He could have driven for hours, for days. He could have looked for weeks and never found it, were it not for the church. That, presumably, had been the point. It had worked, in the end.
It was half ruined, and stood by itself in the middle of a field. David knew enough to understand this meant it most likely represented the last lingering sign of a lost village. Seen from above, from a low-flying plane, there would have been crop marks to show where domestic buildings had once been, a previous lay of the land. But that had been long, long ago.
When he saw the two remaining walls, the jagged half steeple, it took his breath away and every unremembered dream came back at once.
He lurched the car over to the side of the road, parked chaotically on the verge. He got out, stepped gingerly over the low, barbed wire fence, and started to walk towards the ruin. It was probably private land. He didn’t care. Twice he disappeared up to one knee in the boggy ground. He didn’t care about that either. His mobile phone rang once. He didn’t even hear it.
He walked slowly around the church. He knew it only meant one thing to him, that he had only been here once before. He approached it, finally, and stood close up against the wall. The sky was blue above, flecked with cloud. It looked the same wherever you stood, whether inside the remains of the structure or without, and at any point along the walls. But again, he had planned well, and eventually he found the heavy stone.
He went down on one knee and prised his fingers around the sides. Gym savvy told him to protect his back, and he took his time to pull the big, flat stone out of place. Underneath was a small metal box.
He lifted it out, and sat down on the grass.
Inside the box was a small old sack, stained with time and wrapped over itself. He waited for a while, wishing for a cigarette, though he had never smoked. He thought about the ceiling in his mother’s bedroom, knowing it not to be the first thing he had ever seen. Finally he opened the bag, and pulled out the envelope inside.
He recognised the handwriting, from a list he had written back in February. The letter said:
To whoever I might be—
I hope this time it has worked, and I’m young, that I’ve caught me in time. Better still I hope I will find this and smile, knowing it was unnecessary, knowing I can palm anything, make coins appear out of people’s ears, and that I have not come here alone. But just in case:
[1]
Do things. Do everything. Learn, explore, open the world’s boxes while you’re young and time stretches out infinitely far.
[2]
Make mistakes, and make them early, not late. Too soon can be undone. Too late cannot.
[3]
Marry the one who could break your heart.
[4]
There is no [4]. The first three will be enough.
Good luck,
Yourself.
Ten minutes later David put the letter back in the bag. He wished he had known to bring the Houdin book with him. He could have put it in there as well, for next time. But if he remembered this late then too, there would be little point. He might as well sell it, hope it would find someone who would use it in time.
When the stone was back in place he spent a while standing close to the wall of the ruined church, memorising the shape of the road, the pattern of the water inlets in the distance: anything he might reasonably hope would be here next time. Finally he walked back over to the car, climbed in, and sat for a while looking out at the flat fens.
Then he started the drive back to London, where he knew a surprise birthday party was waiting for him.
The Book of
Irrational Numbers
A nice clean page. Page three. 3×3=9, hence 0. The beginning. When I start a new notebook I never use the first piece of paper, because you know it’s going to get scuffed up. I always leave both sides of that one blank, and start writing on the second piece of paper, where it will be protected from dirt. It’s usually hobbies that I use notebooks for. I feel like writing a different type of thing now. Don’t really know how to go about it. Blah blah blah words words words. Letters must add up to something, but I’m not sure what. Writing something down makes it feel like yesterday’s news. Almost nothing actually is yesterday’s news, though. Most of it is still going on. Today was a reasonable day like most others. I was due to paint a house just on the other side of town and I got most of the prepping done in the morning but then it started to rain, so I had to leave it be.
142 = 196. 8.562 = 73.2736.
Roanoke is a funny place to live. Not quite in the middle of nowhere, close by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Of Virginia. Never seen a lonesome pine around here: there’s billions of them. I quite like it though. There’s plenty of work. People always need things done to their houses. There’s not much else to do, and you’ve got a hell of a job finding anywhere to eat or drink in the evening, especially on Sundays. The only place is Macados, a burger bar in the centre of town. Lots of highschoolers, though that’s okay. They’re not so rich that they’re obnoxious. Most of them are pretty good kids. Basically it’s a town with a couple of malls, a small airport. In winter you can go driving up in the mountains, find secret places. I drove back from Richmond once along the Ridge and passed all these little homesteads. People looked up at me like they’d never seen a car before.
The most important thing I have ever discovered is the idea of digital roots. To find the digital root of a number, the aim is to reduce it to a single digit. You achieve this by adding up all its existing digits: 943521, for example, adds up to 9+4+3+5+2+1 = 24. This, of course, still has two digits, so you add them together: 2+4 = 6. The digital root of 943521, therefore is 6. What is interesting, however, is that to speed up this process you can simply cast out the nines. If there’s a nine in the number, or any of the digits add up to nine, you can ignore them. In 943521, therefore, you ignore the 9, and also ignore the 4 and 5, which add up to nine. This leaves you with 3+2+1, which gives you 6. The same answer.
I ended up here completely by chance. I don’t know, can’t chart the steps, which brought me this way. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything in particular, but then maybe it could have been something so small that I wouldn’t have though it was important enough. I can remember some books some conversations some dreams some things I saw. But nothing spectacular. No major blows to the head.
You look for what makes sense.
Susan the new girl who works in the bookstore is lovely. She’s got a great smile and she always looks so cheerful and as if she knows something funny is going to happen sooner or later. And she’s Prime. I guess it’s a vacation job or something. She noticed my accent straight away. I think she thinks it’s cool. I hope so.
Gerry was on the phone again earlier this evening, hassling everyone about what we’re doing for the Millennium. Max is getting all hot and bothered about it too. Who cares? Everybody thinks that the year 2000 is going to be the big one. It’s not. We’re already there. It’s already started. Cast out the nines, and see how it is so. Last year was 1998. 1 + 9 + 9 + 8 = 27, and 2+7 (or ignore the 9s, and just add 1 and 8) = 9; cast it out. Zero, in other words. 1998 is ground zero or the end of things, a nothing year in modulo 9. 1999, on the other hand, has a digital root of 1. 1999 is year 1; 2000 roots down to 2. 2000 isn’t the start of anything, it’s after it has already begun. Millenniums don’t mean anything to real people. Their lives revolve around much smaller circles. You strip things down. If you can’t reduce a number down any further, then it means something. Otherwise it’s just addition.
Got the Macillsons’ house painted today. Did some work inside for them too, fixing up stuff. Think their neighbour might need some work done too. So it goes, luckily.
It’s very much like something breaks. When it’s done, you go through this hell. Like grief. At first the units are minutes, and then hours. Weeks, months. Cycles of guilt and grief and sometimes glee. Once you’ve been through it once, it’s different. The first time you’re culpable, there’s no
getting away from it. Afterwards it’s different. All the structures, once so hard, become fluid forever, like a bag full of broken glass in treacle. When you push you hand in, it’s sweet and sharp together.
People are nice to me, but that just makes me feel sad and guilty, because I know I’m not very nice. It’s really painful. I have good friends, and I always have a laugh with the guys at the store where I buy my materials. Susan at the bookstore waves now when she sees me go by. I don’t deserve it. I want to be nice. It’s important to me. I was nice once, I think, and bits of me still are. I used to drive miles, for example, every weekend, to see someone. I had it in me then, the capacity for being good. I still do. Bits of me seem not to be touched by it all. But they’re no help, either, and you have to wonder where the energy, the motivation and glee come from. Doesn’t any of it come from that part of me, the part I like? It must: or if not, why is it so powerless? It must be very weak to be unable to do anything, in which case it’s obviously not so blameless after all. It’s all very well being that little flinchy man, sitting up in a high tower of the castle, behind a locked door, wanting no part of it. Weak, afraid; rational at the heart of the irrational. Rationality is weak; it has no moment, contributes to no interesting sums. All it does is cringe.
The weather was colder again today. I don’t feel hunted, exactly. It’s as if someone is reaching out of the dark towards me, as if the opaque brown fog is beginning to bulge as someone pushes against it from the outside. Think this is going to be a cold winter.
17 is the last year of being young. I remember when I was a kid, about fourteen, I guess, thinking how weird it would feel to be older. I could just about understand the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Eighteen seemed one of those ages like twenty-one where it’s not so much an age as a legal marker. A boundary line. You don’t think ‘Oh, it’s going to be like so-and-such’ being eighteen, you just think about the things that aren’t going to be illegal any more. Nineteen, though. That seemed really old. Being nineteen was grown up and over the wall. Of course it doesn’t seem that way now. But it did then. Now I realise that nineteen is 1 and 9, and 1+9 = 10 and 1+0 = 1. The first year of being old. 1+8 is 9, a ground zero year.
You have to watch everything very carefully.
I think about people waiting for birthday cards, Christmas cards. A phone call which isn’t going to come. Mothers, mainly. I wish it could say it made a big difference, but it doesn’t.
Squaring numbers is very easy. You just take the number and multiply it by itself. Anybody can do that. It’s an easy road to travel, like time in the usual direction.
Roads. I remember that time, back in England, when I drove up to Cambridge from London on the M11 motorway. If there’s any bad weather anywhere in the world, it’ll be on the M11. I’m telling you. It feels as if the road has been built to make the worst of it. There are high stretches, where strong winds seem to grab hold of the car and drag it towards other lanes; average stretches, where rain seems to sheet into the windscreen almost parallel to the ground; and then there are the dips. Especially just outside Cambridge there are long low patches, where fog collects and sits in a clump like porridge in a bowl. I used to have a girlfriend who lived there. For a year, in fact over a year, I used to drive up the M11 every weekend. I saw it in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—and regardless, the weather there was worse than anywhere else. One night in October I drove down the slipway onto the motorway and found myself completely enveloped in fog. For the next ten miles visibility wasn’t even as far as the end of the hood of the car. I couldn’t see a damned thing. I couldn’t see my own headlights, never mind anyone else’s. I drove slower and slower and slower. I knew that after the next junction the road gradually got a little higher, pulled itself out of the trough all around the town. I kept waiting for the junction. Nothing passed me, and I saw no other cars, no headlights on the other side of the carriageway, no tail lights on my own. After a long time I passed the first exit. Usually the fog lifted then. On that night it stayed exactly the same. Just as thick, just as deadening, just as much like driving slowly through the middle of a monstrous snowdrift that reached up to the sky. There was no sound, except for the hum of the engine. I’d turned the radio off, to avoid distraction. I couldn’t see a thing outside the car, except for slow swirls within the mist. I’d been going for about thirty-five or forty minutes when I started to feel uneasy, and after another ten I was beginning to get really nervous. I knew the M11 like the back of my hand, and a message was starting to persistently knock on the back of my mind, where the autopilot sits and keeps an eye on things. Isn’t it about time, it was saying, that we passed another exit? In normal conditions, I would pass the first exit about ten minutes into the journey, and the second at the half hour mark. This night was far from normal, and I was driving much slower than usual. But it was now at least 50 minutes since I’d passed the first exit. I couldn’t have gone by the second without noticing: the massive exit signs by the side of the road were just about the only thing which I had been able to see at the beginning of the journey. So where was the second? I drove for another ten minutes. Still no cars on my side of the road, and no headlights on the other. I drove on for five further minutes, picking the speed up slightly. I was just a little…concerned. Ten minutes later a shape finally loomed out of the fog, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The journey was halfway over, and I’d seen the second exit. As I lit a cigarette, finally able to spare some concentration from the road, I thought for a moment. How long would it have taken for me to have started panicking? How long would I have had to wait before too long became far too long, before I’d started to feel in my heart of hearts that something had gone wrong, that the exit had disappeared and I was crawling along an endless fog-buried road into nothingness, the real world left behind?
Someone is after me now. Definitely. I know they are. It’s an odd position to be in. Everyone else will always side with the hunter. Which I’m not. Some people in my position calls themselves that, but it’s pure vaingloriousness. I assume he’s a policeman. He doesn’t know who I am yet, but he’s there. I’m not even sure how I know this. I’m not sure how I know a lot of things. Maybe I’m noticing little signs without really realising what they are. I don’t really know what to do about him. I’m not going to give myself up, or give myself away if I can help it, but—maybe he could even be my friend. He must understand some of it, which would help. I don’t understand. That’s part of it. I don’t understand why I can’t just be nice. You read books and a lot of people are just 1, 2, 3…‘these are the reasons why’. An easy addition. I’m not, as far as I can remember. I don’t have the excuse. I’ve got a fair number of friends, and they come round or I go see them and we hang out, but it’s like the whole thing’s in two dimensions. It’s like a painted glass window—one stone, and it’s going to fall apart. I’m just not nice, and it makes me sad, because someone people are nice to me and I want to be nice, but can’t. Not any more. Once is enough, too much. It taints your life.
I was in the bookstore again today, bought some books and had a cup of coffee. I had a chat with Susan again too. The place wasn’t very busy. I told her a couple of digital root tricks. Like…take any number (say 4201); add the digits (4+2+0+1=7); take the sum away from the original number (4201-7=4194)—and the result will always have a digital root of 9. Or…take any number (say 94213); scramble the digits in any order you like (32941, for instance) and subtract the smaller number from the bigger (94213-32941=61272). Guess what—digital root of 9 again. Those 9s, they get around. She thought the tricks were pretty cool. We got talking about symmetrical or palindromic numbers, and how they don’t come along in years very often. 1991; 2002; 2112; 2222. When I got home I realised something. If you look at the digital roots the sequence goes 1+(9+9)+1=2; in the same way 2002=4; 2112=6; 2222=8. The even numbers. Then 2332 gives 1, 2442 gives you 3, 2552 gives you 5, and 2662 gives you 7. The odd numbers. Which is kind of interesting. Maybe.
Gerry spe
nds a hundred bucks a month on porn. There’s a place in Greensboro. We got really drunk a couple months ago and he told me about it. Nothing weird, just people having sex. It obviously bothers him, but he can’t stop doing it. He tries, he buys, he purges. Funny what accountants get up to.
Fall in Roanoke is driving foggy roads.
My twenties didn’t make any sense to me. Or my early thirties. I used to be able to understand ages. Up until you’re twenty, they make sense. Each year from the early teens onwards is such a huge step, until you’re twenty, when they start getting smaller and smaller again. The teens. So many things become possible. Each year is a like a quantum leap. After that—you just keep getting a little older and smaller. You have birthdays, and sometimes people remember them and sometimes they don’t. When you were sixteen, and one of your friends had a birthday and became seventeen, you sure as hell knew about it. It meant your friend had gone to another planet. They stood taller than you. They were older. There’s no difference between being 27 and 28. Or 43 and 44. You’ve been around the ring too many times. 44 is who-gives-a-shit, whatever modulo you’re on. The Greeks knew a lot about maths, but they didn’t know about zero. Seriously. They had no 0, which meant they didn’t understand how numbers relate to people and what they do. The difference between 0 and 1 is the biggest difference in the world, far greater than that between 2 and 3: because they’re just additional counts, whereas 0 is never having done it at all. They knew very little about the irrational, and nothing about the quiet that lies beyond even that. They liked perfection, the Greeks. Perfect numbers, for example, which are the sum of the numbers that you can divide them by: 6=1+2+3; 28=1+2+4+7+14. They are also, as it happens, the sum of consecutive whole numbers: 6=1+2+3; 28=1+2+3+4+5+6+7. Kind of neat. But perfect numbers are very, very rare: irrationality is far more common. They say Pythagoras just pretended irrational numbers didn’t exist. Just couldn’t handle the idea. Shows how you can be a really bright guy, and still know shit.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 17
