Learning to Swear in America (24 page)

“You wrote it out by hand,” Ellenberg said.

“Yeah.”

“In Russian.”

“Yeah. I think in Russian.”

“That’s lovely,” Ellenberg said. “But I don’t speak it.”

“I translated,” Yuri said. “See? I made little notes in margin, so you’d understand.”

“Ah. These cramped scribbles?”

“Yes.” Yuri smiled.

“Your graphs are hand drawn.”

“They’re estimates,” Yuri said. “The equations are all there.”

Ellenberg scratched his head. “Oh, joy. Give me a minute with my people, okay?”

Yuri nodded and sat in the chair. Ellenberg took the papers and huddled with his programmers, and Yuri watched them. He thought about them not understanding what they were seeing, and a stillness crept over him.

“Um, anyone have question right now?”

“We just got it,” a woman said. “Give us a minute, okay?”

“Holy crap, this is complex,” a man said.

“I just thought I’d run back to my office. Maybe get something to read,” Yuri said.

“Go ahead,” the woman said, without looking up.

Yuri walked quickly back to his office. He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk—his work on hitting the asteroid the way he wanted, with a last, huge shot back toward Earth. He rolled it and stuck it down the back of his pants, and was at the bookshelf, searching for something that might keep him awake, when Fletcher stuck his head in. Yuri turned quickly to face him.

“What are you doing in here? You’re supposed to be down with the programmers.”

“I thought I’d get something to read,” Yuri said.

“My speech on communication, fate of the world, all that? You get that you have to be in the room to make that happen?”

“Right,” Yuri said, flushing. The director didn’t move, making Yuri slide by him to get out of the office. Yuri put a hand on the
rolled printout so that it wouldn’t catch on the doorway, then brought it in front of his body, under the text he’d pulled from the shelf. Fletcher didn’t seem to notice.

Yuri kept walking, resisting the urge to look back. When he made it to the stairwell and turned, Fletcher was still standing by his office, watching him go.

Yuri could hear the programmers complaining as he opened the door, but they fell silent when he entered the room. He smiled tightly and sat in the chair, opening the book at random so that it covered his papers. Then he looked up.

“Um, I’d like to know something about your process. Are you all doing same work? Or do you work on separate parts?”

“We work together,” Ellenberg said. “Everybody’s got their job, but we work together.”

What did that mean?

“I need you to split them,” Yuri said. Ellenberg frowned. “There are two sets of data that need algorithms.” Yuri showed him the second sheaf of papers.

“Fletcher didn’t say anything about this,” Ellenbeg muttered. “I better call him.”

“He knows about it. He needs the option to go with second set.”

Ellenberg held Yuri’s eye. “Jesus H. Christ. You guys haven’t made a decision, have you?”

Yuri paused for a moment. “We need both sets of data put in programming language.”

Ellenberg walked to the marker board ledge and picked up an
aqua bottle of generic antacid. He took a slug directly from the bottle, recapped it, and put it back in place. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, but he still had chalky lips when he returned to where Yuri was standing.

“We do them one at a time,” Ellenberg said. “We may not have time for both. Which one’s the primary set?”

Yuri pulled out the bottom papers, the set he’d retrieved from his office. “This one.”

Mike Ellenberg’s people huddled around him. Yuri slumped in the chair by the wall, aware suddenly that he was desperately tired. He thought he might nap, but then the barrage of questions began.

“Hey,” a woman said. “Is ‘lambda’ the same in Russian as in English?”

“Is ‘lambda’ …?” Yuri said. “Of course it is. Lambda is Greek.”

“Yeah, okay,” the woman said, clearly not embarrassed. “Just checking.”

It went on from there.

An hour in, Yuri had answered twenty questions. He was becoming increasingly frustrated.

“What’s this mean?” Ellenberg said.

Yuri walked over to him.

“I’m ordering pizza,” someone called.

Yuri ignored the phone call to Antonio’s and focused on
Ellenberg. “It’s … see, this is for containment of antimatter. Is very hard thing.”

“Yeah, but I don’t get …”

“You just take this,” Yuri said, pointing at the papers in Ellenberg’s hand, “and turn it into algorithm, and convert that into computer code, and run code to generate graphs. Simple.”

Ellenberg stared at him from behind the glasses. “If it’s so simple, why don’t you do it?”

Yuri flushed. “Is not my area.”

“That’s right. You don’t know how. If you can remember that, you can have some pizza, too.”

Ellenberg pointed to the paper. “So this grubby little equation here is a conditional …”

“No!” Yuri stalked to the marker board. He grabbed a marker from the tray and attacked the board with it, but its tip scraped, dry, over the surface. He flipped it across the room into a wastebasket and it rattled in. A rare athletic moment, and Dovie hadn’t been there to see it. He pushed her from his mind.

“There are no other markers.” He looked around in frustration. “Where do you keep spares?”

“I don’t think there are any,” a programmer said.

Yuri, Ellenberg, and several of the programmers rooted around on desktops, in an empty copier-paper box full of remote controls and dead batteries, and under the servers. Finally a programmer shouted in triumph. “Got one!” He tossed the marker to Yuri, who caught it with two hands.

“Orange?” Of course it was. Black would have been too much
to ask. Yuri began scribbling at the left side of the board, remembering to put the few words he wrote into English—even the ‘lambda.’ He was peppered with questions. After a moment, Ellenberg took the marker out of his hand and stepped to the right side of the board, and began to draw a bunch of circles, triangles, and squares, connected by lines and arrows. None of it made any sense. Yuri jammed his hands in his pockets and hissed softly. Ellenberg caught it, and began drawing lines from the shapes to Yuri’s individual equations. Oh. That made a little more sense, except Ellenberg had it all wrong. Yuri looked for an eraser, saw none, and pointed out a line to Ellenberg. “That’s wrong,” he said. “Should be like this.” He took the marker back and made a different connection. Ellenberg spat on the side of his fist and wiped out the first line.

The pizzas came, and the room smelled of oregano and desperation. Yuri began spitting on the side of his fist and wiping out half of Ellenberg’s work. Ellenberg spat and wiped out Yuri’s connections. It was a duel, and Yuri heard a crashing Tchaikovsky score in his head. After half an hour, they both stood back and stared at the board.

“I think I understand this part,” Ellenberg said. “You wanta rest for a couple of hours and give us a chance to work on this?”

Yuri nodded and rolled his shoulders. He ceded the orange marker to Ellenberg and turned. Karl Fletcher was in the doorway. Yuri’s mind raced over the work on the board. Was any of it different from what the director would expect?

“How’s it going?” Fletcher asked.

“I need alcohol-based hand sanitizer,” Yuri said, stepping away from the marker board. “Badly.”

Fletcher snorted. His eyes followed Yuri. Not looking at the marker board.

“You can have him,” Ellenberg called. “We just need time to run with this for a while.”

“Good,” Fletcher said, smiling. “Because there’s a young lady here to see him. I left her in your office,” he said to Yuri.

Yuri flushed. “Is that okay?”

Fletcher shrugged. “Sure. If Mike can spring you for a bit, you can have a visitor.”

“It is
not
okay,” a fortyish programmer said, gesturing with a slice of pepperoni. “Strelnikov’s been here for what, two weeks, and he’s already got a girlfriend? I’ve worked here for seventeen years and
I
don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Let’s analyze that, Bill,” someone called. Laughter and chatter filled the room.

“They need markers,” Yuri said as they trudged upstairs.

“They have a huge budget,” Fletcher said. “They buy the latest tech gizmos and forget to spend any of it on paper and markers.”

“Oh, and I forgot to tell them jokes.”

Fletcher held the stairwell door, his head tilted to the side. “You, telling a joke to those guys—I can’t wrap my mind around that.” Fletcher shook his head as though to clear it, and took off.

Yuri stopped by the bathroom, washed his hands, then wadded wet paper towels and scrubbed out his armpits. He walked to his office, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

Dovie was sitting cross-legged on his desk. She was wearing yellow shorts and a white sleeveless shirt with a touch of lace. Her bangs were purple today. The lights were off and the window was dark, but the office was illuminated by the warm glow of six candles stuck in … beets? He stepped in and quickly closed the door.

“Hi,” she said.

“Um …”

“I hope it’s okay that I came by. I called and asked, and they said you’d have a break.”

“Yes, it’s fine. It’s good.”

“I wanted to see you again. You know, in case …”

He nodded. “Um, are those beets?”

She smiled and gestured with both hands at the candles on either side of her. “I thought you might be homesick. I was trying to think of something Russian for you, and I thought of beets.”

“To hold candles?”

“I sliced off the bottoms to make them level.”

“It would be good not to set NASA on fire right now.”

“Yep. Oh, and I brought food.”

She gestured toward a picnic basket on his floor, on top of a blanket. “And they let me have a TV so we can watch the replay of the Angels game.”

“Is that hockey?” Yuri asked hopefully.

“Baseball. This is a merging of Russian and American cultures. You’ve got the beets and I brought a couple of cabbages, too. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“We also have very rude civil servants.”

“If only I’d known.”

She beckoned to him and he stepped forward and she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He put his arms around her, amazed at the warmth of her skin, and stood before her, gnawing gently on her lip. Finally Dovie leaned back.

He helped her down from the desk and they lay on the blanket, propped on their elbows. Dovie used the remote to click on the television on the floor at their feet, then heaped fried chicken and mashed potatoes on their plates. They watched the game while they ate.

Yuri wiped his mouth with his napkin and pointed at the screen. “I don’t understand why Americans like baseball. It seems like most un-American sport to me.”

“How’s that?”

“America is all about equality, right? But on field, it’s nine to one. That’s not fair.”

She sat upright. “Are you kidding me? Baseball’s the only game with no time limit. It isn’t over until you’ve done everything that needs doing.”

“I’ve noticed. You need shot clock or something.”

“No! And everybody gets a turn. In hockey you could just have your best player take the shot every time, right?”

“Sure.”

“But in baseball, no one player takes over. At the most urgent moment you could have your weakest batter up, and he has to get the hit.
Everybody gets a chance to be the hero
.”

“What’s point in being best player, then?”

Dovie made an exaggerated sigh. “Eat your chicken, commie genius.”

He shrugged and snagged another leg. The game wore on. The visitors’ manager walked to the mound for the second time that inning, signaling for a pitching change.

“This is excruciating,” Yuri said. “No wonder you people do so well in world wars. You’re well rested.”

Dovie exhaled in indignation.

“And besides, your diamond infield represents geometry, and announcers give many statistics, but calculus seems to be underrepresented.”

Dovie laughed. “No one else in the world would criticize baseball for slighting calculus.”

He shrugged. The relief pitcher took his warm-up throws.

Dovie tapped Yuri’s chest. “Baseball,” she said, “is about hot dogs and warm summer evenings.”

“Oh. I thought it was about limits of human endurance.”

The batter stepped in, grinding his toe into the dirt. The pitcher wound up and hung one over the plate, and the batter sent it over the geysers in left centerfield. The geysers erupted and the camera cut to show them, water gushing up, then running down the fake rocks. For a moment the water created a rainbow shimmering against the desert sun. Yuri had always enjoyed seeing rainbows, had felt special as a young child when he explained the mechanics of light refraction to a couple of teachers and they’d exchanged a knowing glance. He wondered if Dovie thought about their mechanics.

“Dovie? Do you love rainbows?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

She looked at him for a moment. “Because they start with us, reach up to touch God, and still come back down to be with us. The treasure isn’t at the end of the rainbow; it’s that the rainbow cared enough to come back.”