A life in review

Long life. Short story.

Could this be the last day of Joseph Nitzinger's life?

Joseph asked himself this question every day. Not because he was a gloomy pessimist and crisis-merchant, or was beset by a terminal illness, or lived in a war zone. It could have been because he was eighty-seven years old, but it was not that, either.

Whether today was the last day of Joseph Nitzinger's life depended entirely, in his opinion, on whether he received a particular email, and what that email contained.

If the email did not arrive, he could live another day in superannuated bliss. Joseph was in the preposterously fortunate position of being a university professor who had maintained good health to such an old age that he not only succeeded in retiring — no small feat, given the twin menaces of the routine Catch-22-like increases in retirement age and the stubborn professorial inability to give up a good office — but had in addition stayed alive and healthy for more than two extra decades, and counting, and so had his beloved wife Joan, and they had basked in the glorious ongoing twilight of a happy life that placed them at the most envious extremes of actuarial statistics.

Joseph believed he was kept alive by a common yet simple psychological trick, namely, to have a purpose. He had a job that needed to be done. It was not, some might argue, if he was silly enough to let such dangerous fools speak to him, an especially important job. But it was a job he had been doing for the last forty-four years, and when you've been doing a job that long, it takes on a significance that even the most rational argument is unable to erase.

(Joan was kept alive by an even simpler trick, her unshakable belief that she would outlive Joseph. Her original plans for how to make it through the inevitable decades of widowhood had been significantly scaled down over the years, but she was still looking forward to catching up on the complete filmography of Sean Connery, who Joseph detested.)

Joseph had a daily ritual. He woke up just before 6am, and for a few minutes lay there in total peace, just like everyone else does before they remember the actual details of their life. Then, much like everyone else, he was overcome with terror. A knot formed in his stomach. He wished he could forget it and go back to sleep, but it was too late now. The only way to make the terror go away was to get up and face his day.

Unlike everyone else, however, all he had to do was walk over to his desk and turn on the monitor of his computer and open the email application and scroll down the thankfully small list of emails that had arrived since yesterday. Then he breathed a sigh of relief, closed the email application until tomorrow, and prepared for another joyous day here on Planet Earth. Often by going back to sleep.

However.

Every few weeks, or months, or, these days, years, there was an email.

Today was such a day.

The email was from a scientific journal, asking him to write a referee report on a scientific paper. This is a standard academic task, whereby the supreme power to dictate a paper's publication fate is cleverly disguised as an irritating administrative chore. Most academics referee several scientific papers every year. That was exactly how it worked for Joseph, back before he retired.

Now he refereed only one paper. Not one paper per year — just one paper, full stop.

The paper first arrived in May 1981 in a large brown envelope. It had one author, a precocious PhD student. It was not especially long, about six pages, but included some difficult calculations that would be quite tricky to make sense of. A thorough review of the calculations might require several weeks of work. Fortunately for Joseph, they were obviously wrong.

Joseph did not want to waste time on a clearly wrong paper by a student whose supervisor should have been paying closer attention, so he followed his usual procedure in such cases and worked through the calculation until he reached the first mistake, and rejected the paper on that basis. He wrote his rejection letter by hand, because he was not going to waste his time, or a department secretary's time, on typing up long equations, and mailed it back to the journal in June.

He forgot about the paper until six months later he was sent a revised manuscript, and a long letter from the author.

The paper was now twelve pages long, but the author's response letter was 22 pages, single spaced. It dispensed immediately with the error Joseph had found (it was a typo, and the rest of the calculation was unchanged), and then went into great detail to explain why the overall result must be correct and how interesting it was, especially in its new expanded form. Since all of this was explained so beautifully in the text, the author was forced, shockingly, to question whether the referee had actually read the entire paper.

The referee — Joseph — was duly affronted, and this time worked through the entire calculation. As he had originally expected, it took several weeks. And also as originally expected, the results were wrong. This time Joseph was able to provide a detailed account of each of the many ways that it was wrong, and his new referee report was longer than the sum of all correspondence to date: 46 pages.

He should have known better. A rejection should be short and sharp. Never give the author arguments to quibble with. Especially not 46 pages worth of them. From the moment he dropped the bulky envelope into the department secretary's Out tray, he was consumed by a sense of dread, which he could not shake for an entire 16 months, when the paper returned.

The PhD student, now graduated, had accepted a number of Joseph's criticisms, and revised the calculation. It was the worst possible outcome. Joseph had to work through it all over again.

And so it had gone on.

The first decade proceeded rapidly through a number of phases. There were the passive-aggressive angry years, where the author implied that Joseph had it in for him, and Joseph implied that the author was a charlatan. There were the years when Joseph was convinced that the author was trying to uncover his identity, and he wrote his referee reports in the distinctive style of one of his better-known colleagues, until that colleague was cornered at a conference and forced to sign a legally witnessed statement of innocence, and then he alternated between a variety of grammatical tics common to non-native English speakers. After that their exchanges became more respectful, as the author strived to weed his calculation of flaws and Joseph assumed that eventually he would succeed.

It was now 2025 and the paper was yet to be published. The two combatants had accumulated over 1000 pages of correspondence, roughly half of them stacked in a box above Joseph's desk, the rest in a file folder on his computer. The latest manuscript, the 56th, bore no discernible traces of its first ancestor.

Joseph had to believe that one day the paper would be published. The entire process would be rendered worthless if it were not. He had come to enjoy his correspondence with an author with whom he had built up a weird and maybe precious sparring friendship. But the worth of their relationship and their discussions and their many realisations rested entirely, in Joseph's mind, on the whole enterprise finally culminating in a finished product.

And so he had come to believe that fixing and publishing this paper was what kept him alive. It was his last great purpose.

As last purposes went, it was rather modest, but that was what made it ideal.

He could instead be toiling on a last masterpiece, a grand calculation of his own, a final triumph, but he was not a fool. Why would he want to watch his handwriting grow shakier, his mind slower, his thoughts increasingly muddled, and his ever shorter bouts of work broken by ever longer naps? He had no appetite for such a heartbreaking race against time.

It was far better to potter away for a day or two every six months, or every few years, and spend the rest of his time reading, and travelling, and enjoying his wife and friends and children and grandchildren.

The only cost of this clever psychological trick was the gradual solidification of the absolute certainty that the moment he clicked the button to accept the paper, his life would end. All right, maybe not that suddenly. Maybe he would hold on until after the confirmation email arrived.

It's not surprising that he was a little apprehensive whenever he received an email from the journal.

Like the one he received today.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

His wife Joan, who was always wide awake and no less terrified when he hobbled to his computer every morning, immediately propped herself up in bed.

“What?”

Joseph did not speak.

“Is it done?” she asked.

He still did not answer. He just stared at the email.

“For God's sake, Joseph, just tell me.”

He finally turned away from the computer, shaking his head.

“He's had a heart attack.”

“Who?”

“The author. He had a heart attack two days ago.”

“That young punk? How could he have a heart attack?”

“He's 71 years old.”

“Oh. Is he...?”

“He's in hospital.”

Joan stared at Joseph for a few moments, while he kept staring at his monitor. Eventually she said, “Where does he live?”

“He was a professor. He retired six years ago. In Melbourne, Australia.”

“We've never been to Australia.”

Joseph turned and looked at her. His eyes began to sparkle. He could feel his last purpose being slightly adjusted.

“I wonder if I still have a chance to meet him?”

---

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You can find more stories and burblings in the Table of Contents. Last week’s is half way to racking up ten times as many views as any of my previous stories, so either it was extremely good, or the bots have found me.