Still the Same Man Read Online Free PDF

toward the car. The chair was motorized, but she needed help there along the rubbly shoulder.
    The whole story about the mutiny on the bus seemed strange to Joanes. He found it hard to believe that the other passengers would have thrown them off the bus simply because of a space issue. Something else had gone on, surely. The professor must have provoked the others somehow, which, knowing him, wasn’t hard to imagine.
    They settled the woman into the back seat and put the wheelchair in the trunk.
    Joanes sat down at the wheel but didn’t turn on the engine right away. He wanted to fix that place firmly in his memory—that nasty stretch of Mexican highway, the roadside hawk perched and watching them from a signpost . . .
    He had imagined this moment countless times since leaving college. In his fantasies, the professor always appeared in some desperate situation where he had no choice but to ask Joanes for help, recognizing, implicitly, that he’d made a terrible mistake in underestimating him as he had. And Joanes always helped him out, making a point of being sober and efficient. He’d make it clear that things were going great, that he ran a prosperous business, that he had an enviable family, and, ultimately, that the professor’s harmful influence hadn’t had the least effect on him.
    “Is something wrong?” asked the professor.
    “No, nothing,” answered Joanes, starting up the engine. “Everything’s in order.”

The professor belonged to a family of dentists. His grandfather, father, and two of his uncles had all practiced dentistry. Out of all of them all, the professor’s father had enjoyed the most prolific career, having made a small fortune from the patents of various professional instruments—two endodontic clamps, a drill burr, a barbed broach, and, most significantly, a dental milling cutter universally praised by his colleagues in the field.
    The professor’s students liked to point out the appropriateness of him being part of a family who’d made their money inflicting pain on others, and they considered the professor’s move from dentistry to teaching math as a sign of his loyalty to the family tradition, and his personal refinement of it.
    He specialized in algorithm theory and recursive mathematical functions and was not exactly up there among the most popular professors in the School of Engineering. He owed his less than favorable reputation to the excessive demands he placed on his students, along with his penchant for upsetting and intimidating them, inciting such levels of insecurity that, for a few, the problem became congenital.

    In one of the first of the professor’s classes Joanes attended, the former took the whole lecture hall by surprise with an inflammatory speech defending the duodecimal system. According to him, various strong cases could be made for replacing the modern decimal system with a duodecimal one. Calculations would become far easier, he assured them. Multiplication and division would be far more practicable, owing to the duodecimal system having four factors—two, three, four, and six—while the decimal system, to its detriment, only had two—two and five. Another of the arguments he put forward was the widespread acceptance—both historical and geographical—of a base 12 numeral system, as demonstrated by the existence of the twelve signs of the zodiac, the division of the year into twelve months, and of the foot into twelve inches. He concluded by pointing out—in case more or clearer explications were necessary—that human anatomy lends itself to counting in divisions of twelve—four of their fingers have three phalanges, and four times three is twelve. The thumb serves as a pointer when counting the phalanges on the other fingers.
    “Think about it,” he told them.
    A few days later, the professor asked them if they’d thought about what he’d said. The first voices in favor piped up timidly. But many others soon jumped on the bandwagon,