Goldbach's Conjecture

Goldbach's Conjecture was over 200 years old. I was familiar with it from a physics geek I roomed with in college. People had been driven mad trying to solve it. More books had been written about the quest for solution than about the solution itself. University classes devoted whole semesters to it. Sabbaticals arranged for the study had wound up alcoholics, suicides, one known double murder, and even a young female professor who simply quit and became a San Francisco prostitute. Through an amorous Italian connection, she wound up posing for Penthouse. It's true. Penney met her when she accompanied philosopher Fran Crick at the '99 Holistic Debunkers Conference, outside Lilydale.

Knowing Penney just wanted a million-dollar prize, I couldn't have cared less that the Goldbach was unsolved. My personal problems were much bigger and I needed Donohugh's help. I needed to know I wasn't losing it. When I called earlier that week, she asked me to lunch, hoping I'd be a positive buffer for this typical encounter with Penney. She was on deadline, editing one of his unsourced, first-person pieces. A Muzak version of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" wafted from unseen speakers, reminding me of shoddy but expensive work I had done once for the local Chamber of Commerce and a Toastmasters dinner I attended where everyone instantly knew my first name.

"You will always get a wrong answer when you are asking the wrong question," Penney coughed. He spit a cancered ice cube into his glass. My head was swimming. I was in a state of relaxed, controlled anxiety. The photo I had was either a handful of red roses or a burnt offering. It was something I had captured, chancing a look up at the sky, spotting a saucer shaped fate, challenging everything. I was almost alone that day out on Cold Springs Road, on my way to a shoot I wound up forgetting. When I set the camera back down on the roof of my car I hyperventilated. No other vehicles passed. I wanted to seize the camera, pull the film and send it over Cold Springs bridge, into the laughing creek. A tap on the shoulder stopped me. Now I felt myself struggling for my portion of the air Page and Chuck siphoned for their wordplay.

"You think the answer came first. Goldbach thought so too, you think, right? He purposely designed the question, the conjecture to throw people off. That's a conspiracy theory Chuck, the very thing we write, we speak out against." Page was getting pissed. I grabbed for her knee, under the table, found the edge of her skirt, telling her without words to calm down, people were looking our way.

"Not pure conspiracy, no," Penney scoffed, his breathing challenged at times by an unknown block, resounding like the hiss of a damp maple log in a campfire. "More like disinvention-creation of something meant to kill and then perish, like a computer virus. Premeditated, predetermined indeterminate. He wanted to create a mathematical sieve that left only confusion behind, dead ends of hyperthought and theory."

All the food on the table was dead. The soft meat sagged under parabolic lighting. The salt shaker was empty. The coffees that had been poured for us soured, untouched, muddying the picture. The fourth seat at the table was reserved for tension.

The vision haunted me, so much that I thought that when I attended the shoot at four that I would see spots of the chrome thing dotted among the girls at the session. I had to shoot a layout for a national kitchen cabinet company designing a special brochure for Alaska men. Laborers from Alaska, where the population is something like one woman for every ten men, liked advertisements for products that showed more half-dressed women than the products themselves. My photos turned rural loneliness into sexily absent intrigue. I was pretty good with the girls-fat, fake tan with a face like Ron Howard-there was no way they couldn't trust me. I got a number now and then, but my love, well, my intense like was Page. She was bookishly sexy, which had always been my thing. She agreed to dinner now and then and I knew I could wait until she decided I was the one, no matter how long it took. However, the story I was about to tell her, and tell her only, might hurt my chances. I needed someone though, someone tough, and she was all I had.