![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2019\/03\/leave-image-1.png\")
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He\u2019d awoken early this morning and lay there for hours, his hand on his heart. A few months had passed and he is still disturbed by the girl. How long has he been awake, considering how to read her? He thinks of her\u2014Georgina\u2014in bed at night, with his wife sleeping beside him. The other day in class she death-stared him\u2014he can\u2019t think of a better way to put it\u2014while he was warning the students of an upcoming surprise math quiz. Her face was pinched, her eyes angry slits. Light begins to spill through the edges of the burgundy curtains while Jillian\u2019s breath closes over him. She is just a rebellious teenager. Besides the constant thumping boots\u2014does she really own no other footwear?\u2014she wears what they all wear now, ripped jeans, their boyfriends\u2019 hoodies, tight t-shirts or muscle shirts hidden beneath, skin exposed. Her black hair has poppy-red stripes painted into it. His own girls, also teenagers, went through similar ritualistic phases, though they didn\u2019t insist on loud combat boots daily to school, thank God.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His heart has been acting up again, after all these years. Before Martha left\u2014decades ago, now\u2014he\u2019d come home after last bell and lay down on the old plaid couch she hated, the one he bought at Value Village for ten dollars, with his left hand pressing down on his chest, his heart pulsing erratically beneath his fingertips. During those few months before Martha left, he spent hours on that couch striving to understand the mysterious formula his heart was trying to communicate. He followed the intermittent, unpredictable beats with his bare fingertips on the top left quadrant of his pale pectoral, searching for an answer through his ginger mat of chest hair. Were three quick beats in a row equivalent to three cubed? Were the long, frighteningly drawn-out pauses meant to be indicative of an equal sign? Or were they an indication of the secondary part of the formula? He never figured it out. All those years as a serious math student, practicing the formulas, making the numbers work, the sum always (so predictably gratifying) the logical outcome of the calculations, but when it came to his own heartbeat, the rhythm of the major organ inside of him, he simply could not find the answer.<\/p>\n
He had tried to explain to Martha that it is always about understanding the formula first, and then everything afterwards follows with logical precision. Such an utterly satisfying exercise for him, every single time, and he couldn\u2019t see how others refused to take delight in it. You simply had to learn the rules, understand how the numbers work together, and then, voila! Martha\u2019s slim hips and curled black hair were silhouetted against the picture window\u2019s dying light as she looked down at the space above his head with her vague, expressionless eyes. So rarely did she actually look directly at him, in those final months. Then, he\u2019d hear her in the kitchen starting supper, and he\u2019d raise his voice to tell her that his whole life, since childhood, he had been driven to finding the answers, and that working out the problem through numbers was the most logical route. It was around this time, near the end, that he frequently heard her say, \u201cRoy, you\u2019re being redundant.\u201d<\/p>\n
He pads downstairs to the kitchen and is greeted by a yellow circle of light cast across an open textbook on the kitchen table with his sullen eldest daughter\u2019s face inches from its pages. Pretending not to hear him.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re up early, Bella? It\u2019s not light yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her voice takes on an old crone\u2019s timbre. \u201cStudying. Latin exam this morning.\u201d He thinks she might have placed herself at the table at this exact hour, knowing her father\u2019s morning routine and determined to have him see her diligence and studiousness. He wonders if she likes Latin. He lightly pats the top of her blond, thin-haired skull, pours himself a glass of orange juice, and goes upstairs to shower.<\/p>\n
Despite his determination to find the answer all those years ago, the erratic vibrato in his chest was not giving way to any kind of formula. He didn\u2019t understand the workings of the body. He only knew numbers, calculations, formulas. Logic. This new shaking way of the heart was lost to him. And so the beating of his heart was just that, he finally realized\u2014primal, biological, uncontrollable. There was no formula; the only mystery lay in why it kept going. <\/p>\n
On top of this, his heart actually, physically hurt, and Martha suggested he see a doctor but she didn\u2019t seem that emphatic about it. He thought her tone suggested he was faking it. A few months later, he came home to an envelope with her goodbye note inside, a rectangle placed neatly in the center of the welcome mat inside the door, stark white against dirty brown. He appreciated the note later only for the care she took to place the envelope so that its four corners were equidistant to the corners of the welcome mat beneath it.<\/p>\n
The season after Martha left he met someone new, Jillian, and no one was more surprised than him. A casual meeting in the local library where they were both caught searching for the same book: Descartes\u2019 Error<\/em>. He asked for her number and she acquiesced, like a miracle. His unusual heart symptoms had calmed down by then, mostly. But since the beginning of this school year, the strange and distant quivering in his chest has become a daily occurrence, accompanied now by a persistent, muffled screech that pierces his inner ear. He\u2019s never mentioned his heart to Jillian because he doesn\u2019t want to break their routine. She wouldn\u2019t react the way Martha did: seething, aloof. Accusatory. Jillian would wait for some time before suggesting, mildly, that they see a doctor. He knows what would follow not too long after: he would find himself one day in his doctor\u2019s office with her by his side, wondering obscurely how he got there. He admits that her easy way of facing life\u2019s obstacles or irritations is admirable. This is the quality he loves most about her but didn\u2019t appreciate, nor did he understand its necessity until well into their marriage when the little emergent hiccups began: the baby\u2019s fever too high, much higher than what the books suggested it should be, or the time the neighbor\u2019s dog bit their six year-old daughter on the cheek and left a scar, or, years ago now, when they, far too late, realized the realtor bilked them out of thousands of dollars. Jillian neither faces that which does not suit her with fierce determination nor does she buckle under it; rather, she expects its presence and moves through it gently like a t\u2019ai chi student moving through a shoulder-high stream.<\/p>\n Roy twists the shower faucet so cool pebbles of water pummel persistently at his heart. Georgina\u2019s lips are often darkened red or glistening with something shiny. One day she wore powder-blue lipstick and long, false, fluttering eyelashes to school. Her skintight top was printed with bright orange and green dinosaurs. It looked like a toddler\u2019s pyjama top. She is small, flat-chested, and thin-hipped. She has never looked directly at him, and despite her affectless expression, she speaks up in class too much and the other kids find her funny. Sometimes she whispers just loudly enough for her desk neighbours to hear, and he always thinks she\u2019s talking about him, not positively, of course. He has not been able to stop her chatter yet. Mostly because, if he admits it, he hasn\u2019t tried. He wants to hear her voice.<\/p>\n He does not believe that he is sexually attracted to her. Her face is narrow, pointed at the chin, strangely reminding him of a cut diamond, and scattered at the cheekbones and jawline are red and purple divots of acne which she attempts to hide behind makeup. Anyway, he hasn\u2019t been sexually attracted to any of his students in years. There were a few he caught himself thinking about too much in those first years of his career, noticing their pointy breasts, the pillowed shape of their lips, the way they walked. He\u2019d forced himself to stop the thoughts during school hours, but at home, in the mornings in the shower, he admits now with some disgust that he allowed himself to think of them as he achieved release. But he wants to get inside of Georgina, inside of her mind, if only as a way to understand that indifferent countenance. He wants to reach<\/em> her.<\/p>\n The students he has reached have always been the ones who love numbers the way he does, but they are few and far between, a handful. Most students haven\u2019t wanted to understand. They want to get through his classes with as little effort as possible. And every year students seem less interested in the numbers and more interested in their phones: Utube, Snapbook, Facegram, Tok-tok, all that social media stuff he doesn\u2019t really care to understand, mostly because it draws them further away and into a world totally foreign to him. Their problem is the absence of a rigorous passion, a profound disinterest in the attainment of mystery. He wants to pierce their thick, screen-addled torpor with the clear measure of numbers, with their beauty, and imbue them with knowledge, so they may understand something glorious. The revelation strikes him deeply. Today is the day. He will call her forward and he will command her understanding of what she thinks she cannot love. He shivers at the thought of seeing the light and the victory in her. Her gratitude. He turns off the faucet. His skin is cold and rubbery to the touch. <\/p>\n When he started out, he refused to believe his colleagues who told him with high airs of authority that the students don\u2019t care, and the vast majority will never love mathematics the way he does. Brace yourself, they told him. Be warned<\/em>. But he wouldn\u2019t believe them, and this was all part of his stubbornness that Martha had come to hate, he sees this clearly now. She never admitted it to him, not even right before she left him two years into his new teaching gig, that it was his stubbornness that turned her away. The way he set the dishes in the dishrack, always the same: forks together, spoons together, separate the sharp knives from the butter and the paring knives. The cups behind the glasses and the dinner plates behind the saucers. Everything in its place. She told him, many times, that she just wanted freedom to do what she wanted, to put things where she wanted on the dishrack, just for one day. She hated how he\u2019d come and move them to their proper places as soon as she left the kitchen. Why did everything have to be so rigid, so constrained<\/em>?<\/p>\n His heart thrums beneath his wet fingertips, volatile, rebellious. He thinks of telling Jillian tonight, after dinner, when the girls are asleep.<\/p>\n \u201cGood morning, Mr. S,\u201d her greeting a question as she flits past him and away to her office. He assumes her offbeat tone is because he\u2019s never arrived later than 8:00 a.m. in over twenty years. He steals a glance in the small mirror beside the staff room door. His eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks flushed, but otherwise he looks the same: thinning, red-blonde hair revealing a long, shiny forehead, thick lenses perched on a somewhat bulbous nose, and a thin, downturned mouth. An image of his college graduation photo oddly flashes at him then, and he understands with a sudden sharpness how his mouth has changed. In his youth he purposely wore a ready, engaging smile, as a way, he thought, to give the students confidence. He was excited, then\u2014hopeful, even. Now, he sees with lightning-strike alacrity that his mouth has worn down into an unmistakeable upside down U.<\/p>\n He rushes to the classroom before the students swarm in. Usually on the mornings Georgina comes to class he makes an extra effort to be prepared, though he\u2019s always been prepared, certainly, every day of his teaching career. He glances at her empty seat at the back, imagines her staring angrily at the numbers on the board. Her eyes dark slivers. She never puts up her hand for help. She barely passed the quiz last Friday, and he knows she could get a higher mark if she tried. But she doesn\u2019t seem to care. Today, it\u2019s going to be different. He\u2019s going to make sure of that.<\/p>\n He leans back in his chair and tries to inhabit a sense of calm. He pushes away the familiar thought: why bother? Today, he wants success. Today, he wants to show his students what can be loved. His heart bounces and a wave of nausea rises to his throat. He feels sweat at his temples and wipes away the moisture with his buttoned sleeve. He rises and forces himself to saunter slowly to the window with his back to the door, willing his heart to beat regularly again: one and<\/em>, two and<\/em>, three and breathe out<\/em>. Be prepared, Roy<\/em>.<\/p>\n Every class begins the same way: he hears them, then he smells them as the first students march in, always the keen ones, rather neatly, followed by the others, the ones who don\u2019t want to be there, in their sloppy clothes and their long, curiously coiffed and coloured hair, their foul mouths and pitted cheeks. He hears the shouts and scufflings down the hall now, the kids a small, raucous herd sowing teenaged sweat, pungent and sour, and above that the girls\u2019 hairspray and scented lotions: vanilla, floral musk, hard candy.<\/p>\n Before he turns to face them his periphery catches something white on the floor to his left. He bends down to look more closely. At first, he thinks it\u2019s an envelope, stark white against the green-brown tiles. But then he sees it\u2019s the class calendar, fallen off the wall. It\u2019s flipped to today, Monday, December 5th<\/sup>. And he remembers with a peculiar rushing in his throat\u2014it was twenty-two years ago on this date that Martha left him. A Thursday. But instead of Martha\u2019s irritated face pushing into his internal vision, it\u2019s Georgina\u2019s he sees as he turns to watch her tromp in last, the real her, remote and angry, as always. He doesn\u2019t know that she\u2019s ever looked directly at him. What colour are her eyes, anyway? Blue? Brown? He wouldn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n Some of the students\u2019 eyes flare with fear, followed immediately by hooded resignation, once they see the equations written in large numbers on the board in his white-chalk scrawl. He spent some time after school yesterday writing up formulas in anticipation of today\u2019s class. His once-a-month ritual, his awful surprise, when he calls up a few students\u2014random, lottery-style\u2014to come to the board and work out the numbers in front of the others.<\/p>\n He does it immediately, he calls her name as they are still shuffling their things, a few of the boys chucking eraser bits from the floor at each other, several more slumped in their seats glaring at the board, and then he calls her name again, a second time, before he has taken the few minutes he always gives them to settle down. His heartbeat is shushing in his ears, louder now. Today is the day and he can\u2019t wait any longer.<\/p>\n She looks as though she hasn\u2019t heard him. She is bent over, tucking her tiny bright yellow backpack with the fuzzy ball attached to the zipper at her feet. When she lifts her head, her eyes are wide ovals. So she did hear him, then. He\u2019s never called her name before, he realizes. She still hasn\u2019t looked at him.<\/p>\n \u201cGeorgina, could you come to the front please?\u201d<\/p>\n This is the third time now and there is no mistaking it and her narrow back straightens. She\u2019s taken on the look of a trapped animal, her eyes darting from one space to the next, looking at anything but him. He can see in these few seconds that the veil of her angry aloofness has been pierced with panic.<\/p>\n And then as she stands she snaps the shell back over her eyes again, to try to keep her position. It takes a millisecond, it\u2019s truly astonishing, like some kind of transmogrification ancient reptiles might have used to fool their prey. How does she do that? He steps beside the equation on the board, writ large and white and dusty, and gestures with his hand to the numbers. They all know this move. Most of them hate it. He wishes they would understand his purpose behind this. No one ever knows when one will be called, so one must always be ready. They don\u2019t want to be looked at, to be made fun of, to be shown to be wrong, though all of this happens anyway. Why does he insist on continuing with this ritual? Because he wants to push them past their fear so they may gain a love they didn\u2019t know they had. But how can he explain this to them? He can\u2019t. Instead, he impels them with action, and maybe someday in their distant futures as they look down at their kids whining at their feet and their softening paunches and their failed businesses, they\u2019ll get it. Maybe they will remember, and know what to do, and what they have to face. Perhaps.<\/p>\n She stomps up to the front of the room and her steps seem to, remarkably, match the rhythm of his whooshing heart, and she\u2019s beside him now, and her scent is unbearable: vanilla mixed with tobacco, much too strong. Her face is lightly made up today, and her acne stands out against the white skin of her cheeks. She takes the chalk from him and looks to the equation warily. She touches the tip of her index finger to her thin upper lip. He believes in her. He can see that she wants more than anything to know the answer, to know why<\/em>. He cannot help but admire her consternation, the way the corners of her eyes draw down, her finger pressing against her upper lip, whitening it. She stares at the formula and he cannot look away from her. His heart leaps as she turns to face him and throws the chalk onto the ledge in a swift movement where it breaks into three pieces.<\/p>\n His heart does its old thump-thump with its rim of pain spreading out like a secret, and with it the soft, high screech emits inside of him, decades old: primordial. And he remembers now what he\u2019s never figured out. His body, this whole, necessary, pumping organ, containing joy, anger, hatred, love, confusion, all of it, the whole universe is encased within his skin and all of its various stars surge through him and he\u2019s astonished it\u2019s taken him so long to understand it, to truly, finally get it. The one thing.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t do this.\u201d She turns to him fully now and he can see the narrow cords in her neck protruding slightly. She\u2019s so small. Her hips can\u2019t be wider than the math book he instructs them to read each night. Sections, chapters. They never do, though. Just the ones who care, who seem so very far away right now. It\u2019s really just him, all alone. He watches the hollow at the bottom of her throat rise and fall as she breathes. Her eyes have turned now, and he sees their colour, finally, they are black, angry. Seething. Why is she so angry? What can she hate about this? He looks to the board: If x2<\/sup> – y2<\/sup> = -12 and x + y = 6, find x and y<\/em>. The numbers are embossed on the dull green board like raised, fresh scars in 3D, and he feels his head tilt sideways to try to understand its appearance. He has given her the easiest one. The easiest one! He wants her to feel the freedom of it, the joy at finding the solution. Can\u2019t she see that?<\/p>\n He seizes one of the broken pieces of chalk to start it for her but it slips from his fingers and falls to the floor, breaking again into more pieces. One of them rolls near his foot, a short, jagged point. He reaches down for it in the new, vast silence and her scent catches him like a fatal wave: vanilla, tobacco, mango. Body lotion, cigarettes, hairspray. He does not know how he knows this. He grips the ledge to stand up. He looks down to her open palm to see that she has a piece of chalk now but everything seems murky, blurred, like he\u2019s underwater. Is she trying to humiliate him, to drown him? Why does she hate him so much?<\/p>\n And he falls down on one knee, a proposal, and he feels the light clamp of her cold hand on his damp shoulder through the thin cotton of his shirt. He can\u2019t see it in the sudden and intimate darkness but he feels her touch through to his skin and it\u2019s like a very cold heat, so cold it\u2019s burning, and her voice sounds like she\u2019s across the room but she can\u2019t be because he feels her and he smells her.<\/p>\n \u201cMr S? Mr. S!\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s shouting his name, screaming it, and it matches exactly the years-old screech in his heart, she has manifested its unbearable voice into the open, it is finally outside of his body for him to hear. And in his final heartbeats, Mr. S. believes she\u2019s done it: she\u2019s finally solved the equation he never could. His small hero. He knew. He always knew it would be her.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Heart Calculation Finalem The first day she walked into his class a phrase echoed in his mind so loudly that he wondered, terrified, if he\u2019d said it aloud: belle-laide. Beautiful-ugly. He didn\u2019t know how he knew this phrase, or even what language it was. (Later, when he looked it up, he realized it was French.) She trudged to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3754"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5072,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3754\/revisions\/5072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThe massive analog clock above the sink in the staff room reads 8:47, six minutes before last morning bell. Doris, the secretary, is the only one in here, strangely. She turns from the coffee machine balancing her cup in her palm and inspects him, sniffing at him with her avian nose, as though she isn\u2019t certain whether he is truly the math teacher or an impersonator.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n