Rubicon Beach (31 page)

When I woke again none of it was there, no men with torches, no ship in the river, no sail on the beach. I was still exhausted. I finally shook myself to consciousness in the earliest hours of the morning; I felt a rush of anxiety about Pop. I can’t be worrying him like this, I thought to myself he has nothing but me to lose anymore. The red moon was out, its tunnel gate having shifted to the other side of the river. In its red light I was surprised to see small footsteps leading across the beach to the water; I had figured the little girl for a dream like the rest of it. But there were definitely the steps, and I followed them to the river and at the edge I heard it again, the music I’d never heard before. I had figured it for part of the dream too. It was right there, coming from the other side of the river; and with the same chill as when I’d stood staring across the tracks that morning after my mother had gone, with my hair standing on end just the same way, something occurred to me. It occurred to me that this particular music was the music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond desire, beyond justice. This number was no mad fancy then, no theoretical conceit, it was out there, beyond the river that stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence; and it also occurred to me, standing where the small steps of the Indian child vanished, that my mother had heard this music too the night she left, and that at this very moment I was very close to that which had taken her. Confronted by it, courage fled. Before I bolted I listened once more to the farthest beach where the red tunnel ran to the end of the night; and it sang to me. It sang.

When the country declared war he was nearly thirty years old. Because his sight and hearing were poor he was not enlisted to fight. For a while he was a military engineer, and his facility for numbers and mathematical theory took him to Washington. He became a secret part of the dour devoted days of the country, secret even unto himself. He had been working three months on a special project when he requested an interview with the project director. He did not receive it till after a seven-week period of infuriating his supervisors by insisting that what he had to say was for the ears of the director and no one else. Late one sweltering September Friday he was ushered into the director’s office. He was seated in a chair before the director’s desk by a window that looked out to the sun setting behind a pool of water and a monument. He was there alone for ten minutes when a man he had never seen before came into the room and sat behind the desk, folding his hands on top of it. Mr. Lake, the man said. Are you really the director? John Michael asked. Yes, the man said, I really am. He waited, and John Michael cleared his throat and pushed his heavy glasses with his invisible-moon eyes up the bridge of his nose. He began slowly, trying to sound as sane as possible. Like everyone else, he said to the director, I do not know the exact nature of this project. However, I thought I might have information that would be helpful. The director waited as John Michael continued. There is a number, he said slowly, that we have never known. It is a number between nine and ten; not nine and a half, not nine and nine tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. I discovered this number some time ago and have tried in the years since to calculate an equation that proves the number, beyond the primary equation that led me to discover it. I have to tell you that I have so far failed to develop such a proof. I must also tell you, however, that l have been unable to disprove this number. Moreover, if one hypothetically presumes the existence of such a number, heretofore unforeseen possibilities come within our grasp. He stopped to see if the director was having a reaction to this; the director was not. John Michael sighed and produced a sheaf of papers which he offered the director, who took them. The director glanced over the first several and then laid them on his desk. He looked at his hands a while and then up at John Michael. He asked John Michael why it was nobody else had ever found this number, and John Michael said, Because it isn’t to be found over
there
; and he pointed east. It is rather, he said, to be found out
there
, and he pointed out the window to the sun setting behind the pool of water and the monument. I know it’s out there, said the young man, because I’ve heard it. It’s across the river. The Potomac, you mean? the director said. John Michael shook his head. The Hudson, you mean? the director said. Of course not, the young man answered in disbelief. The
river
, he said: it’s across the
river
. The director, after watching him a while, asked if he’d told anyone else about this number, and John Michael said no, and then the director said, Of course there is no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already. We know all the numbers, we found them hundreds of years ago. If that’s so, answered the young man across the table, then tell me why the Old World came to the New; and the director smiled a little, quizzically, and dismissed the young man. Thank you for your interest, he said formally; he did not return John Michael’s papers. John Michael continued to work for the project another month, when he was transferred to an accounting bureau in the Pentagon where he added numbers of tanks and divided them by numbers of platoons. On the seventh day of August in the year 1945 he was released from service and returned to Chicago, where his father was dying. 

My father sold the paper during the war, and when the war ended he sold the house, which was too big for him and too small for his memories. He got a room in the city. I set up residence with him. I didn’t have much and I think he was happy I was there. I got a job in the payroll department of a business down on Clark Street. Pop asked when I was going to find a woman and marry and I told him I had no plans. Leigh had been dead over ten years. Pop reprimanded me if I stopped at a bar on the way home. I never drank much but it was always too much for him. “You’ve been hanging out at the speakeasies again,” he said. “It’s legal now, Pop,” I’d point out, “it’s been legal a long time. They’re not speakeasies anymore.” His eyes would look hurt. “Take it easy with that stuff, son,” he’d say. The doctors didn’t give him long, a year or two.

Of course he fooled them: he was around another five. But he wasted away the last half of it, becoming more dispirited and living just for the arrogance of it. “I don’t know where I am anymore,” he’d say, reading the newspapers. One day not long before the end, some government men came to see me. They asked allusive questions, referring vaguely to this or that. My involvement with the war project was of some interest. They asked about Leigh and the people we knew. “She knew them,” I said, “I knew her. What is this any way?” I finally told them I would explain anything they wanted to know about me but not about anyone else. They told me I knew some things that could help my country, and I said I didn’t know anything about Leigh that would help my country. You don’t know that, they said. You just said I did know it, I answered. Do I know it or don’t I know it? We know, they said, what it is you know and what it is you don’t. I’m not a political person, I said. Everyone’s a political person, they said. I finally told them, You want to arrest me, then arrest me; l haven’t done anything except fall in love with a girl who’s been dead ten years. Is that a crime? Could be, they said. 

They didn’t arrest me. I continued with my job and put some money away; some nights I would go to a bar and listen to a baseball game on the radio. My father got smaller and smaller until he was smaller than I. That was what I couldn’t stand, that he was smaller than I. He read the newspapers over and over about congressional committees and counterfeit confessions, nothing but committees and confessions. “Something’s wrong,” he said in confusion, shaking his head, “it’s different.” Forget the papers, I said. One night I tried to wake him and could not; I called the doctor. I sat with him two days and at the end of the second day he woke, desperate eyes in his small white face searching the ceiling. Pop, I called to him. “Something’s wrong,” he whispered. “It’s different.” Pop, I said. He dug his fingers into my arm and lunged for his last breath. “My God,” he cried, “where did my dreams go?”

In the autumn of 1951 a small dark American who styled himself John Lake arrived in the seaport of Penzance on the far southwestern tip of England. This was a time when the tide of GIs that had flooded the island during the second world war had long since ebbed; the summer flux of tourists was gone as well. After disembarking Lake made his way up past the civic promenade and took a room at the Blue Plate Inn on the northern edge of town. A Mrs. Easton ran the inn. For two pounds a week Lake received room and board. In defiance of a proud national reputation for disastrous cuisine, Mrs. Easton cooked well enough. After several weeks Lake applied for a job loading crates down at the docks; it was a position for which he was singularly without qualification. The man in shipping explained this to the American with quiet tact. At a year or two shy of forty, Lake was rather old for such a job when he had never done any physical work in his life; he was also overeducated, something the man in shipping could deduce without knowing anything of Lake at all. Eventually Lake found himself attending to the company books. He had dreaded this inevitability, wanting nothing to do with numbers; but the numbers found him.