The gate of the Sheldon Cooper High School was not made of iron, but a kind of sentient boundary. For Naci Zara, crossing its bleached-white gravel threshold each morning at 7:28 a.m. was a ritual of meticulous divestment. He did not simply walk through it; he was processed by it, a slow and deliberate shedding of selves, like a man carefully hanging his many coats on a series of invisible hooks in the air.
He left home as Naci,
husband to Emel, father to a seven-year-old girl with sticky fingers, sparkly beads around her wrist, and a laugh like sudden, loud thunder. He had kissed them both, had smelled the
warm, buttery scent of toast on Emel’s cheek, had felt the small, fierce
weight of his daughter’s arms around his neck. This Naci, the man of the house,
the man of a certain tender history, he left just there, at the gatepost. The
ghost of his domestic self would wait patiently all day, a loyal dog, to be
collected again at 4:45 p.m.
Parking his car under the usual banyan tree, a few steps onto the
campus proper, on the asphalt path that cut through the militantly green lawn,
he paused. Here, he shed his non-conformist political views. The carefully reasoned, quietly
furious opinions he held on the morning’s news, the letters to the editor he
composed in his mind during his commute—all of it was gently exhaled into the
crisp air. The campus did not tolerate such messy, partisan colours. They bled
into the perfect, abstract whiteness of the mathematical truth he was there to
serve. They were variables for which this environment had no use. He felt them
slip from his shoulders, a weightless, ideological cloak he would not need
until he stepped back onto public pavement.
The main building
swallowed him. The corridor was a long, polished throat of linoleum and
lockers, smelling of lemon disinfectant and adolescent ennui. Here, walking
with a measured pace that was neither hurried nor slow, he performed the most
delicate operation. He unspooled his philosophical vexations. The dark,
beautiful, and deeply controversial thoughts that visited him in the silent
watches of the night—on the absurdity of consciousness, the elegant cruelty of
natural selection, universe as a set of Markov chains, the godless, spinning
rock they all clung to—these he carefully wound into a tight, invisible skein
and placed on the window ledge near the fire extinguisher. They were too sharp,
too potentially corrosive for the young minds he was approaching. A student
might be cut on them. They were not part of the curriculum. His mind, now, was
a clean, well-lit room, empty but for the furniture of instruction.
Finally, he reached
the door to Room 217. On its pale green surface, a poster declared, “The only
way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics!” He placed his hand on the cold
metal handle. This was the final relinquishment. Here, he left his personal morality.
His private convictions on friendship, loyalty, betrayal, love—the complex,
often irrational algebra of human connection—had no place inside. He was not
here to be a friend, a confessor, or a moral guide. He was here to demonstrate
proof. To be fair was to be consistent. To be kind was to be clear. Emotion was
an irrational number in the clean, rational equation of the classroom.
He opened the door.
The man who entered
was not Naci. He was a mechanism of exquisite specificity.
He placed his worn
leather satchel on the desk with a soft thud that silenced the room’s low hum.
His eyes, pale and cool behind his spectacles, scanned the rows of faces. They
were not children, not individuals with names and histories that might snag on
his attention; they were a cohort, a set of thirty units awaiting data input.
“Open your homework to
page 274,” he said, his voice a calibrated instrument, devoid of tremolo or
vibrato. “Problem number twelve. A common point of error.”
The next ten minutes
were a flawless execution of code. Homework check. Three students were queried.
Their answers were parsed, their errors traced back to a single misapplied
axiom, a faulty transposition. He did not chide. He identified the bug in the logic.
He was a diagnostician. p implies q does not always guarantee q implies
p. A common mistake done by the high schoolers. Right Jessica, we talked about
this a few times in the last two months. A flicker of a smile, a
pre-programmed social cue to indicate approbation without warmth.
Fifteen minutes for
new material. He turned to the board. “Today, we ascend to a higher plane of
abstraction. We leave the comfortable, familiar line of real numbers and enter
the plane. We welcome the complex number.”
His chalk, a brittle
white wand, began to dance. It defined the imaginary unit, *i*, the square
root of -1. “A necessary fiction,” he stated, “a logical phantom that makes a
larger, more beautiful system possible.” Ohh, life, a ghost
from the window ledge in the corridor whispered in the deep recesses of his
machinery, isn’t it more complex? Don’t we all require our fictions,
our irrational bits, to become whole? Neither real numbers are truly real, nor
the imaginary numbers can be imagined. Everything is misnamed, the swamp of
political correctness sucks him into an oblivious terrain of mud... He
stared at the ceiling, the mischievous thoughts were instantly quarantined and
deleted. They were not in the lesson plan.
He wrote the general
form: a + bi. “The real part,” he said, tapping *a*. “The
imaginary part,” tapping bi. “Together, they form a complex whole.
A coordinate. A point.” He plotted them, these strange hybrids, on the complex
plane he drew with two swift, perfect lines. His voice was a calm, steady
drone, explaining conjugation, addition, multiplication. He was a guide in a
strange new country, pointing out the sights without ever betraying a sense of
their wonder.
The final twenty-five
minutes. Group work. This was a subroutine designed to foster collaboration, a
directive from the administration. There were 19 students in the class, a
classy prime number, ten plus nine or ten square minus nine square. He thought “either
one group of 19 students or 19 groups of one student.” He almost grinned but restrained
his urges, not in the plan, not in the plan. He partitioned the class into four
groups of four and one group of three. He distributed a worksheet. “You will
solve these. One member from each group will present a solution to a different
problem.”
The classroom erupted
into a low chatter. Mr. Zara did not sit. He paced the perimeter, a silent
orbital satellite. He monitored progress. He listened for conceptual errors.
His interventions were minimal, precise. “Check your sign in step three.”
“Remember the multiplicative property.” He was processing their efforts,
running a silent diagnostic on their understanding.
One by one, they came
to the board. A boy with nervous hands solved the first problem. A girl with a
determined set to her jaw conquered the second. Mr. Zara watched, his head
tilted slightly. He was not assessing them; he was assessing the
output. The solutions were either correct or incorrect. He offered a
“Precisely” or a “Re-examine your distribution” with utter impartiality. There
was no pride, no frustration, only validation or error-correction.
The bell rang, a
sharp, electric shock that severed the room’s focus.
“The problems on page
281, numbers one through twenty-three, odd only,” he announced to the rustling
of closing books and zipping bags. “Show all work.”
They flowed past him,
a river of youth and noise and complication, spilling back into the world of
friendships and politics and moral dilemmas. He stood by his desk, the empty
shell of Mr. Zara, the lesson plan completed, the objectives met.
Then four more classes
repeated the same way, he entered the room, delivered his plan and started breathing
after each session.
When the last student of
the last class had vanished, he turned and left the room. The process began in
reverse. At the classroom door, he collected the waiting shard of his morality.
In the corridor, he retrieved the spool of his dark, beautiful philosophy from
the window ledge. On the asphalt path, he drew a deep breath and took up the
mantle of his political convictions, feeling their familiar weight and texture.
And finally, at the gate, he stepped back into the skin of Naci, husband and
father. The ghost by the gatepost merged with him, infusing his limbs with a
sudden, human fatigue and a faint, anticipatory warmth.
He walked to his car,
a man once more, the intricate and often contradictory sum of all his parts.
The complex number made whole again, if only until tomorrow.
