Case of Lies

Elliott tried out for crew, but confronted with the unfamiliar currents of the muddy Charles, he blew the tryouts. The broad shoulders he had developed rowing across the cove at home slumped and his neck was out most of the winter. He stayed through the winter break and caught a semipermanent cold from the foreign bugs of the East Coast. He missed his father and mother and wrote them endless E-mails.

His mother died suddenly. A heart attack. He spent the summer at home, trying to help his father cope.

It was so cold that second winter at MIT that Elliott almost gave up and went home. But then something happened that made weather and thoughts of home irrelevant.

At the Science Library one freezing January day, Elliott was working through some functions when Silke Kilmer, the most beautiful woman in his physics class, came up behind him and placed her divine soft cheek next to his. Startled, he gave her a push that almost knocked her over and jumped out of his chair.

“Sorry,” she said, smiling. She had recovered like a cat, her hand barely touching the table to stabilize her.

“No. My fault. I’m sorry.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute? I know you’re working, but-just for a minute?”

“By all means,” Elliott said, kicking himself mentally for sounding so pompous.

They sat down again, alone in the group of cubicles on the third floor where Elliott spent a lot of his evenings. Silke set down her heavy backpack and took off her navy pea coat, revealing a fuzzy white sweater with a turtleneck that gave her an exaggerated silhouette, the angles between her chest and ribs and stomach fascinatingly concave and convex.

Elliott tried not to stare at her. She had dark hair and red full lips, and olive skin as though she were Mediterranean, not from some little town in Germany whose name Elliott couldn’t remember.

He knew that she was on scholarship, too, and that she sometimes answered questions in class he couldn’t. She wanted to be a quantum physicist, they all did, all except Elliott, who wanted to be a mathematician. Of the three girls in the class, she was the one who came in late, who smiled, who would talk to any of them. The bet was that she would not return to Germany, that a big American university like Princeton would grab her. She had the smarts, but she was also gracious and sociable, which was not something you came across every day at MIT.

That she had sought him out brought a flush to his cheeks. That her young and beautiful body exuded heat and perfume right next to his made him take a wadded-up handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and take off his glasses and wipe them thoroughly.

“What are you working on?” she asked. “I don’t recognize your symbols, Wakefield.” A pink nail, comma-shaped, perfect as a seashell, tapped his paper.

“My paper for number-theory class. On the Riema

“Of course.” She smiled, and he understood what she meant: that it was just like him to choose the most difficult, abstruse subject possible.

She said, “My paper is also on the primes.”

“You’re kidding!”

“But I’m following a line based on the work of Michael Berry. I’m interested in the idea that the energy levels in heavy nuclei seem to be related to Hermitian matrices in the same way the primes are. I’m a double major in physics, did you know that?”

“I didn’t know you had this interest,” Elliott said. “But the Hermitian matrices correlations-they are just interesting correlations, until someone can explain the actual relationship, if there is one. Personally, I don’t believe there’s any co

“You are wrong, Wakefield. The primes have a deep co

“Sure. It’s just incredible that you are into the primes. Berry, that’s pretty new stuff. He’s in England, isn’t he?”

Silke said, “Ja, it’s new. That idiot Riema

“It wasn’t his fault. After he died, his housekeeper threw out most of his papers.”

“He should have had a better housekeeper.” She smiled. “Why can’t geniuses find decent housekeepers?”

“You should look at my work. I have brought in some of Ramanujan’s work on partitions and factorization. The primes show that addition and multiplication aren’t transparent vis-à-vis each other. It’s going to be revolutionary.”

“Oh, really? Ramanujan? I have a friend you ought to meet.” That smile again. She had a dimple to the right of her chin when she smiled, showing small, even white teeth. Elliott wanted very badly to impress her.

He jabbered, “Riema

A silence followed this pronouncement. Elliott thought to himself, That is so elementary. If I get any more boring, no one will ever talk to me again.

But Silke finally said, “I love it. It sounds absolutely wild. I’d like to read your work.”

He wanted to give it to her, give her anything she required, but there existed many reasons why he could not share his work. “When I have the proof,” he said.

“What exactly will you be able to show with this proof?”

“More than Riema

“What an ambitious boy you are. Math students are supposed to be modest and retiring, aren’t they? ‘More than Riema

“My God, I can’t believe we haven’t talked before,” he said.

“But what is this supposed to mean?” She was looking at his notebook. “This symbol looks like a little man with a long prick.” Her efficient accent made it sound dry and academic. “So you are going to outshine Riema

“What prize are you talking about?”

“You have to be kidding. You don’t know about the Clay prize? It’s a million dollars for the first person to prove the Riema

“What about de Branges? He published a proof of it last year,” Elliott said. “Didn’t he apply for it?”

“Have you looked at his paper? People seem to think it won’t stand up to peer review. You really didn’t know about the Clay prize? I heard you came out of the Western woods, but how could you miss that?”

“Why are they offering money? It’s a corruption-a commercialization of pure math. I just do my work. And that symbol at the bottom you’re pointing at-that’s just a doodle.”

“ Wakefield. Look at me.” She still smiled, as though there was something amusing about him. He hoped he could somehow keep her amused. He didn’t want her to leave. He had so much to share with her, and she was so gorgeous, and he was getting an erection-oh God, she had noticed-

“I-I can’t just this minute,” he said, and heard her silvery laugh. She put her long hand with its pink nails on his leg. He stared at it, cheeks flaming.

“You need money, don’t you? I heard your mother died and you’re still living in the dorms. Not too good for concentration, is it?”

“I’m doing okay.” He wondered how Silke knew about his mother. Did the other students talk about him? The idea bothered him.