Chauncey skipped five grades. When he took his seat in English 9 with Mrs. Sotomayor he looked like a mushroom in an arboretum. He was very quiet, only answering when called on directly and sheepish in groupwork, but he paid attention every second. At the end of one class he overheard an older girl say smoke in a low voice. Another day he saw an older boy put his hand down his pants, which choreography not even the boy noticed. Chauncey could feel that he was developing an excess of attention. He would notice things that had no causal effect — Mrs. Sotomayor would slightly misunderstand something a student said, but not enough for it to make a difference to the class discussion; or she would turn heel and point to the sophomore boy (repeating) who she was sure was the one talking, and on other occasions he had been, but this time he really wasn’t, so his protests of innocence were shaded with a rare validity, just then, to which Chauncey could attest. But he didn’t. He sat there, a small gun, kept clean and not used.
One Monday at home he was writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet. It was a staging paper, so he had to talk about how he would put on the play. The bright edge of his attention was humming now; he knew he could do something real with pantsboy as Romeo and smokegirl as Juliet, the English 9 classroom itself realizing Verona, Mrs. Sotomayor an erstwhile Queen Mab animating the whole thing. But there was a countervibration, humming unignorably in his brain. He hadn’t been in high school long but he could sense this application of his attention could do massive damage, somehow, like a ridiculously thin syringe destroying a small clump of cells it had only been meant to biopsy. Pantsboy was not not the bullying kind (yes, Chauncey was young, which was a public defense, but bullies do some of their best work in private), and smokegirl had a lot of friends. He wrote two papers, handed in the one set in a ski chalet (“an untimely frost…”), and kept the other in his drawer.
Chauncey swelled with writing. He had been a diarist for as long as he could form words on paper, at his mother’s insistence, but he had always felt his diary as a kind of formal, empty thing (DiD nOt Do tOo mUCh tODaY, said entire one very early Chauncey page). Now he had this teeming piece of anthropology he entered every day, full of adults and teenagers whose conversations and motivations were richly studded with a mix of things Chauncey plainly understood and completely didn’t. It was like there was one half of him missing that everyone else already had — like he saw them with only one eye, so the depth was all off. He was writing as a first-ditch attempt to understand.
Chauncey was in Chemistry and advanced mathematics. One Thursday in lab he saw something puzzling: while a group of students that included the English 9 repeater were laughing together, pretending to snort some of the dry powders they needed for the experiment, one boy who was usually among their number completed the assignment, quickly and successfully, in the opposite corner of the classroom. Then when he joined his friends (his lab report discreetly tucked into his backpack on the way over), he pretended he had no idea what they were supposed to do and joined in the faux-snorting. The teacher yelled at them but even before that Chauncey felt a weird, cold fear.
Chauncey didn’t have all the words for this fear yet. Had he been sat in front of Dr. Johnson, the child mental health professional his mother had insisted to his father that Chauncey see, regularly, while he was still acclimating to the new school, he would probably fail to describe it in adequate terms. He knew doing well in school was important. He just hadn’t known you could do it secretly.
When he got home Chauncey started to write a story about the boy. He knew the boy’s real name but for the purposes of his writing he decided to call him Secret Notebook. Secret Notebook was a little like Chauncey — smart, aware, methodical — but also a lot unlike him. Chauncey didn’t have anywhere to be or anyone to be with outside of his immediate family, whereas Secret Notebook demonstrably had friends. Chauncey sat with the thin, oily feeling that Secret Notebook probably knew way more than him about two entirely different kinds of things: academic topics and social life. Chauncey knew almost all his phase-shifted peers were head and shoulders above him in the latter domain, but he had allowed himself, with the sextuple promotion and the facts of his A’s and A–‘s in Honors Precalculus while everyone else was struggling to float at a B or a C, to think he might be the petit king cheese of the former.
Chauncey’s fascination with Secret Notebook sprawled into the beginnings of a novel. In the manuscript Secret Notebook smoked with his friends and put his hand down his pants and secretly excelled at Chemistry and other subjects. Besides aping what he saw other high schoolers do on a daily basis, Chauncey wasn’t sure how to occupy Secret Notebook’s time in the narrative, so he gave him a little brother. Secret Notebook gave medium-length lectures to this younger sibling on topics Chauncey knew a lot about now, but didn’t a year ago, like vectors and orbitals and Elizabethan drama. Chauncey imagined himself at seven, ignorant of so much despite his great promise, and fed Secret Notebook lines from his teachers and the odd big-brotherly razz he interpolated from the way he heard nearly all his new male peers talking to each other.
The novel draft lived in Chauncey’s drawer, until one day it didn’t. On a drizzly Saturday Chauncey came upstairs to his mother reading the first chapter, her expression caught mid-calculation re: whether she was going to be proud or paranoid about this.
***
Chauncey’s thirty-first birthday went uneventfully at school. His postdoc was going well — he was working with one of the world’s premier algebraic number theorists, and they were quite close to an interesting result about the distribution of regular primes. It was still an open question in number theory, whether there are infinitely many regular primes (although Chauncey thought it was funny, and cutely ironic, how it was known that there are infinitely many irregular primes). Chauncey could feel that if he kept on this line of inquiry, he and his coauthors had a real shot of knocking this problem over, which would be a great start to anyone’s mathematical career.
Chauncey got back to his apartment with plenty of time before the appointment. He took off his shoes, sat down on the couch, and opened the browser on his phone. He scrolled briefly through the news, which proved untenably depressing — his own institution was experiencing firsthand much of what he read, including visa revocations and massive defunding; in fact his old school had announced they were pausing new admissions for math PhD students for at least a year, which Chauncey knew could be a harbinger of total program death. Rattled at the thought, he flipped over to arXiv to see if there were any new preprints of interest in his field. He saw a rare paper by one of his grad school friends, with a bunch of coauthors he didn’t know — this friend had mostly disappeared from the regular publication stream since, like many algebraic number theorists “with sense,” as he had put it, he went to work for the NSA after finishing his PhD. Chauncey had believed he had potential to do really interesting work, and maybe that’s what he was doing now, just without any public trace. Chauncey had always really admired the way this friend had pushed everyone in the program to be better, more careful mathematicians; when one of the PhD students would give a chalk talk about a paper-in-progress, he would hammer them with questions, pressing on any hand-wavy aspects of the argument or shaky lemmas. “How do you know that?”, he would ask. Or, “Can you show that to be true, here & now?”
The time was drawing nearer so Chauncey went into the bathroom to prep. He had sent a key by courier the day before, a bit of irresponsibility that he particularly relished. (Though he knew that, in one visit, there would be plenty of time to determine there was nothing here worth stealing.) His favorite part of this iteration of a thing he’d done a few times before (though without the key piece) was that, although he certainly told himself he would ask for the key back at the end, he genuinely didn’t know if he’d be in the headspace then to do it, or even remember he meant to.
The guy entered resembling his photo. He was straight-presenting, which was important, and for all Chauncey knew he may actually have been straight. Within minutes Chauncey was out of his clothes, which were folded and left on the couch, and on his knees before the guy, who was still fully clothed and doing nothing except talking.
You are worthless. Worthless and disgusting.
You better not look up at me.
I would never touch you.
He kept going for the twenty-two minutes they had agreed upon, at which point Chauncey got up and grabbed a wet rag to clean the floor. The guy left as he was checking for streaks or any place he had missed, and Chauncey locked the door.
As soon as the lock clicked he half-sprinted to his room, cracked open his notebook, and wrote down every single word he could remember of what the guy had said to him.
***
Two days before the party marked twelve years of Chauncey teaching at B______ University. His tenure application had been mercifully smooth; he had made unimpeachable progress towards understanding the absolute Galois group, peppered across a number of well-cited papers, and his students sometimes laughed at his jokes. He lived a third of a mile from the math building, alone, in an apartment with two windows. He decided on a dust-blue suit.
The party was a retirement party for one of Chauncey’s colleagues, a differential geometer with a celebrated and foundational textbook who also occasionally jazz-drummed. The clouds hadn’t cleared yet: it was mid-spring, and in the previous September one of the math department’s most promising undergraduate students had been found in her shared off-campus apartment by a roommate, unresponsive. Chauncey had had her in Complex Analysis and sent pink carnations to the family, or the funeral home, he didn’t exactly know.
The canapés were surprisingly good and the floorboards creaked less than Chauncey had expected as people did their slow, sociable shuffle around the foyer. He knew most of the people there, even if he hadn’t met them; B______ U. kept a relentlessly up-to-date faculty directory and, despite the differential geometer’s joint appointments, the crowd tonight was mostly a contained neighborhood of his closer colleagues. Chauncey shook a hand and listened politely (again) to Old mathematicians never die, they just lose some of their functions and then retired himself to a corner where he could linger a respectful amount of time before getting back home to some of his preliminary whiteboarding about quadratic number fields with class number 1. Less than ten steps away from Chauncey’s corner stood one of his newer colleagues.
Jordan Lucknow was around the same age as Chauncey, but they were much newer to B______, having accepted a position there after chafing for a couple years at a liberal arts college with not enough going on research-wise. Their area of specialization was geometric group theory, and Chauncey respected that Jordan seemed not to be afraid of the ways that subfield rubbed shoulders with mathematical logic and other foundational topics. They had made some headway in their recent research on the automorphism tower problem, which was no small thing. Although they were quite quiet about it, Chauncey also knew from half-erased blackboards that they were toying lately with the question of whether all sofic groups were subamenable, an open problem that had almost lured Chauncey into GGT many years ago when he was still in his PhD.
Chauncey gave a little nod and Jordan, seemingly also unaccompanied, walked over.
“Hey — great for Jacques, right?”
Their voice had a little gallop to it, like when you walk by a poster that’s only adhered to the wall along the top side and it flutters.
“Yes,” said Chauncey. “I like Dr. Brest and his work — he’ll be missed.”
Chauncey always struggled with expressing himself out loud to people he wasn’t comfortable with yet, and he wondered at the way his comment had slid away from the personal I like to the almost diplomatic-sounding he’ll be missed at the end.
“How is your semester going so far?” Jordan asked, making unstrained eye contact with Chauncey. They seemed to want to know.
“It’s going okay,” Chauncey said, forcing himself to casually adverbialize okay. “Abstract II is always a bit of a bear for the undergrads, but I’m really enjoying the ANT seminar. There’s some real promise there. Some budding class field theorists, I hope.”
“That’s great,” Jordan said. “The GGTT group is slowly gathering momentum this year too, which is exciting. I promise I’m not trying to poach any of your baby algebraists, though.” The smile on their face was genuine, playful.
Chauncey liked this, the little self-effacing pun on poach. He looked up briefly and saw two of his older colleagues casually-but-intentionally touching arms, a detail he filed away for his notebook later. It was different to have Jordan occupying his full attention, instead of just being able to spectate, and although he was missing lots of potentially fruitful details, in an odd turn Chauncey did not want to duck out of this conversation.
“That’s kind of you,” Chauncey said. “Some of them have hit the wall a little with their lines of inquiry, so I bet they wouldn’t mind being lured into a different specialization. But I’m hopeful they’ll keep at it a while longer. I remember what it was like, being surrounded by all these totally brilliant people and feeling this pressure to come up with something interesting, while it feels like all you’re actually doing is crossing things out or putting pages and pages in the trash.”
“Absolutely, yeah. I remember feeling really lucky in grad school because I came along at just the right time: my advisor introduced a bunch of us to a few families of post-Thurston problems that toppled pretty easily with some sustained effort and time and checking, and it was like this embarrassment of riches for a few of us. But then seeing, like, the algebraic geometers who were still fumbling to get a grasp on the landscape three or four years in — you knew what they were building toward was magnificent, you know, and comprehensive, but it didn’t want to give itself up right away. It made them wait, for first first-authored papers but also for just that feeling, you know, of knowing what’s going on in the field.”
Chauncey nodded, relieved. It was really rare for a researcher to own the fact that they came to their discipline at just the right moment, like becoming a finance professional in the ’90s or someone in cardboard now. He smiled and tried hard to keep returning Jordan’s gaze.
“Yes, completely. It’s a funny feeling — on the one hand you’re struggling to get to know the conceptual tools you need to understand the field as it is. But on the other hand you can’t go anywhere, textbook or conference paper or preprints or whatever, without stumbling into a bunch of open problems and thinking, maybe this one’s mine? Or it could be?”
Jordan laughed and nodded. “My little problem. Little enough to solve, big enough to love.”
“And publish,” Chauncey said, risking the parallelism for speed.Jordan chuckled knowingly and looked briefly away from Chauncey. It was a sweeping, surveying look over the party, but not like Jordan was scanning for an escape route. To Chauncey it felt like, I am happy to be here.