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"Hikigaya. Stay a minute." It was Hiratsuka-sensei after class.
I sighed. I set my bag back down and sat back in my seat as the rest of class filed out.
When we were alone Hiratsuka tapped a pen to her lips. I could tell she wanted a smoke. She walked over to me. I knew what the subject was. Just from her trepidation alone.
"About what you said yesterday…" she trailed.
"What? I said a lot yesterday," I knew what. I was just being an asshole. Because I could.
"About killing yourself," she glared halfheartedly.
"I probably will. Probably. When my little sister doesn't need me anymore. When she finds a good husband and is stable," I yawned. I stretched back and hunched back down on myself.
"So… not soon?" She asked. "No plans?"
"No. Probably not soon."
"'Probably?'" She dissected.
"Well I won't make you any promises," I rolled a shoulder.
"Should I set you up with a counselor?"
"Would it help?" I wondered. She was quiet. "Let's be honest. Would it help? Or would it just be nuisance. I've seriously heard all the usual advice. The fact of the matter is that nobody can really help me but I appreciate you trying. It's sweet. You're sweet."
"Don't think you can flatter me," she tried to sound threatening. It failed and I think she knew it failed.
"I'm seriously not trying to. I think what you're going for is sweet. I just also think it's an exercise in futility," I allowed.
She sighed heavily. She looked away.
"When I kill myself," I pressed on. She looked back at me. "When I kill myself that's not on you. It's literally a problem with my brain and how I was born or something. I'm obsessive. I have real issues. It's hell inside my head."
"I don't know…" she murmured.
"Don't give me so much thought. I'm seriously not worth it. Do yourself a favor. You tried your best and that's what really matters. But I was always going to have to die. And I was bound to be the one to do it if something doesn't kill me before then."
"When is 'then?'"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "Whenever I can't take it anymore or my sister doesn't need me." Whichever comes first.
"But you'll go to the club?" She pressed.
"I'll go to the club. If you don't call an ambulance or recommend me to some counselor, then I'll go to the club," I agreed with a note of bargain.
"Should I call an ambulance?" She wondered.
"Nah," I breezed off. "I can't afford it. You'd only be making things worse for me."
"But you need an ambulance," she pointed out.
"I need a lobotomy." I laughed. "Not an ambulance," I disagreed. "They don't do that anymore. One would rather fly over the cuckoo's nest. But that's not a choice. So I suffer. You think I want to be a lonely little loser? And I know that I am. But I gotta. Being a raijuu is just not in the cards for somebody like me."
"Somebody like you?" She asked.
"Mentally unstable," I clarified. "I see my peers having fun and it's almost like I'm having fun myself. You feel? But I can't quite feel it. It's not in my playbook. I don't have the dopamine or serotonin."
"But you'll go to the club?" She reaffirmed.
"I'll go to your club and hang out with the little snow princess herself. Hopefully she leaves me alone and I can get some real work done."
"On your gradient problem?"
"Or some others. I have my little dilemmas. There's more than the vanishing gradient problem."
"Right," she breathed. "Right." She fidgeted.
"You can smoke," I informed her. She gave me a little grateful look and pulled a cigarette out of her jacket pocket. "You don't need my permission but you can smoke."
I looked out the window. I stood up with my bag in my hands.
"I'm probably not going to kill myself any time soon. You shouldn't worry about me. But you should also leave me alone a little. I'm outside your pay grade. And not because you're bad. You just don't get paid enough to try and handle problems like me. And you were never going to be able to save me anyways. I seriously feel like this is all coming from a good place. That's why I'm tolerating it. Your conscious can rest easily. Really."
"You'd be a lot cuter if you weren't suicidal," she murmured.
"I'd be a lot cuter if I were a plushie," I pointed out. "But I'm not a plushie and I want to die. Well, it's not that I want to die. It's that I don't want to be awake ever again. Isn't sleep a little funny? We look forward to being pretty close to dead every single night."
I picked a finger into my ear where a bug crawled and nestled into it's little home.
And yeah. I knew how that sounded. It sounded fucked. But it was literally my daily life. If I was lucky, it was this bad. A six out of ten. I wasn't lucky. If you took anything from this little story about my life, it would be that I was not lucky.
"You're not just saying all this because you think it's cool to sound cynical, are you?" She asked. "That wouldn't be funny."
"No. I'm not very funny," I agreed. "I'd like to tell you that I'm making it all up. It's all pleasant in here for me. I promise," I lied pointing at my skull.
I laughed at her expression.
"Now that's funny. Come on. Would you really believe that? You didn't even for a second. I thought you were going to be sick when the words left my lips. That's why I laughed. Who would have expected my words to be so nauseating?"
"So…?" She took a drag. She exhaled hard and away from me. I waved a hand in front of my face. The smoke didn't really get too close but it was still awful. "Take it easy, Hikigaya."
"Will do Sensei," I agreed. I left for the club room.
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"Good afternoon," I addressed Yukinoshita. She gave me a dainty little absent smile.
"Good afternoon," she returned. "I thought you weren't going to show up."
"I promised Sensei that I would on the condition she didn't try to set me up with a counselor or call an ambulance."
"You need counseling," she murmured.
"I don't need counseling because I don't have a plan. I'm not prepared to make an attempt on my own life."
"And you would tell me?"
"I'm a man of my word," I purred and I watched her shift uncomfortably.
"Don't do that," she ordered. I shrugged but made no promises. I set my bag down by a chair far from Yukinoshita and walked over and grabbed a piece of chalk. What to work on today?
I wrote the Einstein field equation.
G_{\mu \nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu \nu} = k T_{\mu \nu}
Here was the problem with the Einstein field equation.
It didn't work.
Saying that made me sound petulant.
Okay so it's not quite that simple. Where they didn't work mattered. They didn't work on a Plank length. The Einstein field equation worked off of assuming the minimum length of the universe was infinitesimal. This was not the case. The universe had a minimum length component. And the Einstein field equation didn't work at the singularity of a black hole. Where the slope should become imaginary or the Dirac delta function the equation failed.
This made quantum gravity and black hole physics a hard problem. Probably the hardest problem in all of physics and mathematics besides maybe finding the prime numbers.
I wanted to solve it.
There were two main theories which attempted to account for gravity in the standard model. Loop gravity and string theory.
I was going to focus on string theory today which also has its problems as a theory. Namely no supersymmetric particles had ever been observed to date. There should have been an inverse of the standard model waiting to be discovered. Sort of like antimatter. Nobody had ever seen anything like that even particle laboratories geared up to find that sort of thing. The LHC for one. Fermi Labs for another.
"When you showed up after being lambasted I assumed you're a masochist," Yukinoshita drawled.
"Well…" I trailed. It's not like I enjoyed pain. But so long as I was in pain I might as well enjoy it.
"Don't tell me you are a masochist."
"Not for this. But there are some pains that just feel so right. Confusion. Not understanding. They're siblings of curiosity. And I like them."
"A stalker perhaps?"
"You assume I have a thing for you?" I wondered. "Arrogant of you. Don't you think?"
"It's only arrogance if it isn't true. Yes I was convinced you liked me."
"And now you're not?" I asked.
"I'm getting conflicting reports."
"You're not my type," I clarified for her.
"And what is your type?"
"Sweet?" I answered. "Say what you will about you but you're not a sweetheart. What I want is a cute girl to pet my hair. You're not that kind of girl."
"Are you saying I'm not cute?"
"You're drop dead gorgeous. But you would never run your hands through my hair."
"So you think I'm gorgeous?"
"You keep misinterpreting me and I'm starting to think that it's on purpose."
"You're the one trying to flatter me."
"Am I?" I demanded. "We both know you're a good looking girl. Does me saying it count as flattery, then?"
She looked down at her book. "I suppose not."
"I suppose not as well. It sounds like we're in agreement. It's only flattery if I reveal to yourself that of yourself which you know not yet of."
"Shakespeare?" She wondered in surprise.
"I read," I defended myself. I gazed back at the field equation. It gazed back at me.
"Do better than me," Einstein whispered in my ear. I shuddered. My back convulsed as liquid silver, cold and chilled went down my spine. I heard the challenge in his words, however.
I'd have to do better than Einstein if I wanted to make any headway with this problem. Gravity was a problem in that it's the weakest force out of all the fundamental forces by a long way. The others were easier to detect and measure. Maxwell, in his time, pretty much nailed electrodynamics. Yeah, he stood on Newton's shoulders but didn't we all? Newton and Euler had invented calculus mostly independently.
Euler again. I rolled my eyes at Euler. Would you shut the fuck up? Man? It was hard to think with you always talking!
I sighed as I stared at the expression and I imagined ways to make the curvature defore smooth into infinity. I stared, tapping my foot at the expression. I kept working it through in my head and ended up with Riemann's paradox as I tried to make the field equation work with a length which wasn't infinitesimal.
\infty - \infty = z\pi, \all z \in mathbb{Z}
I might have to Yang Mills up in this bitch and that was another problem I was unable to solve. It was one of the six remaining of the big seven.
There's only been one of the big seven solved. The Poincare conjecture.
The conjecture was simple: every simply connected, closed three-manifold is homeomorphic to the three-sphere.
What did mean in plain english? Every closed three dimensional object could be deformed - without punching holes in it, or tearing a piece off and gluing it back on - into a perfect sphere. It just also needs to be finite in size and closed. Not having any holes. Gregori Perelman proved it on Arxiv when I was a young boy. He turned down the prize money. But then again, Gegori Perelman was probably state sponsored. Russia and China had state sponsored hackers and mathematicians.
But, and this was important, one can pose the generalized Poincare conjecture: every simply connected, closed n-manifold is homeomorphic to the n-sphere. It has been solved in every dimension but four. The fourth dimension was space-time under relativity. So… there's that? Was the universe a Poincare object? A hyperbolic Poincare taurus rather than a disk? Essentially a hyperbolic tessellation inside of each piece was another universe in the multiverse.
And there was probably a multiverse. Just based on the evidence for the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. But what did it all mean?
I had a lot of reading to do.
"You've been staring at that equation without moving for thirty minutes straight," Yukinoshita intruded from behind me. "Whatever you're trying to solve with it you will fail."
I sighed.
"Probably. Yeah. I probably won't get it today," I hummed as I thought over the problem of gravity and the problems with Einstein's theory. The tool I was using was at its limit. It just didn't go any further. And that really wasn't Einstein's fault. But it kind of was. Maybe if he'd embraced statistics we'd be further along as a species whatever that meant. But he hadn't. He'd given up. And maybe that was for the best rather than pushing himself into a corner of some sort. "'God does not play dice with the universe,'" I murmured.
I turned back into the room and took in Yukinoshita's appearance where she sat with her book neatly marked. I sighed and walked back over to my bag and perused through for my notebook. I jotted down a note about the Poincare disk. I closed it again.
"Make any good progress whatsoever?" She wondered.
"Maybe. I don't have all my tools here with me."
"It's a different project than the one you were working on yesterday."
"It is. This one is gravity. Maybe you've heard of it?" I laughed.
"That brand of humor doesn't become you."
"What brand of humor does? I'd be curious to know. Or are you so abnormal you see me living my best life and you say to yourself 'something must be done about that.'"
"Well, considering your low social standing you may well perceive me as strange. However, it's only natural that I came to think this way. It's something I derived from experience."
"What is experience?" I wondered. I think she realized I wasn't joking and she hesitated for a moment. "I mean, your obviously talking about your school life. But it's been on my mind a little. What does it mean to experience something. I experience things which aren't really there all the time. I am deluded."
"Well, experience is the sum of sensory input and memory. And you are correct. I am referring to my peaceful school life."
"You don't have many friends, do you?" I picked up.
"We should start with the definition of friend if we are to ask that."
"That sounds like something I would say," I accused.
"And what does that mean?" She demanded.
"I have no friends. So… I suppose my question unravels and we have our solution. We call that 'trivial.' In the business."
"The business?"
"The number game," I clarified. "Making the numbers dance and play music."
"Do you really hear and see that?"
"I don't hear anything like that. For me it's a little like playing chess with God."
"You're going to lose," she observed. "Why play?"
"But you can play as many times as you like," I carried on. "And he trumps you. As you implied. He wins every time. But sometimes you can make him change strategies so he's not beating you the same way anymore. And aha! Eureka! You've found something. Even if it's small."
"And then you go back to losing? And you're happy with that?"
"Nobody said I was happy," I denied. "Who said I was happy? But this is livable and you the game is still a game."
She hummed in thought. She gave the room a thousand yard stare as she considered that. "What were we talking about?"
"How you didn't have friends?" I felt confused.
"I never said I didn't have any friends. Although, even if that's true it's not like that would be disadvantage in any way."
"You won't find me disagreeing. But it's one thing for me not to have friends and quite another for a cute, well liked girl. Isn't it?"
"You would never understand," she puffed her cheeks and looked away.
"Try me," I whispered. "I'm… pretty good at understanding things. It's… it's sort of my gig. But I think I understand what you're trying to say. Being alone means you can have a great time by yourself. You could even say the belief that one shouldn't be alone is disgusting." Yukinoshita just looked at me for a second before she turned her face back to the front and closed her eyes. "Even though you like being alone, having somebody just pour their sympathy on you would be irritating. I totally get you." I marched forward.
"I wonder why you're acting like we're on the same level. It's extremely irritating." Then as if to cover up her irritation, Yukinoshita flipped her hair back behind her.
"Well, although you and I are of a different standard, I suppose we more or less share the same feelings in regards to being alone. Though it's a little vexing." Upon saying it was vexing Yukinoshita gave a slight self-deprecating smile. Her smile seemed somehow sombre yet calm. "Despite being liked by everyone you call yourself a loner. You're a disgrace to lonely people everywhere." I said triumphantly, satisfied with her expression.
"Well that's a simplistic idea. But what else can I expect from a calculator? You only know how to handle numbers because people are too complicated for you. I mean, what do you understand about being liked by people? Oh that's right, you've never experienced it before. Sorry, that was my lack of consideration."
I threw my head back and laughed. I think that surprised her. I think she expected me to be indignant in some fashion. That only made it more funny because I agreed with her completely. Numbers would never lie to you. They couldn't. Mathematics was truth. People were cunning and full of doubts and dark secrets.
"So what's it like being popular?" I asked.
Yukinoshita closed her eyes as though she was thinking about it a little bit. After clearing her throat a little, she spoke. "For someone like you, who isn't at all popular, this may be a little unpleasant to hear."
"Oh no! And my day was going so well. I was having a blast." I replied. Yukinoshita took a deep breath in response.
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-WG