Numbers Don't Lie

by Terry Bisson

  “I must have been out front smoking a cigarette,” she said. “You know how your Uncle Mort is about second-hand smoke.”

  “You could get an answering machine,” Candy offered.

  “I have one,” Aunt Minnie said. “Mort bought it for me at Forty-Seventh Street Photo, right before they went out of business.” She pointed to the end table, and sure enough, there was a little black box next to the phone. The red light was blinking.

  “You have messages,” I said. “See the blinking red light? That’s probably me.”

  “Messages?” she said. “Nobody told me anything about messages. It’s an answering machine. I figure it answers the phone, so what’s the point in me getting involved?”

  “But what if somebody wants to talk to you?” I protested.

  She spread her hands; she speaks English but gestures in Lifthatvanian. “Who’d want to talk to a lonely old woman?”

  While Aunt Minnie took Candy upstairs and showed her our bedroom, I checked the machine. There were eleven messages, all from me, all telling Aunt Minnie we were coming to New York for our Honeymoon, and bringing her back to Alabama with us for the wedding, and asking her, please, to return my call.

  I erased them.

  * * *

  Aunt Minnie’s guest room was in the back of the house, and from the window I could see the narrow yards where I had played as a kid. It was like looking back on your life from middle age (almost, anyway), and seeing it literally. There were the fences I had climbed, the grapevines I had robbed, the corners I had hidden in. There, two doors down, was Studs’s back yard, with the big maple tree. The tree house we had built was still there. I could even see a weird blue light through the cracks. Was someone living in it?

  After we unpacked, I took Candy for a walk and showed her the old neighborhood. It looked about the same, but the people were different. The Irish and Italian families had been replaced by Filipinos and Mexicans. Studs’s parents’ house, two doors down from Aunt Minnie’s, was dark except for a light in the basement—and the blue light in the tree house out back. My parents’ house, a block and a half away on East Fourth, was now a rooming house for Bangladeshi cab drivers. The apartments on Ocean Parkway were filled with Russians.

  When we got back to the house, Aunt Minnie was on the porch, smoking a Kent. “See how the old neighborhood has gone to pot?” she said. “All these foreigners!”

  “Aunt Minnie!” I said, shocked. “You were a foreigner, too, remember? So was Uncle Mort.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “Never you mind.”

  I decided to change the subject. “Guess who I saw at the airport yesterday? Studs Blitz, from down the block, remember?”

  “You mean young Arthur,” said Aunt Minnie. “He still lives at home. His father died a couple of years ago. His mother, Mavis, takes in boarders. Foreigners. Thank God your Uncle Mort’s benefits spared me that.”

  She patted the urn and the cat’s eye glowed benevolently.

  That night, Candy and I began our Honeymoon by holding hands across the gap between our separate beds. Candy wanted to wait until tomorrow night, after we had “done the tourist thing” to “go all the way.” Plus, she was still nervous from the flight.

  I didn’t mind. It was exciting and romantic. Sort of.

  “Your Aunt Minnie is sweet,” Candy said, right before we dropped off to sleep. “But can I ask one question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “How can ashes object to smoke?”

  * * *

  Our return tickets were for Wednesday. That meant we had one full Honeymoon day, Tuesday, to see the sights of New York, most of which (all of which, truth be told) are in Manhattan. Candy and I got up early and caught the F train at Ditmas. It came right away. We got off at the next-to-last stop in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue, and walked uptown past St. Patrick’s and Tiffany’s and Disney and the Trump Tower; all the way to Central Park and the Plaza, that magnet for Honeymooners. When we saw all the people on the front step, we thought there had been a fire. But they were just smoking; it was just like Brooklyn.

  We strolled through the lobby, peering humbly into the Palm Court and the Oak Room, then started back downtown, still holding hands. Candy was the prettiest girl on Fifth Avenue (one of the few in uniform), and I loved watching her watch my big town rush by. New York! Next stop, Rockefeller Center. We joined the crowd overlooking the skaters, secretly waiting for someone to fall; it’s like NASCAR without the noise. Candy was eyeing the line at Nelson’s On the Rink, where waiters on Rollerblades serve cappuccinos and lattes. It’s strictly a tourist joint; New Yorkers don’t go for standing in line and particularly not for coffee. But when I saw how fast the line was moving, I figured, what the Hell. We were seated right away and served right away, and the expense (we are talking four-dollar croissants here) was well worth it.

  “What now?” asked Candy, her little rosebud smile deliciously flaked with pastry. I couldn’t imagine anyone I would rather Honeymoon with.

  “The Empire State Building, of course.”

  Candy grimaced. “I’m afraid of heights. Besides, don’t they shoot people up there?”

  “We’re not going to the top, silly,” I said. “That’s a tourist thing.” Taking her by the hand, I took her on my own personal Empire State Building Tour, which involves circling it and seeing it above and behind and through and between the other midtown buildings; catching it unawares, as it were. We started outside Lord & Taylor on Fifth, then cut west on Fortieth alongside Bryant Park for the sudden glimpse through the rear of a narrow parking lot next to American Standard; then started down Sixth, enjoying the angle from Herald Square (and detouring through Macy’s to ride the wooden-treaded escalators). Then we worked back west through “little Korea,” catching two dramatic views up open airshafts and one across a steep sequence of fire escapes. Standing alone, the Empire State Building looks stupid, like an oversized toy or a prop for a Superman action figure. But in its milieu it is majestic, like an Everest tantalizingly appearing and disappearing behind the ranges. We circled the great massif in a tightening spiral for almost an hour, winding up (so to speak) on Fifth Avenue again, under the big art deco façade. The curb was crowded with tourists standing in line to buy T-shirts and board buses. The T-shirt vendors were looking gloomy, since the buses were coming right away and there was no waiting.

  I had saved the best view for last. It’s from the middle of Fifth Avenue, looking straight up. You have to time it just right with the stoplights, of course. Candy and I were about to step off the curb, hand in hand, when a messenger in yellow-and-black tights (one of our city’s colorful jesters), who was straddling his bike beside a rack of payphones on the corner of Thirty-Third, hailed me.

  “Yo!”

  I stopped. That’s how long I’d been in Alabama.

  “Your name Irv?”

  I nodded. That’s how long I’d been in Alabama.

  He handed me the phone with a sort of a wink and a sort of a shrug, and was off on his bike before I could hand it back (which was my first instinct).

  I put the phone to my ear. Rather cautiously, as you might imagine. “Hello?”

  “Irv? Finally!”

  “Wu?!?” Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu, my best man. Wu studied physics at Bronx Science, pastry in Paris, math at Princeton, herbs in Taiwan, law at Harvard (or was it Yale?), and caravans at a Gobi caravansary. Did I mention he’s Chinese-American, can tune a twelve string guitar in under a minute with a logarithmic calculator, and is over six feet tall? I met him when we worked at Legal Aid, drove Volvos, and went to the Moon; but that’s another story. Then he went to Hawaii and found the Edge of the Universe, yet another story still. Now he was working as a meteorological entomologist, whatever that was, in the jungles of Quetzalcan.

  Wherever that was.

  “Who’d you expect?” Wu asked. “I’m glad you finally picked up. Your Aunt Minnie told me you and Candy wer
e in midtown doing the tourist thing.”

  “We’re on our Honeymoon.”

  “Oh no! Don’t tell me I missed the wedding!”

  “Of course not,” I said. “We had to take the Honeymoon first so Candy could get the personal time. How’d you persuade Aunt Minnie to answer the phone? Or me, for that matter? Are you in Huntsville already?”

  “That’s the problem, Irv. I’m still in Quetzalcan. The rain forest, or to be more precise, the cloud forest; the canopy, in fact. Camp Canopy, we call it.”

  “But the wedding is Thursday! You’re the best man, Wu! I’ve already rented your tux. It’s waiting for you at Five Points Formal Wear.”

  “I know all that,” said Wu. “But I’m having a problem getting away. That’s why I called, to see if you can put the wedding off for a week.”

  “A week? Wu, that’s impossible. Cindy has already commissioned the ice sculpture.”

  Wu’s wife, Cindy, was catering the wedding.

  “The hurricane season is almost upon us,” said Wu, “and my figures are coming out wrong. I need more time.”

  “What do the hurricanes have to do with your figure?” I asked. “Or with meteors or bugs, for that matter?”

  “Irving—” Wu always called me by my full name when he was explaining something he felt he shouldn’t have to explain. “Meteorology is weather, not meteors. And the bugs have to do with the Butterfly Effect. We’ve been over this before.”

  “Oh yes, of course, I remember,” I said, and I did, sort of. But Wu went over it again anyway: how the flap of a butterfly’s wing in the rain forest could cause a storm two-thousand miles away. “It was only a matter of time,” he said, “before someone located that patch of rain forest, which is where we are, and cloned the butterfly. It’s a moth, actually. We have twenty-two of them, enough for the entire hurricane season. We can’t stop the hurricanes, but we can delay, direct, and divert them a little, which is why ABC flew us down here.”

  “ABC?”

  “They bought the television rights to the hurricane season, Irv. Don’t you read the trades? CBS got the NBA and NBC got the Super Bowl. ABC beat out Ted Turner, which is fine with me. Who needs a Hurricane Jane, even upgraded from a tropical storm? The network hired us to edge the ’canes toward the weekends as much as possible, when the news is slow. And State Farm is chipping in, since any damage we can moderate is money in their pocket. They are footing the bill for this little Hanging Hilton, in fact. ‘Footing,’ so to speak. My feet haven’t touched the ground in three weeks.”

  “I built a tree house once,” I said. “Me and Studs Blitz, back in the old neighborhood.”

  “A tree house in Brooklyn?” interjected a strangely accented voice.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Dmitri, stay off the line!” barked Wu. “I’ll explain later,” he said to me. “But I’m losing my signal. Which way are you two lovebirds heading?”

  * * *

  We were heading downtown. Our first stop was Sweet Nothings, the bridal boutique in New York’s historic lingerie district. Candy made me wait outside while she shopped. Inspired, I bought a Honeymoon Bungee at the Oriental Novelty Arcade on Broadway. (“What’s it for?” Candy asked apprehensively. I promised to show her later.) Feeling romantic, I took her little hand in mine and led her back over to Sixth and presented her with the world’s largest interactive bouquet—a three-block stroll through the flower market. We were just emerging from a tunnel of flowering ferns at Twenty-Sixth, when the payphone on the corner rang. On a hunch, I picked it up.

  When you get hunches as rarely as I do, you follow them.

  “Irving, why do you take so long to answer?”

  “I picked up on the first ring, Wu. How’d you manage that phone thing, anyway?”

  “Software,” Wu said. “I swiped the algos for handwriting recognition out of an Apple Newton and interlaced them into a GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite feed program. Then I ran your mail order consumer profile (pirated from J. Crew) through a fuzzilogical bulk mail collator macro lifted off a ZIP code CD-ROM, and adjusted for the fact that you’ve spent the past six months in Alabama. A friend in the Mir shunts the search feeds through the communications satellite LAN until the “IRV” probability field collapses and the phone nearest you rings. And you pick it up. Voilá!”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean, how’d you get Aunt Minnie to answer the phone?”

  “I changed the ring!” Wu said, sounding pleased with himself. “It took a little doing, but I was able to tweak a caller ID macro enough to toggle her ringer. Made it sound like a doorbell chime. Somehow that gets her to answer. I’ll send you the figures.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “The only figure I want to see is you-know-who’s in her Sweet Nothings” (Candy, who was pretending not to listen, blushed) “and yours in a white tux at noon on Thursday! There’s no way we can change the wedding date.”

  “Can’t you put it off at least a couple of days, Irv? I’m having trouble with my formula.”

  “Impossible!” I said. “The ice sculpture won’t wait. Let the butterflies go and get on back to Huntsville. One hurricane more or less can’t make all that much difference.”

  “Moths,” said Wu. “And it’s not just hurricanes. What if it rains on your wedding?”

  “It won’t,” I said. “It can’t. Cindy guarantees clear skies. It’s included in the catering bill.”

  “Of course it is, but how do you think that works, Irving? Cindy buys weather insurance from Ido Ido, the Japanese wedding conglomerate, which contracts with Entomological Meteorological Solutions—that’s us—to schedule outdoor ceremonies around the world. It’s just a sideline for EMS, of course. A little tweaking. But I can’t release the first moth until the coordinates are right, and my numbers are coming out slippery.”

  “Slippery?”

  “The math doesn’t work, Irv. The Time axis doesn’t line up. In a system as chaotic as weather, you only have one constant, Time, and when it isn’t . . .”

  But we were losing our signal, and Candy was looking at me suspiciously. I hung up.

  “What are all these phone calls from Wu?” she asked, as we headed downtown. “Is something wrong with the wedding plans?”

  “Absolutely not,” I lied. There was no reason to spoil her Honeymoon (and mine!). “He just wants me to help him with a—a math problem.”

  “I thought he was the math whiz. I didn’t know you even took math.”

  * * *

  I didn’t, not after my sophomore year in high school. I was totally absorbed by history, inspired by my favorite teacher, Citizen Tipograph (she wanted us to call her Comrade, but the principal put his foot down), who took us on field trips as far afield as Gettysburg and Harper’s Ferry. Every course C.T. taught, whether it was Women’s Labor History, Black Labor History, Jewish Labor History, or just plain old American Labor History, included at least one trip to Union Square, and I grew to love the seedy old park, where I can still hear the clatter of the horses and the cries of the Cossacks (which is what C.T. called the cops) and the stirring strains of the Internationale. I tried to share some of this drama with Candy, but even though she listened politely, I could see that to her Union Square was just scrawny grass, dozing bums, and overweening squirrels.

  Candy couldn’t wait to get out of the park. She was far more interested in the stacked TVs in the display window at Nutty Ned’s Home Electronics, on the corner of University and Fourteenth, where dozens of Rosie O’Donnells were chatting silently with science fiction writer Paul Park. There’s nothing better than a talk show without sound. We both stopped to watch for a moment, when all of the screens started scrolling numbers. Over Rosie and her guest!

  On a hunch, I went into the store. Candy followed.

  Nutty Ned’s clerks were firing wildly with remotes, trying to tune the runaway TVs. The displays all changed colors but stayed the same. It was strange, but strangely familiar:

  I fi
gured I knew what it was. And I was right. At precisely that moment, an entire FINAL SALE table of portable phones started to ring. It made a terrible noise, like a nursery filled with children who decide to cry all at once.

  I picked up one and they all quit.

  “Wu? Is that you?”

  “Irv, did you see my figures? I’m shunting them through the midmorning talk net COMSAT feed. See what I mean? I’m getting totally unlikely dates and places for these hurricanes, all down the line. Not to mention rainy weddings. And it’s definitely the T.”

  “The T?”

  “The Time axis, the constant that makes the Butterfly Effect predictable. It’s become a maverick variable, too long here, too short there. Speaking of which, I wish you wouldn’t make me ring you twenty times. It’s annoying, and I have other things to do here, living in a tree house, like feed the flying—”

  “I picked up on the first ring.”

  “The Hell you did! The phone rang twenty-six times.”

  I did a quick count of the phones on the FINAL SALE table. “Twenty-six phones rang, Wu, but they each rang only once. And all at once.”

  “Whoa!” said Wu. “I’m coming through in parallel? That could mean there’s a twist.”

  “A twist?”

  “A twist in local space-time. It’s never happened but it’s theoretically possible, of course. And it just might explain my slippery T axes. Have you noticed any other temporal anomalies?”

  “Temporary comedies?”

  “Weird time stuff, Irving! Any other weird time stuff happening there in New York? Overturned schedules! Unexpected delays!”

  “Well, New York’s all about delays,” I said, “but as a matter of fact—” I told Wu about never having to wait for the subway. Or the bus. “Even the Fifth Avenue bus comes right away!”

  “The Fifth Avenue bus! I’m beginning to think there may be more than a temporal anomaly here. We may be looking at a full-fledged chronological singularity. But I need more than your subjective impressions, Irv; I need hard numbers. Which way are you two lovebirds going?”