5. Silas
Everything around us is made of numbers. The first thing we do when we wake up? Check the time. Every object in our home was manufactured at some cost and sold at some price. Getting from point A to point B is just gallons of fuel and miles logged against the clock.
That’s why numbers have been the one constant in my life. With an alcoholic father who taught me how many beer bottles one can take to the head before you stop counting, I figured out that the only things in life that don’t come down to numbers are the ones I’ve never been able to understand.
Emotions. Feelings.
No mathematical formula can tell me what threshold of provocation will push a man to commit a crime, or what the equation looks like for someone falling instantly in love with another person.
I watch her weave back and forth across campus and try to work out what exactly is going on with Amalia Sanchez, more precisely why I can’t seem to pull my eyes or my mind away from her.
What makes her different? Is it the nerve she had to correct me in the middle of a lecture? Those eyes that go twice their size when she’s caught off guard? Or the fact that, apparently, a single question from me was enough to trigger a panic attack?
I know why I asked her that question. I don’t like people who think they’re smarter than me, especially students who believe they know more than they actually do.
But when I watched her focus drop and her hands start to tremble, something tightened in my chest.
Another new reaction.
And now, officially, I’m curious.
I watch her rush across the courtyard with that bun she’s wearing, exactly five strands escaping it, glasses slipping toward the tip of her nose, dressed like someone sneezed every color in the spectrum onto that dress.
And yet, why can’t I look away?
“Silas, how are you settling in with the schedule?” The dean’s voice reminds me I’m not alone in the staff room.
“No issues,” I answer, but my eyes are still on Amalia, who’s stopped to talk to some guy.
He looks familiar, maybe from class, but before I can place him, she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and pulls out her phone.
Did they just exchange numbers? Why would she do that? And why does that sit wrong with me?
“Did you manage to get settled in the new apartment? You know we could have arranged on-campus housing,” he continues, and I wish certain people could read the room to know when a conversation has run its course.
I could have stayed on campus, but I can afford to pay for my own place in the city.
Something nobody needs to know. No one would believe a professor’s salary covers that apartment, and they’d be right.
“Perfectly settled. Thank you, Rodolfo, but I have a class to get to.”
I don’t, but I know he won’t stop otherwise. And even if he’s well aware I have two free hours, he won’t push back because he can’t afford to lose a professor who turned down MIT and Imperial College London to be here.
I imagine he still crosses himself sometimes, wondering how I ended up choosing Mexico City over either of those.
Here, I don’t have to orbit politicians and self-satisfied men who think my value is being articulate enough to stroke their egos.
Because that’s what I would have been doing at those institutions.
Event after event, working the room for the people who hold the purse strings and fund every university program that matters.
Over the last five years, I’ve made more money than I’ll ever spend, and it’s precisely the way those people prefer to display that wealth that gets under my skin.
They won’t back a talented kid who needs a scholarship, but a brand-new McLaren for their own offspring? Without blinking.
At least here, the emphasis falls on education and on what I can actually give my students, not on how well I can charm one of the university’s major donors at a cocktail party.
I check my watch and realize that under normal circumstances, I would have used these two free hours to work through a research paper on optimization algorithms in the automotive industry.
Under normal circumstances, I keep to my routine. Routine is a constant I know and can control.
But as I run through all the reasons I shouldn’t be standing in the shadow of this lecture hall watching a head of chestnut-brown strands, I notice something: the anxiety that usually kicks in when I break from my usual activities isn’t there.
Hmm. Interesting.
I watch her color-code the formulas from the whiteboard, and even though I have the answer to most equations, Amalia Sanchez is the one that keeps eluding me.
One last look, and I get up and walk out of the lecture hall.
I don’t like unsolved equations.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and when I glance at the screen, I roll my eyes.
“Yeah, Silvio?”
“Silas, I need a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to disappear from this month’s balance sheet.”
Silvio is connected to the Italian mob and uses a construction company as his front.
He’s also an idiot who doesn’t understand that you cannot make sums like that vanish without something solid to show for it.
Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t be an issue.
The problem is, this would be the third time I’d be stepping in for him within a few months, and that is not how I operate.
I don’t take more than one job per twelve-month period for the same company. Two months ago I did him a favor and helped him out, but he apparently hasn’t grasped the fact that I don’t do magic. I do math. And lately, his numbers have been trending in the wrong direction.
“I’ve already explained that it’s not possible. If I step in again, you’re going to find the IRS on your doorstep, and I’m fairly certain Alessio is going to have something to say about that.”
The head of the Cosa Nostra knows the terms of my contracts and why I run them the way I do. Not all of his associates, however, are sharp enough to connect the dots.
“You don’t get it, Silas. I blew it on some bets last week. I need to put that money back somehow.”
“That’s not my problem, Silvio.” And I hang up.
Another night of calculations. Maybe by the end of it, the image of those chestnut-brown strands will have cleared out of my head.