Ratio

Ratio Tile is at wit’s end—or, more precisely, quite a ways beyond wit’s end, and frantically in search of things besides wit to get to the end of. He’s sitting here on the bed in his and Jorge’s quarters, laptop in lap, one arm around Jorge’s warm curled-up form, which is the position he’s been in for a lot of the last 36 hours. There is nothing to do, and nothing to say, and Ratio doesn’t like that one bit.

The reintegration has left Jorge an emotional wreck. Not through any direct harm associated with the event itself, as Ratio had initially feared, but through good old ordinary grief. Unlike so many others on the Sphere, who’d found this desolate place the logical conclusion of a series of retreats from the human world, Jorge had come here with deep ties remaining: to his parents, to his brother and sister. As a fresh-faced mechanical whiz, a young man whose head danced with visions of vast furnaces, boiler rooms, Rube Goldberg contraptions that worked, he had jumped at the chance, three years ago, to work on the coolest project on the globe. He had left his family without even thinking it might be for the last time, and the parting was tearful anyway. In the years he’s been down here, Jorge has gotten used to the fact that he’s not an eccentric or an isolate in the way so many Sphere-dwellers are. He’s taken in stride the sort of people who dreamed from early childhood of seclusion at the bottom of the sea. But he had never bargained for this. Now his family is gone, now everything is gone, now there is nothing or no one left but these bottom-feeders.

Jorge made this all more or less clear to Ratio in the first few hours since Ratio, hungover beyond description, stumbled back into their quarters. The rest of the last 36 hours has consisted of a succession of embarrassing, unsuccessful attempts on Ratio’s part to somehow ease Jorge’s pain, ending in the present, dejected stalemate.

Ratio does not like feeling useless, and he does not like feeling like Jorge resents him, and for the moment both things are true and apparently unfixable. Ratio’s cast of mind leads him to see a partner’s grief, like all other things, as a decision problem in which he must find the optimal choice. There must be right words, magic phrases, which even if they lack the power to whisk grief away—Ratio’s not that naive—are at least definitely best, definitively the right response. And so Ratio has tried to suss out the contours of the problem, to look for weak points in the formidable armor of Jorge’s grief, to find suboptimalities and exploit them. He has tried to say what some rarely considered part of his mind tells him are the things he’s “supposed to say.” For instance: “I’m sorry,” or “this must be so hard for you,” or “I just want you to know I’m here for you.” Jorge has received these cliches with a pitiless gaze for which Ratio cannot blame him.

Ratio finds this all very frustrating out of empathy, yes, but also—he admits to himself—because his cast of mind abhors an unsolvable problem. He is clearly saying and doing the wrong things, and for the concept of “wrong things” to be meaningful, there must be “right things,” and yet what could they be? Nothing he can do will bring Jorge’s family back.

Ratio is shaken because he feels out of his element. He hates feeling this way; it’s been part of his overall approach for many years now, part of the overall approach that endears some to him and pushes others away, that problems are soluble, and that their solution should be approached by plodding up whatever his mind tells him is the direction of fastest improvement. Ratio remembers the dark days of early childhood when he was nearly kicked out of school for steadfastly refusing to do his math homework, a set of tasks which seemed to his cast of mind so pointless and arbitrary as to approach a kind of blasphemy. Instead he spent his classroom days gazing out the window, envisioning spaceships in combat, and scribbling page after page of what looked like gibberish. He was saved only when the sum total of a semester’s scribblings was revealed—in a fortuitous run-in with the school’s most well-educated teacher—to be a complete re-derivation of the differential and integral calculus, a quest Ratio had embarked upon after being told to compute the area of a triangle and wondering what was so special about triangles, anyway. This was Ratio’s vindication: an assurance, from the highest authority figure in the vicinity, that the same Rational mind that preferred space battles to math homework was in some way in tune with the deepest ways of the world. And from then it was onwards and upwards, towards deep and fundamental physics, and finally towards pneuma science, that final vindication, psychology mathematicized, the heart made Rational.

But there is nothing in pneuma science that can help him heal his lover’s wounded pneuma, and all the inadequacies of the child who could not—could not!—do his math homework seem to have returned to stalk him here. He has been reduced to a warm doll, his most reliable function to hold Jorge’s limp body in his arms, his silence a clear improvement over his inept attempts at helpful speech.

Ratio understands Jorge’s undauntable and untamable sense of humor, his wonderful ruthless tendency to drive to the heart of an issue when anyone else would be too polite to, the way this leads to long spiraling conversations he could have with no one else. He understands Jorge’s chiseled beard, the way Jorge’s toned physique feels against his own nerdy pudge. But he is realizing, now as never before, that there are aspects of Jorge that he doesn’t understand at all. That Jorge has known this all along, has resigned himself to it, has never expected Ratio to understand.

Ratio thinks back to their first meeting: alone in an elevator at mid-floornight with this sweaty giant, just back from some dreadfully necessary task in the lower half of the Sphere, Ratio had said without thinking, “you look like a man who could use a drink.” It was really just an observation—his limited repertoire of social skills kicking in, looking for a thing to say to a companion on a long elevator ride. But Jorge had in fact been a man who needed a drink, and Ratio had just, by accident, asked someone out on a date for the first and (as yet) last time ever. They had stayed at the bar until floordawn, quickly recognizing the kind of unexpected kinship that needed no alcohol to sustain itself, getting lost in conversations that went too far, too fast, no joke without serious potential, conversations that went all the way to the calculus when someone else might have been satisfied with one half base times height.

Now, though, Jorge clearly does not want a conversation that goes too far. He slumps, unmoving, Ratio hugging him reluctantly, using his other hand to prod idly at the laptop, checking his email again and again, waiting for news from the wide and mostly undiscovered globe. What can Ratio do? More and more, as the hours have drawn on, he’s had to be satisfied with doing nothing. So here he sits, defeated. (And beside him, Jorge slumps, much more than defeated.)