LOST Chapter 12: The Notebook Language

Read chapter 12 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Ken had given me the notebook three weeks before the crossing. He had given it to me in the way he gave me things he thought I should have without wanting to explain why, which was to leave it somewhere I would find it and not be present when I found it. In this case he had left it on my kitchen table while I was in the bathroom, and when I came back he was already in his coat and saying something about a meeting, and the notebook was there next to my coffee with no particular ceremony. He said: I thought you might find this interesting. I said: what is it. He said: I'm not sure. Someone left it at the office. No one claimed it. It looked like your kind of thing. He left before I could ask what my kind of thing meant in this context. I had looked at it that evening and established that it was not in Japanese or in any language I recognized, and that the notation system inside bore some structural resemblance to my own, not identical, a related dialect of the same mathematical language, and that whoever had written it had been working on something in the same general area I was working on, from a different angle, with different tools, arriving at some of the same intermediate results through routes I could not fully trace. I had found it interesting and somewhat frustrating and had put it in my bag with the intention of returning to it properly and had not returned to it properly because of the thing that had happened three weeks later, which was Ken putting his hands on my shoulders and the floor going away. The notebook had been in my bag across the crossing. It had traveled with me, the way my phone had, the way my keys had, the way the pen in my coat pocket had, and it was sitting on the desk in room four now between my notebooks and the harbor window. I had not opened it since I arrived. Three days of crossing and inventory and shrine plaques and triangle doorframes and kitchen table conversations and I had not opened the notebook Ken gave me, and I was aware this was avoidance, and I was also aware that some avoidance is actually pacing, the mind knowing that it is not ready for a thing and protecting you from arriving at it before you have the context to hold it correctly. I had the context now. Or enough of it. I sat at the desk after Nao left — she had stayed through the afternoon and into the evening and the conversation had been long and dense and had required most of what I had — and I opened the notebook and started from the beginning and read it properly for the first time. The language question first. Not Japanese, not any language I could identify by script or structure, but internally consistent, with a grammar I could feel even if I couldn't parse it, the way you feel the grammar of a piece of music without being able to transcribe it. Whoever had written this had written it fluently, without hesitation, the pen moving through the notation the way a hand moves through its native system, the small shortcuts of fluency, the places where a character was half-formed because the writer's hand knew what it meant and didn't require the full form. The content I could engage with better than the language, because the content was mathematics and mathematics crosses most barriers if you know where to look. The notation for operators was different from mine, the way of expressing field relationships was structured differently, but the underlying moves were legible, the way a chess game is legible even when you're reading a notation system you weren't trained on. I went slowly. I made my own notes alongside the text, translating where I could, flagging where I couldn't, building a partial map of what was being argued. The argument was about rupture propagation. Specifically about the geometry of rupture initiation, the conditions under which a boundary layer becomes unstable enough to permit crossing, the relationship between what I had been calling the field density and what this notebook called something I couldn't trans