Edom was being led by a piece of paper to a place where he had never been. The words, written in his own blend of capitalized script and textbook cursive, bore the names of streets he did not recognize. He thought he knew this city well. But now he found himself slowly looking from the piece of paper up to a building. He was sure he had never seen it before. Its sheer height appeared too modern for the stone from which it was constructed. He knew he would have recognized such a strange, anachronistic piece of architecture had he seen it before. He racked his brain for possible architects. No one came to mind.
Edom glanced back at his bike, still leaning against a light post. It was an old single-speed cruiser, maroon from both paint and rust. The seat had strips of black electrical tape across it in a pattern reminiscent of an off-kilter Mondrian painting. Composition with maroon and white filling… Tattered vinyl had ruined one pair of his pants; the tape was enough to prevent another loss.
Edom wasn’t sure why, but he expected to see neither his bike nor the light post when he looked back, but they were still there. Regardless, it said 3:00 on the piece of paper, above the directions, and his watch read 3:05.
The first thing Edom noticed as he opened the door was that, despite the intimidating height of the building, he couldn’t see an elevator. There was a single desk to the left, and no doors, just a spiral staircase in the center of a vast circular atrium. The walls appeared to be paneled with the same redwood as the desk, the floors, and even the staircase.
Years earlier, he had followed his friend, Naomi, through a doorway that led to a low-walled walkway. On their left, there had been two windows that seemed to extend symmetrically down below the walkway. Actually, the whole room, including the wall and the door on the right, had been symmetrical from top to bottom. This had given him the notion that he was walking on a plank suspended over the next room down, which was made to mirror the one above. Suddenly, Edom realized what he was looking at — a room filled with oil. The low walls protected them from the oil, which perfectly reflected the upper half of the room. He immediately worried he might accidentally dip his hand into the oil and distort the symmetry, but instead he had seized. He had stood there for about five minutes, unmoving, gawking, in epiphany.
Edom felt he looked just as dumb entering this room. He realized that he was hearing someone say, “May I help you?” for the third time. The simple question, to which Edom didn’t have an answer, came from a woman, mid-forties (perhaps), whose hands were neatly folded on an old book whose leather spine (by no surprise) matched the color of the massive piece of wood from which this entire room appeared to have been carved. Her hands were evenly clasped over the center of the book, her spine perfectly erect, her shoulders back, and her gaze perfectly orthogonal to her back. The only rogue element was the uneven bun that held most of her hair in place.
“… Sir?”
Mathematics relies heavily on intuition. Most people, errantly, believe math to be rigid, unmoving, a thing beyond doubt. What they do not understand, however, is that there is a reason why computers cannot yet prove meaningful theorems, much less pose a conjecture that is worth proving in the first place. So, when a mathematician finds a conjecture that he believes is true (no matter what the evidence is), he will pursue a proof. This process is rarely linear. Often, it is best to get the larger pieces of the proposed puzzle together before filling in the final gaps. And, after months or even years, the mathematician will often have a “great” proof that is missing one little piece he knows can be solved — intuition amid ambiguity.
Recently, Edom had come to such a point in his research. He was on the verge of completing the proof of a conjecture that had been open to the mathematics community for some time, but was stuck on one little result. Such a result, which is needed to prove a more significant theorem, is often called a lemma; Edom affectionately referred to this as the “Die” lemma. And, while he was not technically alone on this project, the lemma fell into the category of things that were (supposedly) in his area of expertise — that is, his collaborator had already finished her part of the problem. As a last resort, he had posted the conjectured lemma to a forum online five days earlier, offering publishing credit to anyone who could help. He hated having to do this. Those mysterious mathematicians who lived only on the internet rarely gave beautiful proofs, but a proof is a proof, and Edom needed to move on in his research.
So, when Edom had received a call the next day from someone called Jeremiah, who told him that he could “be glad” and who claimed to have a solution to his problem, he had assumed it was regarding the Die lemma. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Edom looked at the paper in his hand with the directions given to him by this Jeremiah four days earlier, looked up once more at the lady, and told her about the call.
“Of course,” was all she said as she slid her chair back and rose to her feet, without making the slightest noise. She began to walk to the wall opposite her. Edom watched her walk to the right. For the first time, he noticed that the walls were not made of wood paneling, but were instead covered by little doors, which couldn’t have been bigger than five centimeters tall by three wide. Each had its own tiny wooden knob. He found it strange that he had not seen these when he first walked in. There did not seem to be a square foot of the wall that wasn’t covered in the little doors. It reminded him of that moment wherein you realize a whole log is covered in ants, having initially noticed just a single ant. Of course, the knobs were camouflaged, made of the same wood as the rest of the room.
The lady pulled on one of the little knobs, which revealed that, rather than being doors, each panel was, in fact, a drawer. She must have pulled this particular one a full meter out. Edom wondered how deep the tiny drawers went. The woman, balancing her pair of red reading glasses on her round nose, looked for something in the drawer. All Edom could see was the glint of tiny metal objects that appeared to be spaced evenly down the entire length of the exposed drawer.
“And here it is,” she said cheerfully, pulling out a key from about two-thirds of the way down the drawer. “Do not lose this, as there are only two, and the second key is to be kept on file here at all times.”
She handed him the key, closed the drawer, and returned to her post, reading the untitled leather book. Edom stood there, dumbfounded. What did the key unlock? Had she misunderstood who he was? And where was Jeremiah in all of this? He looked at the key. On it was simply etched 25E421.
“Up the stairs, then,” she said, briefly looking up from her book, “… to the 25th floor.”
It wasn’t unusual for Eddy to be late. Naomi was used to him getting absorbed in his work, losing track of time. Usually, he’d at least reply when she messaged him, especially when the message was to remind him that time existed. Naomi had tried texting him, not once but twice. She was a bit worried. She knew he had been looking forward to this exhibition. He loved Brancusi… especially his endless columns. She, however, was more interested in seeing The Kiss. They were bringing a few pieces in from Philadelphia, and it was included. If you combined The Kiss with the Endless Column, perhaps you would have Oldenburg’s Clothespin, but there was no way to move a 10-ton, 45-foot clothespin to where they were.
Sure, most people wouldn’t consider Oldenburg on the same level as Brancusi, but his work always made her smile. She would just have to visit Philadelphia again to see the big clothespin. Either way, Edom would definitely want to be here, unless he was dead in a gutter somewhere.
Naomi was worried about this new thought toddler, toddling around, grabbing other thoughts. She often referred to worries that she couldn’t remove from her head as “thought toddlers.” She knew it was apt, but Edom never understood. She insisted it was only because he had never had to yet watch a toddler, or (worse) toddlers, for an extended period. She tried calling him again, in order to keep the thought toddler at bay, but there was no answer. A louder, chattier, toddlier toddler joined the group.
Edom wondered how many floors the building had. He had already passed 19, on the way to 25, but, looking up through the seemingly infinite rotini, he estimated there to be at least 500.
Finally, he opened the door with a large red “25” painted on it carefully with a serif font. The door opened to an annulus, a center column with a lone door leading back to the staircase, and a large outer wall similar to the first room. Instead of tiny drawers, however, this room’s wall was covered by full-sized doors, each with its own letter. The letters ranged from “A” to “Z”. Edom looked at the “25E421” on the key. He entered the “E” door.
Edom stared down a long corridor lined with doors on either side. There was no way that all of this fit into the building he had initially entered, and he definitely did not remember noticing it get wider as it rose toward the sky. Besides, the height, as seen from the stairs, appeared vastly different from the height as viewed from the building’s exterior. None of this made any sense — Edom was getting a headache: roughly 500 floors, 26 hallways, and 500 doors per hallway — that made over six million rooms in this building — a building which he had never noticed during the nine years he lived in this city.
Despite his headache, he proceeded, slowly at first, down the hallway… the even-numbered doors were on the left, and odd-numbered on the right. As he passed door 73, he picked up his pace; 421 would take forever to reach if he kept a slow pace. He glanced at the numbers as he accelerated: 79, 83, 89, 97. Soon, he was in a slow jog and was in the 300s, then 401. His pace slowed. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there, much less what he might find behind the 421st door.
Finally standing in front of his door (or was it his?), the feeling in his stomach reminded him of his first time on stage.
In high school, Edom had been somewhat directionless, but still curious. This led him to participating in a few different sports, taking varied electives, and even trying out for a few plays. He had been cast as the lead for The Glass Menagerie. The first time he had gone on stage had been a strange sensation, due to the nerves from knowing that he was about to be on display for an entire audience. Once he crossed into the lights, however, the nerves left. Edom supposed it was because you weren’t, in fact, on display for anyone; instead, the character was. It wasn’t written in the script that Tom was nervous.
Edom had that same feeling now — that he was about to enter some sort of stage.
He grinned, turned the key, and recalled the line “I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.”
Inside, card catalogs were stacked 12 high on either side of a narrow hallway, which led to a small circular room containing only a chair and a simple desk with a reading lamp on it. The desk, chair, and faces of the catalog drawers were all fashioned from that same wood. From where he was standing, Edom could see a minimum of four hallways extending from the round room. It appeared as though they contained stacks of books bound in that same old leather. It was difficult to tell. The hallway containing the card catalogs was long, and everything else seemed so distant.
Instinctively, Edom approached one of the card catalog drawers on the left and pulled out a card:
Edom had completely forgotten about his meeting with Naomi. He had promised to meet her two hours ago for the Brancusi exhibit. Without reading past Naomi’s name, he quickly replaced the card, closed the drawer, and looked at his phone — no service.
Edom headed back to the stairs. He seemed to reach the first floor in an arbitrarily short time and said a hushed goodbye to the reading lady.
Once outside, his phone beeped five times — 5 missed calls and four new text messages, all from Naomi.
Continue reading A Free Will Manifold — read the rest on Amazon ↗ (opens in a new tab)
