The Mandelbrot Set

By Janet Burroway

Mandelbrot had an ass like a bifurcated cantaloupe, the two halves set side by side in the squishy paisley of his great room loveseat. Mandelbrot sat alone. His party furled around him, tinkling and chortling in the usual way; his choice of friends, his choice of rivals, half a gross of go-getters academic and political, divorcés, heirs and CEO’s, the crème de la Birmingham, Alabama, each with a murderous desire for the esteem of colleagues they found contemptible. A merry band!

Nearest him, the batch from neuroscience had got into celebrity sightings and couldn’t seem to find a way out. Franklin Yorke claimed to have bummed a light from Steve Martin in the lobby of the Lyric Hammersmith. Cantor Swinney had shared an elevator at the Hotel des Artistes with Francois Truffaut. Curvy Helga Koch had run into Dustin Hoffman in a hooded parka on Fifth Avenue, and in their moment of eye contact he had made a silent plea that she not blow his cover. She was proud to say that she had not. How they admired her! How they were invigorated to remember their moments with Debbie Reynolds, Dick Cavett, Doris Lessing, Henry Kissinger — not ten feet away in the street, the corridor, the bar, the dining room, the pool!

Mandelbrot alone sat despondent. A man of order and control. A man well known for his unflappable, imperturbable, slightly cynical take on the world (some said his raised eyebrow, the single wafting lock on top of his bald head put them in mind of Jack Nicholson); a worldly man, slightly jaded, something of a roué, a bit louche at worst, but through it all a mensch of regular habits, regular meals, regular bowels. Overwhelmed.

It was no one thing in particular. It was too much of everything. A cascade of last straws. Money, society, love, career, all just over the top of whelm, rendering his heart arrhythmic, his bladder in flood. Mandelbrot was overwhelmed with the futility of things. He thought of death. He! who had never given root-room to gout, hemorrhoids, hangover, peptic ulcer. Now he was aware of himself flaking off into the carpet, body ash and dandruff, psoriasis. He would flake away to nothing, so much organic gray confetti.

Mandelbrot was a flunky with a fancy handle, a monogrammable honorific; he was a Consultant, a Coordinator, an Associate, a Liaison. His job description said he had “primary responsibility for generating alumni enhancement and targeting growth potential in the community sector for developmental outcomes.” This meant it was up to him to squeeze ten million a year out of somebody other than the Boosters, who had their own deep pockets. For this he was paid like six professors and worth every shekel.

For Mandelbrot believed in the primacy of fundraising. Fundraising explained nothing in the world. Fundraising was a self-referential science and could not be valued in terms of its application. Mandelbrot was a number cruncher, one of the best. Of course he was. He could slip a digit or finesse a stat faster than the eye could see. He had begun in pure math and proceeded to impure math, his detractors argued. Nevertheless. Number crunching was a good thing, a move toward abstraction, which is the direction of human intellect. Mandelbrot was a master of the abstruse abstraction. He could go on and on. Of course I crunch numbers, Mandelbrot said; I keep them in the freezer and defrost them one at a time. He ground his teeth for illustration, for emphasis.

Therefore he had brought oodles and oodles of endowment into a system nearly strangled by the tight-assed Legislature. He had got trucking magnates to ante up. He had got pharmaceuticals to grant and frozen chickens to bequeath. He had milked the mega-dairies. He had tickled misers till their coins fell out.

But this year he had come up short. He had not taken it to the hoop. In truth, he was two million shy of the projected goal, and the fiscal year-end just three weeks away. Never had this to him before happened. He was in dutch with the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, the Provost, the President. He was their point guard off point. If he didn’t make up the deuce, his career would be on the downside, even the downsize! He would have the game to answer for.

This gig was a longshot. A last ditch. Based on no more than a titillating hint, offhandedly dropped by his beloved (!) Edie, that there might be a couple of mil untapped under the most unlikely mattress in mattressland. He had, it happens, rolled on that particular Dunlopillo — twice? three times? — how many! years ago? Which made it the trickier to dip into the kapok, so to speak. And yet, if Edie was right, it might yet prove the coup of coups, the coup de grace, the graceful coup. In any case it was already in progress, whatever it was, and must certainly run to its conclusion. Could he get up for it?

And then his marriage. Mariage! Mirage! In the area of interpersonal relations a little bravado had always been necessary — but sufficient. More than one woman had been polite about the size of his cock. More than one colleague had referred lip-smackingly to his trophy wife. Trophy! He might as well jerk off into the Ryder cup.

There she was, down the center of the room, the gorgeous Edie Mandelbrot née Lorenz, percolated into a satin strapless with, on each breast, a mad tendril of stitching no thicker than dental floss, swirling inward to nestle each nipple in an array of pastel colors. Booby colors. Edie scooped up a tray of canapés and insinuated them into a circle of investment bankers, lost her balance, juggled precariously a moment — almost lost it! — but contained, maintained. Laughed at self, deprecating, delicious. Even as he applauded her save, he imagined the stink of lox and capers in the carpet nap. Oh, Edie! If they only knew.

She was his third (the first had a Ph.D., the second money). A world class looker, flat bellied, bumptious ass, tits out to here with aureoles like taffy targets. Butterfly tattoo on her adorable trapezius. At night she wore underwire contraptions and bikini panties in startling colors like stained glass, and she was easy in them, sitting cross-legged on her pouf to dig at her toenails or standing at the foot of the bed hanging her weight on one foot, taunting, amused. Was that it? Was that the point: amused? Still, she took trouble. She took her time. The trouble was that he would have to close his eyes and imagine her doing what she was actually doing, maybe in the burgundy red outfit instead of the lime green. He had to fantasize her sucking while she sucked. In the fantasies she meant it. In reality she was dog-paddling, polishing silver, pulling on a joint. As soon as he got active she just lay there, a lump. Amused?

All sixteen belltones of Westminster Abbey sounded. Now Edie had rid herself of the tray and was crossing to the front door for the fortieth or fiftieth time, a waste of effort since everybody came in anyway. But his Edie, she would play the hostess. She passed in front of the aquarium wall, flicked a finger as usual at the seahorses, who tumesced for her, and opened wide the door. Tantara! Here she was (at Edie’s invitation), Helena Nagy, sleek in a floor length number, matte black panels falling plumb from a rhinestone cluster on each shoulder. And her young lover, according to Edie, who (Edie) had promised to spirit him (the young lover) away so he (Mandelbrot) could talk to her (Helena). Good God, a young giant, six foot twelve at least, a tumble of curly forelock and a wing chair’s worth of shoulder. Cheshire smile. (Helena must be fifty if she’s a day. He knew exactly. Fifty-two.) Bit of a dork, though. Made a show of bending over Edie’s hand, who giggled and managed with a modest twist of her body to make her tits still more strangely the center of attraction.

Helena Nagy was nervous. Even at this distance she signaled sex. She ground her shoulders prettily, palpated her own black silk lungs. Did not so much listen to the others’ prattle as auscultate it, ear pressed to the air in front of her. So: not wholly sanguine about appearing in public with her studly dalliance. In a state of turmoil, wanting but not wanting to be seen to want.

They three disappeared in the direction of the drink. Mandelbrot sat pat.

A complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time. Dissipation is an agent of order. Over the vastness of his great room Mandelbrot surveyed the situation of his own making. They were cultured guys and gals! Multi-cultured, too. A Pakistani horticulturist, a black Dean. A Representative of Latin extraction. A lady novelist! Mandelbrot himself boasted a Jew and an Arab in his ancestry, not that those two progenitors had ever met. This was his crowd as he had envisioned it, the clique he fantasized as a child in that dank Queens basement, looking up at the world through shit-colored glass. His place, cleanly constructed as geometry! Why did his vision fail him now? No sense to it. Yet mood is random. Here around him his chosen few seemed rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth; a social circle pitted, pocked, twisted, tangled, intertwined.

The neuroscientists, for example, couldn’t quit; any minute now they would self-destruct. Harvey Smale had seen Martin Amis jumping into a Jag in Atlanta! Frank Houthakker shared a first class flight with Larry Bird! Lori Crutchfield’s grandmother was second cousin to Louisa May Alcott! Their cigarette smoke curled toward the cathedral beams. The pendulum of the grandfather clock boomed back and forth.

An impossible thing had happened. At that last opening of the door a butterfly had got into the room. Wrong time of day, wrong setting, a mortal miscalculation for a Monarch. Mandelbrot snatched at it for an ugly omen. The butterfly passed before the aquarium, the grandfather clock, rose in a drift of smoke from Chris Sierpinski’s con mille amores and disappeared. The immediate effect was to get Mandelbrot off his ass. He lumbered up, a big man, no longer agile, and wended his way toward where he thought the wings had gone.

“Great Party, Benni!” Imelda Peano called. Mandelbrot flashed on her in some other elegant soirée, saying, “Oh, I knew Benni Mandelbrot quite well when he was alive.”

No sign of the butterfly. Maybe he imagined it. Mandelbrot was no lepidopterist (“I had lunch with Nabokov at Cornell!” claimed Guy Scholz hysterically), but he thought he knew a Monarch when he saw one. No sign, however.

Once up, Mandelbrot continued to amble through the topology of partydom. He wandered in oscillating isolation. He encountered dynamical systems, robust and strange. There was instability at every point. The senators’ aides were vying with each other on how many votes they could muster for the HMO’s. The religion people were falling over themselves for a handle on humility. The phenomenologist was pitting his claims for perception against the Marxist’s materialism. In the TV room a couple of tag-along teenagers were slopped in front of Blow-Up, immobile except that one foot of each was in competition for the hassock. On the screen the stills clicked forth one after the other in ascending scale. (Detail. Detail of detail. Detail of detail of detail. ) On the floor three pre-schoolers whacked each other with Barbie dolls. (What am I, a Day Care Center?) There was a dog, unfamiliar, scratching fleas that no doubt had other fleas to scratch. Free enterprise also displayed itself in a pair of red ants squaring off over a crumb of hot dog bun. Unbeknownst to Mandelbrot, under the parquet, two rival armies of termite were at work on the central joist.

“Great party, Mandelbrot!”

“Benni, it’s lovely here!”

Beset by random pressures, his trajectory took him past a voice just beyond the edge of recognition, clear in spite of the ice cubes clacking, the canapés gnashing, the decibelia of good times:

“…won’t be sitting so pretty this time next year.”

Who won’t? The remark had not been intended for his hearing. It cut. His heart in tachycardia, rat-a-tat, boomararaboom, Mandelbrot careered off toward the dining room.

And therefore encountered there the gorgeous three. Edie with her head atilt, radiant as a silver lining. The hunk towering and gesturing above his head with a slice of asparagus quiche as if he was about to slam dunk it. Helena Nagy against the pillar in a curve of question mark, a glass in one hand and a mini bottle of Perrier in the other.

She was very gone on the toy boy, that was apparent. She had the smell of sex on her, which is near enough the smell of terror. Internal, nay, subterranean agitation; a twitchy, musky lovely reek, exuding labyrinths. She hiccuped softly and stumbled on the vowel sounds of suffixes, certainlay, delightfoil. Ashamed of discovery — his, perhaps.

Or was it something else? She knew somehow that Mandelbrot planned to rob her pretty nest? Prey on her nest egg? Pry her fingers free? Would Edie have let something slip?

Not Edie, no. Here was Edie exuding nothing but hostessly luminosity. Helena you know, of course (of course!); and this is Mitchell Figginbaum. The hunk high-fived. The sleeve of his silky shirt was rolled up on a forearm like a hirsute two-by-four. Helena gave Mandelbrot a peck on the mandible.

“Helena,” he said. “Surely we can find you something more exciting than that to drink.”

“Oh, I’m easily excited,” she skittered. Then registered an unintended double-entendre? Colored, maybe. Recovered quickly. “These are my two best students, you know.” Blushed still more?

The situation was as follows: Edie had decided to improve herself via an Article and Essay Workshop. But would not insinuate herself into the U. at Birmingham lest others should think her nepotistical, Mandelbrot having some influence in that arena. Week after week she would rap out Personal Essays in the Persuasive or Descriptive mode, out of her repertoire of froufrou, trivia, trifles, furbelows and frivolalia. Week after week, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, she would hop in her sassy little teal green T-roof SRX and toodle off down the road to Hoover State. Young Figginhunk, her classmate, was also improving himself, being back from a comfortably warless stint in the U.S. Navy — spent, as far as Mandelbrot could ascertain, mostly on the Banzai Pipeline of Oahu. This world-experience rendered him, in Edie’s gleeful opinion, sufficiently sophisticated to be sex partner for Helena Nagy. Who, however, was looking a little scrawny about the neck if she didn’t mind his saying so (he did not say so).

“Edie is a natural ironist,” Helena said, and for a brief, mad second he imagined Edie ironing his shirts. Whereas — his mother had done all that, back in the basement in Queens — he would cut off his left pinkie before he’d subject his wife to such lumpen humiliation. We all suffer a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

He knew, however, where the picture came from. Mind trash, out of Edie’s closet-cleaning this afternoon. Christ! The bed stacked with six department stores’ worth of folded finery, every smidgeon paid for by yours truly the number-crunchateur. How did she find the time to sign the charge slips? “I didn’t know what to wear tonight, and I got into this,” she said. Helpless. Radiant. Awkward. The uncertainty principle has it that when you are observing a woman she is perforce not behaving normally.

Mandelbrot had no problem imagining Helena and Hunkenbaum in bed together. She was, as he recalled, quite frisky. (Or was that Fran Bourbaki?) What was harder to get his head around was the notion of Edie as Helena’s confidante. But it must be so. For not only did his wife know of this unseemly May-October liaison, she also knew that her teacher had two million stashed in Apple stock. An affaire may be gossip fodder, but financial affairs of that magnitude are classified. That Edie was the vault in which such knowledge had been deposited endeared her to him the more, if more were possible. Into the ears of babes!

The question was (that is, before the real question: could she be parted from it?): how had an ass. prof come by that amount? On her salary? Reparations? — Mandelbrot had suggested: she was a refugee. But no, Edie didn’t think so, just natural thrift. Helena never went anywhere. She didn’t spend anything to speak of. A raincoat was a major purchase, Edie said. Helena had her little cottage that she’d had built to her own quaint Euro design. But that was in the early seventies, and it was a squidge of a place on a pine scrub acre of outskirts. Can’t have cost very much. Lean living, then, leading to a fat portfolio, the same as he was always preaching to the BOR.

“Mitchell,” Edie-ever-the-hostess was saying, “Would you like to see the house?” Which left him free to interpose, “Helena, come take a look at my hibiscus.” And easy as taffy they pulled apart, the kiddies up the circular and the adults through the lanai.

Outside it was ravishing, Mandelbrot’s estate. Beemers and Royces, natty Infinity sunroofs lined the drive. The academics’ clunkers were exiled beyond the wall. This side, one Porsche, one Mercedes, one classic’57 Plymouth Fury, every boy’s dream, the get-a-girl car. Ah! In those days! You see that Fury over there? Get in.

“Shall we walk this way?” he now unctuously proposed.

The drive was low-lit with state-of-the-art twilight-sensitive coolie hats. Cedars had been topiaried into phalluses, uncircumcised. Behind the house, the garden was laid out as a giant paisley — “Did you know that the paisley shape derives from the mango?” — though of course it also suggested a pear, a teardrop, a human liver, a human heart. Viburnum hedges at hip-height outlined the shape over a lush acre, one end fat and the other coiled on itself. Inside that, a ruching of rose bushes in pink and red, then the walkway studded with mosaic in miniature paisley pattern, the beds of impatiens and hydrangeas, day lilies, calla lilies, hyacinth, hibiscus. Inside it all, the paisley of pool like a glittering jewel on a dinner ring. Tiles, half submerged, sported the seahorse motif again, picked out in chartreuse and cerulean glaze.

All this of course was surface. But Mandelbrot was deeply interested in surface.

Nor was this portion of the estate unpeopled, but callow bodies cracked the water, flapping, splashing. These were the fractious, fucktious, upwardly mobile silicon young. They had barely dipped a toe in divorce, betrayal, self-loathing, putrefaction. They trailed no real estate, they nursed no gall. They knew no erectile dysfunction. They had not been downsized! They wore bikinis, cutoffs, flattops, flipflops, toe rings, ankle bracelets. They were into marijuana instead of Marlboroughs. They were into Programming, gigabyte and megahertz variations. They were into Information Theory, Artificial Intelligence, media blitzen, Fuzzy Logic. They had so little history they couldn’t tell the difference between a room of one’s own and lebensraum.

“I wanted to mention…that I haven’t said anything to Edie about…” Mandelbrot resorted to aposiopesis.

“Of course not. What would be the point?” Helena fell into step.

“Well, I know you’re close.”

“I like her a lot. She makes me laugh.”

Laugh! Ironist! Amused? Mandelbrot would not pursue it. He had other fish to fry. “Well, in any case, it’s a long time since…”

“We were practically children then.”

An ironist? “Still, I remember…” He remembered nothing. Panic.

“I remember you called me girl.”

“Did I? Good God. Were you offended?”

“I don’t remember.”

A young woman in vermillion hair said hotly to a balding boy, “I don’t get why you’re so big on the standard toolbar!”

They did not pause to hear the mystery solved.

“I gather,” said Helena, “that you haven’t read her pieces? She does domestic comedy in the Benchley-Bombeck range. The fleas of life, that sort of thing. She may be shy about showing them to you.”

Edie shy! “Why? This comedy is at my expense?”

“Not at all, not at all.” The suggestion made her hyperventilate. “I was thinking she should record a few and try them at NPR.”

They mounted the gazebo with the onion top. Billows of cloud burbled up in the night sky, complex edifices without a hint of random. Giant water oaks forked and branched and twigged and leaved and veined.

All dross. All dross.

Under normal circumstances he would have psyched himself for some special spiel. Aimed just at her. He tried to remember something about their couple of — three? — nights together — how long? ago! She was frisky, right? Feisty. No? Tender. Athletic, perhaps. He couldn’t quite bring it back. This being the case, he heaved his breath up in his deflated lungs and launched into a generic.

“Helena. If you could do one thing for young people today, what would it be?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Perhaps you should. You know there’s an information revolution going on. Our world is going to change in ways you and I cannot imagine.”

“Oh, yes, we’re going to die. It’s famously difficult to imagine.”

“Helena!” This was zigging into the undergrowth. He zagged. “It’s well known you’re one of the most dedicated teachers in the system. Edie says…” Panic. Invention flagged. Mandelbrot had an extensive command of phatic phrases. He could filibuster a vapor out of a void. But he needed some nouns, however abstract! Some verbs, preferably passive! Whereas he hadn’t the remotest recollection what Edie said about Helena, except that somehow she still snagged the studs and that she had stashed away in stock the precise amount of his shortfall. “…the young adore you. That must be what has kept you so young yourself.”

“On the contrary, Benni, I’ll tell you why teachers get burned out. If you’re raising a child, everything that happens is a phase. You don’t know what you’re doing because you’re always doing something new. But when you teach Freshman comp, it’s like taking care of an eight year old, and then an eight year old, and then an eight year old…”

“I see.”

“…and an eight year old, and an eight year old, and an eight year old, and an eight year old, and an eight year old….”

“I see!” he said with some vehemence. A gross misstep, that, vehemence toward a mark. Not that he thought of her as a mark. “Edie tells me…” he paused, more confident. This was what he did remember. “I’ve always been an IBM man myself, but Edie tells me you’re into Apple.” She looked at him. Behind her head a giant water oak branched and twigged. “An Apple for the teacher,” he grinned.

“The life has its rewards, I grant you that.”

Mandelbrot grinned anew and moved his elbow just discretely in the direction of a rib-dig. “I think you’re pretty well rewarded one way and another, eh?”

“How so?”

“Well, that’s a helluva good looking young man you’ve got in tow.”

She gave him a funny look. Compassionate, something of that nature. Pitying, in that ballpark. Possibly exasperated.

“You can say what you like” (said Mandelbrot, who was not saying exactly what he liked, but was wiggling on the hook while trying with unaccustomed incompetence to set the hook), “you can say what you like, but there’s something special about the young.”

She looked uncomfortable. Splotchy. A possibility of tic. A sidelong skittering glance. “Oh, I don’t know, Benni,” she sighed. Sick at ease, it seemed! Caught out robbing the cradle — was that so blooming bad? Better than grave robbing, ha ha! Hadn’t she been a lot looser in days of yore, a bit of a flybynight, a bit of social butterfly, a happy hippie? So changed? that she couldn’t tweak to a hunk without this display of discombobulation? “There was a day I realized I‘d been pulling backward, trying to be one of them. And it came to me that I was done with all that. I like the look of the young, but I no longer want to be one.”

This was off-kilter, somehow. There was an undertext. She eyed him strangely.

She looked out over the rough air of the bodies plashing. “You and I haven’t always picked the most suitable companions.”

This was a strange confession. “Lieutenant Figginbaum, I presume.”

“I’m sorry, Benni.”

Good God, what was she sorry for? She couldn’t imagine that he’d descend to jealousy after all these years, a man of his experience. “I can handle it.”

“I’m glad. To be honest, none of us were sure.”

This tickled him. Or, no, his stomach tickled; there was a hint of butterflies. He decided to be blunt. He was blunt. “You are having an affair with young Mitchell.”

“Oh! No, Benni. I’m not. I’m sorry.” She didn’t look sorry. She looked suddenly composed. She looked briefly toward the road. What did she look? Relieved. Absolved. “Dear Benni. I’m so sorry.”

Understanding comes as a form of chaos. It may begin with no more disturbance than the sand-flick of a seahorse at the bottom of the sea. But it increases with the tide. Even as he saw again in his mind’s eye the folded stacks of all she owned, there was disturbance in front of the house. A friction of fractal surfaces where the rubber met the road. Mandelbrot observed, at the crest of the drive, the little teal SRX tilt and hover. He couldn’t see the driver’s side, but out of the passenger window stuck a hairy arm, hooked over the roof in a j-shot. The T-roof hung there, revved. And ran.

Still — he would not let the knowledge break over him, not yet. He held the swell at the moment just before the whitecap crowns. He had always been interested in this moment, in the abstract. Philosophically. Scientifically. The calm before the storm. That second of hesitation before the donor bends to sign. The moment the diver bounces from the board and hangs outstretched. Michael Jordan treading air. Baryshnikov in flight. Not yet!

“You have Apple stock!” he asserted.

Helena furrowed, squinted. “I do?”

“Edie told me you’d invested in MacIntosh.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes. Was that indiscreet?”

“It seems a bit — arbitrary.”

“It’s true, though?”

“For what it’s worth.”

“Quite a lot, I’d have thought, depending when you acquired it.”

“Well, for me it’s an extravagance. But Edie convinced me it was an investment. A real Burberry, shipped from Regent Street, with a zip-out lining.”

“Say what?” he said.

“My new macintosh.”

They wagged their heads this way and that.
Edie was still standing in his mind’s eye among the folded clothes. Holding an angora sweater studded with a sequin paisley. No, seahorse. Butterfly? He remembered thinking that it was an odd time to sort out her closet, when the guests would be arriving in a few hours. He remembered rationalizing, then, that, anyway, the do was catered, the housecleaning was accounted for, the pool man had been and gone, the florist that very moment at work among the baby’s breath. Edie was free of any need but to make herself sartorially scrumptious.

Now the wave crested. Now the surf churned. The macintosh was a cheap shot! A superficial culture clash! A minor mistranslation! But Edie stood among the silken stacks. Flustered. Footing something away beneath the bed, perhaps. The suitcase surely.

She wasn’t sorting; she was packing.

She wasn’t on a joy-ride, she was gone.

The surface of the human lungs is so fabulously folded, richly textured and enribbed, that its area approximates that of a tennis court. Mandelbrot was deeply interested in this surface at the moment. Mandelbrot wheeled and navigated the gazebo steps. He lunged for breath.

At the whiff of oxygen, synapses fired. The dendrites branched and put forth feelers, electrical impulses leapt from place to place such as universally happens when someone is in the process of learning something. The limbic system took up the alarm. The nerves sent signals through the gateways, making spasm in the muscles, clenching at the valves.

“Benni?”

He staggered up the path and past the tumbling tots of darkness. He gained the great room and flung back the door. There they all were, his set, his sidekicks, his society. Revealed to him for what they were. Quicksand. Offal. Carrion. Every one of them divorced, lapsed, terminated, corrupted, stuck. Not one among the mahogany and naugahyde who had not adulterously boffed some other, diddled this one on stock options, been screwed by that on a land deal, had fingers in till, nose up ass, tongue on boot, foot in mouth, hand on heart, heart in throat, heart on sleeve, heart in the wrong (!) place.

He may have seen the Monarch feebly flapping at the glass. Or that flutter may have battened on his chest wall from inside. You can’t always be stopping to figure out the source of turbulence! He stumbled on and up.

“Benni, Benni?” Helena was his black wake. He fumbled at the bedroom door and achieved the walk-in, the stagger-in. The shelves were nearly empty, but you couldn’t tell what had been taken because on the Axminster was dumped a mini-mountain of her stuff, the fulgent rubbish of a promising career in Consumerism. Even as he breathed in silken, woolen, flaxen reek, the hillock seemed to shift and body forth a flock of moths. Flock — nay — a company! A host!

“Are you…?” Helena was frowning at him prodigiously. What he would never learn (and how much time was there left to learn?) because he would never ask (or because Helena wouldn’t say, or both. Whatever!) was to what degree she was part of the plan and to what degree an innocent bystander. How much of the joke she was in on and how much a victim of it.

Edie! Edie!

According to Gleick, three tiny parachutes make up the gauzy heart valve. Luminous, they fold aside. In the His-Pukinje network, that ordered wilderness of paths, that methodical tanglement, the pumping chambers left and right coordinate their rhythm. The whoop and suck, the surf and tide, the stretch and squeeze of blood percusses from one side to another, and back, and through; the fluid pounds and whirls. Like earthquakes, like the stock market, the frequency spectrum of heartbeat timing is subject to fractal law. Many are the pathologies of arrhythmia: electrical alternans, ectopic beats, torsades de pointes, high grade block and escape patterns, atrial parasystole pure or modulated; Wenckebach rhythms simple or complex.

The most common of these is tachycardia leading to ventricular fibrillation. But there is absolutely no predicting when or whether this sequence will occur. The wave does not always crest. The storm does not always break. The Nasdaq skids in the snowbank, which may or may not avalanche.

Helena was leaning toward him. A halo of moth dust hung around her.

He saw himself reiterated, diminished, in the pupil of her eye. “Benni? Shall I get somebody?”

Somebody? Such as…?

Going, going, going. Oh, my heart!

“The Mandelbrot Set” appeared first in Five Points Magazine, and subsequently in Pushcarts Prizes XXII. Great Jones Street is grateful for permission to reprint.

Editor’s note: To support writers like Janet, please click the green heart below and follow the Great Jones Street publication. Thanks.

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children’s books, and eight novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review), and most recently Bridge of Sand. Her plays have received readings and productions in Chicago, New York, London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her Writing Fiction, now in its ninth edition, is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and Imaginative Writing is in its fourth edition. She is author of the memoir Losing Tim (Think Piece Press, 2014). Winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council, she is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.