The Abundance: A Novel Page 12

  Years more, ten years, maybe fifteen years more she might have lived. She might have retired to her room at seven like always and passed from half-sleep to nothing, propped on two down pillows, earbuds in her ears and the white cord vanishing beneath the blanket, blissful, the lamp still on at her elbow, Track 04 still playing, some spiraling alaap of Pandit Jasraj that would follow her soul through the chimney and up into the slate-gray Ohio sky. But she never agreed to come. I want my own flat, I want my own place, she explained. And besides, a parent mustn’t live in a daughter’s house.

  At night, after everyone is asleep, Mala opens her laptop and sits in the glow. She starts to type, rapidly, as everyone of her generation does. It sounds like a small private rainfall. Our house has high ceilings and hardwood floors. Her key strokes echo. I can hear her from the study, where I am sleeping for the first time tonight. Maybe she is writing an e-mail to Ronak, giving him an update. Does he care to be told of anything but the big changes?

  The ceiling of my days has been lowered by one flight. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping here. I regretted the night winding down. Sachin, who had made our cheeks ache with Gujarati jokes, put away the pistachio ice cream, and Mala rinsed the bowls and spoons. They went upstairs. Abhi and I went to the study.

  Its dimensions felt wholly strange in the darkness. Twenty minutes into my sleeplessness, I whispered to Abhi, “I didn’t want you to give up your study.”

  There was no need to check if he was awake. I had my head on his shoulder, and I could sense his body’s tense wakefulness. “I haven’t given up my study,” he said. “I just moved my study upstairs.”

  “That room is half the size.”

  “I didn’t use most of the room I had in here. It was empty space.”

  “It wasn’t. It was space for you to think.”

  “This is the room I think in,” he said, tapping on his head. “Besides, we were going to turn this room into a first-floor guest room, remember? If Ma or Ba had come to live with us, I would have transferred upstairs anyway.”

  “We talked about that years ago.”

  “So?”

  I shook my head. “This has been your study for years, Abhi.”

  “I like it up there.”

  I lifted my head and looked at his face to see if he was lying. I can tell when he is lying; he does it to spare me sometimes. Like: Of course they processed it wrong, they’re going to pay for that scan in full. He looked as if he meant it, but I could only see his profile by the flame-shaped night-light.

  “The window upstairs, it looks out over the back. Just yesterday, I saw the neighbor’s grandchildren on their trampoline.”

  I nodded.

  “I think I’m going to sneak out to their trampoline one warm night and do some jumps.”

  I smiled. He yawned.

  “Let’s go to sleep, okay?”

  Abhi, arm across my stomach, is pretending to sleep right now, here in the room where he used to come alive. He has started lingering until I fall asleep. His mind stays awake. He leaves when I steady my breathing for a minute straight. I have told him he can go right away, he doesn’t need to lie next to me, but he says he wants to. He enjoys getting more rest, he says, he’s fresher during the day. But I know he doesn’t care about being groggy during the workday so long as his nights in the study have him at peak alertness. He can prescribe Sinemet or check a Babinski reflex on two hours of sleep or fewer. That can all be done on the auxiliary generator. It’s brain-stem function for him. The main generator kicks on at midnight. His study burns white against a backdrop of sleeping suburban houses.

  I slow my breathing. He starts to extricate himself. His arm goes weightless by degrees. He turns gingerly, watching how his movements transmit across the mattress. It’s the way he used to leave for work on those kindergarten mornings when Ronak, scared of lightning or simply wanting his mommy, had shuffled into the master bedroom and come between us to sleep. (Even though she was the kid sister, Mala had no fears back then. Monsters, Abhi used to joke, were scared of her.) As he has done every night recently, Abhi stands and looks at me a while. Even though I am keeping my eyes shut, I can sense his gaze on my face. Its warmth makes me feel like I’m napping outdoors in the sun. He keeps the knob turned as he closes the door.

  I try to sleep for real, but I can’t. Abhi is upstairs now—the light on in his new study, his mind in low earth orbit. I go outside to where Mala is typing. She works by the dull light from the hall. Answering e-mails from work, maybe. I put my fingers on the switch, but I don’t turn on the light. Should I ask her first? Best not to disturb her concentration. It is so rare for her, now that she has the kids, to get this kind of alone time. She usually checks her e-mail and the news before sleep. When I was a mother, I don’t remember having anything I needed to catch up with. I never felt left out. Mothers now do; motherhood feels like pulling over and parking on the shoulder of a highway. I peer more closely at the screen. She isn’t on the Internet, I don’t think. The light from the screen illuminates a card from this afternoon. Three more are at her elbow. She sets it down and types again, her fingers moving while her head is still turned. I step up noiselessly (what do I weigh anymore?) to read the file name across the top: Mom.doc.

  Mala turns. “Hey, Mom.”

  I smile and stroke her hair. “Busy?”

  “Just taking some notes.”

  “Keep working.”

  “I’m almost done. Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t sleep?”

  “I’ll sleep soon.”

  Her hair feels like mine used to. She has many of her father’s features, but this detail, at least, is mine.

  “What recipe is that?” I ask.

  “The dahl we made today.”

  I see what I have been doing forever only now that I can read it. What always felt like one reflex is really a sequence of small steps. It astonishes me that the dahl I have been making for the past thirty years can fill a whole screen with letters. It seems so important there, so permanent. But it’s really just a cup of dusty-yellow mung beans soaked overnight.

  “Do you need anything, Mom?”

  “I’m just getting a glass of water.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want the monitor?”

  She doesn’t say baby monitor; she’s certain I would never say yes to baby monitor. Tonight, over ice cream, she proposed “the monitor” for the first time; she had gotten Sachin to make a case for it to me. She had probably coordinated with him, knowing I would be less likely to say no to him. A baby monitor! As if I would let my every toss and grunt be transmitted upstairs in case I needed—what? A walk to the bathroom? “I’ll be fine, Mala. I’m getting a glass of water.”

  “Okay. But if you kept the monitor, you could ask for it, and we’d hear.”

  “I am okay without it.”

  At the refrigerator, I drink and pause and listen to her typing. The sound comforts me.

  “Do you want water, Mala?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  I open the cupboard to get her a fresh glass.

  “Your glass is fine, Mom,” she says distractedly, picking up the card again and setting it in her done pile, on the other side of the laptop.

  I know her. She will want two ice cubes. I set her water beside her finished note cards without speaking. How satisfying it feels to set drink before thirst, food before hunger. I pass the light switch again and rest my hand on it.

  “Do you want the light on?”

  “I’m almost done. Last thing is uploading the pics.”

  “The ones you took on your phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The light will be better for your eyes.”

  “All right. Turn it on.”

  The brightness, sharp as a whistle, shatters the quiet. I use the dimmer to restore some softness to the night.

  “Good night, Mala.”

  “Night, Mom. Tell me if you need anything.”

>   “Okay.”

  I turn to the hall that my shadow fills. Mala types another line, then sips from my glass, her mouth where my mouth was.

  In the study I still can’t sleep. I look around. My bed is where his desk was. His room smells of books. His walls have no nail holes—this space is for pure mathematics, austere. Uninterrupted planes. Abhi even kept the picture of me and the children propped on the bookshelf, not mounted. As a rule, he doesn’t like paintings or pictures on walls. A Home Sweet Home plaque and three staggered porcelain wall-tiles hang in the kitchen because the kitchen is under my jurisdiction. The main room’s vast walls are bare. It is where we entertain guests, or used to. Whenever we had someone over, I would see our blank walls through their eyes and complain to Abhi that we needed paintings or at least mirrors. He would shake his head and say the walls were beautiful the way they were. Why clutter them? He thought blank sheets of printer paper beautiful, too. Blank sheets of graph paper, even more so.

  Before today’s move upstairs, this study had been disrupted only once. After Abhi got his award, a local station asked to interview him for the ten o’clock news. He had fielded phone calls for several days prior to this, and six different magazines had done written interviews with him, but this was the first interest shown by a television station. When the crew said they wanted to do the taping in his study, he agreed right away.

  The next day, two cameramen, keeping their boots on, set up their equipment. Soon a huge camera tripod was squatting in Abhi’s sanctum like a gigantic insect. After a second trip to the news van, they brought a lamp on a pole, the sort used at photography studios. They had to tilt it through the doorway. Dirty-looking orange extension cords coiled on the hardwood. We kept staring at their boots, but it was too late to say anything. The soiling was done. The cameraman moved Abhi’s chair so he was sitting in front of some books.

  The local news had sent the doctor who did its health segments to do the interview, probably because Abhi was a doctor, too. It was the closest thing to a qualification anyone there could claim. We had watched Dr. Tim’s segments for years. I had no idea his face was so pink in real life. It could have been from the sun, but the flush looked more like the kind that comes from smoking—Dr. Tim, who always warned how cigarettes cause lung cancer.

  Before the taping started, Dr. Tim wanted Abhi to put the medal around his neck, but Abhi explained how one didn’t generally wear awards of this nature. It wasn’t done.

  “That’s probably true, but it would be helpful for the viewers to, you know, actually see the medal,” Dr. Tim suggested, aligning papers on his lap.

  “It’s not from the Olympics.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I can stand it on the shelf behind me.”

  “That would be helpful—Chuck, is it in the shot?”

  The cameraman nodded and leaned forward to speak quietly to Dr. Tim. “It’s in the shot, but you can’t see it. There’s glare off the case.”

  “Maybe I can take off the cover?” said Abhi.

  “Let’s see. You know … why don’t we take it out?”

  Abhi brought out the medal, which had a ribbon affixed to it. Dr. Tim held out his hand. The cameraman and Dr. Tim tried different locations and finally set up the medal so that it dangled off the shelf. The case itself they used as a weight to hold the ribbon in place. I stood in the doorway behind the cameraman. Abhi touched a handkerchief to his forehead and scalp, where the light’s reflection shone intensely white.

  The medal was still swinging, pendulum-like. Dr. Tim told Abhi the interview would be edited for time and “flow,” so he should feel free to stop and restart an answer if he wanted to; they would smooth things out in the cutting room. Abhi nodded and stilled the medal between his thumb and forefinger. When he let go, it began ticking again, side to side. Both Abhi and Dr. Tim waited before starting to record, staring until it hung still. The cameraman put up his hand and counted down with his fingers. The Record light went on.

  Dr. Tim’s demeanor changed. His posture improved. His voice took on the slightly high-pitched friendliness I knew from segments warning about processed sugar and fatty diets. He said a few brief things about how honored he was to meet Abhi. My husband glanced at me and nodded. Dr. Tim asked his first question.

  “Can you tell our viewers a little bit about the Millennium Prize questions?”

  “Well, in 2003, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced seven unsolved problems in mathematics. These were problems that have been hanging around, waiting for someone to provide a proof. Some of the problems were unsolved for centuries. Around 2005, I started working on one of the problems. I worked on it pretty regularly, and last year, I had what I felt was a publishable solution.”

  “And how much was the award?”

  “Yes, ahem,” said Abhi, flushing. I noticed he had not mentioned the award money. His voice went soft. “One million dollars.”

  “One million dollars! What are you planning on doing with all that prize money?”

  “Well…” Abhi looked at the floor.

  “Any vacations planned?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  Dr. Tim nodded. “All right.” He checked his notes. “Tell us: Were you always good at math in school?”

  “I was good enough to get good grades. I certainly enjoyed it more than other subjects.”

  “So how did you end up in medicine?”

  Abhi’s shrug was more eloquent than it looked. It expressed everything: the passivity in the face of his father’s profession, his title not inherited, but feeling that way, like the left-sided part to his hair. But the shrug also said It never really bothered me. People had trouble understanding how he had never felt constrained by his destiny. They thought medicine demanded absolute dedication, or at least sustained focus. But Abhi had excelled while in a state of perpetual distraction. It was as if he had read his textbooks using peripheral vision. On our coffee table, the Journal of the American Medical Association frequently sat under the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

  “Will you go on practicing medicine, now that you’re a world-famous mathematician?”

  Abhi smiled and shrugged again. “My life hasn’t changed as a result of this. I really can’t imagine my life without Neurology at this point.” It was true: He had gotten the call about the award during morning rounds, had stilled the phone’s buzzing when he saw it wasn’t me, and resumed eye contact with the third-year medical student presenting a case. He finally found out four hours later, when he happened to check his seven messages. I hadn’t found out until 6:30 PM that day because a complicated add-on consult had kept him late at work.

  “So you have two passions, then: your numbers and your patients?”

  Abhi, in utter innocence, said, “I wouldn’t say that. My passion has always been one thing only, mathematics.”

  Dr. Tim looked at his papers and began again. “One of the most amazing things about this story is how you manage to be a full-time neurologist—and solve these daunting problems in your spare time. What’s your secret?”

  “It was only one problem I solved.” Abhi spread his hands as if to show he was not guilty. “I think I can do it because I don’t need a big lab or anything. Many of the attempted solutions sent in for the Clay problems are the work of amateurs, actually. Much of this is theoretical. I didn’t need big computers.”

  A pause. “Can you explain, for our viewers, how you did what you did? How you managed to crack this particular nut?”

  Abhi shook his head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. Tim. He looked at the cameraman. The red Record light blinked off. “Do you think you might be able to, maybe, summarize what you did? I’m talking about a very simplified version, for our viewers. Just so they get a sense.”

  Abhi scratched his ear. “That is … difficult. It’s not something you can just explain.”

  He knew how difficult it was because he had tried with me, more t
han once. In his famous paper, he had written something beautiful and everlasting that only a few people on Earth could understand. And among their number was no one he loved. What he had written spoke of the universe but was not universal. All those years of secret exploration; at the end, a discovery, but one that was intrinsically secret. You could make it public and it would still remain secret.

  “Are there any applications for your solution? Say, in technology? Engineering?”

  Abhi scratched his ear again and looked at the camera to make sure it was off. “It’s really a proof, you know. It’s not a … it’s really very abstract.”

  When he met mathematicians, it was no better. He was alien to them as well, the wealthy, well-spoken physician shaking hands with slouching unkempt professors and poverty-line grad students in jeans and tennis shoes. He had the absolute loneliness of the anomaly.

  The interview started again. Dr. Tim, having gotten nowhere with questions about math, circled back to the other natural focal point of Abhi’s story. How did he find the time? Was he really self-taught? And then he rephrased a question he had asked earlier. “Why didn’t you decide to study mathematics in college?”

  And this time, hearing it phrased this way—not why medicine; why not his true love—Abhi gave a different answer. “I felt I should do what was best, as a family man,” he said. “There really is no job as rewarding as medicine, in every way. I am very grateful. It’s very much a part of who I am now.” And then, with a flicker of the eyes in my direction, unconscious I am sure, he added, “There was never an opening for me to be another way.” Such an odd pair of statements, gratitude and regret in immediate succession. Dr. Tim did not register that oddness. He went on to other things. But I noticed it, and I felt a burning in my cheeks and neck. I knew what underlay that statement, even if Abhi didn’t. If his wife had worked, if this had been a two-income household, he might have had more time. He might have given up the profession that wasn’t his passion; he might have become a mathematician instead of a neurologist who solved a famous problem for a one-million-dollar prize. I remember looking at the boots of the cameraman and at the Rolex, platinum-heavy, on Dr. Tim’s wrist. I know Abhi meant no malice. He might not have been thinking of me. In the segment that aired (one minute and twelve seconds, all edited), you can hear a small tap during one of Abhi’s answers. That was me, resting my head against the blank austere plane of his study wall, blinking with sudden, bewildered, tearful guilt. Who might he have been had I not been me? How much better might he have been, if I had been better?