Goldbach's Conjecture

"Like Goldbach was making some scholarly joke, like Gardner's Science magazine puzzles? A mathematical wisecrack? I can't and I won't believe it, Penney, until you have real proof."

Page had continued, after pulling her warm leg away from my grip. I folded my cloth napkin like an American flag.

Terrence Monk, my roommate at Cornell until I failed out, was bent on Goldbach so it was all I heard for mine and his last semester. He had a lot of prescription pills. He started seeing things, telling me, days later, what had been there, or not. He read Jung and loudly hated "Star Trek," and Disney. He left notes in my desk and in my old Nikon bag, "The binary Goldbach conjecture is still lacking a proof." Terry would have loved the fact though that in 1999-nearly 10 years after he left this life-British publisher Faber & Faber offered $1 million prize for a proof. The race is still on.

I thought of what had happened with my photo and how I would open my statement to Page, outside the restaurant, after Penney had walked out without paying, after the waiter asked why the other man had not eaten anything, after Page had wiped her glasses with a Kleenex and wondered how she would ever finish the piece on the Taiwanese members of the once Garland, Texas-based UFO cult that had relocated to my own Lockport, New York, to gather members for a planned encounter with God on the misty shores of Lake Ontario. Penney's interpreter translated interview with cult leader Soon Been Chen was an international exclusive.

It seemed like a lot of people anxiously monitored the skies above Lockport since I had returned here from school. Battles of another kind, psychological, ensued over a move. In 1990, the U.S. military operated Artysmoky Falls International Airbase-just 15 miles north of my hometown-had rerouted its Air Force training flights over Lockport and nearby Amherst, reportedly hoping to calm years of Falls Tourism Bureau complaints about low flying jets ruining the romantic peace and majesty of the Honeymoon Capital of the World. At first secretly and then in quiet rumbles, Lockportians feared the military mistake when a plane careened off course to drop from the sky, when an insane gunner or bomber would open fire on us, or when World War III finally came, with foreign forces zeroing in on the base and its surrounding civilian towns, washing all humanity away at midnight, employing unknown tools of destruction. Yet the greatest anxieties were over the mysteries of the base itself, which, in 1991, received $2 billion in additional federal money for "atmospheric research." The Lockport Talk of the Town turned ugly. Odd sounds emitted from the gray military planes that spied on cookouts, yard sales, and neighbors' pools. Full moons were often blotted out by midnight runs of practicing teams of Devil Dog Detachments. Certain hangars of the base were strictly off limits to touring high school groups and even some military personnel. Insane rumors surfaced of mind control, false advertising campaigns, muffled angry shouts coming from behind walls, backward running clocks, agents infiltrating local bowling alleys, and a decorated national Air Force Reserves pilot who could make a really scary face. An empty, syrup-coated NASA envelope was found in a restroom in the Lockport Mall. One Monday, the whole area reeked of dung. Now and then a dead cow, it's heart removed, was found in the deserted lot of a defunct Transit Road Kmart, throwing increasing suspicion on the hidden activities of the Falls base and its apparent anger toward area farmers who had spoken with the Lockport Sun & Journal about sonic booms that decreased milk production. Speculation ensued, toxic rumors were mongered, and guilt was stealthily established. A joint citizen/area government committee was formed to study the issues residents had about the base. One meeting was held at the United Auto Workers Local 54 hall, but attention wound up focusing on an idling camouflage Hummer with tinted windows, parked in the UAW lot, lights dimmed. Future meetings were all adjourned for lack of a quorum.