Aldo was not an especially good communicator, either. That was what the drugs had been for to begin with; he was an anxious kid, then a depressed teen, and then, for a brief period, a full-blown addict. He had learned over time to keep his thoughts to himself, which was most easily accomplished if his brain activity was split into categories. His mind was like a computer with multiple applications open, some of them buzzing with contemplation in the background. Most of the time Aldo did not give others the impression he was listening, a suspicion that was generally correct.
“Exponential and logarithmic functions,” Aldo said without preamble, walking into the poorly lit classroom
SCENE: A university classroom.
and suffering the usual itch to dive out its institutional windows. He was exactly one minute late, and, as a rule, was never early. Had he been any earlier to arrive, he might have had to interact with his students, which neither he nor they wished him to do.
“Did anyone struggle with the reading?”
“Yes,” said one of the students in the second row.
Unsurprising.
“What exactly is this used for?” asked a student in the back.
Aldo, who preferred not to dirty his hands with application, loathed that particular question. “Charting bacterial growth,” he said on a whim. He found linear functions banal. They were mostly used to simplify things to a base level of understanding, though few things on earth were ever so straightforward. The world, after all, was naturally entropic.
Aldo strode over to the whiteboard, which he hated, though it was at least less messy than chalk. “Growth and decay,” he said, scrawling out a graph before scribbling g（x） beside it. Historically speaking, this lecture would be extremely frustrating for all of them. Aldo found it difficult to focus on something that required so little of his attention; conversely, his students found it difficult to follow his line of thought. If the department were not so hard-pressed for qualified teachers, he doubted he would have been promoted to lecturer. His performance as an apprentice had been less than stellar, but unfortunately for everyone （himself included）， Aldo was brilliant at what he did.
The university needed him. He needed a job. His students, then, would simply have to adapt, as he had.
For Aldo, time in the classroom regularly slid to a crawl. He was interrupted several times by questions that he was required by university policy not to remark were stupid. He enjoyed solving problems, true, but found teaching to be more tedious than challenging. His brain didn’t approach things in an easily observable way; he unintentionally skipped steps and was then forced to move backwards, usually by the sound of some throat-clearing distress at his back.
He knew, on some level, that repetition was required for some base level of learning—extensive boxing training had been part of his self-inflicted rehab, so he knew the importance of running the same drill over and over until his head pounded and his limbs were sore—but that didn’t stop him from lamenting it. It didn’t keep him from wishing he could walk out of the room, turn a corner, and head in an entirely different direction.
Theoretically speaking, anyway.
* * *
THE FIRST OF THE DAY’S TOURS included an elderly couple, two twenty-something women, a handful of German tourists, and what Regan furtively ascertained （having made it a custom to check for rings whether she was interested in the outcome or not） to be a married couple in their mid-thirties. The husband was staring at her, poor thing. She knew that particular stare and was no longer especially flattered by it. She’d started using it to her advantage as a teenager, and now simply stored it among her other tools. Philip’s head, paintbrush, saturation scale, the attraction of unavailable men; it was all the same category of functionality.
This particular husband was good-looking, sort of. His wife had a pretty but unremarkable face. Likely the husband, a “catch” by virtue of what Regan guessed to be a practical job selling insurance, saw the Chinese mixing with Irish in Regan’s features and considered it some sort of exotic thrill. In reality, she could have been the genetic combination of half the Art Institute’s current occupants.
“I’m sure many of you will recognize Jackson Pollock’s work,” Regan said, gesturing to the Greyed Rainbow canvas behind her.
THE NARRATOR, A TEENAGE GIRL WHO IS BARELY PAYING ATTENTION: The piece Greyed Rainbow by Jackson Pollock is basically just a black surface covered with splotches of grey and white oil paints with, I don’t know, some other colors at the bottom. It’s like, abstract or whatever.