Research, for Mitch, was as physical as swimming. Patterns established through months of examination lived not only as marks in her notebook or bits in a spreadsheet but as a feeling in her body. She knew right away if a result was anomalous even if she couldn’t articulate why until later. Eric called her the Data Whisperer, and it was true. When hypotheses were confirmed through experimentation, they settled into gaps in her mind perfectly sized to receive them.

Angel put down a beer in front of Steve’s empty stool and a gold-and-tan concoction right into Mitch’s waiting hand. “You sure ran him off fast.”

“Bladder the size of a pea.” Mitch took a swallow, licked her lips for effect, and identified the drink. “Dark and stormy.”

“You stinker. No one around here knows that.” Then, in a dizzying non sequitur, Angel said, “Speaking of exes …”

“What?”

She erased the distance between them and whispered, “The table by the bathroom.”

Like an ass, like she couldn’t comprehend Angel’s conspiratorial look, Mitch swiveled around and saw Kim. Her straight, wheat-colored hair was caught back behind her neck in a barrette, she had on a deep-red blouse, and the way her face was animated and her fingers strayed across the table meant she was laying some serious charm on the woman sitting with her.

Seeing Kim looking so good was plenty to deal with on its own, but it brought to mind Carol’s bet against them and the lurking secret of Reginald. Juggling s**t like this made fighting with words back at the office feel downright desirable by contrast. She reeled back and dove into her drink.

“Well, dang, Mitch, I didn’t think you’d go and stare,” Angel said in a low rush and slapped Mitch’s hand.

“Sometimes I’m dumb like that.”

“I thought I once heard someone in here call you a genius.”

Mitch made a look of disgust and pushed some errant hair behind an ear. “It was a test of your gullibility.”

Angel narrowed her eyes. “Why don’t you let anyone call you Dr. Mitchell?”

“Because I’m not qualified to operate on humans, only machines.”

Steve hopped onto his stool and said, “And she’s only barely qualified for that.”

“Gee, thanks,” Mitch said.

“That’s not to say she isn’t scary smart.”

“When I’m not scary stupid.”

“Now that’s true.” Angel laughed, snapped her towel, and left to serve some new arrivals, an older couple familiar to Mitch in a generic, around-town way.

Two dark and stormies in, Mitch and Steve got to talking about capacitors, and tonight, despite the setting, it didn’t take long for them to move from electronic generalities to The Device’s controller circuit that Eric had redesigned. In the same way nerves passed along messages to the brain, this circuit transmitted data from the part of The Device installed in the turbine to the processing software outside. When Eric had come on board, a year after Steve, he’d cackled over the state of their electronics.

“I’m surprised you guys haven’t electrocuted yourselves,” he’d said.

“Oh, we have,” Steve said. “More than once.”

They had advanced to drawing circuit diagrams in the back of Mitch’s notebook when Carol skinnied between them. She was all bounce and energy in her cap-sleeved T-shirt and tidy jeans, and she wrinkled her freckled nose at the page of diagrams. “Ew. Seriously? How has Angel not b***h-slapped you?”

“Mitch started it,” Steve said.

“That goes without saying.” Carol glanced back and forth between Mitch and Steve. “Whatcha drinking?” Angel appeared, and Carol started in. “All right. I’m tired of everything I usually drink. Seriously, another gin and tonic? Gin and tonic is like white shoes—Memorial to Labor Day only. Maybe a Manhattan? Or a cosmo?”

“Sounds like you need a Friday-night special.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll like it.” Angel held up the Girl Scout salute. “I promise.”

“Sign me up, then.” Carol turned to Steve and said, “I need to borrow Mitch for a while.”

He held out his hands. “Be my guest.”

When Angel came back with her drink, Carol pulled Mitch off her stool and dragged her to a table in the bay window where it was quieter. Tilsen students drifted by outside, glancing in with clear disinterest. A string of little white lights around the window softened the snap of Carol’s hair.

Carol said, “Steve and Angel should totally get together. She’s got that thing for younger men.”

“Carol …”

“I’m so in love.” She yodeled the last word with her chin lifted like she was howling at the moon.

“In love with someone other than Brian?” Mitch said with feigned shock.

Carol looked at Mitch from under her eyebrows and lowered her voice. “Dr. Abigail Rosen.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. But I’ll tell you. She’s gorgeous and brilliant and so sophisticated it’s like she’s from another planet. One that I very much want to live on. She’s all the best parts of Jewish.”

“Yeah, you’re light-years from planet sophistication.” Mitch laughed and nudged Carol’s leg with her foot.

“I’m serious. You know how some people get under your skin and make things crackle?”

Mitch answered the rhetorical question. “Yeah, and actually, I’ve been wanting to tell you—”

Carol made a sweeping motion with her drink, nearly losing some of it in the process. “Well, that’s how it is with Abby.”

Maybe it was fatigue or the two drinks she’d consumed or some misguided guilt over this Reginald secret, but Carol’s statement triggered a gnawing in Mitch’s gut. Carol must’ve seen it, because her goofy grin slipped a little. Mitch didn’t want Serious Carol tonight. Serious Carol would keep her captive at this table, rooting around for every last detail about Reginald, would push and press Mitch about her feelings until she got flustered enough to make Carol back off. Serious Carol had her time and place, like those occasional nights when accumulated insomnia and stress broke Mitch down, and Carol could be quiet and calm and just what she needed. But now was not the time or the place.

So she grinned and said, “Abby. First-name basis, huh?”

Carol studied Mitch then gave a motionless shrug. “Mitchy, she’s my fast friend and just doesn’t know it. I’ve memorized whole passages of her book. Her office phone number blinks in neon when I close my eyes.”

Mitch let the quiet between them stretch before she said, “Sounds like you should call the woman.”

“But I can’t.” The yodel surfaced again.

“Sometimes I think you like driving yourself crazy.”

“Then sometimes you’re absolutely right.”

“Call her. We both know she’s been waiting for the phone to ring.”

Carol practically laid herself out across the table to loop her arms around Mitch’s neck and squeeze. “You’re such a catch. You need to find someone who appreciates you.” Carol disengaged and flopped back in her chair.

“Like Dr. Rosen?”

“No, silly, like me. Well, me minus the matrimonial entanglement. I mean, come on. You could do a lot worse.” Carol gave herself some Vanna White action.

“You’re pretty tough to top.”

“That’s very true, so look for a single me—just one hundred percent lesbo.”

Mitch pointed at Carol and said, “Call her.”

“Yessir.” Carol snapped a salute.

“And go keep Steve company while I hit the bathroom.”

“I think Angel’s taking care of that.” She nodded over at Angel and Steve in conversation, their differing shades of blond dipped toward each other.

“Then rescue him, I guess.”

The crowd had swelled since Mitch’s arrival, and she threaded through it toward the bathroom. In her peripheral vision, she saw Kim’s head follow her, but she resisted the urge to turn and look. In the bathroom, Mitch sat in the last narrow stall and listened to other women come and go.

Carol sometimes claimed that Mitch operated like the FBI, with umpteen layers of security and everything on a need-to-know basis. Sure, Mitch didn’t share Carol’s compulsion toward confession—she prized privacy and fuss-free quiet—but it would have been easy enough to tell Carol tonight. What really bothered her was that telling Carol about Reginald was in any way different from letting her know, a month into the proceedings, about sleeping with Kim. But it was different, and Mitch was going to have to deal with it.

She couldn’t find comfort in her body, ached for a pool, any pool big enough to allow a few strokes before turning, to feel the rhythm of movement, of breath, the buoyancy of water just dense enough to cradle her. But at 9:47 on a Friday evening, a swim was impossible, though some relief might come in the drive to her house, the windows open to the balmy early fall night, the familiarity of the wheel in her hands, the forty-miles-per-hour motion.

Outside the bathroom, the dim hallway was lined with bulletin boards hidden under Paleolithic layers of postings. Kim was there, leaning back next to a flier for piano lessons missing half its tabs and looking worse for wear. Her head was tilted so she peered at Mitch down the slope of her straight, fine nose.

She said, “I’m surprised you’re not at work. You look really tired.”

Mitch felt itchingly awake.

“I mean, but good. You look tired but good.” Kim pushed away from the wall and twisted a large silver ring on her right hand with the thumb and forefinger of her left.

“Kim,” Mitch said. In every aspect, Kim couldn’t be more different from Reginald, but Mitch’s attraction to them both felt the same at its root—divorced from gender and appearance. Something inside her had resonated with something in each of them, and that was that. To break the spell, she made herself remember what Kim had said in angry conclusion to their official breakup: “f**k you and your device.” Mitch had tried and only somewhat succeeded in not taking it personally.

Mitch said, “I should go.”

“No, wait.”

Mitch craved to feel the movements of freestyle and backstroke, the exhausting flailing that was her butterfly. “I really should go.”

Kim snagged Mitch’s arm. “I’m trying to tell you something.” Her fingers pressed into Mitch’s bicep. “I know you were just being you, and I thought I’d be okay with that, with you and your work. It’s not your fault that I wasn’t, but I really, really wanted it to be. Anyway, I shouldn’t have said what I did, and I’m sorry.”

Mitch forced her gaze from her black oxfords to Kim’s face. “I know. It’s okay.” Kim released her grasp, and Mitch tried to find something else to say. Failing that, she hurried from the hallway, but one step into the main room, assaulted by Carol’s raucous laughter, she turned and stumbled out the service door instead.

After walking two blocks in the alley behind Main, she moved to the better-lit sidewalk, keeping her head down amid the steady flow of students while she beat it to her truck. Her house was only four miles west on Route 56, but all that awaited her at home was Chester, an orange tabby more reproachful than affectionate. The way her mind was revving yet disengaged indicated that sleep was long hours away, and so Mitch drove south.

Mitch drew judgments like filings to a magnet. ‘Workaholic’ and ‘compulsive’ were a common one-two punch. Then there was ‘hard,’ which was sometimes a compliment, sometimes decidedly not, and was related to a whole class of similar characterizers: ‘driven’ (obsessed), ‘capable’ (know-it-all), and ‘focused’ (standoffish).

She didn’t take them to heart. How could she when she knew how complicated the act of observation was? Quantum physics postulated that probability, not actuality, was king. Left to their own devices, the universe’s swarm of subatomic particles existed as a giant maybe: Maybe a particle was exactly here right now and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was travelling at a certain velocity and maybe it wasn’t. If curiosity got Schrodinger’s cat and the itch to measure had to be scratched, the natural state of probability collapsed, and what was measured was really only what the act of observation had brought into being in the first place.

A similar quandary existed between people. The force of the observer’s history and current emotional state compromised what little objectivity existed around human nature and motivation, and the whole enterprise of understanding another person became hopelessly unreliable.

Long miles later, Mitch pulled over next to a fallow field, cut the engine, and sat in a rich darkness that was absolute until her wide-open eyes adjusted to the starlight. She might have outrun Carol and Kim, but she’d fallen right into the arms of old habit. Not that old habits were always bad. A long time ago, when she was Mitchell but not yet Mitch, she’d gotten used to the huge expanse and quiet of night in the Indiana countryside. Even now, she kept a tight roll of sleeping bag and foam shoved behind the passenger seat for just these occasions.