The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [43]
Symphony? That word got Kloska’s attention, but he had too many questions to start following the many assumptions leaping through his head. “So this tetraktys. What’s that about? Why would she want to keep her communication with you a secret?”
“I didn’t suspect it was a secret until now.” He rubbed his scalp. “Maybe she didn’t want her medical colleagues to know she was working on such an oddball, romantic project. Maybe she didn’t want them to know she’d been contacting me.”
“She was working for an outfit called Executive Concierge. Why would they care?”
“Mathematicians are an odd lot,” he said. “Did you know we are statistically more likely than any other classification of scientist to believe in heaven? And do you know why that is? Because we see it. Every day. A world so perfect, so logical, that in comparison our actual existence seems like a confusing dream. An illusion. Perfection exists in our notebooks and on our whiteboards and our computer models. Ask any mathematician which world seems more real—the perfect world of numbers or the disordered, incoherent mess all around us”—Cepeda waved his hands at the room—“the universe revealed to us by our eyes and ears—and almost to a man we will vote for the numbers. What most people call reality is just the overmatched mind trying to make sense of a universe too vast for it to understand. As the world appears more and more complex, we find ways to deny its complexity and make it simpler. Our brains fill the huge gaps in our knowledge with myths and delusions in order to create a world through which we can navigate. A world in which we can feel secure. Numbers are up to the task by themselves, however. You and I are blind and deaf, but numbers can see and hear.”
“Hm-hmm,” Kloska said.
“Tell me, Detective. What is real to you?”
Kloska didn’t try to hide the sideways look he passed to Traden. “Um, I guess real would be a Verdi opera and women in stretchy skirts, and a steak sandwich with peppers and provolone, and a cold beer. Anything I can see and hear and touch and smell and taste. What I can know. What I can prove and confirm. It’s not complicated.”
Cepeda said, “Einstein predicted the existence of black holes, years before anybody had observed one, using only math. One of the most vexing problems in all of physics today is dark matter, a mysterious, invisible substance that accounts for over 95 percent of the mass in the universe. We know it’s there because the math says it must be. The fact that we can’t see it is meaningless. If humans didn’t have ears, we wouldn’t know about sound or pitch until math could prove it. Scientists trust the math. Call it faith if you like.”
Cepeda blinked his eyes and made a motion with fingers against his lips, a sign one makes when looking for a cigarette. Reaching for a smoke in his drawer, he asked, “Do you mind? Not supposed to in the office. Sometimes I wonder if I should put a wet towel under my door, but what are they going to do?”
With a nod from the professor, Kloska took a cigarette for himself as Traden fanned his face with a hand. Bobby was becoming frustrated by Cepeda’s tangents. He wanted to know what any of this had to do with Marlena Falcone and whadidjacallit—harmonia. “So Pythagoras was into celestial harmony or whatever. Why would a modern-day former neurosurgeon be interested?”
Cepeda considered the red tip of his cigarette as if the answer might appear there. “Numbers were originally abstractions, invented just to quantify things, to count rocks or people or grapes or whatever. The fact that dust floating in the air and the price of stock options behave according to the same mathematical principles, the fact that everything in the universe apparently can be described or predicted with a mathematical equation—a radical idea when Pythagoras suggested it—is probably the most startling coincidence in the history of mankind.” He snatched a piece of paper, one among thousands, turned it