Jonathan Levi - Septimania

My dear Pepys. Perhaps it is indeed time to take firm action to save this noble mind. Might you ride up to Trinity before the New Year? I believe Newton will follow your counsel. I understand he still has property in Lincolnshire. A small farm might be just the thing. Beets. A few sheep.

Yours,

Montague

OW DID YOU LIVE?

I find people, Cristina. That’s what I do.

I remember. You found me and Tibor.

Or did you find me, all those years ago on the Circo Massimo?

Maybe. You were such an attractive little girl.

Attraction works in two directions. It’s what brings us food and shelter and, when we need them, a car, a plane.

How did you decide where to go?

At first, there was some question. Louiza told me she used to wake up every morning — had spent the past twenty years waking up every morning — with a fresh set of problems laid out next to the orange juice. Orange juice was not my strong suit. And for the first few days, as we wandered from Motel 6 to Waffle House, our days were vague and Louiza withdrew in a way that made me nervous.

One night I woke up cold, what passed for a blanket on the floor. The draft came from the open door of a TraveLodge near Tuxedo, New York. I heard voices, Louiza’s. When I walked outside to see if she was okay, she was alone, in a thin slip, standing with her left foot flat on a plastic deck chair, while her right index finger drew shapes and numbers in invisible scrawls on her exposed thigh. I looked around. No one else. I led Louiza back to bed. I chained us in. When I woke up, it was daylight. Louiza was showered and dressed. Her eyes, her hair, the skin from her cheekbones to her collar was brighter than I’d ever seen.

“I was sleepwalking,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “I heard you last night.”

“Not last night,” she said. “For years.”

Where did you go, Ottavia? After Tibor shot himself.

The first month, we walked and talked. Louiza told me about her childhood, imaginary numbers, her mother. She told me about the day she passed her viva at Cambridge, how she met a strange little man in the organ loft of a church. She told me about following him to Rome, about finding him in a church and how he carried her to a hospital. And how she never saw him again until that day.

That day?

Twenty years ago. I saw them by the pond that day. I saw the way that Malory grew into another human, another body, more powerful, more massive, an altogether larger person in the range of Louiza’s orbit. It took much longer for Louiza to tell me about the dark matter. The years in The Gables, Vince, MacPhearson, her father, negativity.

Where did you live? After that day.

We couldn’t stay at TiborTina, of course, and it was getting cold in the woods.

Where did you go?

Louiza followed the girls, I followed Louiza.

The girls?

At first, I could only hear them, and I’m sure that the music I heard was different from the music that moved Louiza. She called them the Unimaginables. Sometimes there were four, sometimes six, sometimes more. They weren’t real in the sense that you and I are real, but products of the far reaches of our imaginations, if not beyond. Their music came to my ears in a style and a rhythm past what Louiza could imagine. Louiza described them to me, Una and Dodo and Terri and Quatro. But since we shared the language of mathematics, it was on the long nights of walking, following Louiza following the Unimaginables, that Louiza told me about dividing by zero.

Dividing by zero?

There’s no point in talking about that now, trying to explain how Louiza had discovered not only ways but benefits of dividing by zero, how to manage the Unimaginables. Old news. After Tibor’s death and Malory’s disappearance, it was no longer enough to divide by zero. We were past that. Oh, occasionally the girls played an oldie or two, or invited another group to sit in on an encore until some producer pulled the plug or a groupie got stomped. But the girls played newer and newer combinations and Louiza and I danced past velvet ropes of mathematics my tutors could never have imagined.

So you joined forces with Louiza?

Joined forces? No. There was a sympathy that joined us, that joined us together.

A sympathy?

When I was little, Sister Francesca Splendida at Santa Sabina took us into the Giardino degli Aranci at night and showed us the stars above St. Peter’s. She taught us that there was a sympathy between heavenly bodies, a mutual attraction, the same way there is between human souls. Isaac Newton called it attraction at a distance, since it didn’t require that the two objects touch or even be in the same city. The boys guiding rocket ships from Houston, the boys with their fingers on buttons or joysticks guiding bombs or drones know a great deal about power operated at a distance. But Sister Francesca and Sir Isaac were talking about something else. They were talking about the way that an orange or an apple pulls the Earth at the same time as the Earth pulls the fruit. It’s the same sympathy that drew Louiza to me that morning at the Farmers’ Market on River Road, that led me to scribble an invitation to Tibor’s party and drop it into a bag of apples for her. Malory was the name she mentioned then, and perhaps Malory was the link. But there was a force that drew us towards one another and all the adventures that followed.

The adventures, yes. That’s what I want to hear about. Where did you go?

Do you want a list? We went to Minsk, to Benghazi, to Baghdad. We went to Beirut where I danced on rooftops to R.E.M. and Fairouz, to underground temples in Malta where it was David Bowie and Croatian cello duos playing Guns N’ Roses. But most of all, we went where the answers took us. The answers to the problems that came to Louiza in the middle of the night, the ones that she solved with her right index finger on her left thigh or drawing equations in the air.

What were the answers?

What were the questions?

Did it matter?

I knew where to go. That’s my talent. I know how to find people. That’s what I do. That’s how I found him.

Him?

It was easy. But it wasn’t from any lesson I’d learned at the feet of Tibor or the Bomb Squad, or any genetic talent deep in my DNA. I simply followed Dodo, the leader of the Unimaginables. I left Louiza sleeping in a stone hut outside Tora Bora and followed Dodo, as completely camouflaged as my raven-haired supergirl. Over rocks, through the wind, picking my way around Improvised Explosive Devices made of sheep bladders and shrapnel, down, down. Dodo, hard-edged against a sky more purple than black, luminescent for my eyes only. I followed Dodo and walked into his cave with a cadre of mujahedin .

But the Americans say they found Osama in Abbottabad, and not in the caves of Tora Bora.

Years later. Many years later. They never asked me.

Would you have told them?

After Baghdad and Kabul, Helmand and Tora Bora? After the mass slaughter, the gang rapes, the multiple manias of Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kurds and Pashtuns, Alawites and Maronites, Israelites and Philistines, Episcopalians and Mormons? I had seen the apple tree. I had talked to the gardener. I had spoken with the apple. If talking to the Americans would have prevented that, why not? But they didn’t ask, and I didn’t see any point in volunteering the unbelievable. I followed Louiza, and she followed Dodo and the answers to her equations to Serbia to Karadžić and Mladić, and then to the Sudan for Omar al Bashir, and Burma for Than Shwe, North Korea for Kim Jong-Il, and Venezuela for Ingrid Betancourt.