Mathematics Made Simple

A WRITER'S WIT
Every day of my childhood, when I woke up for school, I’d glimpse Pablo Neruda’s house through my bedroom window, high up on one of Valparaíso’s fifty hills. Today, that house has become a museum, named after the poet, that attracts tourists from all over the world . . . [his] poems, many of them  born in his Valparaíso home, were a source of inspiration for many people as they fought the dictatorship and strove to create a more just society. As his Valparaíso neighbor, I owed Don Pablo a novel that portrayed his full being.
Roberto Ampuero, Author of The Neruda Case
Born February 20, 1953

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Abbott Miller

February 22, 2016, Don DeLillo, “Sine Cosine Tangent”: As one who never advances through the study of mathematics to enroll in trigonometry, I am forced to research the three common terms in the title of DeLillo’s story. They provide a certain frame or form, I believe, for this retrospective narrative of a boy, his mother, and his father: sine, cosine, and tangent, respectively. (I could be wrong; I never was any good at math.)
 
DeLillo is a master in so many ways, a wordsmith whose prose is rather straightforward and simple, except when his character is exploring the meaning of words:

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“Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. ‘Coarse woman, a shrew.’ I had to look up ‘shrew.’ ‘A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.’ I had to look up ‘shrewmouse.’ The book sent me back to ‘shrew, sense 1.’ A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up ‘insectivorous.’ The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for ‘insect,’ plus the Latin vorus, for ‘vorous.’ I had to look up ‘vorous’” (61).

The narrator thinks in strands of time that seem to wash over one another in waves. He’s thirteen. He’s fourteen. He’s in college. But not necessarily in that order do these events occur.
 
As a victim of his parents’ divorce, the narrator returns to the triangle again and again: his mother studies Portuguese in high school; it advances her professionally because she is able to communicate with Brazilian clients in her firm. His father, who leaves when the narrator is thirteen, can be seen on national TV and on the cover of Newsweek as a wizard of finance. The boy develops a limp when he is fourteen, an affectation that is designed to win him sympathy, but it only sets him farther apart from his peers—which may be his subliminal goal after all.
 
DeLillo’s wretched yet beautiful mathematical formula is repeated over and over again until one day the narrator calls home, only to be told by a neighbor that his mother has suffered a stroke.

“Ordinary moments make the life. This was what she knew to be trustworthy, and this was what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past, and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define ‘lint,’ I tell myself. Define ‘time,’ define ‘space’” (65).

Sine. Cosine. Tangent.
 
The author’s novel Zero K is due out in May of this year.
Design By Abbott Miller

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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