Solve for X
It’s midnight and she’s on the roof of the physics building with Paul. He’s looking at the stars through a telescope the physics prof set up earlier. She’s doing homework: medieval history, organic chemistry, and calculus. The sky turns overhead like the face of a great clock. Julian of Norwich, medieval mystic, looks down on them from her perch in Heaven.
The calculus text tells her the derivative of X becomes nonzero when the function begins to change. But how, she wonders, do you find X when you don’t know the formula? How do you solve for the unknown when no one has taught you the rules of algebra, much less calculus?
Julian, sensing her confusion, says, “It is necessary that there should be sin.”
Paul is hunched over the telescope viewfinder, a small eyepiece that juts out at a canted angle from the black cylindrical telescope. “I think I’ve got it!” he shouts, one eye squeezed shut, the other pressed against the cold brass. He twists a knob and says something she can’t make out—the wind whips his words away, carrying them far from her.
The branches of the tall pines next to the building create a whooshing sound, like water, bathing her in sharply-scented terpenes and other volatile organic molecules.
“What is it?” she yells back, her voice also whisked away across the valley.
He looks up, a question forming between his brows, as if he’d forgotten she was there. But then he smiles, and the slope of her unknown is tugged from zero toward infinitesimal. The heat of his breath creates smoky puffs in the cold mountain air. She can see his torso outlined beneath the tight tee shirt, his worn jeans, creased at the thigh where leg bends to form hip, his tousled dark hair and the way his smile grows to encompass his eyes as he looks over the rooftop. At her.
He waves a hand her way. “Come look at this. It’s another world. A god damn other world.”
She makes her way across the high roof, leans to press her eye against the cold brass eyepiece. Overhead, the vast Milky Way wheels to eternity above the small mountain town where her body stands next to Paul’s, the heat of Him conducted into Her through the chill air and the thin clothing that separates these two bodies.
She twists the brass knob and what seemed a reddish star resolves into a planet. “It’s Mars,” he whispers. She is transported. She travels, first, to this planet, then to the far reaches of the galaxy. She stands on a glittery branch of stars and looks back at herself. She knows then, without a doubt, that she can see the future. She will take this boy’s hand, this Paul creature, Earthling, and lead him down the stairs back to her dorm room. And the derivative will become positive.
She has found the unknown, solved for X. She now knows the rules of math and of eternity.
“And all shall be well,” says Julian, gazing down on these two. “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Before moving to Colorado, Raima Larter was a chemistry professor who secretly wrote fiction and poetry and tucked it away in drawers. Her work has appeared in Cleaver, Another Chicago Magazine and others. She has published two novels and a popular science book. Read more about her work at raimalarter.com.
