A couple nights ago, Artichoke and I had a real conversation for the first time in 3 months. I normally only see him in passing--I'm not around the language school as much as I used to be, our schedules don't coincide, and after the summer I kind of felt like avoiding him.

After work, a bunch of us went to Вогзаль (a bar named "Station" because of its high-ceilinged, darkly-wooded interior. The ambience is sort of warehouse, but people go there because it's cheap and close). Artichoke and I were together at one end of the table.

Like an unstable chaotic system, something tipped us ever so slightly and we spiraled into math-nerddom. I think it started when he mentioned an elementary school teacher who looked at him with repulsion when he asked what infinity plus one was, and I said that's like asking what the universe is expanding into, and he said no that's more of a legitimate question. I said no, possibly not, and was soon tipsily insisting that the rectangular formica tabletop was actually a torus, if you thought of each pair of parallel edges as being the same edge, so that if you walk your fingers off one edge you're immediately on the opposite one, and if you take that up a dimension there's a decently convincing argument we live in a giant dodecahedron where you go out one face, get spun around a fifth of a turn, go back in the opposite face, keep going and eventually end up where you started. In that case the universe is a finite boundaryless 3D object that's just expanding without expanding into anything.

He said come on, it's not a torus it's a formica tabletop, I said bear with me it's an analogy. He said you can never verify anything like that experimentally, everything is bound to be an approximation, I said of course it won't be perfect, but it's still a useful model, and yes you can support it experimentally. He loves pure math but scorns the idea that it by itself can teach us anything about the world and I totally disagree. Take the one simple beautiful assumption that light moves at the same speed in all frames of reference, use it to derive a lot of purely mathematical equations, and, as soon as your equipment gets sophisticated enough, watch them predict how the world works, right? If your assumptions and your math are perfect, you can learn a lot in advance of it being observed. It's a whole other can of worms why the universe would behave according to math, but it seems pretty clear that it does. Given the rest of his personality, with his mercurial moods and mistrustfulness, it somehow seems fitting that he wouldn't believe in that sort of order.

We went to the kiosk afterward, then the quasi-compliments began. "It's wonderful when a woman who can speak lyrically and eloquently about maths. Your geekiness is almost redeeming." "You've got the second-most beautiful eyes I've ever seen." I just looked at him like what on earth are you saying, and words kept coming out of his mouth.

It passed 1 am, when the metro closes, and Blueberry, Artichoke, Radish, and I were still by the kiosk. Radish lives walking-distance away, but farther than me, so he went home and Blueberry and Artichoke came back with me. (Blueberry had pulled me aside earlier and said, do you want me to go sleep at Radish's? Do you like Artichoke? I said no, come back to my place, if anything I want Artichoke to go to Radish's).

At my flat, Artichoke passed out on the mattress on the floor (where I usually sleep) and started snoring like a freight train while Blueberry and I hung out on my pullout couch and talked. She had an interesting insight into him. He's half-Iranian and half white, and to me he looks fairly unplaceable. He comes from a part of London where there's huge tension between British Asians (a term that seems to refer mostly to people from the Middle East and South Asia) and whites. His dad is Muslim, his mom is Christian, and he went to a Christian school with pretty much only white kids. He was pretty cruelly singled out (which he had lightly referred to before, but I hadn't realized the extent of it until Blueberry gave me some context). Most white girls, Blueberry says, probably wouldn't bring him home to the family.

He goes by David, which is pretty close to his given Iranian name. His accent's of the right London sort that, according to Big Midwestern Underground Fungus, if all the teachers had it we'd be the richest school in Moscow. Here he's British, which is how he likes it. In London he's caught between not seeing himself as British Asian and not being wholly accepted by white culture. His sensitivity and insecurity and attachment to the Moscow expat ego-feed make sense in a different way now.