Bloody Fabulous (26 page)

Olivia sat there in her chair, burning with every swipe of the cursor and click of the mouse. This was some horrific troll. There could be no other answer. Someone had made this garment, planted it in the Dog and Pony, knew Olivia would find and buy it, and then unleashed all of this crap on her. Everyone had to be in on it—even the other members of the ladysphere who’d given her advice and made their jokes and led her to the app were just part of an all-encompassing cyber-bullying ring. Even Star from the store was likely in on it. So Olivia was alone, a friendless waif who didn’t even have any Internet friends, and everyone who saw her blog hated her and wanted her to die, and she was agreed. She just wanted to die too.

She supposed that one way to die would be to simply follow the instructions, and swallow the garment. And then something occurred to her. An impossible garment couldn’t be created by a far-fetched, if possible, hoax. Anything was better than the idea that the whole world, online and off, was arrayed against her. It was easy to wallow in teenage angst, hard to do something about it. Witchiness! roared up inside her.

As beautiful inside as out?
she typed.
So you tried it and choked on it, didn’t you Marthe, because you’re an ugly bitch inside, right?

There wasn’t a long wait for the answer this time. The virtual planchette scooted right to the left-hand side of the board. YES.

And maybe your daughter too—though I bet that was your fault too, for being such a bitch to her when she was alive.

A swifter answer: NO. The planchette shivered like it was angry.

I suppose living under Nazi occupation had something to do with being a bitch,
Olivia typed.
But she finally tried the dress after bringing it to America and it didn’t work. It’s not so witchy as you thought it was.

YES.

I’ll wear the dress,
Olivia typed. Then she shut down the app and went to the kitchen to get a pair of pliers from the junk drawer.

Olivia wasn’t much for social studies, but she wasn’t half-bad at biology. And she knew better than to hang her clothes on wire hangers—
No wire hangers, ever!
as she had learned from an old movie—so she had them going spare. It took an hour to untwist the necks and straighten out the hooks, and Olivia scratched herself on the tips more than once. She’d be a raccoon by morning, but that was all right, she decided. Dark baggy eyes could be accentuated with make-up, and would go well with the look. The jeans were going back in the dresser.

By dawn she was done. Fifteen hangers refolded and crimped together to form a three-dimensional maze—a little cage that came up to her knees She stood in the middle of it. Then Olivia took what she perceived as the bottom of the garment, put the hanger-labyrinth in and started slowly working the long nylon stretch through it, turning it over and over in her hands, tugging and yanking. The fabric was tough; it snagged, but never ripped. Finally, the long boa constrictor of intestine was wrapped around the wire hangers. She jumped out of the assemblage, took off her baggy sweatshirt and shorts, and threw on a slip. Yes, she’d be wearing the same tights two days in a row, but if anyone was looking at that, she had done something very wrong with the rest of her outside. She stepped back into the maze, lifted it up around her hips, and then held the top of her garment over her chest. It looked fine, covered everything, and even looked cool, so she pushed herself up against the wall to hold it in place while she reached for the bottom of the garment and moved it up to cover her back. Olivia had been ready to staple the two ends together if need be, or to use a dozen safety pins on each shoulder, but what at first appeared to be random ribbons worked perfectly as straps to make the top the front and the bottom the back.

It was a good look. Half-Black Swan, half-Frank Gehry tutu, and the slip and tights were okay. Olivia wouldn’t be going to school in it—one more cut day wouldn’t ruin her life or anything, she decided—but the look would definitely make fashionn00b.net’s Google ranking skyrocket. Olivia had a story to tell, about ghosts and death and style and important life lessons, but she decided to keep it to herself, for now anyway. She took some pics, cropped them, put them up, and by way of explanation wrote a simple caption:
Figured out the impossible garment. Just doing my part to Keep Austin Weird.

Then she added,
Ever notice how all the
Keep [City] Weird
bumper stickers always use the same font and color scheme, no matter which city is supposed to be the weird one?

Incomplete Proofs
John Chu

Next autumn’s proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tailored itself to Grant’s body. A three section proof, the trousers grew snug around his waist and shortened to break against his feet. The shirt buttoned itself as it tightened against his chest, arms, and shoulders. Jacket sleeves shrank to reveal his hands. The proof looked retro rather than elegant, not at all what Grant expected from Duncan. Grant wondered what the buyers and journal editors on the other side of the curtain would make of it. He hadn’t verified a proof for an audience this important in years.

His own jacket, shirt, and trousers pooled around his feet. Duncan’s stylists stopped fussing with Grant’s face and hair, pronouncing him fit for the runway. They scooped up his clothes, patted him on the back for luck, then left him alone to focus.

The cutting edge mathematics that held the proof together permeated Grant’s brain. He felt its structure, how each lemma and proposition stitched together to support the conclusion that no axiomatic system could be both consistent and complete. Either some truths were unprovable or the system could erroneously prove falsehoods. This time, Duncan had proved the theorem through computability theory.

The audience’s quiet murmur bled through the curtain. Grant took a deep breath, then cursed himself for letting himself become a cog in Duncan’s machinations again. His grad students had been having the time of their lives watching mathematicians verify proof after proof. Otherwise, he’d have told Duncan’s stylists to go stuff themselves when they asked him to verify the final proof of the new Duncan Banks autumn collection.

Grant exhaled. His feet tested the runway’s sprung floor as he stepped through the curtain. Where other theorem houses placed safety nets for their mathematicians, a trench of spikes lay on either side between Grant and the audience. Nothing was too over the top for Duncan. Journal editors thought he was potentially the best mathematician since Gauss or Euler. People had worn their proofs, or ready-to-wear copies thereof, for over a century. Editors expected the same from Duncan.

The audience hushed except for his students: Marc and Lisa. They stood, cheering and waving their arms in the air. The silence surrounding them made their excitement sound ironic. He resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands. Instead, he launched into the first steps of the proof: a tumbling pass down the length of the runway.

The jacket, shirt, and trousers exploded apart at their seams into their constituent lemmas and propositions. They swirled in wide arcs around him as he twisted and spun through the air. Pain spiked his knees and shocked through the rest of his body each time he landed. Air whooshed past him and flapping lemmas surrounded him on all sides. Each somersault, jump, and handstand evoked the logic and reasoning that stitched pieces of proof together. The body canvas and chest canvas slipped inside the jacket’s shell and gave the jacket its retro shape.

The proof danced in counterpoint exactly as he expected his logic and reasoning to animate them. As he flipped through the air in a pike position, the trousers slid onto his legs. One section proved, two to go. He stepped to the far end of the runway. The shirt weaved around his arms then settled on his torso. It buttoned itself as Grant ran, building up speed for the proof’s final steps. Focused on proving the theorem, he danced with the jacket.

It flew toward him from the side rather than from the back. Its sleeves reached out as if it wanted a hug. Rather than sliding onto his body, it was about to tangle him in mid-air, knocking him into the pit of spikes. If he lined himself up with the jacket, it’d slide onto his body but, in the process, he’d tumble off the side of the runway into the pit of spikes. No valid proof took a mathematician off the runway. Either he repaired Duncan’s proof right now, or he’d be impaled by rows of sharp spikes.

Grant stretched his mind out to the jacket. He’d already started his front triple layout when he realized the jacket’s shape was subtly off. Duncan hadn’t intended the jacket to feel retro. Its chest was prone to collapse and the lapel rolled too easily. The proof’s linch pins, the body canvass and chest canvass inside the jacket’s shell, were fine by themselves, but they didn’t hold this proof together. Grant need stronger intermediate results.

The jacket sideswiped him as he started the second revolution of his layout. If this were a valid proof, he’d be wearing the jacket now. Instead, he thought back to where the proof had gone wrong. The jacket split on its seams into pieces. It flowed around him rather than tangling him and knocking him into the pit of spikes. He landed, then tumbled an extra pass, flipping and twisting in the air. Through that reasoning, he proved stronger versions of the lemmas Duncan had used. The body and chest canvasses morphed in response from what Grant was given into their proper shapes.

The math was so complicated that the reasoning took longer than the length of the runway. As he hit the end, he front tumbled towards the curtain he’d started from. His lungs burned with each breath. His heart pounded not from nerves or even fear of death but from exhaustion. His legs wanted to crumble each time they hit the runway. The jacket reformed, now swooshing towards him from the front. He dove and the jacket rushed onto his body just before he rolled to stand next to the curtain.

Grant stood, his arms stretched overhead, the jacket, shirt, and trousers crisp on his body. His students stood again and hollered, their arms pumping. This time, applause did fill the space. He nodded to half the audience, pivot turned, then nodded to the other half. Disconcertingly, the applause seemed to be growing. They had to have noticed the jacket he wore now wasn’t the jacket he’d started with, but that didn’t stop anyone from cheering.

Duncan strode onto the runway to receive the applause as Grant left. The two passed each other. Grant glared. Letting this proof onto the runway was no accident. At the latest, the theorem house should have caught its flaws during the run through. Duncan trapped Grant in his arms. He whispered into Grant’s ear.

“Hi, Tsai.” Duncan always called Grant by his last name. “I know you’re angry at me. Meet me in the dressing room after the show. I’ll explain everything.”

Grant hung the proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem on a rack with the other proofs verified tonight. His own clothes lay in a heap on the dressing room table next to some proof that hadn’t been put away. His wallet and cellphone fell out as he pulled out his shirt. Wisps of thread jutted where there should have been buttons. One sleeve dangled from its seam. His trousers had been rent into strips. That explained how the stylists had undressed him so quickly. They’d assumed he’d worn a proof to the show and could fix the damage. His clothes, though, were just clothes, ready-to-wear.

The proof still on the table had an apology in Duncan’s handwriting pinned to it. Grant recognized the work, a proof of Fermat’s last theorem Duncan had created during grad school. Its asymmetrical curved seams emphasized Grant’s musculature. He didn’t feel clothed as much as he felt like an anatomy chart. Spent, he slumped into the chair next to the table and waited.

Duncan strode into the dressing room wearing the proof of the first significant problem they’d solved together: ten was a solitary number. A critical triumph, the proof never sold well. Too few people had the body to pull it off. Duncan had, and damn it, he still did.

To Grant’s dismay, Duncan wore the proof better now than ever. His brawn no longer fought to burst out of the proof. Rather, the proof now exposed his beautiful proportions. He was still the mutant spawn of the sun and lightning. If the sun had passed its zenith and the lightning was now the lament of distant thunder, he still made any room feel too cramped to contain him.

“You couldn’t have asked me for help before you put the proof on the runway?” Grant was determined to stay angry despite Duncan’s smile. “You invited Marc and Lisa here, all expenses paid. It’s not like you didn’t know how to find me.”

“You wouldn’t have come, much less helped, if I hadn’t brought your students here.” Duncan sat on the table. “The proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is the signature piece of the fall collection. No one understood its flaw much less how to fix it. I brought here, the only way I could, the one person who could fix it.”

Grant stood. He folded his arms across his chest. With Duncan sitting on the table, they saw each other eye to eye. Duncan’s gaze burned, but Grant met it.

Duncan was right, as usual. Grant wasn’t above refusing to help just to spite him.

“The one person who could fix the proof? Give me a break. And what were you going to do if I’d failed or died trying? Let the fiasco destroy your theorem house?”

Buyers and editors were a fickle lot. One tumbling pass that wasn’t parallel to the sides of the runway was enough to cancel orders and deny publication.

“Like you could have failed.” Duncan shook his head. “I don’t risk my theorem house on just anyone.” He pulled out his cellphone, tapped at it, then handed it to Grant. “I’m about to offer the man in this video a job. Tell me what you think of him.”

The screen filled with a beefy guy jumping, spinning, and twisting up and down a runway. He used computability theory to prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, a corrected version of Duncan’s proof. The man reasoned with a strength and incisiveness that made Grant’s jaw drop.

Grant might quibble with the handful of moves that were not textbook perfect, but the result was superior to Grant’s attempt. He wanted Lisa and Marc to see this version.