CHAPTER 73: Sheldon Quantifies The Crack
The anomaly had appeared in the RSI on November 19th and Sheldon had been staring at it for four days.
At the whiteboard in Apartment 4A he held his green marker, which he'd already retracted and extended three times without drawing anything. The equation was complete. That was the problem. When an equation was complete, you published it or acted on it. This one said something he could not currently determine how to act on.
"You've retracted the marker eleven times," Amy said, from the couch.
"Ten."
"I counted eleven. You retracted it once while explaining that you'd retracted it nine times."
He turned around. Amy was eating from a bag of pretzels with the focused serenity of someone who had long ago made her peace with the fact that the most interesting things in her professional life happened in other people's living rooms. She was not looking at him.
"The IRB deadline is Friday," she said. "We need to finalize scope."
"I am aware of the deadline." Sheldon turned back to the board. "I am attempting to understand a result before I am asked to publish it, which is — I would have thought — the correct order of scientific operations."
The whiteboard had two columns. On the left: the Relationship Stability Index, which he'd been running since August. The RSI was, he believed, one of his finer methodological contributions to applied social science — a twelve-variable model that tracked fulfillment scores, compatibility differentials, and what he'd termed autonomy trajectory, which measured whether each partner's optimal life-path was converging or diverging over time.
He'd run it for Howard and Bernadette: stable, strongly convergent. He'd run it for himself and Amy: stable, trending convergent, with an acceptable methodological footnote about the challenge of self-referential data.
He'd run it for Stuart and Penny.
The right column was the problem.
"Both scores are rising," he said.
"I know," Amy said. "I've read it."
"Both fulfillment scores rising simultaneously is the expected profile of a thriving relationship. The model should output stability. It outputs 'destabilized' instead." He pointed at the variable stack. "Because the autonomy trajectories are divergent. Each person's best life points in a different direction. And as the fulfillment scores rise — as each of them becomes more of who they are — the pull of their separate optimal paths intensifies."
"Yes," Amy said.
"That is not an answer, Amy."
"It's not supposed to be. Keep going."
He turned back to the board. "The model predicts that Stuart and Penny's relationship will dissolve. Not through conflict. Not through incompatibility in the conventional sense. But because the version of each person that is — according to the data — the most flourishing version, does not share a zip code."
Behind him, the apartment door opened.
"You left it unlocked again," Leonard said, toeing off his shoes. He'd been at the university; he still had the slightly worn look of someone who'd spent six hours arguing with a whiteboard of his own. He glanced at Sheldon's board. "What's that?"
"The RSI update for —" Sheldon began.
"Please don't," Leonard said.
He set his bag down, went to the kitchen, stood looking at the inside of the refrigerator for a moment in the way people did when they weren't hungry but needed something to do with their hands. Then he closed it and turned around, and he'd apparently absorbed enough of the whiteboard in five seconds to do something Sheldon recognized as calculated avoidance: he crossed to the far end of the couch and sat down, facing away from the board.
"The model isn't speculating," Sheldon said, to Leonard's back. "It's extrapolating from established data. Both individuals' scores are rising. Their trajectories are —"
"I know what the trajectories are," Leonard said. "I live in this building."
A silence. Amy ate a pretzel.
"What does it say exactly?" Leonard said. Not looking at the board.
"It outputs 0.83 probability of dissolution within a 90-day window. Due to —"
"Health," Amy said.
Sheldon paused. "I'm sorry?"
"Health." Amy had put the pretzels aside. "Both of their fulfillment scores are high because both of them are in genuinely good shape. They're good for each other. And the path that leads each of them to their best version of themselves is being followed — by both of them, simultaneously, in different directions." She paused. "That's not a system failure. That's two people growing."
Sheldon looked at his equation.
"The model calls it dissolution," he said.
"The model is describing love," Amy said. "It just doesn't have that variable."
He processed this. The equation didn't change. He retracted the marker.
From the couch, Leonard said nothing, which in Sheldon's experience meant either that Leonard agreed or that Leonard was doing something emotionally complex he hadn't allocated the correct subroutines to handle. The second seemed more likely. He turned to say as much, and stopped.
Leonard had a particular look on his face — not the one he wore when he was jealous, which Sheldon had catalogued thoroughly since 2007; this was different. The jealousy look was sharp and restless. This was flatter. It sat still.
"Leonard," Sheldon said, "the probability the model outputs for your current relational variables, if it were to be applied, would be —"
"Sheldon," Amy said.
"— significantly different, obviously, as your primary declared relational candidate has not, as of the last data entry, altered her geographic —"
"Sheldon." Amy's voice, very calm.
He stopped.
Leonard said, "What does Stuart say? About the model."
"He has declined to provide a data point on three separate occasions." Sheldon considered. "Most recently by stopping by to drop off a box of the green tea I'd expressed marginal interest in, staying exactly long enough to be warm and pleasant and completely unquantifiable, and then leaving."
A sound from the hallway. The elevator, audibly.
The apartment door opened again, and Stuart appeared with a box of green tea under one arm and a look of mild surprise at finding three people at medium alert in the living room.
"Hey," he said. "I texted that I was coming by."
"I didn't receive it," Sheldon said.
"I sent it to your university address."
"I have forty-seven unread messages at my university address."
"That tracks." Stuart set the tea on the kitchen counter. He'd seen the whiteboard by now — Sheldon could tell by the fractional pause — but his expression hadn't shifted. He looked at the board the way he looked at most things: as though it were interesting but not urgent. "New iteration?"
"Updated RSI," Sheldon said. "Stuart —"
"Nope," Stuart said, pleasantly.
"You haven't heard the question."
"You're going to ask me to numerically characterize some aspect of my emotional state for a study that doesn't have IRB approval for —"
"It has IRB review," Amy interjected, with the tone of someone who'd had this argument several times. "The filing is in progress. The data collection is —"
"Pre-cleared," Stuart and Leonard said, simultaneously. Leonard looked at the floor. Stuart looked at Amy with the mild expression of a man returning a serve.
Amy blinked. Then she wrote something in her notebook, and Sheldon suspected it was about this specific moment, and he couldn't determine if that was useful data or not.
"I brought you the Gyokuro," Stuart said to Sheldon, setting it on the counter beside the first box. "The bag on the left. Don't brew it above seventy degrees; it goes bitter."
Sheldon opened his mouth.
"Also," Stuart said, "the tenure-track listing at Caltech that Leonard has apparently decided not to tell you he saw last Tuesday? It's real and it's worth reading."
Leonard's head came up. "How did you —"
"You had the tab open on the laptop at the coffee place. You closed it when I walked in." Stuart picked up his keys. He looked at Leonard with the particular expression of someone who found it slightly sad that a man capable of experimental physics had not yet developed a poker face. "It's a good listing. You should read it."
He raised a hand to the room in general — a small, unhurried wave — and walked out.
The door closed behind him.
Sheldon turned back to the whiteboard.
The equation was still complete. The 0.83 probability sat in its column, unrevised. He looked at it for a long moment, at the entire right side of the board, and then he reached up and drew one small horizontal line through the output row — not erasure, just a mark, the kind of mark you made on something you'd decided to table.
He didn't not know what to do with a result that was probably correct and certainly unkind. He had a protocol for incorrect results: correct them. He had a protocol for correct results: publish them. He had no protocol for this.
"We're not publishing the 90-day prediction," he said.
Amy looked up.
"Confidentiality," he said. He recapped the marker. "The subjects haven't consented to public dissemination of findings that bear directly on —"
"Sheldon."
"What?"
"I know," she said, gently. "I know."
He set the marker on the ledge.
From the couch, Leonard was looking at the whiteboard for the first time. At the double-rising lines of the fulfillment scores. At the diverging trajectories. He didn't say anything, and Sheldon decided that was acceptable, and left the board where it was, and went to put the kettle on, at the correct temperature.