The Coats

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.