The Visiting Professor

Chapter One

Lemuel Falk, a Russian theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos, threads thick, callused fingers through a tangle of ash-dirty hair that manages to look wind whipped even in the absence of wind. He leans his brow against an icy pane as the train spills through the marshaling yard toward the terminal; departures he can cope with but arrivals give him indigestion, migraines, shooting pains in his solar plexus. An implausible fiction stirs in his brain: he is the Great Headmaster, circa 1917. Long shot of a train creeping into the Finland Station. Tight on the paramount Homo sovieticus, seen through a rain-stained window, worrying himself sick he will be lynched or, worse, ignored. Vladimir Ilyich’s edginess infects Lemuel. His headache presses against the back of Lemuel’s eyeballs; his cramps pinch Lemuel’s intestines.

The fiction ebbs as Lemuel’s train docks at the quay. Shabby billboards advertising budget rental cars, mint-fresh toothpaste, a local MSG-free Chinese restaurant, graffiti denouncing plans to establish a nuclear waste dump in the county, piles of freight stenciled this side up drift past the window. In any given country, who gets to decide which side is up? Lemuel wonders. Under foot, there is a hiss of hydraulics, a shriek of wheels. The train shudders to a stop. On the overhead rack, an enormous cardboard valise teeters. Lemuel, with improbable agility, reaches it in time and wrestles it to the floor. Outside the window, a figure Lemuel instantly identifies as a Homo antisovieticus is stamping his feet to ward off frostbite. Immediately behind him, two men and two women breathe great clouds of vapor into the night as they eye the passengers descending from the train.

Lemuel recognizes a reception committee, as opposed to a lynching party, when he sees one. Heartened, he raises a paw and salutes them through the rain-stained window. A woman wearing fox cries, “That has got to be he,” and holds aloft a cellophane-wrapped beacon to guide him to the Promised Land. Shrugging a worn strap of his old Red Army knapsack onto a shoulder, clutching the cardboard valise in one hand, a duty-free shopping bag in the other, Lemuel lurches up the aisle to the vestibule, spots the reception committee milling on the platform in a brackish pool of light cast by a naked overhead electric bulb. Struggling with his luggage, he backs down the steel steps, turns to confront the reception committee.

The Director, tall, thin, abstemious, floating in a ski parka that makes him look lighter than air, peels off a sheepskin mitten, cracks several knuckles and offers a cold hand. “Welcome to America,” he declares with manifest sincerity. “Welcome to upstate New York. Welcome to the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies.” He tries to smile but his facial muscles, frostbitten, only get as far as a smirk. His lips, which appear to be blue, barely move as he pumps Lemuel’s hand. “I am delighted the Commie bastards finally let you out.”

“Out is where they let me,” Lemuel agrees fervently.

“To tell the truth, I never thought I’d see you on this side of the Iron Curtain.”

Lemuel mumbles something about how there is no Iron Curtain any more.

A gust of Arctic air brings tears to Lemuel’s eyes. The woman wearing fox lunges forward and thrusts six cellophane-wrapped red roses under his nose. “Russians,” she emotionally informs the others, misreading his tears, “wear their hearts on their sleeve.”

Until he misplaced the book, Lemuel taught himself rudimentary English from a Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual. At a loss to see how it is possible to wear a heart on a sleeve, he pushes the bouquet back to her. “I am allegoric,” he explains. He is desperate to make a good impression, but he is not sure how to go about it. “I break out in tears in the presence of flowers or cold.”

The woman wearing fox and the Director avoid each other’s eyes. “Summers must be living hell for you,” the Fox remarks in a language Lemuel takes to be Serbo-Croatian. “Winters too, come to think of it.”

The Director serves up a formal introduction. “D. J. Starbuck,” he informs Lemuel, “teaches Russian Lit 404, which is mostly but not all Tolstoy, at the university. She is here in her capacity as chairperson of the local Soviet-American Friendship Society.”

Lemuel, bowing awkwardly over the Fox’s hand, mumbles something about how there are no Soviets any more.

Impatience flares in DJ.’s eyes. “We are looking for a new name,” she admits in her guttural Serbo-Croatian Russian.

The Director, whose name is J. Alfred Goodacre, waves forward the committee. A man wearing windowpane-thick eyeglasses, an astrophysicist studying cosmic arrhythmias, is introduced. “Sebastian Skarr, Lemuel Falk.” Skarr angles his head and addresses his remarks to a distant galaxy with a mysteriously irregular pulsar throbbing in its core. “I was stunned by Falk’s insights on entropy,” he says, almost as if Lemuel were not there. “I was mesmerized by his description of the relentless slide of the universe toward disorder; toward chaos.”

An older man stumbles forward, removes a fore-aft astrakhan, exposing a scalp covered with a crewcut gray fuzz. “I’m Sharlie Atwater,” he announces, slurring consonants so that Lemuel has trouble following what he says. “When I’m sober, whish is weekdays before noon, I do surface tension of water dripping from faucets. Your paper on the relationship between deterministic chaosh and what you call fool’s randomnesh took my breath away.”

A handsome middle-aged woman speaks up in a clipped English accent. “Matilda Birtwhistle,” she introduces herself. “I cultivate chaos-related snowflakes in the Institute’s antediluvian laboratory. We followed your exploit with pi—calculating it out to three billion, three hundred and thirty million decimal places. Your formulation about how if pi were truly random it would seem at times to be ordered struck us all as incredibly elegant. None of us had given much thought to the enigma of random order being a constituent of pure randomness.” She flashes a thin smile. “The faculty are keen to have one of the Western world’s preeminent randomnists join the staff.”

Lemuel, roused, seizes Birtwhistle’s hand and, bobbing, brushes his chapped lips against the back of her hand-knit Tibetan glove. The gesture is mean to convey old poverty as opposed to the newer, sweatier, more desperate poverty of the proletarian masses. Straightening, Lemuel coughs up a nervous rasp from his throat. Dealing with abstract ideas, he likes to think he can hold his own with an Einstein; he is less sure of himself and easily intimidated when it comes to dealing with people. On this occasion he ducks for cover behind memorized phrases: He begs them all to presume he is elated to have been named a visiting professor at the Institute, to believe he is eager to plunge into its chaos-related waters.

Searching the faces of his interlocutors, Lemuel slips into a delicious fiction: The Swedish embassy has turned out to inform him that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in pure randomness. Close in on the ambassador, wearing sheepskin mittens. Pan to a certified bank check for three hundred and eighty thousand United States of America greenbacks as he hands it to Lemuel. Negotiated on the Petersburg black market, that should bring roughly 380 million rubles. Set for life, set for the next one too, Lemuel sniffs at the cold; it burns his nostrils. The pain reminds him who he is and where he is. The members of the reception committee are staring at him as if they expect an encore. Traces of alarm appear in the corners of Lemuel’s bloodshot eyes. His brows arch up, his nostrils flare as he departs from his prepared text, memorized during the interminable hours of the Petersburg-Shannon-New York flight. The voyage has exhausted him, he says. He desperately needs to urinate. Would it be imposing on their hospitality to ask for a cup of authentic American instant coffee?

Charlie Atwater, who has been holding his breath to extinguish hiccups, says, “How about shomething with a teeny-weeny bit more alcohol content?”

Muttering “Falk badly needs a hat or a haircut,” the Fox pivots on the spiked heel of a galosh and stalks off in the direction of the station’s coffee-vending machine. With a toss of his head, the Director invites Lemuel to follow her.

And follow her he does. With listless gratefulness, Lemuel permits himself to be sandwiched between the people who are proposing to deliver him from a fate worse than death: chaos!

The last thing Lemuel expected when he applied for an exit visa was to get one; the last thing he wanted was to leave Russia. It was an unpleasant matter of fact that the former Soviet Union was spiraling into chaos; shelves in stores were bare, people had taken to trapping cats and pigeons, to brewing carrot peelings because tea was too expensive, inflation was running to three-digit figures a year, the ex-Communists who claimed to be governing in Moscow were distributing money as fast as they could print it. Lemuel’s salary at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where he had worked for the past twenty-three years, had tripled in the last four months. The price of a loaf of bread, when bread was available, had quadrupled. Pretty soon he would need a fifty-liter plastic garbage sack (impossible to find) to bring his ex-wife her monthly alimony. Still, the chaos had the advantage of being Lemuel’s chaos. The English scriptwriter Shakespeare had put his finger on it: Better to bear the chaos we know than fly to another chaos we know not of. Or words to that effect.

*

This being the case, what prompted someone as viscerally cautious as Lemuel (he has always taken the position that two plus two appears to be four) to head for allegedly warmer climes and allegedly greener pastures?

He had applied for an exit visa every year since he began working as a randomnist. It was his way of taking random samplings of the political climate. Come September, he would fill in the appropriate forms in triplicate, stick on the appropriate government tax stamp and drop the application into the overflowing in basket of the appropriate time-server at the Foreign Ministry’s visa section. Every year the application would come back with a bold red “Refused” stamped across its face, proving to Lemuel that the world he knew but did not necessarily love had the saving grace of being in order. For Lemuel, it seemed, had a working knowledge of state secrets. Because of this, he was not permitted to stray beyond the state’s frontiers.

When, this year, a stamped, certified visa miraculously appeared in the communal mailbox, he panicked. He fitted his eyeglasses over his eyes and read it twice, removed his glasses and cleaned them with the tip of his tie, put them back on and read it a third time. If they were letting Lemuel Melorovich Falk—winner of the Lenin Prize for his work in the realm of pure randomness and theoretical chaos, member of the elite Academy of Sciences—slip through their usually sticky fingers, state secrets and all, it meant that chaos had infected the rotting core of the bureaucracy; it meant that things were worse than he had imagined.

Because they gave him permission to leave, he decided the time had come to go.

He had made the acquaintance of the Institute’s director a dozen years before at a Prague symposium on the relatively new science of chaos. Invited to deliver a paper, Lemuel had dazzled the assembly with his work on pi, the Greek letter that represents the transcendental number arrived at by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. In his quest for pure, unadulterated randomness, he had programmed an East German mainframe and calculated pi out to sixty-five million, three hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and forty-four decimal places (a world record at the time) without discovering any evidence of order in the decimal expansion of pi. The Director, impressed not only by the originality but the elegance of Lemuel’s dissertation, had arranged for the paper to be published in the Institute’s prestigious quarterly review. One article had led to another. Already eminent for discovering potentially pure randomness in the decimal expansion of pi, Lemuel, essentially a randomnist who dabbled in chaology, began patrolling what he called, tongue in cheek, Falk’s Pale: the gray no-man’s-land where randomness and chaos overlap. Every time someone put forward a candidate for pure, unadulterated randomness, he would subject it to the rigorous techniques of chaology, then advance proof that what looked like randomness was in fact determined albeit unpredictable, and therefore not pure randomness at all. Nature, according to Lemuel, generated complexities so vast, so unpredictable, that they appeared to the naked eye to be examples of pure randomness. But this “fool’s randomness,” so he argued in a paper that gilded his reputation in America, was nothing more than the name we gave to our ignorance. We did not know enough. Our instruments were not sensitive enough. Our sampling was not spread over a long enough period—something on the order of a million years. Once you burrowed under the surface—once you perfected the instruments with which you measured randomness, once you increased the period over which the measurements were taken—you discovered (to Lemuel’s bitter disappointment) that what passed for pure randomness was not random at all, but a footprint of what physicists and mathematicians had taken to calling chaos.

For several years there had been a standing offer of a visiting professor’s chair from the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies; the Institute would be thrilled to have Lemuel patrol his Pale on its turf. The day Lemuel discovered the exit visa in his mailbox, he remembered the Institute’s offer of a chair at the same moment he realized that he badly needed to sit. He had been on his feet for forty of his forty-six years, queuing for food, for toilet paper, for windshield wipers for his beloved Skoda, for permits to Black Sea spas, for mud baths at the spas, for the apartment he shared with two couples eternally on the brink of divorce, if not murder. He had joined queues simply because they were there, without knowing what was for sale until his turn came. He had queued to get married and queued to get divorced a decade later. Over the years his ankles had swelled. His heart, too.

With the exit visa tucked into his passport, Lemuel had slipped out of Russia without a word to his ex or his colleagues; without even telling his daughter, the common-law wife of a black marketeer who had cornered the market in computer mice. The only person he confided in was his occasional mistress, a bleached-silver journalist for Petersburg Pravda named Axinya Petrovna Volkova, who devoted Monday afternoons and Thursday evenings to conjuring erections from Lemuel’s weary flesh. Axinya, a creature of routine who invariably spent half an hour putting Lemuel’s room in order before allowing him to fumble with the zippers and clasps and buttons of her clothing, took the news of his impending departure badly.

“You are trading one chaos for another,” she told him, “in the mistaken belief that someone else’s chaos will turn out to be greener. Your pal Vadim told you American streets are paved with Sony Walkmans. Admit it, Lemuel Melorovich, in your head you know it’s a fiction, but in your heart you think it may be true. In any case, the trip is bound to end badly—you have always been more fascinated by the going than the getting there.”

When this argument failed to impress him, she trotted out the big guns. “People kill for tenure at Steklov. How can you abandon it like that?”

“Everyone in Russia has tenure,” Lemuel observed crabbily. “The problem is they have tenure in Russia.”