Golden Spiral

This is the first and now the fourth place she’s left things. Campus—students trooping between classes, clamped to their phones. So, reward the ones who look around. A stained-glass bird near the fountain. A glass-shell-bead fish hanging from a statue. Sun catchers near the library, the Student Union, the cafeteria. This time, abstract human figures—glass-wire-whatever. In the plaza near the physics building, she sees a bench overhung by a promising branch. Sitting, she opens the box of mixed-media people. The cords and cards are tangled. As she works them free, a shadow falls on her lap.

“Me too,” a young man’s voice said. “I do that, too.”

She looks up. He’s backlit, so she can’t really see him. “You make stained glass?”

“I give things away.” He points to the tangled tags that read, “Free Art.”

“Do you? What do you make?”

“Guess.”

She shades her eyes, looks at him. Grad student, probably, but his appearance gives nothing away. No paint traces, inky fingers, or band aids, no band t-shirt. She makes a wild guess, thinking it will make him tell.

“Small hand-set chap books of long poems.”

No response, just the same smile. Rueful?

She tries a trade-off. “This is to help me get back to the serious stuff.”

He squats down, really looks at her. “Have you ever thought, maybe this is the serious stuff?”

The chapel bell rings. He jumps up, says “Late for class,” and heads into the physics building.

A week later, half an hour earlier, she sits on the bench again, a stained-glass Fibonacci spiral wrapped beside her. Will she recognize him? People are surprised that an artist has such a lousy visual memory. And she’s thought about him enough that he’s morphed in her mind.

At a quarter to, students begin exiting the buildings. At ten to, students begin entering the buildings. She sits until quarter after without seeing him. She sits for another hour and a quarter until classes change again, ruminating. Still no him.

He hasn’t left his apartment for, like, three days, other than teaching. At the open window next to his desk, the stained-glass bird he found in January is arcing in the breeze. Looking at it helps him focus. This morning, it helps him unfocus, take time to let the theorem settle on the page before transcribing it, looking for flaws, shortcuts.

Back in January, he was leaving the library with Deni Morgan when he spotted the glass bird hanging from a tree. He took it down and tried to give it to Deni, but she wouldn’t take it. “You’re already giving me free tutoring. I’m not taking anything else.” Maybe she thought it was a romantic move? Everyone says he needs to charge for tutoring. Monetize. But teaching helps him think, keeps him excited. He likes doing it for free, spreading math love. Dad: “Get a job in the business sector. They pay more. A lot more.” And seeing your work applied in the real world, that’s something. If there were still places like Bell Labs, and they’d hire him, it would be a no brainer, but those days are gone. Now it’s all short term, myopic goals, money, money ASAP. He’d like a longer arc. Space and time. Academia. But Dad has a point. Mindy loves finance. And Cal wants him to come to L.A. and find a start-up. He needs to decide.

She’s feeling burnt out. And she hasn’t even reached full adulthood. Follow your instincts, her teachers say. Yeah, as long as your instincts are confrontational. Apparently, anger and alienation speak to people. So she’s channeling her anger into her new assemblages, and everyone in the department is praising her “new energy.” Which only makes her angrier. Her old work had energy, but “happy energy” is apparently an oxymoron in the art world, or at least in academia. Unless you’re celebrating your own specificity. Which doesn’t interest her.

This morning, she wanders off-campus, head down, looking for rusty bits in the road. She always has luck, but, today, nothing so far. She has a collection bag, and a box of small stained-glass swirls of all sorts. Even a couple of Fibonacci spirals. The bigger one, the one for the physics guy, is sitting in her room, waiting for another Tuesday attempt. Maybe. Or maybe she should sell it. Money equals validation. 

It’s getting chilly, and she gives up and heads back onto campus, to the art building, and hangs swirls in the shrubs leading to the front entrance. They look lovely. Take that!

The breeze has become wind. He closes the window and sits with his work. Five hours pass, six, and it’s still looking good. Elegant. Ready. He makes an appointment with his adviser, promises to send the file tomorrow. Why not now? He sends it. Gives the glass bird a thumbs up. 

How to celebrate? He tries Mike, then Braya, then Carlos. No dice. Restless energy sends him out of the apartment. Walking on campus, he decides to make a tour of the alien parts.

Outside the art building, something flashes in the shrubs. Sun catchers. Stained glass. Even a Fibonacci spiral. It must be her, the girl with wide-open eyes from the physics quad. What’s it like to do something that everyone gets, that anyone would like? He debates, then takes the Fibonacci and hangs it off his jacket pocket. Imagines she made it just for him, to help him celebrate. He heads to the student union and buys a complicated coffee, sits surveying his domain.

The portfolio critique went really well, although part of her wishes she’d shown them her “shadow portfolio,” the one with harmonious assemblages. Maybe next year. She’ll think about it this summer. Tomorrow is Finals Fest on the student union plaza, and she’s selling her stained glass. Money from real people, validation from artists: Is having both too much to ask?

The next day, she sets up her table. Mostly small things, but a few panels. She almost brought the Fibonacci panel, but, at the last minute, left it behind.

Business is good. She sells a lot of sun catchers and a good number of what she calls “Thingy Mobiles,” collections of bent copper rods and links, old chandelier crystals, and other objects that anyone can shift around, hang in different configurations. She likes to imagine people playing with them, feeling creative. And she’s even sold two panels to two different professors. She’s playing with a Thingy when a shadow falls on the table. She looks up, and there he is. Physics guy.

“You do cast a shadow.”

“What, everyone else is a vampire?”

She smiles. “I have something for you.”

He’s surprised. “A small chap book of long poems?”

“Do I strike you as verbal?” He laughs. She decides. “Can I drop it off later this afternoon?” 

He takes a moment, then, “I’m heading back to my apartment.” But then, “Yeah, okay. I’m in grad housing. If that’s okay, that would be good.” He smiles. “Depending on what it is.”

She gives him a time. He gives her the address.

She approaches grad housing, feeling surprisingly calm. She knows he’ll like it. He answers the door and steps back to let her in. There are half a dozen of her sun catchers in his windows, spreading colors around the room. She raises her eyebrows. He shrugs. “I thought about hiding them. But they were there when I needed them, so…. Not a stalker, I promise.” 

There’s a bottle of seltzer with two glasses and a plate of cheese and crackers on his coffee table. He gestures. They sit.

“Here.” She hands him the package. He unwraps it and holds it up so the light comes through. “Wow. Just wow. What did I do to deserve this?”

“Who says you did anything? I just wanted to. You know, it’s an extension of my charity work.” She gestures toward the sun catchers, and they laugh.

“I’d give you a theorem as thanks, but….”

“Yeah, no. Math is…. But I liked doing proofs in high school, you know? Finding the sequence.”

“Exactly. Math is story telling. Stories can be verbal, visual, aural, sure, but also numerical. It’s another way of describing the world.”

“Okay, sure, yes. But what I want to know is—and here I am smoothly changing the subject—you said, on the physics quad, you said you give things away. What? What do you give away?”

“I like tutoring, so I do it for free.”

“Wow. I’m impressed. I bet you’re a good teacher.”

“Thanks.” He looks at the panel, the sun catchers. “These really make me happy.”

“Yeah. Happiness is underrated.”

“I’m not saying I don’t like a little edge, but sometimes, at the end of a long day in the algorithms, you just need happy.”

“We all need happy.”

“We do.”

They pick up their glasses, each drinking to “happy.”