A rest cure, his father called it. Elliott had allowed the breakdown to happen, gone exploring in the zeta landscape with full knowledge of the danger, and had taken a tumble, breaking something.
He had also brought something away with him, which no meds could make him forget. Scrawled in his black notebook, his function filled several pages, in handwriting that didn’t even look like his. He had his idea, but no proof yet.
That summer, he returned to MIT. Raj was in Madras, Silke in Germany. He rowed on the Charles during the hot hazy afternoons.
In the evenings, he worked on the prime numbers, taking care to knock off by eleven and sleep at least seven hours.
He now took life slowly, but there was never any question of turning his back on the primes. A very few people are granted knowledge of their destinies at an early age-gymnasts, musicians, great beauties, scientists, and many mathematicians. He had been blessed with a certain future. He knew his fate, but he also knew now that he wasn’t God; he couldn’t run rampant toward his goal; he would have to approach it stealthily, the painstaking calculations on the infinite sequence he had discovered, the endless checking and rechecking of the algebraic expressions.
He tried to explain it to his father over the phone, but Pop couldn’t follow anymore. “The only actual numbers are primes,” Elliott said. “The composite numbers are just junk in the road, piling up, slowing down the primes.”
“Are you sleeping?” his father said.
“Each prime is a cloud of probabilities, like quanta.”
“Come home as soon as classes are over.”
“I’m back to the li line. I have finished the first phase of my work. If you give me any number up to three hundred digits, I can tell you egg-zackly how many primes there are to that point. Do you know what that means, Pop?”
“No, I don’t, son.”
“It’s big.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine. I’m sleeping. I’m eating. It’s linked with physics. This correction we’re looking for-there is information loss from the more fundamental structure behind what we see as primes. I’m moving into phase two.”
He had traveled beyond Riemann. Keeping his excitement in check, he stayed on the safe side of the precipice. He corralled his imagination and worked on debugging his proof, which would be a long and arduous process.
The angel did not come to him again.
When the first year of their graduate programs began a year and half later, Elliott and Raj and Silke resumed their gambling jaunts. Elliott and Silke did it for the money. Raj did it for the kick. Even Carleen came along a time or two. She had decided against grad school and taken a job with a company on Route 128 that made security software.
Not wanting to see pity in them, Elliott avoided Silke’s eyes. She and Raj were never apart. Fiercely entwined and forbidding to outsiders, they were as tight as barbed wire.
After a Fourth of July trip, the team was barred from the casinos in Atlantic City. Their photos were circulated. They dressed differently, changed their signals, and concentrated on Nevada, where they were still uncaught.
November came. They picked a weekend.
They chose Tahoe.
Something was wrong between Raj and Silke on the flight west. Even Elliott, who didn’t pay much attention to silence and surly expressions, could feel it. Silke stared out the window, arms crossed, face shuttered. She ignored Raj. He didn’t seem to care. He teased the attendant and drank some of the wine they served, which was very unusual for him.
Elliott sat behind them. He slept most of the way.
They took a cab to some motel by the state line, paying cash as always from the stash in Silke’s purse. It was a Saturday morning, cool, dry, bright, airless from the altitude.
Later, inside Harveys, Elliott played desultorily, waiting for Carleen or Silke to signal him to move to a hot table. Silke suddenly came to him, tears in her eyes.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “Can we go outside?”
“Let me tell Raj…”
“Don’t tell him.” They wound through the banks of slots and went through the revolving doors. At 6:00 P.M. or so the evening shift of tourists had just begun.
“Shall we go back to the motel?”
“No. Let’s go toward the mountains.” They crossed the busy highway and walked through Caesars’ acre-wide parking lot. Then they were really in the mountains, walking uphill on a dirt path, alone.
“Did you hear? Raj is getting married.” Silke walked ahead of him, wearing those high-heeled boots that seemed so silly away from a city.
“Oh.”
“Is that all you can say? His parents found him a wife. A Wellesley girl whose family is from Madras. Tower Court, that’s her dorm address. Sounds grand, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“He loves me, but he’ll marry her. Wait, though. He won’t marry her right away. He’s checked his calendar and squeezed us both into his future! First, he and I continue to live together while we get our doctorates, he, a man with two foolish females to keep happy; I, the doormat; she the ignorant, innocent dupe. She’ll finish grad school, marry him, and become a banker, he says, at least until the four children come. I, at that point, well, he forgot to say what I will be doing right then. But doesn’t his life sound wonderful?”
She was really messed up, Elliott could tell by the perfection of her grammar, but she had always known this day would come. To tell the truth, he was glad Raj was finally leaving her. The old passion rose in him again, with the thought that she would be alone and lonely and perhaps turn to him.
Then he chastised himself for his unquenchable egotism, which converted her pain into a potential advantage for himself.
“He thinks he’s another Ramanujan,” Silke said as they walked. “But he has never had an original thought. Except in bed. He’s very original. When we make love, he-can I say this?”
“Say whatever you want.”
“He says, ‘I-am-Ram!’ over and over. You know. In rhythm.”
“Who is Ram?”
“A Hindu god.”
“Does it make things more interesting?”
“It’s funny! I’m making fun of him! What would it be like with you, Wakefield? ‘I have the proof!’ Climaxes all around.”
“Silke, you are savage.”
“Only because-I do feel savage.”
Elliott puffed now as the trail became steeper and rockier, petering out. He could hear the sound of a stream to his left. “Let’s go this way.” Silke followed him as he picked his way across the rocks. “Let’s sit down,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.” Bushes clustered along the bank of the streamlet he had found. He reached down, letting the cold pure water run over his hand.
“He gave her an engagement ring.” Tears choked her voice.
“His family is wealthy,” Elliott said practically. “Conservative. So is he. You always knew that.”
“He loves me!”
“He does.”
“He can’t leave me.”
“How do you mean? What are you thinking?”
“I’m not thinking,” Silke said. She let out a bitter laugh, then said, “Do you still love me?”
“I’ll always love you.”
“I’ll always love Raj.”
“Stay with him, then, for as long as you can.”
“But-” She brushed away her hair and looked at him dubiously. “I’m too good to be second best. I deserve-”
Elliott said, “What use is pride? What does it do besides keep you away from the one you love? I never let it stop me.”
“I’d start to hate him.”
“I haven’t started to hate you.”
“You’re an idiot, that’s why. You should hate me.”
“Why are you so harsh to me, Silke? Why do you say things like that?”
Her face contorted. She reached over and put her arms around him. “Maybe you’re right… maybe if he stays with me… he won’t be able to go through with it,” she said into his shoulder. He held her tight and pretended she was crying over him.
Finally, when she let go and wiped her face with her sleeve, he said, “I’ll never get married.” Then he added shyly, “I managed to find a function that seems to predict the primes. It implies an easy way to factor large numbers, too.”
Silke became all business. “Are you sleeping?”
“Brother John, Brother John,” Elliott sang. “Not another breakdown, not another breakdown-”
“Ding dang dong. Stop singing. Tell me.”
“There are some flaws. But-”
She gave him a long look. She had sat down on the rock opposite, one knee pulled up in what Elliott remembered was called the Royal Pose in Asia. She looked like a small and perfect statue, her face immobile, a wet streak still evident on one cheek, like a stone goddess who has been left out in the rain. The windless air and shadows where they sat seemed to calm her.
“You found it through your work on the Riemann Hypothesis?” she said.
“No. I’m following up on some work by Connes and Berry in physics. I went back to the li line and started over, where Riemann started. Before he went down his blind alley. It’s a correction to the Prime Number Theorem.”
“You can prove it?”
“Not yet.”
“You confuse me,” Silke said. “Do you have a proof or not?”
“Not yet. But give me any number up to three hundred digits and I think I can tell you if it’s a prime in about fifteen minutes. If it’s a composite number up to about five hundred digits, I can factor
