An Abundance of Katherines (11 page)

When Colin finished laughing, he placed his hand on top of Lindsey’s. It stayed there for a moment, and he could feel the worn place on her thumb where she nibbled at it. He pulled his hand away after a moment and said, “My Theorem will tell the story. Each graph with a beginning and a middle and an end.”

“There’s no romance in geometry,” Lindsey answered.

“Just you wait.”

The Beginning (of the Middle)

He never thought much about Katherine I. He only felt upset about the breakup because that’s what you’re
supposed
to feel. Little kids play house; they play war; they play relationships. I want to go with you; you dumped me; I’m sad. But none of it was really real.

Because Katherine’s dad was Colin’s tutor, Colin and Katherine continued to see each other periodically over the next several years. They got along well—but it’s not like he burned with longing for her. He didn’t miss her enough to become obsessed with her name, to date her namesakes over and over and over and over
⁵²
again.

And yet, that’s what happened. It didn’t seem willful at first—it was just a series of odd coincidences. It just kept happening: he’d meet a Katherine, and like her. She’d like him back. And then it would end. And then, after it ceased being mere coincidence, it just became two streaks—one (dating Katherines) he wished to keep, and one (getting dumped by them) he wished to break. But it proved impossible to divorce one cycle from the other. It just kept happening to him, and after a while it felt almost routine. Each time, he’d cycle through feelings of anger, regret, longing, hope, despair, longing, anger, regret. The thing about getting dumped generally, and getting dumped by Katherines in particular, was how utterly
monotonous
it was.

That’s why people grow weary of listening to Dumpees obsess over their troubles: getting dumped is predictable, repetitive, and boring. They want to stay friends; they feel smothered; it’s always them and it’s never you; and afterward, you’re devastated and they’re relieved; it’s over for them and just starting for you. And to Colin’s mind, at least, there was a deeper repetition: each time, Katherines dumped him because they just didn’t
like
him. They each came to precisely the same conclusion about him. He wasn’t cool enough or good-looking enough or as smart as they’d hoped—in short, he didn’t matter enough. And so it happened to him again and again, until it was boring. But monotony doesn’t make for painlessness. In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting.

ten

The next morning, Colin felt tired enough to sleep through the rooster’s squawking until eight. When he made his way downstairs, he found Hollis wearing a hot pink muumuu, passed out on the couch with papers strewn across her chest and the floor. Colin walked softly past her, and thought to add “muumuu” to his mental list of unanagrammable words.

Hassan sat in the kitchen, eating oatmeal and scrambled eggs. Without speaking, he handed Colin a note written on stationery embossed with the words HOLLIS P. WELLS / CEO & PRESIDENT, GUTSHOT TEXTILE:

 
Boys,

I’m probably sleeping, but hopefully y’all got up on time. You need to be down at the factory by 9. Ask for Zeke. I listened to your interview with Starnes—it’s good work, but I’ve changed my mind about some things. At six hours per person, we’ll never get through the whole town. I’d like you only to ask the following four questions: Where would you live if you could live anywhere? What would you do for a living if you didn’t work for the factory? When did your people come to the country? and What do you think makes Gutshot special? I think that’ll move things along nicely. They’re expecting you at the factory. Lindsey will accompany you.

See you tonight. Hollis.

P.S. I’m writing this note at 5:30 A.M., so don’t wake me up.

“Nice bedhead, by the way,
kafir
. You look like you stuck a fork in a light socket.”

“Did you know that in 1887, Nikola Tesla’s hair stood on end for an entire week after he passed fifty thousand volts through his body to prove that elec—”

“Kafir,”
Hassan said, putting his fork down on his plate. “Absolutely, completely not interesting. Now if Nikola Tesla, whoever the hell that is, had a long-term love affair with a one-legged chicken, and his chicken-lust made his hair stand on end—then, yes, by all means, share with me this bounty of hilarious history. But not electricity,
kafir
. You know better.”
⁵³

Colin searched through a labyrinth of cabinets for a plate, a cup, and some silverware. He scooped eggs from the frying pan onto a plate and poured himself water through the fancy push-this-lever-and-water-comes-out refrigerator.

“How are the eggs?” asked Hassan.

“Good, dude. Good. You’re a good cook.”

“No shit. That’s how Daddy got so fat. By the way, I’ve decided to start referring to myself exclusively as ‘Daddy.’ Everytime Daddy would otherwise say ‘I’ or ‘Me,’ Daddy is now going to say ‘Daddy.’ You like?”

“Oh, yes. I love.”

“Love what?” asked Lindsey Lee Wells as she came into the living room wearing her paisley pajamas, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Colin noticed she looked different, but not quite how, and then he saw it. No makeup. She looked prettier than she ever had before—Colin always preferred girls without makeup.

Colin sneezed, and then noticed that Princess was following in Lindsey’s wake. XIX had a dog, too—a miniature dachshund named Fireball Roberts.

No one looked more beautiful without makeup than Katherine. She never wore it, and never needed to. God, her blond hair in her face when the wind blew as they walked by the lake after school; the corners of her eyes crinkling when he first said “I love you”; the speed and assured softness with which she had replied, “And I love you.” All roads led to her. She was the nexus of all the connections his brain made—the wheel’s hub.

When Colin looked up, Lindsey was reading the note from Hollis. “Christ, I guess I better get some pants on, then,” she said.

 
They piled into the Hearse after Lindsey successfully called shotgun. At the front door of Gutshot Textiles, they were met by a large man with a beard like Santa Claus’s but browner.

He hugged Lindsey with one arm, saying, “How’s my girl?” and she said, “I’m a’ight. How’s my Zeke?” He laughed. He shook Hassan’s hand, then Colin’s. Zeke walked them past a very loud room where machines seemed to smack against each other and into a room with a small brown plastic sign that read, THE STARNES WILSON BREAK ROOM.

Colin put the tape recorder down on a coffee table. The room seemed to have been furnished with stuff that employees could no longer bear to keep in their homes: a stomach-bile-yellow corduroy couch, a couple of black leather chairs with foam peeking out from innumerable cracks, and a Formica dining room table with six chairs. Above two vending machines hung a portrait of Elvis Presley that had been painted on velvet. Colin, Lindsey, and Hassan took the couch and Zeke sat in one of the leather chairs. Before they could even start asking their questions from Hollis, Zeke started talking.

“Hezekiah Wilson Jones, aged forty-two, divorced, two sons aged eleven and nine, Cody and Cobi, both on the honor roll. I was raised up in Bradford and moved here when I was thirteen on account of how my dad lost his gas station in a poker game—which is the kinda shit that happened to my old man regularly. He took a job at the factory. Started working here myself in the summers during high school and went full-time the day after I graduated. Worked here ever since. I’ve worked the line; I’ve worked quality control; and now I’m the day shift plant manager. What we do here, boys, is we take cotton—usually from Alabama or Tennessee.” He stopped then and reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out an aluminum square. He unwrapped it, popped a square piece of chewing gum in his mouth and started talking again. “I quit smoking eleven years ago and still chew this Nicorette, which tastes like shit and ain’t cheap either. Don’t smoke. Now, the plant.” For the next twenty minutes, Zeke walked them through the process of how cotton becomes string, and how those strings are then cut by a machine to a length of exactly two and one-eighth inches, and then how those strings are shipped off. A quarter of them, he said, get shipped directly to their biggest client, STASURE Tampons, and the rest go to a warehouse in Memphis and from there head out into the world of tamponery.

“Now, I got to get back to work, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to send in some people for twenty minutes, for their break, and you can ask them questions. You got any questions for me, by the way?”

“Yes, actually,” said Hassan. “Where would you live if you could live anywhere; what would you do for a living if you didn’t work for the factory; when did your people come to the country—wait you already answered that; and what do you think makes Gutshot special?”

Zeke pulled his bottom lip tight against his teeth, sucking on the Nicorette. “I’d live here,” he said. “If I didn’t work for the factory, I’d work for another one, probably. But maybe I’d start a tree-trimming business. My ex-brother-in-law’s got one, and he does right well. And what makes it special? Well, shit. For starters, our Coke machine is free. Just push the button, and Coke comes out. They ain’t got that at most jobs. Plus we got ourselves the lovely Miss Lindsey Lee, which most every town does not. All right, y’all. I’ve gotta get to work.”

The moment Zeke left, Lindsey stood up. “This has been a blast, boys, but I’m going to walk to the store and go stare dreamily into the eyes of my boyfriend. Pick me up at five-thirty, okay?” And then she was gone. For a girl who’d be in deep shit if Colin or Hassan ratted her out to Hollis, Lindsey seemed quite confident.
And that
, Colin found himself thinking,
must mean that we are friends
. Almost by accident, and in just two days, Colin had made his second-ever friend.

Over the course of the next seven hours, Colin and Hassan interviewed twenty-six people, asking them all the same four questions. Colin listened to people who wanted to make a living with chain-saw sculpture or teaching elementary school. He found it mildly interesting that almost all of the interviewees said that of all the places in the world, they—just like Lindsey Lee Wells—would want to stay in Gutshot. But since Hassan asked most of the questions, Colin was free to focus in on his Theorem.

He remained convinced that romantic behavior was basically monotonous and predictable, and that therefore one could write a fairly straightforward formula that would predict the collision course of any two people. But he was worried that he might not be enough of a genius to make the connections. He just couldn’t imagine a way to correctly predict the other Katherines without screwing up the ones he’d already gotten down pat. And for some reason, his feared lack of genius made him miss K-19 more than he had since his face was pressed flat against his bedroom carpet. The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much—and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn’t there can hurt you.

 
At four-thirty, a woman walked in and announced she was the last uninterviewed employee of Gutshot Textiles currently at work. She removed a pair of thick gloves, blew her bangs up into the air with a puff of breath, and said, “They say one of you is a genius.”

“I’m not a genius,” Colin said dispassionately.

“Well, you’re the closest thing I’ve got and I’ve got a question. How come the shower curtain always blows in when the water should be blowing it out?”

“That,” Hassan acknowledged, “is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the human condition.”

“Actually,” Colin said, “I know.” Colin smiled. It felt good to be useful again.

“No!” Hassan said. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. What happens is the water spray creates a vortex, kind of like a hurricane. And the center of the vortex—the eye of the hurricane—is a low-pressure area, which sucks the shower curtain in and up. This guy did a study on it. Honestly.”

“Now,
that
,” Hassan said, “is
really
interesting. It’s like there’s a little hurricane in every shower?”

“Exactly.”

“Wow,” said the woman. “I’ve been wondering that my whole life. Well, okay. So my name’s Katherine Layne. I’m twenty-two, been working here ten months.”

“Wait, how do you spell that?” Hassan asked.

“K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e L-a-y-n-e.”

“Uh-oh,” mumbled Hassan. She was quite attractive now that Colin took a look at her. But no. Colin didn’t like Katherine Layne. And it wasn’t the age gap. It was K-19. Colin knew the situation was dire, indeed, when he could sit across from a perfectly nice and attractive (and sexily older!) Katherine without feeling even the smallest hint of enchantment.

 
They left after interviewing Katherine Layne. They drove around in Satan’s Hearse for a while, getting good and lost with the windows rolled down, driving down a two-lane highway toward absolutely nothing. They listened to a country radio station turned up so loud that the twangs of steel guitars were distorted in the Hearse’s old speakers. When they could catch on to the chorus, they sang loud and off-key and didn’t give a shit. And it felt so good to sing with those trumped-up, hound-dog country accents. Colin felt sad, but it was an exhilarating and infinite sadness, like it connected him to Hassan and to the ridiculous songs and mostly to her, and Colin was shouting, “Like Strawwwwwberry Wine,” when all of a sudden he turned to Hassan and said, “Wait, stop here.” Hassan pulled over on the gravel shoulder of the road and Colin hopped out and pulled out his telephone.

“What are you doing?” asked Hassan from the driver’s seat.

“I’m going to walk out into that field until I get cell reception and I’m going to call her.”

Hassan began pounding his head rhythmically against the steering wheel. Colin turned away. As he walked out into the field, he heard Hassan shout, “Dingleberries!” But Colin kept walking. “Daddy is leaving you here if you take one more step!” Colin took one more step, and behind him, he heard the car start. He didn’t turn around. He heard the tires spinning in the gravel, and then they caught onto the asphalt, and Colin heard the rumble of the eternally struggling engine grow distant. After five minutes of walking, he found a spot where he had okay reception. It was awfully quiet.
Chicago only gets this quiet when it snows
, he thought. And then he flipped open the phone, pressed the voice button, and said “Katherine.” He said it softly, reverently.

Five rings and then her voice mail.
Hey, it’s Katherine
, he heard, and in the background cars rushed by. They’d been walking home together from the RadioShack
⁵⁴
when she recorded the message.
I’m not, uh
. And she uhed, he remembered, because he’d goosed her butt as she tried to talk.
Uh, at my cell phone, I guess. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back
. And he remembered everything about it, and also everything about everything else, and why couldn’t he forget and
beep
.

“Hey, it’s Col. I’m standing in a soybean field outside of Gutshot, Tennessee, which is a long story, and it’s hot, K. I’m standing here sweating like I had hyperhidrosis, that disease where you sweat a lot. Crap. That’s not interesting. But anyway, it’s hot, and so I’m thinking about cold to stay cool. And I was remembering walking through the snow coming back from that ridiculous movie. Do you remember that, K? We were on Giddings, and the snow made it so quiet, I couldn’t hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it’s hot, and dead quiet again, and I love you still.”

Five minutes later, he was trudging back when his phone began vibrating. He raced back to the spot with good reception and, breathless, answered.

“Did you listen to the message?” he asked immediately.

“I don’t think I need to,” she answered. “I’m sorry, Col. But I think we made a really good decision.” And he didn’t even care to point out that
they
hadn’t made a decision, because the sound of her voice felt so good—well, not good exactly. It felt like the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans
, the fear and the fascination. The great and terrible awe.

“Did you tell your mom?” he asked, because her mom had loved him. All moms loved him.

“Yeah. She was sad. But she said you always wanted to be attached to my hip, which wasn’t healthy.”