The evening’s final rays of sunshine penetrated into his study and became suspended into brilliant patterns of light; scintillating within the glass geometric models he kept on the table. On a clear day in the early evening, his room would dance with the lustre of the dusk filtered through these glass models and fill the otherwise melancholy space with a radiant display of the sublime. He seldom noticed these nuanced moments of beauty. He seldom noticed anything besides the triangles. With a sharp, almost mechanical precision, his hand steadily etched a perfect 45 degree radial arm of what was to be a right-angle triangle on another sheet of graphing paper. He needed not a ruler, nor a T-square; as the ratios and proportions of the triangles he drew were an integral component of his decisive coordination; carefully projecting the models from his mind into the tangible greatness of reality. His hand guided the movements of the drafting pencil across the paper with the precision of a surgeon’s first laceration into a quadruple bypass. When the triangle was complete, he pondered it for a good few minutes. He stepped back and basked in the product of his labour. Isosceles knew he had created perfection. He adored that the sum of the squares of the opposite and adjacent angles equalled the square of the hypotenuse. He loved the sine ratios, the cosine ratios, the secant ratios, and every other self-evident aspect that this most sacred polygon was a manifestation of God himself into Isosceles’ beloved discipline of mathematics.
He mounted the triangle up above his drawing table to accompany the other thousands of triangles he had amassed throughout his lifetime. The walls of his study were enveloped in triangles. He pinned up pictures of bridges with distinct triangular patterns in them, news articles mentioning triangles, etchings and diagrams of triangles, and countless other constituents of his shrine to three-sided polygons. His favourite types of triangles however, were right-angle triangles. Isosceles felt that the ratios and proportions of a perfect right-angle triangle were a deep affirmation of the logical consistency to life. He clung to the triangles like a rock against all the doubt and illogical nonsense he endured about his daily routine. Tomorrow would be the first day of classes in the fall semester. Isosceles dreaded having to emerge from the nurturing solitude of his triangles to face the spiteful gazes of other humans roaming about the university campus. His employment could have been worse, as he had so often contemplated, but the awkward relationships Isosceles shared with his fellow professors made his life at the university a rather disheartening experience. Nobody understood Isosceles; not like his triangles did. Triangles were the dominion in which he was a god.
There came a knock upon his study door.
“Come in.”
Paige softly opened the door and stood in the entranceway of his room. She wore a grey blouse and a black skirt; her dark hair was tied up on the back of her head.
“Good evening professor, I was just making sure you had your lesson plan arranged for tomorrow.”
Isosceles peered over his shoulder to meet her gaze and motioned with his hand to the neatly stacked papers on his desk. They were soaked in sunlight. Paige sighed with a tone of apprehension and took another step into the room.
“I have been worrying about you professor. We all have been. It seems that lately you haven’t been spending any time with people. You’re too caught up in your work.”
Paige was Isosceles’ housekeeper. She was a young woman in her early twenties earning money to pay off her student loans. Her bodily structure was composed of symmetrical proportions and soft, angelic angles. The features of her face were acute and feminine while the angular curve of her backside was desirably obtuse. As Isosceles viewed her as both an attractive and intelligent woman, her presence in his home was a welcome taste of human company. She was usually left to her own accord to keep his house clean of dust and his clothes stainless and ironed. During the downtime, she studied for her classes or sometimes read the myriad of trigonometry tomes Isosceles kept in his library; to be filed alphabetically, as he had so vehemently insisted upon.
“Don’t worry about me Paige. I’ll be fine. It’s just all the work I’ve been doing to prepare for tomorrow.”
She glanced at the geometric models he kept on the table.
“You should really open your curtains all the way professor. The light is so nice in here this time of the evening.”
Paige shrugged and then turned to leave, gently shutting the door behind her.
The following day, Isosceles set his coat on the back of his chair and organized his lesson plan. The lecture hall was large and imposing like an empty cathedral. The shuffling of his papers reverberated throughout the room like a man’s cry echoing in the opiate-ridden peaks of Appalachia. He glanced out to the hallway which was soon to fill up with thousands of University students. A familiar frump in a brown tweed jacket crossed the doorway. Isosceles called out to him.
“Hey, Dr. Crandall, can you spare some chalk? Somebody appears to have taken mine.”
The man walked into his lecture hall, ignoring his request. Isosceles asked again for chalk. Crandall glanced to the collection of implements and instruments on his desk.
“You see that X-Acto knife there Dr. Triangle?”
“What about it, Dr. Crandall?”
“Imagine the feeling of that utility knife being thrust into the back of your hand!”
Isosceles flinched.
“You know that feeling triangle boy? That’s me. That’s what I am to you; is a utility knife thrust into your hand. Don’t ever so much as speak before my presence, or I will shoot you with my musket. You can never comprehend the deep intricacies of reality within the span of your pathetic lifetime, and you waste it studying triangles. I, as a superiorly enlightened human specimen can attain a certain higher morality than you. I am the master of morality, and you are but a slave to me. The mere presence of your putrid slave morality has harmed me to an unfathomable extent. Don’t ever look me in the eye again!”
“I’m sorry; I just wondered if you had any chalk I could borrow.”
Crandall stormed out of the lecture room without responding.
Crandall had been the head of the Philosophy department at McMaster University for the past nine miserable years. He and his department of woe-begotten miscreants and borderline-schizophrenic orators had a particular grudge against the likes of the Mathematics department, whom they denounced as being charlatans to the pursuit of capital R, Reason, and capital T, Truth. It was Isosceles in particular whom they targeted their bullying. Dr. Crandall and his female accomplice, Dr. Stragger had virulently tormented the Trigonometry teacher by nailing Cartesian plots depicting crossed vertical asymptotes to his classroom door and etching disfigured triangles whose total degrees were more than 180 upon his chalkboard. They rarely spoke to him, except to mock his study.
He reclined in his chair and watched as the fresh batch of students slowly trickled into his classroom, reminiscent of the congregation of flies to a fleshly-laid dropping of shit on the sidewalk. Isosceles felt an unnerving disdain towards those students who did not hold trigonometry to the high regard that he did. They were born into wealthy families and their parents paid for their University tuition with the sole intention of removing them from the basements. During his lectures, they played Minecraft and surfed Reddit on their high-end laptops and sent each other insipid and redundant text messages via their BlackBerrys. After class, they retreated back to their frat houses, drank themselves into retardation, and fornicated like insects. Isosceles had never recalled any of his students displaying the slightest interest in his lessons. They had no reverence for the majesty of his triangles.
“And so, as we can see from this graph, the period of this sine wave is 360 degrees. The amplitude of a sine wave is indicated by a. For instance, the amplitude of f(x) =4sin(x+2π)-2 is 4.”
An obese male in the front row interrupted his lecture.
“Excuse me sir, but what application does this stuff have to the real world?”
“Actually, there are no shortage of practical examples I can name to which trigonometry is applicable. In computer programming for instance...”
“No, that’s not what I meant. How the hell do sine waves help us to find jobs?”
Isosceles winced.
“Is that all you kids care about, is finding jobs? Don’t you care about the mathematic concepts?”
“Yeah, math is good if you want to be a charlatan all your life.”
The class laughed.
“Dr. Stragger and Dr. Crandall teach philosophy and its application to real world situations. They teach us the think laterally and critically. They teach us about logical strategies to cope with problems that arise in the business world. You teach us about Sine Waves.”
“That’s because this is a mathematics class. If you wish to learn about philosophy, you should not have taken a Trigonometry course!”
This was precisely the brand of insolence from which his triangles provided refuge. He didn’t understand how anyone could be so wilfully ignorant of these mathematical concepts-- It wasn’t as though they were difficult to understand. Later that evening, Isosceles drove the 5 miles to his secluded rural estate and retreated back to the solitude of his study. At his request, Paige brought him some sliced cantaloupe and a glass of warm milk, homogenized, with 3% fat.
“How did your first class go Professor? Do you have any aspiring mathematicians among the lot?
He grunted and sunk his head deeper into the papers on the desk.
“Sine wave functions.”
“Oh, well that’s neat. I love Sine waves.”
“Great. That makes two of us at least.”
She walked closer to the desk at which he was seated. His palm was buried in his thick, greying hair, supporting the exhausted weight of his skull. Though Isosceles did not drink, his face bore the expression of a man whose spirit was defeated by alcohol as he leaned forward, towering over his work—tomorrow’s lesson plan and a few sketches of some triangles he had recently drawn up.
“I take it you wish to be left alone now Professor?”
Paige had worked at his home for just over three years now. Even though she had developed the personal relationship appropriate for her to address him as otherwise, it always just felt correct to call him Professor.
“If you don’t mind. I have a lot of work to do.”
He watched her ass while it oscillated gracefully from side to side as she walked out the room.
That putrid excuse for a life form, the one whom Isosceles had come to know as John, again interrupted his lecture. It was the final review before the weekly test and the conceited, overweight bastard had the audacity to interrupt his explanation of how the cescant ratio of a triangle equalled the reciprocal of its cosine ratio. The young man’s insolence was merely an obstacle he had come to accept. John was also taking Dr. Crandall’s philosophy class and was told to be metacritical of the doctrines opposed upon him by the mathematics department.
“Dr. Crandall told me that Pythagoras was an insane cult leader whose deceitful banter was not be trusted!”
Isosceles winced.
“It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was a tyrannical cult leader or not, his concepts are infallible. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the tangent ratio equals the sine over the cosine ratio!”
“But what if the tangent ratio doesn’t really equal the sine over the cosine ratio? What if mathematics is only a mere illusion? The only thing that I know is that I exist! Everything else in life is but a mere assumption. Cogito Ergo Sum!”
Isosceles would have kicked him out of his class if the University had not given him a generous raise to stop doing precisely that. He would be lying if he told you that at times he didn’t think about not accepting that raise. There were students like John in every course he taught at McMaster. They were the wealthy pseudo-intellectuals, the incorrigible, thoughtless drones who saw it their way to conduct themselves with a demeanour of unwarranted self-righteousness. They were the valiant heirs to the future world, as they had learned in their philosophy class, and they virulently denounced everything that either stood between their arrogance and reality, or likewise, that which they did not have the capacity to comprehend. Isosceles had endured their antics before; there were uglier, stupider, more porous students than John that his patience had withstood, but he knew it was the growing influence of Dr. Crandall and his philosophy department that bred these over-sceptical creatures. He didn’t know how much longer he could put up with them.
Isosceles had never attended any of Dr. Crandall’s lectures. He had heard that Dr. Crandall gave the most passionate, exuberant lectures pertaining to epistemology, metaphysics, and the nature of reality, but Isosceles had never found a time when he would not rather have been amongst his triangles. However, It was a certain feeling he got, looking into the eyes of the smug bastard who sat before him, that compelled him to finally see what Crandall’s students were always going off about.
“Uh, John, when is Dr. Crandall’s next lecture?”
John swallowed his mouthful of hamburger and responded.
“It’s this afternoon at 3:00. He is going to introduce us to the great works of Arthur Schopenhauer. Dr. Crandall said very clearly that he doesn’t want any math teachers to come though. He says your dogmatic influence stifles his philosophic contemplation.”
Isosceles winced.
Later that afternoon, Isosceles walked briskly across the campus to Dr. Crandall’s lecture hall. It was at least twice the size of his, and he could see an ample supply of fresh chalk at all the blackboards. He took his seat in the last row to avoid making eye contact with Crandall and being struck with a musket ball or stuck with a utility knife. Dr. Stragger sat in the front row making conversation with the students beside her, one of whom Isosceles recognized as John.
Dr. Stragger was a middle-aged woman who had a disproportionately high level of enthusiasm for the likes of Dr. Crandall’s philosophy teachings. During his lectures, she attentively leaned forward at the edge of her seat, contingent upon every word he spoke. She memorized his debate tactics, his arguments, and every position he held on every contemporary subject in anticipation for the misfortunate drudge who was to come along and challenge her philosophical convictions. To compensate for her gnomish stature, thick strands of frizzed chestnut hair burst from atop her head like the eruption of a mud geyser, much to the plight of those whom she sat directly ahead. Isosceles had made it a point to avoid her presence whenever convenient.
He watched Dr. Crandall’s monolithic entrance to the stage. There was a noticeable tension in any room Crandall entered. He had a distinct air of self importance; the profligate expression of many ostentatious hand gestures and the unnecessary exaggeration of otherwise menial movements demanded the attention of all who beheld him. The tension those felt being in his presence was described as a sentiment of impending doom or of the suspense before a jury’s final deliberation. Nobody spoke during his lectures; they did not interrupt him, nor did they mock him or deliberately misunderstand him. His students were the most diligent of pupils, eagerly awaiting the slew of philosophical jargon which they would unquestionably absorb—to be regurgitated when any confrontation with the mathematics faculty were to arise.
“Good afternoon fellow admirers of philosophy.”
His voice resonated with the volume of a grand cathedral. To hundreds of over-privileged youngsters and liberal arts students among him, this was their god.
“Fellow philosophers, we have come upon my favourite part of the semester that is the great study of nineteenth-century German Idealism.”
Isosceles chuckled to himself.
“To hell with Belarusian idealism!” He thought.
Isosceles took his ham sandwich out of the Tupperware container. He was pleased to see that Paige had remembered to cut the bread diagonally, leaving two right angle triangle-shaped sandwich halves. Indeed, Paige had never once forgotten his daily routine, but it always pleased him nonetheless to see the two triangles awaiting his consumption.
“As I mentioned yesterday, we shall commence our study with a biography on Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the greatest philosophers of the past few centuries. He was born in 1788 in present-day Gdansk, Poland. Perhaps one of the most notable pessimists in philosophical debate is embodied in his pinnacle work, The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818.”
Isosceles had never before heard the name of this man of whom Crandall spoke so highly.
“Of the many topics on which Schopenhauer wrote, one of the most unique among philosophers were his opinions regarding love and affection. Having been rejected by many women throughout his life, Schopenhauer lived alone with his poodles and his philosophy. His loneliness was commonly attributed to his extreme pessimistic, albeit realistic view of the world. He found little joy in money, fame, women, or education; his mother refused him to speak to houseguests in fear that he may depress them, and he toiled in obscurity until he achieved fame only a year before his death. Schopenhauer is a particularly admirable figure in philosophy precisely for this reason. It was his bleak worldview that denied him happiness, but it was this view that he held against all the nonsense he perceived about his daily life. I conjecture that to stand by one’s principles is a much more noble position than the pursuit of blind whims.”
Although he had never before displayed any inclination or interest whatsoever to study philosophy in the past, Isosceles was captivated by the life of this man whom he had never even known. There was a certain familiarity with this biography that aroused his curiosity. Having never had the time to seek out a spouse for himself due to his extensive studies, Isosceles knew, from listening to the plight of this Schopenhauer fellow, that he ought to peruse his quest for love. There was only one woman in his life that did not repulse him; she was the only one to share nearly the same passion for triangles that he did. Suddenly, he was captivated by the spontaneous urge to seek this woman out and tell her how he felt. He snuck out of the lecture hall, though was certain that Crandall had caught a glimpse of his presence in doing so.
Paige slid the giant mathematic tome back on the shelf. The professor’s library was immense. After decades of accumulating everything in the least bit pertaining to his niche, the shelves, of which there were hundreds, had been crammed with more books than one was likely to encounter in a single dwelling. Even the University had a collection that seemed miniscule in comparison to his. He had often complained to Paige about the incompetence of the University’s book collection, although it was unlikely that any worldly institution could have met Isosceles’ high standards of academic prestige. She enjoyed spending time reading his books that she would often lose track of time and find herself well into the early hours of the morning enthralled in a volume of advanced functions or vector calculus. The resources had been an invaluable aid to her study at McMaster. There were many instances in which a book found in the library had saved her on a test or had guided her through a particularly difficult unit. Now in her final year of university, she knew that she owed a debt of gratitude to these tomes, and of course to Isosceles himself. She climbed down the ladder and walked to the kitchen in order to prepare the professor’s evening tea.
When she entered his study, she found him standing, with his back to the door, looking nonchalantly out the window. The curtains had been opened all the way and the sunlight shone through the magnificent window, casting a breathtaking pattern of light into the room as it shone through the glass geometric objects on the table. She had never been taken by such a majestic scene before, and at this moment, the study was more resplendent than any other time that she had beheld it.
“I remember that day when you told me to open the curtains all the way. I have to agree with you Paige, that the room looks much nicer having done so.”
“Yes it does. Anyways, I left your tea on the night stand.”
She turned to leave.
“Wait, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“What is it?”
Isosceles turned from the window, and knelt down on one knee before his housekeeper, holding forth a large diamond ring in a velvet box. The diamond was in the shape of a perfect triangular pyramid and shone brightly, more so because of the majestic reflection of sunlight in its finely cut surface.
“Paige, I’ve always thought that you were the smartest, most beautiful woman I have ever met. I have never been more certain of anything in all my life than I am of this. Paige, will you do me the honour of taking my hand in marriage?”
She was silent only for a few seconds, though the tension he felt had made it seem like hours. Then, a look of unadulterated sympathy manifested upon her mouth and a tear streamed down her left cheek. She gently shut the velvet box with her hand, unable to bear the sight of the diamond ring.
“I’m so very sorry Professor, but I already am engaged. In fact, he is a student in one of your trigonometry classes; John is his name. I have told him about you, how he should make an attempt to connect with you professor, as the both of you are very smart indeed. However, I see that such a bond was not to be.”
Isosceles stared at her with hollow eyes. His face was empty of any expression, and he for a brief moment imagined the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and that the familiarity he had sensed was in relation to his own life—his own social and romantic incompetence.
“I’m very sorry professor, but I really must go now. I have been considering this for some time, but I hope you understand if I don’t come in to work tomorrow, or any other day for that matter.”
She turned away to depart, and Isosceles listened to the exhaust of her automobile as she drove away, never again to bring him tea or sliced cantaloupe; never again to sort his books or iron his clothes, never again to slice his sandwiches or comfort him in the wake of his interpersonal misfortunes. A wave of emotion, half-way between the searing fervour of rage and the lowly grip of sadness consumed him from his somewhere deep in his chest, and he once again recalled the beauty of a perfect right-angle triangle. However, it yielded him no exaltation. The world, as he had come to know it, was unworthy of the superlative proportions of such flawless splendour. As he looked around his study, and basked in the scintillating radiance of the reflected light, soaking the various trigonometry articles he had pinned up on the wall, realized, that he too was unworthy of their splendour. Isosceles remembered a revolver he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk, in fear of looters that may break in to steal his precious work. He retrieved it and held the barrel up to his right temple, and as a spray of his teeth and grey matter painted the drawing he had etched weeks prior; for the very first time, Isosceles had become one with the triangles.
