Cherif says that when he was a little kid, he thought that your heartbeat was caused by a bumblebee punching a speed bag inside your body. He doesn’t feel any kind of remorse for this, even when I told him he must have been a pretty stupid kid. I said, “that’s ridiculous; were you on cocaine or something?” and to my surprise he said no. He estimates that he must have been four or five years old when he thought this thought. He says that it was a rational thing to deduce given the information and experience he had at the time, but I wasn’t so sure about that, so I decided to ask master logician Kurt Gdel.

I first met Kurt in Vienna in 1933, when he was presenting his paper on the Incompleteness Theorum. At the time, Kurt was a ballsy newcomer with a reputation for not taking shit off of anybody when it came to proving and disproving things about axiomatic systems using axioms from that system, and while his maverick approach ruffled a few feathers, he got things done. I had heard stories about him, like how he flipped a bird to the camera on his faculty portrait, and threatened to punch anyone who took it down from the wall of the Mathematics department at the University of Vienna. I said, this guy is all right.

After the conference, I approached him.
“Nice theory,” I said.
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
“It’s total bullshit, obviously.”
“Hey, fuck you,” he said.

After that I bought him a drink and we were good friends. When the Nazis killed his brother I helped smuggle him through Russia and into Japan, where he eventually made his way to the United States. The war made it difficult to keep in touch, and after a while we lost track of each other. So it goes.

But I felt sure that if anybody could resolve the question of whether Cherif’s assumptions about the cardiovascular system were based on reason or on childish naivety, it would be my old buddy Gdel.

Cherif and I hopped on the jet and landed in New Jersey. A driver took us to Princeton, to the last address at which I knew Kurt had lived. It was drizzling as we stood on the porch and listened to the engine of the limousine idle. I stabbed the doorbell again and Cherif rubbed the bridge of his nose. Finally, we heard footsteps coming down a staircase and the door opened. It was a young woman.

“Oh, hello,” she said, a little surprised.
“We’re sorry to bother you, ma’am, but we’re looking for an old friend, Kurt Gdel.”
“Yes, I’m his grand-daughter,” said the woman, who was pretty.
“Can we speak to him?”
“I’m, I’m sorry,” she said, “grandfather passed away twenty-five years ago, he starved himself to death because he thought people were trying to poison him.”
A little surprised by this, I did my best to act natural.
“Yeah, that sounds like old Kurt,” I said, reassuringly.
There was an appropriate silence, broken when the young woman opened the door and invited us in. “Would you like to see a picture of him?” she asked.

Inside, the house was cold and still, the antique furniture smelling like wood polish and the ceiling blotted by tea-colored stains. She led us over to the mantel, where pictures of her relatives stared out at us, and as I stared back at them I felt the accumulation of time. Had he really been dead for twenty-five years?

The woman fetched a particular portrait and brought it down. It was an 8×10 of Kurt wearing a white cotton undershirt. His left hand was holding up his shirt sleeve, which had been rolled up to reveal his right arm—he was flexing, showing off a tattoo which read, “Still Raisin’ Hell” superimposed over the logo of the University of Vienna Mathematics department.

“Thanks for this,” I said, and left.
As I was opening the door, she called after me.
“It was his favorite picture,” she said.

We got in the car and Cherif asked if there was anything else I wanted to do while I was in Princeton. I said no, so we drove back to the airfield more or less in silence.

There was no way to answer the question about the bumblebee, nor did it particularly matter to me anymore. Like math, some things in life can’t be discussed from the inside.

There’s no punchline to this story, and a moral would not be in keeping with the theme. However, since incidents like this do cause me to evaluate my decisions in life, I would like to say that, in retrospect, I regret sending anonymous letters to Kurt Gdel saying I was going to poison his food.