Book of Numbers: A Novel (25 page)

“Let me help,” Abs said.

“I got it,” she said, and slumped the guy up against a
banister. “Chivalry is misogyny.”

Then she turned away just as he said, “And chauvinist on a double
word score is 36 points in Scrabble.”

She paused, “Heavy.”

“And a pair of Yahtzee dice can be rolled in 36
combinations.”

“So you’re a [spaz/square]?”

“I’m 36.”

“That’s your draft number?”

“I mean I’m 36 years old.”

“Bummer.” [“far out”?]

A month before, on the first day of December, the Selective Service
System—an agency of the US government responsible for
staffing the armed forces—[had reached its omnipotent eagle’s talons into
a dimestore fishbowl] and chosen 366 blue plastic capsules, each of which had been
[impregnated] with a paper slip marked with a number corresponding to a day of 1944,
which was a leap year. The first number drawn was 258, and the 258th day of that year
was September 14. The last was 160, and the 160th day was June 8. Anyone born on June 8
got the highest draft number, 366, and would be among the last to be inducted, while
anyone born on September 14 got the lowest, 1, and would be among the first
—the other 364 days of 1944 all drew draft numbers between
them.

A subsequent drawing was held with the 26 letters of the alphabet, to
determine the order in which the men born on the same day would be called. The guy [in
bellbottoms/pirate shirt] groveling at the woman’s [quilt skirt] had a birthday
of October 26, which was the seventh number picked. His last name was Negrón, and
N was the fifth letter picked, and his first was Witold, and W was the ninth. Witold
Negrón had done seven shots [of rum?], then five, then nine.
Then pounded a beer[?]
. He was going to smuggle himself to Vancouver, and
the woman told Abs she was considering tagging along.

Her name was Sari Le Vay, and she was a PhD student of comparative
linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley[, at which she’d later
teach linguistics and gender studies]. She was just finishing up her classwork but was
finding it difficult to begin her dissertation [WHAT WAS ABS’S DISSERTATION? DID
HE HAVE TO DO ONE?], she said. Her academic field was not respected, women the world
over weren’t respected, the current party Central Committee in Hanoi had the
lowest number of women of any socialist or communist governing body worldwide, zero, and
beyond all that, it was like America had already slaughtered her boyfriend, whose body
was laid out on the stairs. She rolled her own Bali Shag, drank Mohawk ginger brandy,
popped bennies. She had opinions on how Bundists treated their wives and Trotsky treated
the blacks. Self-determination was not a transitional demand. She’d registered
Chicanos to vote in Oakland and dated them. Men and women both.

Out on the porch they pondered space. She had theories beyond
MLK and the Kennedys. NASA landed on the moon, but it also
controlled monsoon season. Kissinger sabotaged the peacetalks to tilt the election from
Humphrey.

“Like this lottery shitcrock,” she said. “Like
we’re all equal and even and fair in America and who gets picked to go die is
just one big serendipity—I don’t think so. It can’t be an accident
that everyone I know numbered low is either a minority or an immigrant. You’re a
numbers guy—you check the numbers.”

That’s what Abs did the very next morning [BUT WHAT DID HE DO THE
REST OF THE NIGHT?]—he found the numbers in
The Stanford Daily
[IN HIS
APARTMENT OR?]. But they had nothing to do with minorities or immigrants. Though there
was something about them still perturbing. Or something about Sari had left him smitten.
He got her number out of the phonebook and wrote it down at the top of [a page]. Under
it he listed all the draft numbers, in 29 rows for the shortest month, 31 rows for the
longest, across 12 monthly columns, making a crippled square of days with 18 extras
dangling at bottom [like orphans trying to hang onto a Huey whomping out of Saigon].

He got up and into his [car type?] to find a computer, because the sooner
this got done, the sooner he could call her. But Stanford’s lab was closed for
New Year’s and PARC wasn’t finished yet and didn’t have any
computers. The IBM 360s and SDS Sigmas were still trucking on the interstate. He
shouldn’t have shown up at work until [?].

He went back to Perry Lane [his neighborhood?], and took the integers by
hand, put together scatters, chi matrices, demarchic distributions. He called up Lahasky
to hash it out at the Nut House [WHICH WAS?], even bothered their mutual dissertation
advisor [UNINTELLIGIBLE NAME]. The math was just elementary statistics, the
advisor’s encouragement was exciting, the rest was galling. [As a computer
person] It was galling that the US government had entrusted such an undertaking to
anything but computers.

“Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots” was
carried by all the major news outlets, in reduced layreader form, over the second week
of January [(the days of draft numbers 101, 224, 306, 199, and 194)], though the
complete article was published only in July, in a special War
Math
issue of
Science
. Abs’s scrawled charts had been typeset, and the
epigraph was from the Book of Proverbs: “The lot causeth contentions to cease,
and parteth between the mighty.” The paper opened by [IN THAT PEDANTIC
AUTODIDACTIC SNIDE WAY TECHNOCRATS HAVE OF KNOWING, NEVER THINKING] surveying Biblical
and Classical literature pertaining to divination by lots (or cleromancy), before
recounting the supplanting of deistic caprice by the laws of nature and rules of logic
[erudition supplied by Rabbi Maurice Fienberg of Congregation Beyt Am, Palo Alto]. It
went on to define differences between the “arbitrary” and the
“random” (the former a determination of will/discretion, the latter
hypothetically indeterminate, or chance), and the basic principles of sortition (the
differences between chance samplings of volunteers and of the general population):
[“QUOTE”]

The second section explained the Selective Service regulations for the
draft lottery[, the third was tragic, the fourth, a farce]

The third section opened by asserting that in a year with 366 days the
average lottery number for each month should be situated in the middle—at 183.
But in this lottery the average draft number for the first six months of the year was
higher (for people born in January, the average draft number was 201.2), while the ADN
for the last six months was lower (for people born in December, the ADN was 121.5). The
correlation between one’s date of birth and draft number indicated a regression
curve of −.226. An unflawed lottery would’ve maintained a level
correlation at zero, a straight flatline throughout the year.

[In sum, the closer you were born to the start of things, the
better.]

The paper then pointed out that people are not born with uniform
distribution throughout the year[ and especially not with uniform distribution in the
leap years]. It proved this by parsing datasets from the US Public Health Service to
determine that the birthrates in the first quarters of each year between 1900 and 1940
[EARLIEST RECORDS? TO THE WWII DRAFT?] were a mean 12.2% above average[, confirming that
summers between the equinoctes have normally been the busiest periods of conception].
Further[—through a sinister twist that might only be explained through a syncrasy
of biochemistry, sex trends, and God—]an average of 64.2% of all babies born
during the first quarters of 1900–1940 were male. This meant that early year male
babies were
doubly insured against conscription—firstly by
their birthdates, and then secondly by their disproportionate sample size.

All [samples of] men who shared the same birthday were inducted by order
of their names, last, middle, and first weighted accordingly, and ranked in the
lotteried sequence: an alphabet that began with J and ended with V[ for Victory]. This
policy spelled discrimination for men who lacked middle names, and made no provision for
the grading of men with identical birthdates and names.

It was this nameranking that comprised the lottery’s purest bias,
apparently. Equations weren’t required to understand that the scores of Johnsons
and McNamaras and Nixons and Mitchells and Hoovers and Helmses in America tended to have
middle names while the singularly ethnic Witold Negróns tended not to.

The paper’s fourth section, its conclusion: In preparation for the
lottery drawing, Abs wrote, the days and so the months had been encapsulated
consecutively. Meaning that the capsules containing the papers with the January dates
were assembled first, the February capsules were assembled second, and so on through the
calendar, with each month’s encapsulations poured into a handcranked drum, a
mechanical bingo spinner [like a wheel for a gerbil or hamster], upon completion. This
meant that the January capsules were mixed with the others 11x, the February capsules
mixed 10x, and so on, through the November capsules, which were mixed with the others
2x, and the December capsules, mixed only 1x. A final condemnation cited the Selective
Service’s own report that the capsules had been poured into the fishbowl from the
side of the drum that’d held the earlier days of the year, so that the latter
less thoroughly spun days remained atop[ floating like a scum].

On the day “Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy
in with the Lots” was published in a special War Math issue of
Science
in July 1970, six months after Sari inspired it
Abs
proposed to Sari. Theirs being an engagement very preoccupied with
numbers—figures, equations—it bears notice that though they were married
at Congregation Beyt Am, in Palo Alto, on January 1, 1971, their son and only child was
born on June 8.

Witold Negrón, 8th Battalion, 4th Artillery, was mortally
wounded in Operation Lam Son 719 between Khe Sanh forward supply base and Tchepone,
Laos, March 1971.

[[[[OPENING VERSION 2 BIOGRAPHY:
Sari’s parents, Imre and Ilona Le Vay, were Hungarians to the Americans, but Jews
to the Hungarians. Above all, though, they were Budapesters, geographically and
culturally marooned between Joseph’s [Abs’s father’s] ghetto
origins and Eve’s [Abs’s mother’s] haughty ancestry in Cologne.

To them, Joseph was just a [coarse] peddler of frozen water who’d
tried to socially elevate himself through his union with a [wealthy snobbish] yecca
wife, Eve, who invariably played the same EZ piano arrangement of Mozart’s
Variations KV.265 (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”/“Baa Baa Black
Sheep”/the ABCs), dabbled in depopulated watercolors (kitchen still-lives,
insipid landscapes of the wildlife preserves around JFK), and in lieu of financially
solving whatever problems their daughter was having with her monkeywrench son, preferred
to waste her fortune on transcontinental flights, to offer her opinions in person.

The Le Vays would have sudden fevers and lymphatic surgeries whose
recuperation periods would last the durations of Eve’s visits. They called her
“the princess gourmand [Princesse de Guermantes] of the synagogue women’s
league.” Or else “the doyenne of the mooing bourgeois [la doyenne de la
moyenne bourgeoisie].” They mocked her Shalimar perfumes, her Scherrer suits worn
always with the gloves, her inaccurate recitations of Heine that never aspired to more
than the first two couplets of
Die Lorelei,
and were just the malapropic
asyntactic expressions of the trait that most provoked them: Eve’s Deutschtum, or
the conceit of her Germanness. Though it wasn’t just that she persisted in a vain
attachment to that identity, it was that she hadn’t suffered for it—she
hadn’t suffered like they had. The Le Vays had cultivated the full European
education and with such unflagging intensity
the continent had no
choice but to plan their genocide so that
they embodied its quintessence.

The Le Vays were the conjugation of generations of linguists,
etymologists, philologists, and lexicostatisticians who’d been querulously
crossreferencing one another ever since their forebears—who on both sides
included Lévais and Lévajs—Magyarized their surnames in solidarity
with the Kingdom of Hungary following its fraught unification with the Austrian Empire
in 1867. [Their grandparents?] had learned how to speak, read, and write all the
Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, and how to speak, read, and at least write
about all the Baltic languages
too. [Their parents?] were capable of
griping about the dissolution of the dual monarchy in its every single tongue, and in
the Ural-Altaic, the Finno-Ugric-and-Permic, Samoyedic, and Oghuric—in everything
but the Semitic.
The stiff leatherskinned and authoritative edition
that was their family would go to its death incomplete—the Le Vays the
missing volumes.

Imre and Ilona had been doctoral candidates at the University of Budapest,
where they’d maligned each other’s talents so publicly that when their
professor paid a university janitor [how much?] to shelter them both in the
janitor’s dacha [Hungarian equivalent?] outside Sárospatak, the
beneficiaries, even with the Nazis at the door, interpreted the gesture as only partly
altruistic. If the other part was a joke, though, the professor never laughed. Dr.
Péter Simonyi died fighting with the Resistance. He never got to meet the
couple’s daughter, born in spring—or witness its nuptials, civil in
fall—both 1945.

But then neither did their parents and siblings [how many?]: Imre’s
family had perished in Auschwitz/Auschwitz-Birkenau, while Ilona’s had been
executed and left to the Danube [by the Arrow Cross?].

Following the war, the couple was unable to find employment—despite
Imre’s formidable achievement as an Esperantist (his dissertation sought to
officialize the artificial language’s first natural phonological evolution, the
replacement of the phonemic
ĥ
with the
k
), and despite Ilona
being one of the great hopes of Hungarian bibliography (her dissertation had proposed
conversion mechanisms between the author/title taxonomies then prevalent in Hungary? and
the various faceted? international standards). They labored, instead, in the dissident
underground, as translators, interpreters: in Russian,
vragi
naroda
—“enemies of the people.”