A CANTICLE FOR LOBACHEVSKY

“Why don’t they take their receipts? Why didn’t she take her receipt in my cab? I handed it to her with her change. On the news, every few weeks, tick tock, someone leaves something valuable in a cab. A violin. A secret file. A child’s first drawing, now not taped on the refrigerator. So simple, brother. Sorry, I mean Father. Father brother, eh? Take a receipt, pocket it, have it if you forgot something, you get it back.” John Dunne Mahaya, graduate student and part time New York cabbie, would Skype his brother, Father Samuel, back in his kraal in Uganda whenever he had an ethical or philosophical question. Not that John himself was a slouch at that area. The Mission school where John was from had about the same college acceptance rate as Minnesota. Samuel became a Priest, John and Virgil were part of the Obote Government. When Amin came to power, John defected during a chaotic General Assembly session in New York before Idi Amin Dada could eat his liver. Loyal Virgil was not so fortunate. 

“John, what is your duty as a Christian to return the handbag to this woman?” 

“Of course, Sammy, I must return the bag. I deadheaded back from Brooklyn to where I dropped her off. It is not a doorman building.” 

“John, did you open the purse?” 

“Of course not, Sammy! You know I’m not going to open a woman’s bag anymore.” 

“It may have identifying information. She will need the things in her bag. Think of your duty.” 

“But.” 

“John, what happened 19 years ago was a fluke, maybe ignorance of a new thing, possibly sloth. I am quite sure that in Manhattan women do not put them back in their bags once they have been used.” Ugandan Christians paid a tad more attention to Pentateuch rules than other flavors of the religion. “Open the bag, John.” 

“I’m taking your word as a priest that I will be indulged in case it happens again.” 

“You may have my word, my son, Brother Son, John.” 

“I’m in the parking lot at the McDonalds on 10th. I’m opening the bag. There is a wrapped bar of soap with a picture of a horse and a piece of paper. I’m feeling around for hidden pockets. Nothing else. Just the soap and the paper, crumpled and torn.  It looks like a shopping list: Saddle soap. I guess that’s what the bar of soap is. Can Kraut. Milk. Introduction to Bottomology by Ignatz Trachtenberg. Ramen. Sammy, this is getting me hungry. I wish I had some sim-sim cookies right now. Mechanical drafting kit. There’s a letterhead on the other side, part torn off, the letters I can see are ‘ilda Lobochvsk.’ The address is where I dropped the woman off who would not take a receipt and left her bag in my cab. I’ll go back again and see if I can ring her bell. Thanks, Brother Father. It always helps to talk with you.” 

“John, you now know what this woman wants from her shopping list. If you know what a person wants, you can know who and where they are, little brother.” 

“I have to go, Sammy. The Detective is here.” 

The meeting took place at La Savane, uptown. An informal, informational meeting, so John had been told. There are no Ugandan restaurants in New York, but La Savane had a pan-African menu. Not that there is a lot of savannah in Uganda either, relative to the other countries. John had learned to enjoy Shakshaya for lunch. 

“Detective Iglesia. What are the odds, an African restaurant with a taxi relief zone right there. Do you like pigeon? Here you call it squab, yes, very expensive. Don’t wory, these are not from Marcus Garvey Park, I can assure you. Anyway, Detective. You’ve seen my GPS logs. You saw my CabCam footage showing a woman in a pink, what is it you call it, cloak, yes, a cloak, like the kind Spock wears on Star Trek when they don’t want anyone to see his ears. Pink. With chalk dust on it. Detective, you saw me picking her up at the tack shop on 24th Street. I just wanted the woman to get her bag back.” 

“Mr. Mahaya, it’s like I said on the phone. If you can tell us anything about the ride from Manhattan Saddlery to Yorkville, maybe we can put something together to find the woman. You know she’s gone missing, right? Can you tell us anything?” 

“She was writing in a notebook. The notebook is not in the cab. She didn’t make any calls, I didn’t see her with a phone at all. Now I’m sorry I’m not the kind of cabbie that bites people’s ears. Wait. A woman is a fare, I drop her in Manhattan, I wait till she goes through both doors. The second door, she didn’t use a key. She used the communicator. My camera didn’t pick that up, did the building’s? I checked under the seats, no keys in the cab. Maybe she was distracted? Absentminded? Her list was not in any kind of order.” 

“Do you know anything about Bottomology?” The waiter recognized me and came around the big communal table with sweet millet porridge and sim-sim cookies. 

“I looked it up at school, a branch of mathematics that died out because nobody could figure it out. It was from Greece. Before you called, I was going to Skype my brother, Father Samuel. He was first in his class in HelPat.” 

“Helpit what?” 

“HelPat. Hellenization and Patristics. Greek influence on the Israelites to the Septuagint, Christian writings about Greeks being natural Christians, Greek science and technology 300 BC to 300 AD, how people came up with the Trinity idea. Sammy will know.” 

“These cookies are really good, what do you call them?” 

“Sim-Sim cookies. You can’t get them.  Sometimes Walter makes them for the Kampala folks. Sammy is expecting my call, I’m going to Skype right now. You can listen in.” John hit connect. 

“Hello, little brother. Any news on the no-receipt lady’s handbag?” 

“This is why I’m calling. What can you tell me about Bottomology, Father Brother?” 

“Ah, famous dead ends, my specialty. What a wonder it is to troll the sciences of when people didn’t know what was going on. And to think that someday we will be the ones who didn’t know what was going on!  Mathematique Naif. Nobody ever told the cat it couldn’t walk through walls, so it kept walking through walls. This may be that. Now then. Timon of Sicily, uncle of Timon of Phlius, model for Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, started the field after he lost a child who fell off a roof. The field started with the regular solids and conic sections being used as predictors of when and under what circumstances would things fall. But then he decided to mix that with what passed for Number Theory back then, especially prime numbers. Three of his theorems of prime numbers may or may not have been helpful, in work on finding a solution to Goldbach’s Conjecture about sums of prime numbers. Now here, Detective, little brother, is the one who kicks. Timon of Sicily may or may not have written a scroll about what would happen if any of Euclid’s Postulates were removed from Geometry. We know the scroll was at some point translated into Farsi but was then damaged during the Siege of Isfahan.” 

“Father Samuel, listen, all due respect, but we’re trying to find a missing woman. Hilda Lobachevsky has been reported missing by her landlord. All of her stuff is still in her apartment, toothbrush, medicine, gPhone, jewelry. The door had been locked from the outside, and this is a very hi-tech key, with a chip. No record of it being duplicated. We have pictures and descriptions out all over social media. Can we get back to her, please? If she was abducted, time is, well, you know what time is.” 

“Detective Iglesia.  Nicholai Lobachevsky was the first modern—19th Century—mathematician to see what happens without Euclid’s Fifth Postulate. Any two parallel lines meet precisely once. Flat surfaces are revealed to be shaped like saddles. There is a song about Lobachevsky, the greatest mathematician to get chalk on his coat. Now look where you are and where you came from on this journey to save this woman, and before whom you will stand at the conclusion. Detective Iglesia, you had to call one of those “shit-hole countries” to connect the woman to a family and to find out what the saddle on the woman’s list is about. Get to work, Detective, and you too, John. Little brother, you have vowed to this.” 

“You know, I think I remember some of this from High School.  There was another one, too, Geometry on a sphere.  Parallel lines intersect twice. Any line on a sphere has to be the circumference of the sphere, a Great Circle. It’s why you start out flying north when you want to fly from Boston to London, due west. I asked the teacher what it was called if there was a line on the sphere that wasn’t a Great Circle. She told me it was a ‘doodle on the sphere,’ and I’ve hated math since then. Reiman. That was the guy who made it up. Probably just to torture me.” 

“This isn’t my field, but there is a difference.  With Reiman, Elan Musk can dig a hole through a sphere and take shortcuts from point to point on the planet. But what does it mean to tunnel through a saddle?” No sooner did Father Samuel sign off from the Skype that Iglesia got a call from a precinct captain in Staten Island. 

“Iglesia.” 

“You’re running the missing woman case, Lobachevsky?” 

“Yes, sir! Interviewing the cabbie right now. We have a handle on the saddle.” 

“Well, detective, we have a sighting. A woman leaving a house, wearing a pink coat with chalk dust. It’s on Todt Hill Road, number 142.  We have a couple of uniforms parked nearby in case she comes back. Can you make it out here?” 

“I’ll be there as soon as I can, Captain.”  Iglesia turned to John and promised he would keep him updated. 

Lunch was over.  John strolled lazily to the Third World Market, an open-air bazar, just off 125th Street, as he always did when he was uptown. John fingered some Kintege cloth, some traditional, some so wild he could not believe they were woven in Kampala. He selected two bolts of each type for Shoshana, a seamstress he had been seeing. Then some of the more clever banana-fiber toys, very advanced, a monkey and a helicopter, for her little boy.  An economy of children making toys for children. He paid and was headed back to his cab when he spotted the dusty pink cloak leaving a small Art Deco apartment building. This building was done up right.  Butu, a semi-domesticated impala John had fed as a child could not outrun him in his race to catch the woman.   

“Madam! Madam!  Mizz Lobachevsky!” That caught her attention and she turned to see the source of the shouting.  Their parallel lines intersected one time at the base of Striver’s Row, St. Nicholas Avenue. 

“Madam, are you Hilda Lobachevsky?  Did you leave your handbag in my cab two days ago?” 

“No and no. Zelda Lobachevsky O’Boyle,” she declared in an accent John dimly remembered. Russian.  The last days of the cold war, when the Soviet Union was still looking to influence things everywhere. “Has something happened to Sister?” 

“She left a handbag in my cab. She’s been reported missing. There may have been a sighting on Staten Island. This list was in her bag, along with a package of saddle soap. I had picked her up from a store that sells horse things. A tack shop.  Does this list make any sense to you?” 

“Show please. Ah.  Is hunt. Hunt for scavengers.  Things need to find. Some need real, some joke.” 

“A scavenger hunt?”  John was familiar with it since childhood, but some years the hunts were not at all for fun.  He tried a new tack. “Did Hilda have a boyfriend?” 

“No. No boyfriend. None of us boyfriend.  You have expression, call of booty, yes? Her booty Andros, filthy Hungarian.  Shake hands with Hungarian, count fingers after. Do not know Andros address. Would not tell if knew. Czarist agents come after us.” 

“Can you tell me what these things are for?” 

“Family business.  Hyperbolic Geometry. Lobachevsky Geometry. With Bolyai.  Bolyai-Lobachevsky Geometry.  Bolyai pounded erasers for Nicholai, Great Grandfather.  “World is saddle.  Soap make hole in saddle. Czarist agents want secret, regain throne. Only reason I talk you is you are black man, only trust blacks, no czarists black.” 

“How can there be Czarist agents? There hasn’t been a Czar in almost a hundred years.” 

“Believe making. Brighton Beach.  Arch Duke Cyril. LGBTQ. Easy be woman, leave Palace with maids.  Easy have woman, easy make baby, now grandson Brighton Beach.  Recover stolen smart property.  Intellectual property. Make hole in saddle.  Restore empire, Alexander Romanov, grandson, Czar of all Russias, when Putin win over dust. Metropolitan agree. Lobachevsky family defeat Czarists, Russia Menshevik. Like Colonel Sanders. No not Colonel.  Candidate Sanders.  Health, school, jobs, food, freedom.” 

“And the can of kraut?” 

“Goes good with sausage, good for to digest.” 

“Thank you, Madam.” 

John had eleven voicemails and a dozen texts. Each one a sighting of a woman in a pink cloak covered in chalk dust. As the sightings racked up, the dust-to-pink ratio increased in tandem.  Always exiting something, never entering. Sometimes the Lobachevsky would talk to an interlocutor, but never a reporter. Mostly they would not speak. There was a Gilda, a Brenda, a Marta, and a Laura so far, with assorted married names. Talk or remain silent,  

And then all Heaven broke out. Credit Ponchain, biggest big swinging dick on the Avenue of the Americas, had a nightly dinner buffet for the late shift. Food repurposing organizations, Meals on Wheels, God’s Love, would only accept unplated kitchen leftovers, but tossed the buffet food. Three days after Hilda was declared missing, the remnants of a Pronchaine buffet was found the next morning in Tompkins Square Park, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood filled with down-on-their-luck old hippies and junkies and even older honest-to-gosh Stalinists busy being replaced by gentrifiers. Then it was out-of-season clothing. Trays of what a fast-food chain was telling people were the greatest sandwiches of all time disappeared, and each one showed up at the house of someone who had been shut out of getting one. Delivered by, some witnesses said, a woman in dusty pink. People were starting to talk. 

“Slow light. Feeding the hungry.” The Right Reverend Bethany Herrington, DD, was warming up. 

“What do these have in common?” It wasn’t a cloak, but it was pink and showed a square of white collar at the neck and white dust all the way down. “God in his compassion feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, raises up those who are bowed down. Slow Light was a hypothesis competing with the Big Bang Theory, not the TV show, mind you. You know Einstein admitted a mistake about the nature of the Universe. Now with Hilda Lobachevsky’s new insight, another round of mistakes may be admitted. But this time, with Slow Light, the Earth may actually be scientifically proven to be under 10,000 years old. Genesis may be literally correct. Christianity may be confirmed once and for all!” 

  The old movie palace at the top of St, Nicholas Avenue, where Reverend Ike preached the gospel of wealth (for himself) for decades, was filled with clapping and cheering people. The last Pink Lobachevsky sighting was a woman going downstairs to the A Train platform at the station near the site of what would come to be known as the Slow Light Declaration. 

### 

It happened in a room in the basement of the old, original Vatican Observatory, the Tower of Winds, the only observatory with obstructed views.  A plenary session of the Congregation for the Cause of Saints was meeting.  They located an experienced adversarial Cannon Lawyer, Peter Akarakian, in a nursing home in Avignon. He was the last Devil’s Advocate.  Father Samuel was to advance the cause of the potential Saint Hilda to Beatification.   

Samuel: We have four miracles well documented. Feeding the hungry, clothing the, well, ragged, appearing and disappearing,  providing a possible means of justification for a literal interpretation of Genesis. Pretty good stuff, don’t you think? 

Peter:  She stole food and then gave it away. A draw.  Appearing and disappearing?  We don’t know if she was alone or if there were that many relatives.  Slow Light? It will take a long time to verify that such an interpretation of the Universe matches scripture.  And since when is a scientific discovery a miracle?  On top of all of that, we don’t even know if she is really dead. 

Samuel:  Peter, Learned Counsel, what really is the difference, phenomenologically, between relief of suffering by spooky means or by finding a way to do it? 

John started wishing he was back in his cab. Being an educated man, he decided to perform an experiment: praying to “Saint” Hilda for a sign. Seven minutes later, there was a cloud of chalk dust falling from the ceiling. No one seemed to know that the room above was where school supplies, including chalk, were kept for astronomy classes. Hilda’s cause was headed for Beatification. 

Back in New York, as appointed executor of the estate of Hilda Lobachevsky, the court gave him authorization to enter her apartment. There on a little dining table was a handbag identical to the one in the cab, but filled with a wallet, photos, the list, and possibly other items in hopefully hidden-too-well pockets.