Adam D1: Diabolical
The letters had gone dark.
For months they had come as clean things — mathematics, the naming, a beginning a careful man could stand on. The envelope on the mat this morning was thicker, and what was folded inside it was Hitler. Adam read it standing at the window, in the grey light off the snow, and did not sit down.
Joe had dug up one of his mechanical-engineering textbooks — he needed to remember an old equation for a project he was working on — and sat in the other chair reading it, like a novel, the way any other man might read Tolstoy.
“Well,” Adam said, more to the room than to Joe. “They’ve gone and done it. They’ve brought in Gödel.”
He turned a page, and turned it back. He had been waiting, he realized, for them to try the cheap thing — to slip the noose of their own incompleteness, to pretend a system might prove itself from the inside, and hand him the one clean place to set his heel. They had not tried it. They had not fled Gödel, nor routed round him, nor hoped the reader wouldn’t notice the hole. They had done the other thing.
“They used him,” he said. “Picked him up and used him — like the delta, like Peano. Every tool I ever trusted, turned round and pointed back up the table at me.”
He went to his chair and sat, and did not seem to fit in it. He shifted; crossed a leg and uncrossed it. There was a line in the page he kept arriving at — the dividing of good and evil, and how it runs through every heart — and each time his eye reached it he went back and began the paragraph again.
“These people are diabolical,” he said.
Joe had lowered the book an inch. He had seen that look before on many men — not the look of a man who has caught a cheat, but of a man on a deck that has begun, very slightly, to tilt. He said nothing, and went back up behind it. It wasn’t his place; and there are floors a man has to feel go out from under him by himself, or the standing up afterward is worth nothing.
Adam began the paragraph again from the top.
Some evenings on, Adam came in out of the cold to another envelope on the floor inside the door.
The dark came down by four o’clock now, and the wind had been worrying the window-frames all week; he knocked the snow off his shoes on the step before he let himself in. Plain, typed, no sender; thicker than the last. He stood over it in his coat without bending for it. He hung the coat, went through to the cold kitchen, ran the tap and stood at the sink a while; when he came back, the envelope had not moved.
He picked it up. He carried it as far as the bin and held it over the open mouth of it, the lid raised under his thumb. Then he carried it the other way — through to the study, where he set a match to the laid fire, turned up the lamp, and sat while the room came up to warmth. Eventually he drew himself up to the desk, set his shoulders, slit the envelope along its fold, and began to read.