Goldbach's Conjecture

Goldbach's Conjecture

Brandon M. Stickney

The photo I still have, now brutally folded and fingerprinted, seems to fade, but my own memory is clear, though those who disbelieve now tell me that memory itself cannot be trusted. Memory is an enabler that fills in reality-based details that the mind may be missing and is always ready to employ. If I really saw what I thought I saw, then what I saw was seen among those, other than myself, who refused to see it.

It was silver, chrome-a magnetic camouflage hidden among fleeting June clouds and the black sunspots that cluttered my eyes. I still see the awning of my right hand shading my perspective. There as the odd angle of the camera as I brought it up to my eye, and the dizziness that almost toppled me later in my lab. Among the disbelievers, I am untrustworthy I suppose, and as your narrator, I am a guide you need not pay. You can see the photo yourself and your belief, or complacence is payment enough for me, now, after all that has, or has not, happened. Consider yourself saved, if I may be so bold.

This began after I had seen it. I wanted to tell her when we were leaving the Red Lobster on Maple Road in Amherst, a suburb thirty miles from Buffalo. I had eaten with Chuck Penney and Page Donohugh, both editors at the Skeptical Review. "SR," as people called it, was the "magazine for science and reason," a scholarly subscription-only glossy that debunked reports of psychics, Christian science, crop circles, creationism, extreme magic, government conspiracies, coverups, aliens, alien abductions, alien autopsies, talking dogs, holistic medicine, end-time predictions and cults, weeping statues, sightings of dead celebrities, channeling, astrology, crystal powers, parapsychology, spontaneous combustion, miracle workers, collective delusions and crowd madness, Fortean mysteries, the Shroud of Turin, weeping icons, musical healings, herb healings, levitation, séances, hauntings, hypnosis, dowsing, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, demonic possessions, reincarnation, false memory syndrome, the Bermuda Triangle mysteries, and irresponsible journalism. SR's position was that most big questions had scientific answers and great mysteries had logical explanations. Monied scientists and even affluent scholars-and there are quite a lot of them in the U.S. and Europe-kept SR in print. Founded in 1977 and still located in a brooding former Bell Aerospace hangar at 41 John Glenn Drive in Amherst, SR drew hundreds of visitors annually from around the world. Pro-science and pro-cynic conferences were held on each Friday the 13th, where mirrors were broken, ladders were walked beneath, and black cats crossed paths. While Penney had once gashed his index finger while breaking a mirror, no other experiences of bad luck or ill will were reported. Religious holidays were open to criticism and scorn, while widely accepted publications like newspaper horoscopes and new year predictions were met with angry rebuttals in letters to the editor across the nation, all generated by the devoted SR staff. Despite the zealotry, only one longtime SR editor, J. Edward Crump, actually went to work and labored late into the evening each Christmas Day. SR was a story in itself, which the national media summarily ignored-so unpopular was the agenda of unbelief. Unbelief did not sell books, it did not make movie plots, did not endorse piety, and it did not support psychic hotlines. Still, everyday atheists, agnostics and humanists had a place to converse with top scientists-common ground founded on unbelief.

Carl Sagan had been a regular contributing editor to SR before his death and Steve Allen had been a financial supporter before his death. Penney and Donohugh, charter members of SR's Committee for the Specific Investigation of Claims of the Religions & Paranormal, had fretted over the magazine's apparent loss of direction since the passing of these two men. But the main focus of the afternoon was not one of mourning-it was a notoriously unsolved mathematical problem.

"What of Goldbach's Conjecture then?" offered Penney.

"Oh, no. Do we have to do this again, today, now? In front of Gibson?" complained Donohugh. Even her perfume was intelligent, less than Lauren, more than Shalimar. I imagined that she wore nothing, simply bathing in natural springs available only to the eclectic tenants of her east Amherst apartment building.

"Humor me for just a moment, Page, after all we've been through, I need the diversion. This potato tastes like it was baked alongside a rancid haddock."

"Okay then. Send it back. Yes. Goldbach. I decline to stand by your theory."