September 14, 2015 | Occasus | Issue 5 | Fiction

The Incompleteness Theorem

        It frustrates Robert, the slow, irrational creep of the disease. When he wakes each morning, he takes stock of himself, graphing the results on a chart in his mind. Things lost: a half inch off of his waist, the slight convex curve of his cheek, the ability to swallow with ease. The red line plunges insistently downwards. For each subtraction there is an addition: the protrusion of a rib he had not acknowledged, a new throbbing in his temples.
        This morning, he notes, is October 17th, 1988. He has been in the hospice for eleven days. It has been 546 days since he was diagnosed with AIDS. It is 9:36am.
        Michael is sitting in his armchair in the corner of the dim room. He smiles: a quick upward quirk of his lips, a crinkle around his glasses-framed eyes. “Good morning, Professor Miller. How are you feeling?”
        Robert does not answer.
                                                               
        Michael, from the moment they’d met, had always been too much. Robert had learned to inhabit the feeling of the gaze on his body, but Michael had the uncomfortable habit of looking into Robert’s eyes. He had a steadiness about him, a straight spine that seemed to protect him from things outside of himself. One of Robert’s most vivid memories is of the time when, as a test he gave to all new PhD candidates, Robert asked him to exercise his faculties on extending a known axiomatic system of his choice. Most students would have brought him pages of scribbled calculations and messy hypotheses, but Michael returned to his office the next day empty-handed.
        “It would be a waste of time, Professor Miller,” Michael explained with his exasperatingly calm wisdom, “and I don’t intend to waste my time with you. You obviously know that Gödel’s theorems of incompleteness prove that all buy the most trivial mathematical systems are incapable of finding true completion.”
        “Do you not think that it’s worth disproving him?” Robert argued in earnest.
        “I don’t,” Michael said. “There are more important things to be done than to struggle against the idea that there is no ultimate truth. What would we do with it if we knew it, anyway?”
        Thought it plagued him constantly, it was the last time Robert ever gave a student that test.
        Michael had been working as the teaching assistant for one of Robert’s classes for two years before Robert invited him home. But their wine-stained lips never touched. Michael left before midnight, after a disjointed attempt at connection that faltered and fell before it had launched. Michael’s heavy eyes, his grounded soul, were too substantial to be held for only a moment.

        As October 17th ticks on, Robert starts losing seconds, and then minutes, to blackness. He does not even have the strength to indignantly turn away, the only defense he feels he had left him and the man in the chair.
        The touch of Michael’s hands stirs in him a deep discomfort. There is no relief from the embarrassment he feels when Michael takes his skeletal limbs in his warm hands and strokes down the paper-thin skin with a wet sponge. There is something so unbalanced between them when they touch. He gets the same panicked feeling he used to feel waking up next to a man with his arm around his torso. He has the urge to run, to escape from the terrifying, constricting warmth that is there, but his body will no longer allow him to.
        The nurses are trained, impersonal, and detached. Michael is everything they are not. Every so often, Robert will notice that look in his eyes: that pained, terrifying look. When Michael leans forward, resting a hand on Robert’s forehead, he is intolerably gentle, yet to Robert his palm feels like the end of a sledgehammer.

        Mathematics had gotten him through the early years. In them there was a rationality, a transcendental subtlety, a beauty that the real world never seemed to be able to match. When he won an award for his final thesis, he was suddenly sought out. Smart men surrounded him, valued him, admired his mind.
        In his world, mathematics was everything. There was always a solution. The incompleteness theorem unsettled him, but he could always find ways to subvert it: marrying numbers, assigning values, calculating until things fit together. He created infinites in his head.
        But still, there was emptiness, and there were many puzzles that sat unsolved, untouched.

        Every day, Michael is there. He asks Robert questions and tries to start conversations, and doesn’t complain when Robert begins to answer less and less. He is stiflingly patient. He is there when Robert wakes up and when he at last falls asleep. Robert thinks that his partner, Cameron, must come and pick him up each evening. But he is not sure.

        The sex started when Robert was twenty four. The men he met at the bars, as stupid as he found them, provided the rudimentary exchanges he needed. He learned the system of negotiation in bathroom stalls as quickly as he’d learned quadratics—there was a starting point, a rise, a climax, a fall, and that was where the equation ended. Later on he progressed from bathroom stalls to bedrooms. As he grew older, he let himself become someone else, tried on different skins, changed the pitch of his voice, and learned what it felt like to transfer power by placing his glasses over another man’s eyes. During, he tried to cast off his thoughts and let himself feel alive. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop the whirring of numbers behind his closed eyes. He knew that putting two things together was supposed to create something bigger than the sum of their parts, but in the morning, the disgust in his stomach shattered all the answers he thought he’d found the night before.

        Robert has always had the sense that Michael would have fit in better in another profession, with his resigned eyes and his slack face that always seemed to reflect some inner meditation. He embodied very little of the chaotic, socially stunted energy that seemed to characterize the mathematicians at the university. In his early years as a professor, Robert had spent time mentally situating himself against his awkward, tweed-clad colleagues, and fed his pride by being one of the few who could navigate the ‘real world’ as well as the one in his head. However, when Michael arrived, he found himself by comparison more stilted than he would have liked. He developed a disdain, then a denial, then a painful obsession with Michael’s self-satisfaction, and the way he seemed to not feel the lack of wholeness that Robert felt so often. The first time he saw Michael and Cameron together, he was struck by how gentle they were with each other. As Michael started occupying larger parts of his mind, academic and otherwise, Robert reverted to his disdain. There were days when he couldn’t stand the sight of the young man and his infuriating capacity to care.

        Each day, Robert struggles with the incompleteness theorem. He spends hours in his head, searching his imaginary file cabinets in the hope that he will be able to disprove Gödel before he runs out of time. It is unbearable to him, the thought that one can die without ever being complete. But Robert is running out of places to search for what he is missing. He retreats further and further into his mind, into the stores of information, hoping he’s just overlooked the answer that will bring him peace. Michael, meanwhile, talks to him.
        “You should see the movement outside,” he says. “The protests, the die-ins… people kissing on the street.” Michael also tells him about the dog, a Beagle, that he and Cameron have taken in. Robert barely registers his voice, so occupied he is with his desperate search.

        Moments fleet, steal away into darkness and whip around Robert’s conciouness in a chaotic motion. At 5:47pm, shaking, he calculates that four Robert Millers die every day in the United States. He is certain that no one will notice his absence. His lungs feel like lead. He counts the seconds between his heartbeats. One. One. One. Two. Two.
        Michael sits with his knees pressed against the edge of the hospital bed. The skin on Robert’s hand feels like it’s puckering in the cold, squeezing the heat from Michael’s fingertips into his own brittle bones. It feels disgustingly hot, and makes beads of weak sweat roll down Robert’s forehead. Michael’s eyes are like broken mirrors. He holds on.
        Robert knows he is dying. He recognizes it in the gasping for breath, the grasping for light. He has been waiting for this moment, and with the last of his conciouness he searches the blur for answers, for numbers, for infinity.
        Michael hovers like a halo above his bed, framed by fluorescent lights, surrounded by the sudden influx of alarms and nurses. His bottom eyelids are raw red. Robert feels Michael’s hand, feels his own muscles release their hold on his bones.
        Seconds later he is gripped by panic, and his heart explodes in his chest. No, he thinks, I need more time. I need to find it. His fingers tremble within Michael’s grasp.
        Flashes of orange light explode behind his eyelids. Miraculously, he can feel the moment his heart stops beating.
        No, he screams. I am incomplete, I am incomplete, I am incompl--
                                                                                      

       

LEVI HORD is a first year student in the SASAH and Scholar's Electives programs, who is also majoring in Sexuality Studies. Leanne has had two of her original plays featured in the Grand Theatre's High School Playwright's Cabaret. She has had her short fiction published in school publications, and is an active participant in London's spoken word poetry scene.