Who doesn't want to believe in magic, even if we may at times resist the idea that genie or an amulet could grant us our desires. Perhaps there is a chance of change in even the most certain of things -- like an equation?

The clear white hieroglyphs of our work, the long strings of Greek letters, parentheses, a number, maybe two, each balanced delicately on the two bars of the equals-sign, might tell the tale.

So many, it took all three chalk-dust-frosted blackboards of the Tower Room, his preferred room for the seminar, to hold them.

We saw it there, the possibility, on those blackboards, ranged in their circle between the windows, the campus quiet in the evening dark, lights of the city sparkling beyond.

Let's leave it there, though, with the mathematics, so that our glimpse of realities collapsing and reforming, shatterings and reassemblies on new axes of perception does not itself slip into the mundane, an aphorism about eyes of beholders that we think we understand.

More important, I think, to see that room, that moment. To see the lines of the equations, more than each symbol, to see the glittering of the downtown lights beyond the campus trees. We were perched high there, the Tower Room lay just below a would-be steeple built when the university was new. It was a nod to the prestige of my professor that he could claim the Tower Room for his own.

"A drink," he said, after a bit. "To celebrate."

"A drink," I replied.

On the unsteady table where, the semester before, a handful of us would sit, piles of texts and notebooks making fortress walls around each: two glasses now. Wine glowing ruby-like, candles flickering in an unfelt breeze.

We sat, and watched equations, as if they danced for us. The equations, more than the wine, were what intoxicated.

Then, feeling warm candle wax: a slowly flowing stream, warm enough to move, but not to burn as it touched my, I started, realized I hadn't touched my glass. He stared, still, at the blackboards, nodding, dark brows for once not glowering, fierce black beard now framing an unexpected grin.

Students avoided him, despite his fame. A dark presence, silent mostly, demanding always, it was as if he frightened us. But I was back in grad school, burning with ambition of my own; my spell away from school spent with the Forces, I was, I knew, more than tough enough for any professor, even him. He'd grinned with relish when, in this room, in another seminar, I was the one, the only one, to dare a challenge. In this room, other challenges, turning to dialog, as seminars grew smaller, smaller, smaller; and now, this one, only him and me.

Absently, I stroked the warm wax; it seemed almost to glow there, in the center of my palm, smoothing it across my skin, my hands turned pale, fingers longer, elegant.

Our work together, the equations, turned on the fabric of things. We explored the changeable shapes of things -- and what stayed constant. Our work was with the many dimensions the professors in the physics department contended wove the world, like strings forming a knot.

Could we really tug, just there, perhaps, wherever that square-root-of-alpha really rested in the world, and flip, say that one, there, that x, from positive to negative; what might that mean?

Perhaps the same thought struck us both at that same instant, as eyes turned from chalkboard, locked on each other.

"Let's try," he said.

I nodded.

"Imagine," he said. "Imagine ... "

A classroom; blackboards looming far above: teacher's neat writing out of reach, bitter dust of the chalk tickling your nose as the numbers flow from your fingers, through the chalk, to the cold black surface. The teacher's gray anger, then wonder. Behind the both of you, beyond the tall windows of the school, maples flaming red against blue sky, a morning's chill to make you gasp and catch your breath, a real world behind your back, and teacher's, calling you. Just as the numbers did.

He said it, I recalled, for I remembered. As he must have, too, to tell me it so clearly.

Imagine, yes, imagine ....

Empty straight road, unpaved back them, pale brown leading to the crest of hill, the valley opening below, then:

Running down, arms wide, winglike, unafraid the ruts might trip you, as if convinced that if you could just go a little faster, you might just rise and soar above the silver S of the river's bend, above green fields and darker woods, might soar and fly into the very heart of some unimaginable freedom.

Imagine ... grey dawn down by the river, the grownups gazing skyward waiting for the geese, the cold iron of the gun. Fidgeting, impatient. Or, crack of bat, the narrowed vision of a world reduced to a scuffed white line leading to the canvas bag at the base, a friend's grim face, glove poised, shouting, shouting. Out.

A hard chair in the kitchen, a mother's tired voice: there are some things you just don't say. The principal's glare, the lean across his desk: we don't do that. A sergeant's startled glance when a thought best unspoken is said.

The blackboard no longer looms, I hear him murmur, the hill's crest, no longer quite so high. You do not run as much.

Imagine... his voice, dispassionate, disembodied now. Imagine ...

Tightness of cloth against your ribs, hands tug it into place. Sitting on the kitchen chair, cloth tight on ribs, a fluff around your hips awkward to manage; your mother's whispered voice: knees together. The touch of her fingers, stroking hairs to their proper place. Faces come alight, as you step up to meet your mothers' friends.

Imagine ...

Shouts echo from the playground beyond the school, you hear them from the hallway. But sunlight here only paints the dust-motes white, warms still air so that you drowse, so that you in fact prefer to drowse, to be still, to be quiet here. Your arms reach now behind your back, the hook and eye connect and you're contained. The brush of hem against a knee, lace tickling your neck. The blackboard no longer seems as tall, the teacher's writing more a scrawl. Now, a tiny breath of stale pipe smoke instead of lavender when he turns to you, startled by the numbers flowing from your fingers. And now, flushing, you turn away, your work left incomplete.

But work is there, the lines and lines of the equations. The city's lights still glitter beyond the trees, I see them still from our perch in the Tower Room.

I turn, and he is sitting, right across from me; the wine untouched, the wax still warm on my skin.

He's looking at me. Dark eyes locked with mine, grinning through that fierce black beard.

Something has happened, but I cannot tell what.

Flushing now, cheeks hot. I try a deep, shuddering breath, the thin cloth of my shirt now tight on ribs. A trickle of sweat slips down my throat, my breastbone.

Edging an unexpected swelling.

Startled, standing: the hard chair, like a kitchen chair, clatters to the floor. A swirl of cloth around my ankles; without pausing to think, a gesture of arm and wrist sweeps it clear, as he steps towards me.

Behind me, the lines of equations almost dance, tracing the shape of things and how they change and what remains the same; equations, unraveling, reweaving.

There is, opposite the blackboards in the Tower Room, a mirror.

And so I see now. And so I understand as his arm encircles my waist and (his hand warm and large in the bowl of my lower back) he pulls me close.

My head bends back, his bends towards my face.