Three
There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number for desire. There are numbers for avarice and betrayal. But when the scheme becomes utterly one of avarice and betrayal, then there are no more numbers other than those that quantify what we possess and lose. It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.
He was born in the northern heartland of his country in the year before the outbreak of the first world war. His name was his father’s, Jack Mick Lake, three cracks of gunfire that suited the father as the publisher of a small newspaper outside Chicago. For the son the name was apt less for its explosiveness than for its symmetry. When he was six, the year after the war ended, he discovered the family tree, reaching back to a great English grandfather on Jack Mick Senior’s side, and including two uncles who lived across the state line in Wisconsin. Though too young to understand the thrill felt by a peddler’s daughter named Jane Shear when taken in a London alley by an ancestral nobleman at five-thirty in the morning before the dawn of the Victorian era, Jack Mick Junior could still compute the equation of the illicit moment. As he was staring into the family scrapbook on the afternoon his seventh autumn lapsed into his seventh winter, his mathematical genius found its first expression. After that he closed the book and computed the equations of autumn and winter themselves.
His mother’s past eluded recorded history. She was born to a woman of the Potawatomi tribe, also known as the fire Nation, or the People of the Place of the fire. Originally rooted in the northeast of the country, they migrated southwest. Jack Mick Junior’s maternal grandfather, by what accounts existed, was a white trapper or sailor, perhaps from Europe. Thus there was bastardization on both sides of Jack Mick Junior’s parentage, though it was surmised the union involving the Potawatomi grandmother lacked the thrill that marked the one involving Jane Shear. Precocious enough to compute a number for sexual thrill even though he did not yet understand the experience, he would nonetheless need several years to find a number for rape, let alone humiliation, let alone subjugation. As with avarice and betrayal, once these experiences became a part of the scheme, the scheme became so utterly bankrupt as to defy numbers altogether. Thus his mother, who assumed the name Rae in place of a Potawatomi name for which there were no English sounds, remained to him a woman of mystery as well as strength and depth, until she died at the age of forty-one or — two, when the son was twenty-two or — three.
She was forty-one or — two. I was twenty-two or — three. I know I saw her on the tracks that night; the moon was too full for my eyes to play that kind of trick on me. It would have been better, I suppose, if we had found some remains, some body; yet no one particularly regretted that we didn’t. It had been a troubled time for my father, the ten or twelve years that preceded that night, and it seemed there was nothing left to happen to us.
First his uncle died when Jack Mick Junior was ten. Jack Mick Senior was the youngest of three brothers: the middle brother, Dirk (a family of gunfire names, this was), had gone west in 1915, venturing back once the next year and then dis appearing for good. Eight years later Jack Mick Senior and his oldest brother Bart got a wire on a night when, as it happened, they were returning to Jack’s home together from a card game in Chicago, where Bart would sleep off the bourbon before going on to Milwaukee the next day. It would later strike Jack Junior how the influence of bourbon on this particular night was a harbinger of things to come. Of course Bart did not go to Milwaukee the next day but, looking odiously green, accompanied Jack Senior in his motor car out west where they would either bury their brother or bring him back. For three unnerving weeks no one heard from them, either at the Lake home or the newspaper office. The ten year-old Jack Junior waited hours by the dirt road running along the railway tracks, watching his own shadow shrink before him in the mornings and slither out behind him after noon, until finally one day he rose from his bed and came on his father and uncle sitting in the family room before an empty fireplace. His mother was standing in the doorway of the kitchen; she had found the two men the same way. She asked if they wanted coffee. She, made them coffee. She asked about the west; she asked about their brother. They only stared before them with their mouths slightly open. Jack looked at his mother and his mother looked at Jack; he looked out the window at the car crusted with dirt and there flashed across his mind the image of these two men sitting in the car and looking just like this all the way back from wherever they had been, never saying anything. By that evening Jack Senior had gotten out of his chair and built a fire in the hearth, which he watched until the flames died. He did not look like a ghost anymore, but he did not talk about the west. He did not talk about his brother Dirk. Bart went to Milwaukee.
The boy was a bit of a runt, compared to his father and uncle, both barrel-chested and filling rooms. It was supposed his size derived from the Indians on his mother’s side. His hair had the coarseness of his mother’s and the lightness of his father’s. His temperament was his mother’s stony inscrutability, into which, as his father said, one dropped words and did not hear the splash for days. When the boy was seven the father noted, as did Jack Junior’s teachers, that his eyes were bad; the parents drove him into Chicago on a Saturday to get him glasses. As they left Chicago the blur that had accompanied him on the way in was transformed into a panorama of revelations: the blast of the lake in the distance and a great hubbub in the streets on behalf of a newly ratified constitutional amendment. Women carried on as men watched in silence from the doors and windows of the shops. Young Jack looked to his mother who smiled to herself. He looked to his father who looked to his mother and said something to the effect that he hoped her first contribution to democracy would not be the election of Harding. In her way she turned from the window with her knowing smile and answered without saying a word; in his way he smiled too, once she had turned back to the window. Jack gazed at it all through his heavy glasses, gladly bearing the burden of their weight in exchange for a thousand distinctions, colors that cut.
He had eyes of a blue that vanishes with infancy only to return a lifetime later with old age; in all the years between, the blue journeys to some unknown place, presumed dead and, upon homecoming, is received with some resentment as it lays out a treasure of sights the eyes can never understand. That the eyes of the boy retained the blue didn’t mean the blue never journeyed, didn’t mean he more sensibly deciphered its treasure; but it may have explained the numbers. Behind his large thick glasses the blue took the form of dual spheres, as though his eyes were two moons that had always been in the sky but had never been seen because they were exactly the sky’s color, and now they had fallen to hover before the face of a child. He was also a little hard of hearing. This may have explained the music.
I was out in the fields behind the house and I heard it. I don’t know how old I was, twelve or so; it was after Pop and Bart came back from out west. Part of the field was ours but a lot of it was no-man’s-land, where lived a few Indians the country tried to run off until my father made a thing of it in the paper. Not my mother’s people at any rate. It was early in the evening. The sun was down but there was still a cold light left, and from out of the ground came a music, cool and hazy and windy like the light, and in the music were a hundred numbers, sixes and sevens and threes waving back and forth in the sound of the light. It was the music and light of a person’s sleep, as when you dream in the morning and everything is very sharp except the background, people’s faces sharpest of all against back grounds that go nearly blank. There was a big burly Negro man who ran a mill down by a creek a couple of miles over the ridge, and in my dream when he laughed his Negro face was sharp and clear and the room behind him fell away utterly: he laughed a five. A deep full five. The light now in these fields was of that kind of sleep and the music of that kind of light. But no fives. Sixes and sevens and threes. Honestly I don’t think it was a dream when I heard that music; but honestly I have to say no one else heard it or admitted to hearing it. My mother and father hadn’t heard it. I asked Bart once and he hadn’t heard it. They didn’t laugh at it when I told them; l had never made up such a thing before. They knew about my numbers.