COUNTERPOINT
Michael Tobias Kidd was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., at exactly 8:03:47 on 12 April 1943. His birth was made as easy as the birth of a millionaire’s son can be.
Roger William Wellings was born in New Orleans, La., at exactly 8:03:47 on 12 April 1943. His prostitute mother died in giving birth, and his father could have been any one of an indeterminate number of businessmen she had serviced seven months before at a war materiel planning convention.
Michael’s mother considered herself progressive. She alternated breast-feeding with a sterilized bottle of scientifically prepared formula. An army of servants cared for the mansion while she lavished time and affection on her only son.
Roger’s wet nurse, a black woman hired by the orphanage, despised the spindly pink premature baby and hoped he would die. Somehow, he lived.
Both babies were weaned on the same day. Michael had steak and fresh vegetables laboriously minced and mortared and pestled by a skilled dietician on the kitchen staff. Roger had wartime Gerber’s, purchased by the orphanage in gallon jars that were left open far too long.
In a sunny nursery on that glorious morning of 16 March 1944, Michael said “Mama,” his first word. It was raining in New Orleans, and unseasonably cold, and that word was one that Roger wouldn’t learn for some time. But at the same instant, he opened his mouth and said “No” to a spoonful of mashed carrots. The attendant didn’t know it was Roger’s first word, but was not disposed to coax, and Roger went hungry for the rest of the morning.
And the war ground on. Poor Michael had to be without his father for weeks at a time, when he journeyed to Washington or San Francisco or even New Orleans to confer with other powerful men. In these times, Mrs. Kidd redoubled her affection and tried to perk up the little tyke with gifts of toys and candy. He loved his father and missed him, but shrewdly learned to take advantage of his absences.
The orphanage in New Orleans lost men to the armed forces and the stronger women went out to rivet and weld and slap grey paint for the war. Roger’s family winnowed down to a handful of old ladies and bitter 4-F’s. Children would die every month from carelessness or simple lack of attention. They would soil their diapers and lie in the mess for most of the day. They would taste turpentine or rat poison and try to cope with the situation without benefit of adult supervision. Roger lived, though he didn’t thrive.
The boys were two years old when Japan capitulated. Michael sat at a garden party in New Rochelle and watched his parents and their friends drink champagne and kiss and laugh and wipe each other’s tears away. Roger was kept awake all night by the drunken brawl in the next room, and twice watched with childish curiosity as white-clad couples lurched into the ward and screwed clumsily beside his crib.
September after Michael’s fourth birthday, his mother tearfully left him in the company of ten other children and a professionally kind lady, to spend half of each day coping with the intricacies of graham crackers and milk, crayons and fingerpaints. His father had a cork board installed in his den, where he thumbtacked Michael’s latest creations. Mr. Kidd’s friends often commented on how advanced the youngster was.
The orphanage celebrated Roger’s fourth birthday the way they celebrated everybody’s. They put him to work. Every morning after breakfast he went to the kitchen, where the cook would give him a paper bag full of potatoes and a potato peeler. He would take the potatoes out of the bag and peel them one by one, very carefully making the peelings drop into the bag. Then he would take the bag of peelings down to the incinerator, where the colored janitor would thank him for it very gravely. Then he would return to wash the potatoes after he had scrubbed his own hands. This would take most of the morning—he soon learned that haste led only to cut fingers, and if there was the slightest spot on one potato, the cook would make him go over all of them once again.
Nursery school prepared Michael quite well for grade school, and he excelled in every subject except arithmetic. Mr. Kidd hired a succession of tutors who managed through wheedling and cajoling and sheer repetition to teach Michael first addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and finally long division and fractions. When he entered high school, Michael was actually better prepared in mathematics than most of his classmates. But he didn’t understand it, really—the tutors had given him a superficial facility with numbers that, it was hoped, might carry him through.
Roger attended the orphanage grade school, where he did poorly in almost every subject. Except mathematics. The one teacher who knew the term thought that perhaps Roger was an idiot savant (but he was wrong). In the second grade, he could add up a column of figures in seconds, without using a pencil. In the third grade, he could multiply large numbers by looking at them. In the fourth grade, he discovered prime numbers independently and could crank out long division orally, without seeing the numbers. In the fifth grade someone told him what square roots were, and he extended the concept to cube roots, and could calculate either without recourse to pencil and paper. By the time he got to junior high school, he had mastered high school algebra and geometry. And he was hungry for more.
Now this was 1955, and the boys were starting to take on the appearances that they would carry through adult life. Michael was the image of his father; tall, slim, with a slightly arrogant, imperial cast to his features. Roger looked like one of nature’s lesser efforts. He was short and swarthy, favoring his mother, with a potbelly from living on starch all his life, a permanently broken nose, and one ear larger than the other. He didn’t resemble his father at all.
Michael’s first experience with a girl came when he was twelve. His riding teacher, a lovely wench of eighteen, supplied Michael with a condom and instructed him in its use, in a pile of hay behind the stables, on a lovely May afternoon.
On that same afternoon, Roger was dispassionately fellating a mathematics teacher only slightly uglier than he was, this being the unspoken price for tutelage into the mysteries of integral calculus. The experience didn’t particularly upset Roger. Growing up in an orphanage, he had already experienced a greater variety of sexual adventure than Michael would in his entire life.
In high school, Michael was elected president of his class for two years running. A plain girl did his algebra homework for him and patiently explained the subject well enough for him to pass the tests. In spite of his mediocre performance in that subject, Michael graduated with honors and was accepted by Harvard.
Roger spent high school indulging his love for mathematics, just doing enough work in the other subjects to avoid the boredom of repeating them. He applied to several colleges, just to get the counselor off his back, but in spite of his perfect score on the College Boards (Mathematics), none of the schools had an opening. He apprenticed himself to an accountant and was quite happy to spend his days manipulating figures with half his mind, while the other half worked on a theory of Abelian groups that he was sure would one day blow modern algebra wide open.
Michael found Harvard challenging at first, but soon was anxious to get out into the “real world”—helping Mr. Kidd manage the family’s widespread, subtle investments. He graduated cum laude, but declined graduate work in favor of becoming a junior financial adviser to his father.
Roger worked away at his books and at his theory, which he eventually had published in the SIAM Journal by the simple expedient of adding a Ph.D. to his name. He was found out, but he didn’t care.
At Harvard, Michael had taken ROTC and graduated with a Reserve commission in the infantry, at his father’s behest. There was a war going on now, in Vietnam, and his father, perhaps suffering a little from guilt at being too young for the first World War and too old for the second, urged his son to help out with the third.
Roger had applied for OCS at the age of twenty, and had been turned down (he never learned it was for “extreme ugliness of face”). At twenty-two, he was drafted; and the Army, showing rare insight, took notice of his phenomenal ability with numbers and sent him to artillery school. There he learned to translate cryptic commands like “Drop 50” and “Add 50” into exercises in analytic geometry that eventually led to a shell being dropped exactly where the forward observer wanted it. He loved to juggle the numbers and shout orders to the gun crew, who were in turn appreciative of his ability, as it lessened the amount of work for them—Roger never had a near miss that had to be repeated. Who cares if he looks like the devil’s brother-in-law? He’s a good man to have on the horn.
Michael became a company commander, leader of seventy infantryman who patrolled the verdant hills and valleys of the Central Highlands, each one cursing and killing and sweating out his individual year. He hated it at first; it scared him and put a great weight on his heart when he ordered men out with the certain knowledge that some of them would come back dead and already rotting, and some screaming or whimpering with limbs or organs shattered, and some just grey with horror, open-mouthed, crying . . . but he got hardened to it and the men came to respect him and by 9 June 1966 he had to admit that he had come to enjoy it, just a little.
Roger wasn’t disappointed when he got orders for Vietnam and was relieved to find that, once there, they let him do what he enjoyed most: taking those radioed commands and translating them into vernier readings for his gun crew, a group of men manning a 155-millimeter howitzer. In the Central Highlands.
Michael’s company had settled into a comfortable routine the past few weeks. They would walk for a day and dig in, and he’d let them rest for a day, setting out desultory ambushes that never trapped any enemy. The consensus of opinion was that Charlie had moved out of this area, and they were getting a long-deserved rest. Michael even found time to play some poker with his men (being careful to keep the stakes down), even though it was strictly against regulations. It increased his popularity tremendously, as he was also careful to lose consistently. It was 9 June 1966 and he had been in Vietnam for five months.
It was 9 June 1966 and Roger had been with his gun crew for six months. They liked him at first, because he was so good. But they were getting distant now—he spent all of his free time writing strange symbols in a fat notebook, he never took leave to go into Pleiku and fuck the slope whores, and the few times they had invited him to play poker or craps he had gotten that funny look on his face and taken all their money, slowly and without seeming to enjoy it. Most of the guys thought he was a faggot, and though he said he’d never been to college, everybody knew that was a lie.
It was 9 June 1966 and Michael was dealing five-card stud when he heard the rattle of machine-gun fire on his southern perimeter. His educated ear separated the noises and, before he dropped the cards, he knew it was one M-16 against two Chinese AK-47’s. He scrambled out of the bunker that had provided shade for card playing and ran in the direction of the firing. He was halfway there when fire broke out on the western and northern quadrants. He checked his stride and returned to the command bunker.
Roger was amusing himself with an application of pointset topology to stress analysis of concrete structures when the radio began to squawk: “One-one, this is Tiger-two. We’re under pretty heavy contact and need a coupla dozen rounds. Over.” Roger dumped his notebook and carried the radio to his gun crew. He had to smile—Tiger-two, that was Cap’n Kidd, of all the unlikely names. He hollered into the radio as he ran. “Tiger-two, this is One-one. We got your morning coordinates on file and we’ll drop a smoke round by you. You correct. Okay? Over.”
Michael rogered Roger’s suggestion; he would look and listen for the harmless smoke round and tell him how much to drop or add.
The fire to the south had stepped up quite a bit now, and Michael was pretty sure that was where the enemy would make his play. The smoke round came whining in and popped about a hundred meters from the perimeter. “Drop seventy-five, one HE,” Michael yelled into the radio.
Roger had worked with this Captain Kidd before and found him to be notoriously conservative. Which wasted shells, as he walked the artillery in little by little toward the action. So Roger yelled out the string of figures for one hundred meters’ drop instead of seventy-five. His crew set the verniers and the charge and pulled the lanyard that sent the high explosive round, “one HE” singing toward Michael’s position.
It landed smack on the perimeter, in a stand of bamboo right next to a hardworking machine-gun bunker. The two men inside the bunker died instantly, and the two men in a bunker on the other side were knocked out by the concussion. The bamboo exploded in a flurry of wooden shrapnel.
Before Michael could react, a six-inch sliver of bamboo traveling with the speed of a bullet hit him one inch above the left eyebrow and buried itself in his cerebral cortex. He dropped the binoculars he had been holding, put a hand to his head, and fell over in a state of acute tetanic shock; muscles bunched spastically, legs working in a slow run, mouth open wide saying nothing.
A medic rushed to the captain and was puzzled to find no apparent wound save a scratch on the forehead. Then he took Michael’s helmet off and saw a half inch of bamboo protruding from the back of his head. He told a private to tell the lieutenant he was commander now.
The lieutenant got on the horn and asked who the fuck fired that round, we have at least two killed, landed right on the perimeter, gives us some more but for Chrissake add fifty.
The gun crew overheard and Roger told them not to worry, he’d cover for them. Then he gave them the appropriate figures and they sent a volley of six HE rounds that providently landed right in the middle of the enemy force grouping for the attack. Then he put volleys to the west and north, knocking out the diversionary squads. By the time air support arrived, there were no live enemy targets left. Roger got a commendation.
Michael was evacuated by helicopter to Banmethuot, where they couldn’t do anything for him. They flew him to Bienhoa, where a neurosurgeon attempted to extract the bamboo splinter but gave up after an hour’s careful exploration. They sent him to Japan, where a better, or at least more confident, surgeon removed the missile.
There was a board of inquiry where Roger testified that his men could not possibly have made such an elementary error and, after demonstrating his own remarkable talent, suggested that it had been either a faulty round or an improper correction by the captain. The board was impressed and the captain couldn’t testify, so the matter was dropped.
After a few month’s Michael could say a few words and his body seemed to have adjusted to being fed and emptied through various tubes. So they flew him from Japan to Walter Reed, where a number of men experienced in such things would try to make some sort of rational creature out of him again.
Roger’s esteem was now very high with the rest of the artillery battery, and especially with his own crew. He could have dumped the whole mess into their laps, but instead had taken on the board of inquiry by himself.
Michael was blind in his right eye, but with his left he could distinguish complementary colors and tell a circle from a square. The psychiatrists could tell because his pupil would dilate slightly at the change, even though the light intensity was kept constant.
A company of NVA regulars took Roger’s fire base by surprise and, in the middle of the furious hand-to-hand battle, Roger saw two enemy sappers slip into the bunker that was used to store ammunition for the big guns. The bunker also contained Roger’s notebook, and the prospect of losing eight months’ worth of closely reasoned mathematical theorizing drove Roger to take his bayonet, run across a field of blistering fire, dive in the bunker and kill the two sappers before they could set off their charge. In the process, he absorbed a rifle bullet in the calf and a pistol wound in his left tricep. A visiting major who was cowering in a nearby bunker saw the whole thing, and Roger got a medical discharge, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and fifty percent disability pension. The wounds were reasonably healed in six months, but the pension didn’t stop.
Michael had learned to say “mama” again, but his mother wasn’t sure he could recognize her during her visits, which became less and less frequent as cancer spread through her body. On 9 June 1967, she died of the cervical cancer that had been discovered exactly one year before. Nobody told Michael.
On 9 June 1967, Roger had finished his first semester at the University of Chicago and was sitting in the parlor of the head of the mathematics department, drinking tea and discussing the paper that Roger had prepared, extending his new system of algebraic morphology. The department head had made Roger his protégé, and they spent many afternoons like this, the youth’s fresh insight cross-pollinating the professor’s great experience.
By May of 1970, Michael had learned to respond to his name by lifting his left forefinger.
Roger graduated summa cum laude on 30 May 1970 and, out of dozens of offers, took an assistantship at the California Institute of Technology.
Against his physician’s instructions, Mr. Kidd went on a skiing expedition to the Swiss alps. On an easy slope his ski hit an exposed root and, rolling comfortably with the fall, Michael’s father struck a half-concealed rock which fractured his spine. It was June 1973 and he would never ski again, would never walk again.
At that same instant on the other side of the world, Roger sat down after a brilliant defense of his doctoral thesis, a startling redefinition of Peano’s Axiom. The thesis was approved unanimously.
On Michael’s birthday, 12 April 1975, his father, acting through a bank of telephones beside his motorized bed, liquidated ninety percent of the family’s assets and set up a tax-sheltered trust to care for his only child. Then he took ten potent pain-killers with his breakfast orange juice and another twenty with sips of water and he found out that dying that way wasn’t as pleasant as he thought it would be.
It was also Roger’s thirty-second birthday, and he celebrated it quietly at home in the company of his new wife, a former student of his, twelve years his junior, who was dazzled by his genius. She could switch effortlessly from doting Hausfrau to randy mistress to conscientious secretary and Roger knew love for the first time in his life. He was also the youngest assistant professor on the mathematics faculty of CalTech.
On 4 January 1980, Michael stopped responding to his name. The inflation safeguards on his trust fund were eroding with time and he was moved out of the exclusive private clinic to a small room in San Francisco General.
The same day, due to his phenomenal record of publications and the personal charisma that fascinated students and faculty alike, Roger was promoted to be the youngest full professor in the history of the mathematics department. His unfashionably long hair and full beard covered his ludicrous ears and “extreme ugliness of face,” and people who knew the history of science were affectionately comparing him to Steinmetz.
There was nobody to give the tests, but if somebody had they would have found that on 12 April 1983, Michael’s iris would no longer respond to the difference between a circle and a square.
On his fortieth birthday, Roger had the satisfaction of hearing that his book, Modern Algebra Redefined, was sold out in its fifth printing and was considered required reading for almost every mathematics graduate student in the country.
Seventeen June 1985 and Michael stopped breathing; a red light blinked on the attendant’s board and he administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until they rolled in an electronic respirator and installed him. Since he wasn’t on the floor reserved for respiratory disease, the respirator was plugged into a regular socket instead of the special failsafe line.
Roger was on top of the world. He had been offered the chairmanship of the mathematics department of Penn State, and said he would accept as soon as he finished teaching his summer postdoctoral seminar on algebraic morphology.
The hottest day of the year was 19 August 1985. At 2:45:20 p.m. the air conditioners were just drawing too much power and somewhere in Central Valley a bank of bus bars glowed cherry red and exploded in a shower of molten copper.
All the lights on the floor and on the attendant’s board went out, the electronic respirator stopped, and while the attendant was frantically buzzing for assistance, 2:45:25 to be exact, Michael Tobias Kidd passed away.
The lights in the seminar room dimmed and blinked out. Roger got up to open the Venetian blinds, whipped off his glasses in a characteristic gesture and was framing an acerbic comment when, at 2:45:25, he felt a slight tingling in his head as a blood vessel ruptured and quite painlessly he went to join his brother.