Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

It was hearing her voice on the recorded message-her formal voice that held a tinge from the year she’d spent at Oxford. “Lucinda Mandel-baum here. Leave your coordinates, and I shall return your call.” Those tones in his ear had sent that bolt of longing through him. It had bypassed his own will and ended up in his larynx, and, without any intent to do so, he was blathering out those three explosive words. Cass here - that elusive metaphysical substance he had been trying to chase down ever since he was a kid-was collateral damage.

So much for his late-night cuddles with textbooks on game theory. So much for his grids. So much for his dreams of the Seltzer Equilibrium.

He considers calling her back, leaving a message to cancel out the other. He could pretend to be drunk, so that she’d conclude that he had been drunk when he called the first time and couldn’t be held responsible. Better yet, since he’s not much of an actor, he can get himself drunk.

Stop thinking like one of your undergraduates, he tells himself out loud. (He’s talking to himself out loud.)

He has a vivid sense that if only he concentrates forcefully enough he can rewind the tape of his disaster. What happened isn’t irreversible, it can’t be, Lucinda hasn’t even heard it yet, and also it’s three hours earlier in Santa Barbara, which he knows is irrelevant, but, still, there must be some way to undo that swerve of recklessness that had momentarily knocked him off course, flip that arrow of time back, but, no (he is still circling the room), no force of exertion is going to return him to that moment before this disaster happened so that he can make it not happen, the irrevocable past, so close and yet so closed, it’s fleeing his grasp, hurtling, hurtling, and then the phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Cass. It’s me.”

“Lucinda!”

“You sound surprised.” She sounds amused.

“No, I’m not surprised. In fact, I just called you.” She must not have listened to the message, and what reason will she have to listen to it now, after all, when she’s already speaking to him, making that past message obsolete, she’ll just delete it, and it will be as if it had never been, and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

“Yes, I know. I got your message. So, anyway, my talk went very well. The Q & A was certainly the liveliest of the conference so far.”

So she’d heard his message. She must have heard him say, “I love you.”

“So you’re happy with the way it all went?”

They were having a conversation as if nothing had changed. Maybe she hadn’t heard the message through to the end? Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed?

“Yes, I suppose. I can’t really judge yet. Rishi is speaking later tonight.”

Can it be that he’s landed in neither bliss nor hell? Can it be that his midnight grids are all wrong?

“Yes, I know.”

She’s acting as if he had never uttered the words, and his autonomic nervous system is returning to baseline, and he decides to continue the conversation as if nothing has changed, because quite possibly nothing has.

“Well, that’s the thing, you see. I’ll only know how well I did when I know whether I did better than Rishi.”

Or maybe she’s signaling something more?

“I’m not sure that makes sense, Lucinda. Intellectual achievement isn’t a zero-sum game.”

“Listen, Cass, you may be the expert on my soul, but I’m the expert on zero-sum games.”

Her voice is smiling.

“And this is a zero-sum game?”

“It is, Cass. Most of what matters in life is a zero-sum game.”

He laughs at her joke, and they hang up soon after, Lucinda rushing off to dinner, which will be followed by Rishi’s backward-causative talk.

It’s only later, after they hung up, that it occurs to him to wonder whether her zero-sum comment had been a joke. She hadn’t laughed, and Lucinda always laughs at her own jokes.

They had bad Friday-afternoon traffic almost the entire way, and though Klapper was serenely oblivious, Cass was acutely aware of the sinking of the sun as they approached the witching hour of 6:44, when, as Cass had been informed by Cousin Henoch, the Sabbath would begin and travel was prohibited. They had made far too many stops, sometimes for scenic purposes but more often to sample the “facilities and comestibles.” The Merritt Parkway’s rest stops were deemed by the professor to be vastly superior to those of the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Henoch had arranged that Professor Klapper, as an honored guest, would be staying with the Rebbe, and finally they arrived at the redbrick house across the street from what Roz had dubbed the Costco House of Worship.

The door was opened by the Rebbe’s little son, Azarya, the child who Roz was convinced was meant to be the future Gauss, “if we can get him away from all that kosher baloney.

“They’ll have the kid calculating how many Hasidim can dance on the top of a shtreimel . They’ll have him counting the hairs in his father’s beard and multiplying it by the hairs in his side curls to figure out the date of the Messiah’s arrival. It’s a goddamn tragedy. I’d kidnap the kid if I thought I could get away with it, and if I knew what the hell to do with a kid.”

“Why would you kidnap a child from a loving family?”

“Because that loving family are a bunch of zealots.”

“Zealots aren’t allowed to have children? That sounds pretty zealous.”

“I guess I wouldn’t outlaw zealots’ having children, if only on practical grounds, but, frankly, I think that what they do to kids is immoral. It’s immoral to indoctrinate children so that they never develop the tools to think for themselves. It’s our birthright to think about things for ourselves.”

Cass laughed.

“What?”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Well, your mother is right. She knew what she was doing when she got the hell out. I’d have thought twice about sleeping with you if you had those side curls. What do they call them again?”

“Payess . I think my mother’s rebellion had more to do with her hating her own mother so much.”

“On the contrary, I think that her hating her mother gave her the emotional distance to be objective and to judge the beliefs she was raised on with an open mind and conclude that they’re full of shit.”

“You’ve got to meet her. You and my mother are going to love each other.”

“I’d love to meet your mother. I’d love to team up with her about Azarya. Did you tell her about him? She might be our only chance to save him from the forces of benightedness.”

“I don’t know why you’re being so hard on this struggling sect that only wants to be left alone. There surely have been lots of gifted children born to families who weren’t in a position to appreciate their talents.”

“And that’s a tragedy! Wouldn’t it be tragic if Gauss’s father had had his way and his genius son had never been educated?”

“Would it? I don’t know. Not if it didn’t make anyone unhappy. Not if Gauss himself didn’t realize what he could have been.”

“Oh yeah, Gauss a happy bricklayer, or whatever his dumb-ass father had wanted for him.”

“It’s a different situation.” There were times when Cass regretted sharing what he had learned from Men in Mathematics with Roz. “Gauss would have known what he was missing. He’d had enough schooling for that. Azarya belongs to a community that’s completely insular.”

“So what you’re saying is that the best thing we can do for that child is to ensure that his ignorance is never threatened! Do you hear what you’re saying?”