Goldbach's Conjecture

"I read the garbage you wrote," my brother said, blowing smoke rings with a look of contempt. "Overblown and poorly constructed." The real story goes like this. My brother tossed his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it under his grubby boots. "I specifically picked a rainy day," my brother said, his face somber, "to give up on Goldbach's Conjecture." "Don't you give up on it several times a month?" He quit it every few days on his WeChat Moments feed—Goldbach's Conjecture. "That time was different." "Exactly how it was different, I couldn't say right away. But a long time after that, I clearly heard the sound of a door closing. The directions of this world are infinite, but this one direction shut its door on me." "Creeeak." My brother mimicked the sound of the door closing. He was especially fond of the onomatopoeia "creeeak."

An image of a door began to surface in my mind—one of those massive palace doors from the Forbidden City, studded with rivets, painted a dreadful red. Two eunuchs were slowly closing it from either side, producing a creeeak-creeeak sound, as though time itself were lamenting its own irreversible passing. "Click"—the final ceremonial sound. The splendid palace and the many generations of lives filling it simply vanished from the world. "Overblown," my brother said smugly. "See? That's what overblown looks like." "Old Zhang was my co-worker at the Dahua Electronics Factory." The Dahua Electronics Factory was next to Beijing Forestry University. I used to go over there to hang out when I was in college. There was a basketball court there that hadn't been maintained in years. One time I went to play ball and found the court occupied by audio equipment and a few musicians who looked like programmers. I glanced at the notice board on the court: "Dahua Electronic Band—Heartfelt Performance. Sincere apologies for disrupting your game," and so on.

Then I heard the thud-thud-thud of a ball. At first I didn't recognize it as a ball—I thought it was some kind of electronic music or whatever trendy thing. That is, until Old Zhang burst into my field of vision. He charged through the audio equipment and the programmers (like Steph Curry in the All-Star Weekend Skills Challenge), went up for a rim-rattling dunk that sent the drum kit crashing—the ball had bounced off the rim and flown away. "That's Old Zhang from a different story." In this story, Old Zhang has nothing to do with basketball. Old Zhang was actually the factory's security guard, wearing one of those uniforms that symbolize authority without actually conveying any, stationed at the gate to monitor and serve the people coming and going.

I could sense the professional absurdity that Old Zhang must have felt. When I was in college, I joined a Marxist study group—a real one, you know—the simplest of their tenets being: labor is glorious, all professions are equal. And yet, when you pass through the gates of the Dahua Electronics Factory—when you pass through the gates of any establishment with a security guard—you can't help but feel a certain absurdity. The guard at the gate embodies a kind of authority; he scrutinizes your credentials for entering and leaving: you may enter because you possess a certain status, a status that distinguishes you from those who don't have it. At the same time, you sometimes can't help but feel a sense of superiority relative to the guard. Frankly, even if you don't feel this way, or claim not to, this superiority is a matter of fact.

News reports say, "Even a security guard can get into Peking University"—why the word "even"? Walking through the university gates every day, looking at those guard friends who can "even" achieve this or that, sometimes I'd think: we are profoundly different.

It was much later that I came to understand we're actually not so different. Singing karaoke with my brother's co-workers, from Tang Dynasty's "Internationale" to Dao Lang's "In Memory of a Comrade-in-Arms." "Old Zhang was also into Ge-Ba." That's what they called it in the amateur math world—"doing Ge-Ba" instead of "working on Goldbach's Conjecture," which was about as inexplicable as abbreviating "spicy crayfish" to "spicy-cray." "A few times after the night shift, we smoked a couple cigarettes together—that's how we met." In short, one night, two Goldbach enthusiasts from the amateur math world found each other. They discussed Goldbach's Conjecture with great gravity, like two farmers returning home with their hoes at dusk—the soybean seedlings had grown another notch; it was time. "Remember when I talked to you about Gödel's theorem?" "I remember." Back then I kept going to Fayuan Temple to see Miss Rocket Bear, and my brother would drag me into the meditation room behind the temple to ask about Gödel. "Old Zhang was researching that very thing. Based on a professor's work at Beijing Normal University." Old Zhang was hardcore, I marveled to myself. I still don't understand the details of that work to this day, but the idea can be described: through Gödel numbering, one can use a natural number system A to "talk about" a formal system B. Carefully design a coding scheme, and the Goldbach proposition in system A might correspond to a proposition in system B that "essentially" contains self-reference. This would prove that the Goldbach proposition is a Gödel sentence, and therefore it is "essentially" true! "What?" Miss Rocket Bear blinked her beautiful eyes. "What the hell?" I kissed her—the first and last time. "What is it, really?" Miss Rocket Bear nuzzled my stubbled chin with her nose.

I rubbed my nose, not knowing how to explain the Ge-Ba business. A wall of mathematics suddenly rose between us—abrupt, inexplicable—even though her chest was still brushing back and forth against mine. "Hey," I said, "I like you~" "What?" She stopped. "I don't know." "So then what? What happened after that?" I snapped out of my reminiscence. "One day when I showed up for work, I saw Old Zhang waving me over from a corner, wearing street clothes. Without his hat, his graying hair was showing. He gave me a copy of Tao Zhexuan's Measure Theory, and then he was about to leave." "Why would he give you Terence Tao's Measure Theory? That makes no sense." "We're both amateur mathematicians, and besides, I'd told him a few times I wanted to study measure theory. It was a self-printed, self-bound copy, covered in different handwritings, with the distinctive moldy marks of a basement. 'The basement is too damp, it got moldy. I don't have anything else to give you...' Old Zhang said to me." "I see. So why was he leaving?" "He fell asleep on duty and got caught red-handed by the boss. The boss said, 'Look at you, thinking you're hot stuff, reading some godforsaken math book. You're still just a dumb donkey.'" "That's way too harsh." My brother nodded. "No kidding. The boss also said—the boss was a woman, thin as a compass—'That said, who here treats you like a donkey? Am I right? Look at the mess you've made.'" "And then?" "Then he was fired." "Just like that?" "Just like that." I was furious. What the fuck—your story isn't even that good! This barely counts as a story! "I'm not done," my brother said, lighting a menthol cigarette. "Actually, I'm Old Zhang." "There is no Old Zhang. I am Old Zhang." My brother blew a smoke ring at the setting sun. "I packed up my personal belongings—not that there was much to pack—just grabbed my Zorich Mathematical Analysis and a half-bottle of erguotou, these two sleep-inducing companions, and walked through the dappled sunlight to the Beijing Forestry University bus stop. The sun was brilliant, not a cloud in the sky, the heavens clear to the bottom. Once again I felt that anywhere would do, any way would be fine, as long as this sunlight shone on my head, as long as I could wake from sweet dark sleep. On the bus, sunlight flowed through the glass like water, and youth sent ripples through the current of time." I wanted to say something, but in the end I didn't speak. My brother was quiet for a moment, then went on: "Back in the basement, lying down, I felt myself dissolving into the pages like a book melting into the rustling sea of basement microorganisms. But eventually I woke again, and the world was as dark as a dream—so dark I couldn't be entirely sure I'd woken at all, until I heard the sound of running water outside the door. A basement girl, not yet twenty, like a fresh mushroom, in her cartoon pajamas, brushing her teeth. Dawn must have broken, though her thick-soled slippers were absurdly large, and she walked as silently as an ancient forest. In the dimness she gargled tap water and cleaned her teeth, water droplets glinting pale on her slender neck. 'Morning, glasses boy,' she said, turning toward me with a Rocket Bear across her chest, gathering her hair like a mushroom. 'I gave up...' I murmured, averting my eyes from hers. Then I walked out into the drizzling rain to find a living." "What?" I asked my brother what he'd given up. He flicked his cigarette butt to the ground and gazed at the sunset as if asking heaven for five hundred more years. After a long while he finally spoke: "Goldbach's Conjecture."