Esker sticks her sock-feet up on the trunk she uses as a coffee table. Around her shoulders is draped an afghan, one of several her mother crocheted a long time ago. In her lap she cradles a pot holder and a pot of Top Ramen. It makes a warm weight against her stomach, almost like a cat, but she has never been a cat person; more to the point, she has never liked the idea of being a cat person. On her way home from work she often stops at the Korean grocery, and there seems always to be someone buying a head of lettuce, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and a half-dozen tins of some deluxe brand of cat food, Sultan or Infanta or whatever it’s called: lamb and veal and mackerel entrées. She isn’t cut out for that kind of doting.
Outside her windows snow falls: white, then green, white, then green, in the blinking light of the no-name shamrock bar. Hers is the bottom floor of this skinny old house rife with charm and defects. The top two are inhabited by the owners, a pink-nosed, Birkenstocked, gray-haired couple who still get arrested now and then, for demonstrating in front of one embassy or another. They are gentle landlords, who think Esker shy and dependable, and shower her with zucchini and radishes from their little vegetable plot out back every summer. For her part, she never complains about the swaybacked floors, the peeling paint, the cracked windowpanes. In nine years, she has never asked them to fix the faulty toilet, just bought herself a plunger and a snake; she uses paper clips to fasten the chain inside the tank; when one rusts through, she fits a new one.
Albert’s ghost is back in town. She felt him this morning before she opened her eyes, felt him lurking bedside, relentlessly silent. Then she spied him on the train, first in the nape of some man in a suit, then in the shin of another. An exposed band of skin between pant leg and sock. Sometimes she is gladdened by such glimpses, more often burdened. Sometimes she wills him, but not today. He just came. He bowed out when she went to tutor Ann James, but fell into step beside her again outside the apartment building. Accompanied her heavily to the subway entrance. There left her with a scuffing up of gutter leaves.
Soup done, Esker sets her pot in the huge enamel sink, gray with abrasions, and runs a bath. For privacy, when she first moved in, she’d taped over the single, handkerchief-sized bathroom window a laminated photocopy of a Mandelbrot–Peano–von Koch snowflake, and there it remains, buckled from years of moisture: her beauty. She first encountered the snowflake by accident, on the seventh floor of the NYU library, during the autumn of her freshman year, back when she thought she’d be an English major. Esker always studied in the library, or the Cozy Soup & Burger, or sometimes even in the lobby of the gym, any busily populated place; something about the proximal hum of lots of bodies and voices calmed her. It was as if she, who had opted for so much anonymity, so much colorless complacency in her outward manner, required a giant matrix in which to locate herself, something definite and solid enough that she couldn’t disappear entirely.
On this day, someone had left a science magazine in her preferred carrel, and it was too ready a tool for procrastination to pass up; she’d leafed through it and found herself bewitched by an article with the forbidding title “Fractals: A New Kind of Geometry.” The accompanying images, with their strange captions, dazzled: Mandelbrot and Julia sets, the Sierpinski carpet, the Menger sponge. Tesselating shapes like paisleys on acid, crisp and swirly color-drenched diagrams like the drawings she’d made in childhood with her Spirograph set, and then actual photographs of the equations played out in nature, as moodily theosophical as the Ansel Adams calendar everybody in the dorms seemed to have that year: a page of trees in black and white, complex in their winter nudity on the page, and then kelp, and cliffs, and frost against a pane, and a cross-section of human bronchia. What the hell was this? Her heart knocking. Looking up and around at the other students, all locked in concentration, bent over texts in all their finery—for they wore finery, the other students, or so it always seemed to Esker, whose unvarying wardrobe consisted of turtlenecks and jeans and her old suede jacket that matched her eyes. She wore small gold posts in her ears and transported her books in a green army knapsack. In comparison, the other students seemed virtually costumed, in their mishmash assortments of uptown chic and downtown tongue-in-cheek, and all of them, all the time, even when apparently immersed in studying, as those students around her now gave every impression of being, were artfully poised for romance.
This much she could perceive: her fellow students everywhere—in cafeterias and classrooms, in lounges and laundry rooms, playing Hacky Sack in Washington Square Park, standing on line at the bursar’s office, giving blood at Student Health Services, everywhere—were alert primarily for romance, or, alternatively, sex. Everyone except her seemed bathed in it, steeped in it, this ineffable aura, this singular purpose. It permeated the campus like a fine mist. And they all seemed so easy in it, moving through the air with a kind of charged grace, a blinding awareness of undercurrents which dwarfed everything else. Esker, apart, was mystified and unnerved. It was as though she’d been admitted to an advanced class without anyone’s checking to see that she met the prerequisites.
That day in the library, she had looked up from the pages of the serendipitously abandoned magazine and seen, briefly, in a dizzying haze, an application of the theories within the article in the way the students had randomly selected to seat themselves around the stacks, clumped here, spread apart there, as if plotted points on a complex plane, repeated with variation throughout the building, which was designed in a horseshoe shape with open flooring so that she could actually see people, progressively smaller and farther away, playing out the pattern on descending levels all the way down to the lobby, which bottomed out in geometrically interesting black and white tiles (whose pattern, she’d heard, was supposed to discourage suicidal jumps). To think that there was something mappable, something graphable and ultimately therefore graspable, about the way people chose to distribute themselves in relationship to each other! Me, too, were the words she had thought then: Me too.
And although in the next instant all semblance of logic slipped from that thought and she could not have explained what she meant by it, she was left with a hopeful residue: the possibility of a formula into which everyone fit regardless of will or intent or ability, but somehow binding them, embracing them all, even, improbably, her. Some years later, when she first heard the term “unified field theory,” it triggered a memory of the excitement she’d felt that day. It had been like stumbling across an actual mile marker for a destination she’d feared was only mythical. Although the words of the article made little sense to her, she’d put ten cents in the copy machine and brought the Mandelbrot–Peano–von Koch snowflake back to her dorm room.
Now, in the bath, she traces it with her eyes. Not the original copy—that one traveled with her through four years of college and eventually succumbed to one-too-many masking tape scars—but a nicer one she’d blown up and darkened and laminated to withstand the steaminess of this little room. She can articulate its charm a little better now than the day she first spied it: an infinitely long line surrounding a finite area. But having the language doesn’t dispel the magic. On the contrary. Higher math is her higher power, her cathedral, and her prayer all in one. She relaxes her eyes against it, the simultaneous openness of its center and delicate impenetrability of its crimped edges, the comforting repetition of the same shape, same shape, radiating throughout. Behind the snowflake, beyond the pane, real snowflakes fall. Ann looms. Behind her, Albert’s ghost.
It had seemed an impropriety, going to Ann James’s apartment today. Nothing to do with Florence’s purported boundary issues (she’d gone at Florence’s bidding, after all), but an impropriety all the same, to bring herself into Ann’s world. Esker is well acquainted with the inverse: students presenting themselves in her own (and Larry’s and Rhada’s) little office, asking for help or advice, sometimes wanting only to schmooze, to glean, it seems, information about Esker: picking up objects from her desk, inquiring about her past, her family, her first and middle initials, swiveling themselves round in her chair, commenting on the state of her clutter. Esker is not the faculty member most set upon in such fashion—her manner hardly encourages it—but Prospect School students are a quirky bunch, and every year one or two gravitate explicitly toward Esker, as if seeking confirmation for something they sense about themselves. Whether or not they find it she never knows, but she has often been touched and bemused by their presence.
This is not Ann, though. Ann James neither idles in Esker’s office nor seems to ask anything of her—other, of course, than math instruction—yet there is some kind of connection, something sharp and almost familiar, something anomalous, too, in the quality of their exchanges, even before today. Esker leans her head against the hard, curved enamel of the tub. There was something bothersome today in Ann’s account of how she broke her heels. What had she said? She was pushed? Nudged? By a friend? Horsing around? Something hadn’t been right. Esker can’t put her finger on it, but she sees Ann now in her mind, blushing, holding a magazine over her face. Ann is pretty in a rather plain way: hazelish eyes, baby-brown hair, slightly lopsided lips, and skin so translucent it is like a lightbulb, broadcasting every change of heart or mind with an immediate roseate pulse. Was that it? Ann had changed her mind partway through telling Esker what had happened? But what had she told her? Nothing, really. Esker chides herself for seeing intrigue in a teenager’s sudden blush. And of course she likes teaching Ann James, as who wouldn’t? Teachers are wild about her, with her huge, unfettered appetite and her straightforward confidence. She’s one of those students who remind them of why they chose teaching. Still, Albert’s ghost, lurking somewhere in the vicinity of the shower head, hints there is more to it.
“Well, go away, Albert,” says Esker, sitting up and plucking the stopper from the drain, and the weariness in her tone surprises even her. Then she grips the cool, slick side of the tub and lays her cheek on it, suddenly dizzy. It’s the heat, and sitting up too fast. Her view is the bathmat close-up, its weave for an instant elaborate and swirly and as ordered as snowflakes. She has flashes of missing him so densely, so wholly; the missing is like an injection of poison through her blood, a dye staining her tissues. And then it subsides, and so does his ghost, and mechanically she licks a tear from the side of her mouth and rises, and wraps herself in a large rough towel.
It is later, in bed, that the worrisome phrase resurfaces: nudged from the inside. Esker stares at the tin ceiling, hearing the words repeat themselves, spiraling on and on inscrutably.