The New Math – a story in 5 parts with CD
Part I. Zero Sum

By Rachel Levine
for you

    Everyone has their addictions.

    To soothe my mind, I attach myself to places, returning at the same time, sitting in the same seat, studying and absorbing the flow of traffic, facial expressions, postures and poses, rhythm and pace, vibrancy, absences, lightness and speed. I sponge up life around me until I am drenched through and it leaks from my pores. Bar staff and managers wave and smile at me when I come in. Waitresses bring me coffee without handing me a menu. I overtip if I can. “We always know our regulars,” they tell me, letting me sit in a closed-off section. I call myself an Irregular. After a period of days-weeks-months, I find a new place and embrace it, just as if I have always been there.

Why is this soothing? Is it the acquisition or the leaving? the being or the becoming? I do not finger it or try to. I have my own codes, my own rules of behavior. I change them often. If I want to be alone, I draw pictures. I only give out my email address, never a phone number. If someone is intriguing, I invite him to find me again, another night. Sometimes he does. If I am in a certain kind of mood, I will sit at the bar and nurse a pint of Griffon Blonde for hours. If I am in a slightly different mood, I will let the scrub on the stool next to me buy the drinks and paw me, making shallow conversation until nauseous revulsion wells up and I take to flight. “I’m a musician.” “Really? What do you play? Tell me about it.” Throw a stone in Montreal, hit a musician. You can push them over like dominoes.

Like all addictions, shabbiness hangs on the façade of my other lives. Emails have gone unanswered. My voice mail on the cell is full of undeleted messages. Three wedding invitations sit unreturned under a pile of bills to be filed. Are they already married? I skip out on formal occasions anyway. Somewhere is a GST check to deposit. I dodge phone calls for as long as I can, watching the phone ring and ring and ring until it stops. The fridge contains condiments and spreads, but no food. The pile of dishes and pots in the sink leans towards me and winks as I scan the dials and switches on the stove… is everyone here off?… shut the door … gloves, check… purse, check… wallet, check… keys, check… step out into the night with my bicycle and go.

I bike up, up the hills in the wrong direction, against traffic, past linked couples and illegible graffiti and concrete surfaces as unique and textured as skin, past shwarma joints and bling bling and dogs sniffing and storefronts and anorexic trees and sidewalks and the street kids huddled together with their dogs on cardboard mattresses. I swim my way through the world city ocean, dodging cars that turn tightly around corners and cars that are waiting at red lights and cars that are swerving without looking and pedestrians crossing in the middle of the street, letting faster bikers scoot past me. Biking until I have reached my regular places, my current addiction, a bar called the Green Room. Because it is Montreal, it also has a French name, the Salon Vert, but no one calls it that. Modish and thin, dressed as though auditioning for Godspell, the clientele pass through in a swarm around midnight, a stop in their nightly search for the most happening places on St. Laurent at any given moment.

My chosen space here is outside, watching the salmon spawn up and down the sidewalk, in pairs, in packs, but I perch here lately because I like talking to David who moonlights as the alcohol patrol and peacekeeper outside the venue. David routinely aggravates me, a reflection of his difficult, paced personality. I routinely insult him, perhaps a reflection of mine. He may not be objectively aggravating or difficult. I have a crescending attraction for him, a frustrating thing that I would like to pitch over the side of the ship for the sharks. Attraction has never done anything for me except make me jealous and incensed. When I don’t get what I want, I turn coolly insulting.

Tonight, an architectress from France is talking to David. She bobs to emphasize certain things she says, bowing out her knees in a plié of skinny limbs. “The condos on Mt. Royal,” she says proudly, using French sentence structure “My firm designed them.” “We were just talking about them earlier,” David says, referring to an earlier declaration of my desire to buy an apartment in a year or two. Then he continues, “They look nice.” “They are,” she says, and then begins naming their finer points. Hardwood floors. Things like that. I stare at the other side of the street, watching the way the light from the sign reflects in a puddle, watching a boy trip off the curb as he talks on a cell phone. “Architecture is fantastic,” she says, waving her dove-like hands about in the air, “I am so passionate about it. We transform things. Every building reconstructs the city.” She launches into what might be a practiced, but clearly a considered and intelligent discusss-atribe of architecture, mankind, and civilization. I half-listen as David talks to her, this 26 year old with sparkling eyes and oceans of enthusiasm. She is bathed in gold, baptized in her own accomplishments and successes brought about by hard work and equally focused study. And there I am, leaning against the street pole, subverting an irrational jealously because of my irrational attraction. Or perhaps my malcontent is reactionary to less tangible things: her security, her certainty, her ease, her effortless sense of being.
I am in no mood to respond when she shines her light on me and asks me what I do.

    “Nothing,” I say, staring at a place near her feet (long feet in expensive ballet flats), but then search her face and qualify with the truth, “I was a sabbatical replacement, a professor at the University. My contract just ended and I am now finishing my dissertation and looking for a job to hold me over for the year. But I might start a web design company. I’m trying to figure it out.”

    She asks some polite questions and when I don’t return the ball with force, she returns to expounding on her glorious self.

    I stop listening and start prodding myself. What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you being such an anti-social fuck? This girl is cool. She’s from France!  She speaks your language – you study ancient architecture. You know what quoins are and ashlar masonry and orthostates and space and function and aesthetics. She’s bubbly. She’s smart. She’s interesting. You have got to chill the fuck down. And stop saying “fuck.” What is up with you tonight? Count backward to infinity or something.

 Ah, these days, I am not myself. Conversations with the good people of the world make me feel so subversive, so alienated, so much like I’ve failed to live up to the extremities of my abilities. Forget the extremities. Maybe I don’t even make it above the water mark. I somehow ambled off the path and I have no excuses for it. I just seem to be lost on the way, distracted, dreaming, overwhelmed by the ordinary, while claiming that I am in pursuit of something higher. But, I keep losing my focus on what that higher thing is. In fact, I don’t even know what is wrong. Maybe I never did. Is it the dissertation? a permanent job as a professor? All those things are distasteful lately and always might have been. Is it finding my life purpose? Wisdom? Independence? Love? What makes me so different from the billions of other people looking for the same things? I have no excuses for where my head is at today. I have no real problems. If she has problems, she probably has real problems like an alcoholic mother or irritable bowel syndrome, not something invented and imagined.

Furthermore, I remind myself, outside of me to all the world I appear a person who is accomplished and continuing to accomplish. A person in the process of pursuing high things and well on the way. It is only for me, to me, inside of me, that I am scrambling. I can’t even articulate to myself all the ways in which I feel myself eroding me because I can’t fully grasp it, can’t name it, can’t assess it.

Take the “I was a professor.” Why does this bother me? I was many things in my life: I was from Long Island New York, I was going to attend medical school, I was married, I was an internet content manager/writer, I was a safety shuttle driver, I was an editor of a daily newspaper, I was a painter. I have bounced off to so many different identities and have left them all half skipping ahead with the joy of a newly minted life and half looking back like Lot’s wife forgetting the photographs of her parents and grandparents at the house back in Sodom.

My current “I was” is an electric shock to my system and one I am having difficulty shaking off easily. It sticks to my fingers as I try to throw it away from me, and I twist myself up trying to pry it off, using every part of my body in my efforts to detatch it, but end up stuck and contorted. Defiant, I tramp around with it like a piece of plastic that holds a 6-pack of Coke together around my ankle. I act as though everyone knows what it means and if they don’t understand, well, fuck them. Idiots! See this plastic ring on my ankle! Know what it means, motherfucker? 2 months ago, I was a recognized expert on art and culture. 2 months ago, I was respected and esteemed by colleagues and students. 2 months ago, I was faced towards a future and had great expectations.

But, now, mirror mirror on the wall, 2 months later, my contract is over and I am unemployed and struggling to finish a dissertation that should have been finished over a year ago. They’d have hired you if you had finished your dissertation this year. Without a dissertation there will never be a permanent job, just rambling, just a constant shuffle of new faces and disconnect. I am stuck these days between an “I was” and an “I am.”
Who’s fault is that? I’m not slow, I’m just drawn that way. Not meant to be. Tell yourself that it just wasn’t meant to be instead.  

Maybe I should stay with my parents for awhile, get my head straight. But, I’ve been back there, back to visit, and the Long Island of my memory is changed and I never much liked it there anyway. I hate going back and at least I can love it in my memory.

See this plastic thing around my ankle, motherfucker?

I snap out of my head.

“Wha?” I say, sheepishly. Was I part of this conversation?

David has a wild, full faced smile, and he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot. He must get so bored out here. What did he do before I came? People visit him here. I’m not the only one. I think he’s dating the girl inside who works at the bar. I have little to base this on except from the way he touches her shoulder like he feels her on the inside. It’s Saturday night. I prefer Monday or Tuesday nights in Montreal. Friday and Saturday are crowded, unpleasant. I come for the company, sometimes to dance too. He comes for the $40. I’ve had jobs like that. But I always loved them, loved working in libraries and at coffee shops and at simple, undemanding things where I can just hang out, be in the world, have a reason for being there, unlike tonight. At least that is how I remember them.

    “Do you know any stories?” I ask him.

    “Is that all I am to you?” he asks, kicking at something imaginary near his feet, “Your entertainment?”

    “No. I think higher of you than that.”

    He looks me in the eye, takes off his hat and smoothes his hair back. Then he takes off his glasses, looks into them, and puts them back on. There are other worlds than this, other places, other places where I’ve spent time and been. I want to grab his hand and drag him with me to another world, but first my old life. This is the beach where I collected shells and driftwood. Getting pulled over by a cop for going under the speed limit. When my boyfriend peed his name in the sand and spelled it wrong. When I saw a bird’s nest with three eggs in the grass of a dune. Nearly drowning. Rescuing horseshoe crabs in the shallow pools. Things are so beautiful from a distance, even the horrible, especially the horrible.

    He touches my arm. Are my thoughts so loud that he can hear me thinking?