Джеймс Грейди - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Was this his mid-life thing? Fielder had heard of guys his age getting impotent or religious. He’d heard about guys who got earrings and sporty convertibles. He didn’t know about any of that.

All Stephen Fielder knew was that one morning last November, he woke up to find he couldn’t do math anymore.

It was a morning every bit like the last. All seemed normal; everything occupied its regular place. Except that when he went to warm up his oatmeal in the microwave, he just couldn’t manage to decipher the keypad, somehow.

Later, standing in front of his undergraduate calculus seminar, he simply went... blank. Grease pen in hand, Fielder stood there in the echoing auditorium, staring at the empty whiteboard until one of the regular front-row students actually approached the stage to inquire gently if everything was okay.

The rest of that day was a warp in Stephen’s memory. He remembered sitting in his office for three consecutive hours, unable to make heads or tails of the same scientific calculator he’d been using now for more than half his lifetime; the pressure-worn numbers and symbols inscribed on the keys appeared to him as impenetrable hieroglyphs.

He’d finally given up and turned to work. But his own research notes from the previous day mystified him.

Later, in the car on the way home, he’d tried quizzing himself with rudiments, just to get the juices flowing. But it was as if even the multiplication tables had simply fallen out of his brain while he wasn’t looking.

Fielder had gone to bed early that night, somewhere between concerned and amused.

Because he had been working inhuman hours for weeks on end. He hadn’t been eating well, and he hardly ever exercised. Hell, his marriage of twelve years had recently crashed and burned, and the smoke hadn’t even cleared.

Stress, he’d begun to think. Sometimes you just didn’t notice when your own levels crossed into the red zone. A good night’s sleep could do wonders.

But then he woke up the next morning. And the next morning, and the morning after that. He was not restored. Two plus two did not equal four. And Fielder started to worry.

He made appointments with his physician, who found nothing wrong with him and wrote a referral to a neurospecialist. They threw the full battery of acronyms at him: PET, CAT, MRI. He was discovered to be thirteen pounds overweight but otherwise shipshape for a fellow his age.

Meanwhile, Fielder’s amusement gave way to panic. On the recommendation of his physician, he began twice-weekly sessions with the nearest psychiatrist on his PPO list. The shrink prescribed a powerful test-market antidepressant that gave Fielder chronic diarrhea and made him dizzy all the time. But that was all.

Final diagnosis: Nonspecific Acalculia. Nonspecific Acalculia!

Translation: Beats us, chum.

Citing divorce complications, Stephen put in for emergency personal leave from work, letting his graduate assistants cover his classes for the remainder of the term. He was already scheduled to spend the following semester on a paid research sabbatical, funded by a prestigious annual fellowship sponsored by the university’s Burkholder Foundation.

So he had time, Fielder had reasoned. Time to sort this thing out on his own.

Because no matter what else plagued him in life, he could not remember a time when numbers did not make sense. As a youth, Fielder had reveled in them. While the other guys in his class drew fart balloons in the margins of their textbooks, Stephen constructed elaborate Fibonacci sequences that went on for pages at a time.

As an adult, suddenly trudging toward middle age ankle-deep in the rubble of a wrecked marriage, numbers seemed to be the only thing in Stephen Fielder’s world that still added up. They fit and resonated; they created mysteries and revealed unassailable truths. Unpredictable yet consistent, fluid yet fixed, intractable yet endlessly recombinant. People were somehow beyond him. But numbers he could understand.

And suddenly, inexplicably, just when he’d needed them the most... even the numbers had left him.

It was Gudder who said, “The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.” For years, Fielder had used that quote in the introductory header of all his class syllabi.

But these days, the only quote he felt he understood was Darwin’s: “A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.”

Fielder’s world had become a dark, dark room. And all he had was a dog.

He began drinking heavily, late into the nights. He slept through most of his days. He couldn’t work. And he found himself adrift, without strength to paddle, as the tide of his own malaise carried him farther and farther from shore.

The final slide began by accident. Or perhaps it was an inevitable point in some cause/effect chain. Fielder didn’t know. Personally, Stephen Fielder had ceased to acknowledge order in the world.

All he knew was that one night, on a bender, he found himself at The Nugget, across the river. Only because the bar there stayed open two hours later than any place in town.

But it was here, amidst the color and lights and carnival noise, that Fielder experienced the kind of shimmering insight only clinical depression and vast quantities of alcohol can reveal.

For here — before him and above him, around him on all sides — was the essence of mathematics. Here was the complicated wonderment of odds and order. All reduced to the simplicity of a toss of dice, a spin of a wheel.

Stephen remembered sitting back on his stool, turning his face to the light, and experiencing a strange sense of peace.

Because if the odds still thrived in a place like this, by god, maybe there was still hope for him in this orderless world.

“That feels about right,” said Happy Joe King’s collector, hefting the envelope containing the five-hundred-dollar paycheck advance Fielder had secured from his ex-brother-in-law. “I don’t guess I need to count it, huh?”

“It’s all there.” Stephen had asked Ned to count it in front of him, just to be sure.

“You know what? I trust you. Good faith goes both ways, am I wrong?”

“Trust is important,” Fielder agreed.

“We speak the same language, my friend.” The collector smacked Fielder on the shoulder. He wore the same suit as last week. “Future reference, you can call me Shorty. Nickname I sorta picked up on account of my height.”

Fielder looked down at the parking lot. “Okay.”

“Call me Shorty, but don’t short me. That’s what I always tell ’em.” The collector’s laugh sounded like a diesel engine shifting gears.

Fielder turned toward the Bronco Burger’s back door, but a firm hand fell on his shoulder just as he began to move.

“Cool your heels a minute.”

Stephen felt his blood chill. “It’s all there.”

“Easy, Professor. I got a little surprise.”

Fielder tensed.

Shorty the collector just laughed again. “Buddy, you are one jumpy bag a nerves, you know that? You should learn to relax.”

To Fielder’s bewilderment, Shorty reached over to tuck the envelope full of cash into his apron strings.

“Let’s take a little walk.”

Fielder looked at Shorty and went numb.

“Don’t worry, Professor,” Shorty said. “I think your luck’s about ready to change.”

Shorty led him to a dark gravel lot in back of a secondhand furniture store. Amidst a shadowed clutter of scrap springs and broken wood frames sat a dusty black limousine. The big car’s engine was silent, headlights off, dark glossy windows raised. Shorty opened one of the rear doors; no interior light came on.

“After you,” he said.