The Speculist

I suddenly remembered events from the 72nd and 141st days of each of the past eight, nine, and — in accordance with the number of juice glasses in each tray — 20 years. (My memories didn’t go back far enough to accommodate the number of coffee cups in a tray.) I began to remember every word from pages 72 and 141 of every book I had every read — at that time, a little over 7,000 books. Of special interest were those instances where the numbers eight, nine, 20, 25, or (much less frequently) 72 and 141 appeared on those pages. There was even one book, a 1953 Almanac, that had all four of those numbers on page 952, which of course is equal to (72 + 141) x 4. I then began to draw lines of meaning between the books and the events. For example, I remembered this passage from page 72 of an edition of The Last of the Mohicans, which I had read 11 years earlier:

While the eyes of the sisters were endeavoring to catch glimpses through the trees, of the flood of golden glory which formed a glittering halo around the sun, tinging here and there with ruby streaks, or bordering with narrow edgings of shining yellow, a mass of clouds that lay piled at no great distance above the western hills, Hawkeye turned suddenly and pointing upward toward the gorgeous heavens, he spoke…

The sunset on the 72nd day of that same year would not have been much to look at, had I been outside to see it. It was a drizzly March day; the sun would have set unseen behind heavy cloud cover. However, the 141st day of that year was a warm and clear day in May. I was outside when the sun set and, although I didn’t think much of it at the time, the setting sun definitely did have a glittering halo that day, with one or two ruby streaks.

My brain was making two or three hundred of these kinds of associations all at once. I can do this sort of thing because I’m “gifted.” Some gift.

Without realizing it, I had dropped the placemats and the silverware tray. My eyes were closed. I didn’t want to hold anything, didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t want anything but 72 and 141, and all of their cascading implications. I would have been stuck in that position for some time, at least until either Sybil or Jerry found me and snapped me out of it. Had I been alone, I might have spent the next two or even 10 hours working on those two numbers, letting them work on me.

But fortunately, there was a knock at the front door. I was not yet so deep into the numbers that I couldn’t respond to the sound. I opened my eyes to see that it was the baker with his morning delivery of bread, doughnuts and sweet rolls. I caught my breath.

“I…got it,” I called out, the volume of my voice working in my favor for once.

“Thank you, Corey,” Sybil called from the kitchen.

I took the key from the hook under the counter and made way over to the front door and opened it. The delivery man handed me a bundle of baked goods and a receipt to sign.

“Caught you dreaming, didn’t I?” he asked jovially.

I had no idea what he meant. And it must have been apparent from my expression that I did not, because he saw fit to provide a second, clarifying question.

“Do you always sleep standing up?” he asked.

___

It was a slow morning. A work crew from the lumberyard, five men, showed up right at opening. They ate and were gone in a speedy 24 minutes. They had to make their shift. A half dozen truck drivers made their way in over the next hour. Then we had a family of four, up early because they had to make a road trip to Sacramento.

After they left, things got very quiet. I sat down in one of the booths with the book I was reading, thinking I probably had a good hour or so before the earliest lunchers made an appearance. Against all convention, Sybil poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down across from me. I didn’t know what had become of Jerry. Probably out back working on his truck. There was nothing wrong with it — it was only a couple of years old and he maintained it meticulously. Even so, even when there was no maintenance to be done, he loved fiddling with it. As someone who could get lost to the world just by noticing a couple of numbers, I could appreciate the impulse.

She sat there quietly for a good long while. Or at least it seemed that way. It was probably no more than a minute or two. But that’s actually pretty long when you’re sitting across from someone and you know they’re going to say something and you wish they wouldn’t.

“So…” she finally said, “what are you reading?”

I held the book up. It was textbook on fractals, co-authored by Todd and Dr. MacHale. It was several years old.

“This thing again?” she said.

She took the book away from me and began flipping through it, using her thumb to hold my place. She seemed interested in the pictures, turning the book this way and that in order to study them from different angles.

“I would have thought you knew this one by heart by now.”

“I…do,” I said. That was no big deal — I knew every book I had ever read by heart. But I enjoyed reading and rereading this textbook, along with anything else written by my friends that I could get my hands on.

“You miss them, don’t you, Corey?”

I nodded. My cheeks grew suddenly hot and my eyes began to get watery. Sybil hadn’t mentioned my friends in more than a decade.

“It’s okay,” she said.

She set the book down on the table — losing my place, not that it mattered.

“I miss them, too, you know.”

I looked at her, puzzled, and sniffed as unobtrusively as I could. Not fooled, she handed me a napkin from the dispenser. I proceeded to wipe my eyes and blow my nose. I hated myself for being so sentimental.

“I mean Jolene and her little girl. Not that I really know her. I only met her once. But I think about her all the time.”

“She’s…twenty,” I said.

Sybil shook her head in disbelief.

“How can that be? She’s just a little girl.”

“Sybil…I’m…twenty-four.” This she knew perfectly well — we had celebrated my birthday just a few weeks earlier.

She smiled.

“It’s impossible,” she said. “I should be that age. And you should still be a little kid.”

Words failed me at that point. I reached into my pocket and retrieved the notepad and pen I still kept handy. I wrote:

TIME PASSES QUCKLY.
BT U STLL LOOK SAME.

IM AFRAID FOR HER

ALL OF THEM
EVRYBODY
BUT ESPCLLY GRACE

“Why are you afraid? What are you afraid of?”

“I’m…not…sure.”

Just then our conversation was interrupted by the cowbell on the front door. A man was standing inside the door, looking straight at us. There was something odd about his presence there. Neither of us heard a car approach, and it wasn’t likely that anyone would walk to the diner. And there was something strange about the man himself. He was old, dressed in a dark suit and an overcoat that had seen better days.

He walked all the way to the end of the counter and took a seat there. There was something unnatural, too precise, about the way he moved. He stared straight ahead. Too straight. There was physics — or possibly geometry —that could account for what was wrong with the way he moved and the way he sat still. But for the moment, the calculations failed me.

Sybil didn’t seem to think much of the man’s strangeness. Resuming her place behind the counter, she strode down to the far end — coffee pot in hand — and greeted him as she would anyone else.

“Good morning, sir. Care for some coffee?”

His voice was off, too. It sounded like a badly made recording.

“No thank you.”

“Orange juice? Tea?”

“No.”

Nonplussed, she removed the menu from the holder and set it in front of him.

“Take all the time you need,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready to order.”

The man closed the menu and returned it to its holder in one seamless move.

“I do not require food,” he said.

Sybil eyed him carefully.

“Well, then what can we do for you?”

“You were Sybil Lufts,” he said.

She looked puzzled.

“I was what?” she said.

“Before you married the man. Bauche. Where is he, by the way?”

“You have some business with Jerry?”

The stranger shook his head. The movement was a perfect arc — 90 degrees exactly. I would have bet on it.

“I have business with him,” he said, turning and pointing at me.

“He’s my son. What possible business could you have with him?”

He turned back to Sybil.

“No,” he said. “He is not your son. He is Miller. Corey Miller.”

My last name. Nobody knew that.

Sybil turned very pale.

“His name is Joseph Bauche, mister. You have no business with him. Which means you have no business being here at all. You need to go. Now.”

The man said nothing. He resumed his former pose of staring straight ahead.

Sybil looked at me. She mouthed the words “go get Jerry.” I was up and on my way when Jerry stepped through the swinging kitchen doors at the opposite end of the counter. Smiling, he took his place at his wife’s side. He was about to say something to her when the stranger spoke.

“Fine,” he said. “Now we have three.”

Jerry looked at Sybil and then at me.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

“It is only a formality. But I prefer to choose one from three, not two.”

He turned and looked at me again.

“It’s better to eliminate two alternatives than one, isn’t it?”