But my disappointment was as nothing beside poor Bray's, in Year T, "the midpoint of [his] life," at that long-awaited print-out. The title, NUMBERS, bid fair enough: its seven capitals, ranged fore and aft of his central initial, reflected promisingly Bray's mathematical preoccupations, his friend Merope's own special contributions (two "ancient" literary-numerological traditions of her tribe, called gematria and notarikon), and "such literary precedents as the fourth book of the Pentateuch, held by the Kabbalists to have been originally a heptateuch, of which one book had disappeared entirely and another been reduced to two verses, Numbers 10:35,36." But alas, as he himself was obliged to acknowledge, he "had not got all the bugs out of [his] machine"; what followed was no masterwork but an alphabetical chaos, a mere prodigious jumble of letters! These quires of nonsense "shocked [Bray] numb" — another sense of the title? To make matters worse, that very evening, thinking to divert him, Merope took him into the parlor of a group of militant radical students drawn to Lilydale by rumors that it was the hot center of a grand revolutionary conspiracy. When at one point in the conversation they brandished spray-guns filled with a chemical with which they planned to "defoliate the Ivy League," Bray in his distracted anguish mistook them for his poisonous enemies and "narrowly escaped" (this part of the narrative is unclear) by means of a horrifying disguise, a venomous barb with which he struck down and temporarily paralyzed "[his] beautiful betrayer," and a mad flight on V. W. Beetle. Merope, upon her recovery, left him to join the revolutionaries in their obscure immediate project of "filling the office water-coolers of certain large corporations with Lake Erie water"; Bray, convinced now that she was responsible for the NUMBERS fiasco, sat for a long while despondent in the rains of his project — for which, shortly after, the Tidewater Foundation withdrew its support. He describes himself as "rudderless as a ship whose T has been crossed"; as "without weather"; as "stung." "Christmas, bah!" he snarls at the celebrants of Lilydale's principal religious festival; at Year Ts end ("July 3, 1974"), in a startling allusion to Medusa, he surveys the debris of his grand ambitions and writes: "My scrambled notes are turned to stone."
But the very next night, while steering the steamboat numbly around the lake, he is vouchsafed, whether by Computer or by V. W. Beetle, an astounding insight. Mourning the loss of Merope, he remembers her comparison of the NUMBERS print-out to the primordial lawbook of her tribe: according to some commentators, this Torah was originally a chaos of scrambled letters, which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events described by those sentences came to pass. At the same time he idly notes that notes is an anagram for stone and vice-versa, and is thus ("by this mild gematria") re-reminded of his former mistress. On the occasion of her reading out those thousands of narrative motifs for him to feed in enciphered form to Computer — quite as Polyeidus had fed the magic spells to Chimera — she had remarked: "Hey, they missed one: The Key to the Treasure. This fellow's born into this family where all the men for centuries have worn themselves out looking for this particular Secret Treasure, okay? So when he grows up, instead of chasing all over the world like they did, he reads all the books in the library about Quests and stuff and decides that the Treasure's probably somewhere in his own house — the Maeterlinck L'Oiseau Bleu thing, et cetera. That same night he dreams that there's this big apartment of rooms right in his basement, that he'd never suspected, and for some reason or other, in the dream, this news doesn't especially surprise him. When he wakes up he realizes that there isn't any such apartment, but there is an old toolshed or storage closet down there that he's never looked into, because the door's all blocked with piles of junk left by his ancestors, and he's absolutely certain that's where the Treasure must be. So with no sweat at all he gets further than the others did after years of adventures and dangers and such. But to locate the Treasure's one thing; to get it's something else: when he clears the junk away he finds the door locked like a bank vault. The lock's not jammed or rusty — in fact it's very well lubricated — but it positively can't be opened without the key, even by the best locksmith around. So he ends up having to search all over the world after all, right? But for the key instead of the treasure. He goes through the usual riddles and battles and monsters and clues and false trails and stuff and finally rescues this princess et cetera, and on their wedding night she finds this real pretty key in his own pants pocket. She thinks they ought to let it go at that, but he leaves her, rushes back to his own country and his old house, dashes down to the basement, unlocks the door, and finds the closet empty. Once he's left the girl and her country he can't go back, I forget why, so he throws the key away in despair and lives the rest of his life as a sour old hermit. On his deathbed, thinking about his adventures and his lost girlfriend and all, he sees that the Key to the Treasure was the Treasure, et cetera. It's a piece of male chauvinist phallus-worship, but not a bad story." At once, on his remembering this tale, everything is illumined for Bray in a series of flashes "like the fireworks reflected in Chautauqua Lake": not NUMBERS but NOTES is his novel's true title; 5, not 7, is its correct numerical base; what he'd thought a fiasco was the proper culmination of the first three-fifths of the project: a Five-Year Plan, so he realizes now, at whose "Phi-point" he presently stands ("NOT is to ES as NOTES is to NOT"). Those reams of random letters are a monstrous anagram for the Revolutionary Novel, to unscramble which will require no more than the "reprogramming" of Computer with these new insights.
To test his theory he feeds it a simple impromptu list of "fives": the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and "Dr. Eliot's shelf of classics," the tones (Computer hiccoughed happily at this word) of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of "China," the bloods of "Ireland," the nations of "Iroquois" and divisions of "the British Empire," the aforementioned Pentateuch, the days of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus's last voyage, the stories framed by "Scheherazade's Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad," the letters of the word novel (three-fifths of which et cetera), and a few non-serial odds and ends such as quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet, and E-string. These are as nothing beside the hundred-odd "sevens" already in the machine; yet with that meager priming, valiant Computer belches forth two remarkable observations: On the one hand, inasmuch as "character," "plot," and for that matter "content," "subject," and "meaning," are attributes of particular novels, the Revolutionary Novel NOTES is to dispense with all of them in order to transcend the limitations of particularity; like the coded NUMBERS it will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes. Language itself it will perhaps eschew (in favor of what, is not clear). On the other hand, at its "Phi-point" ("point six one eight et cetera of the total length, as the navel is of the total height of human women") there is to occur a single anecdote, a perfect model-of a text-within-the-text, a microcosm or paradigm of the work as a whole: not (what I anticipated) the "Key to the Treasure" story, but (what fetched me bolt upright in the Spartina alterniflora) "a history of the Greek mythic hero Bellerophon; his attempt to fly on Pegasus to Olympus like Apollo's crew to the Moon; his sting; his free downfall to Earth like ditto's to the U.S.S. Hornet; his wandering alone in the marsh, far from the paths of men, devouring his own Reset."