Years later he had a vision that, right before the fall of the stick across her head, she turned to him there in the street where she stood and called to him. “I love you,” he heard her say in this ludicrous vision. Then there was the splash of her hair on the ground and the gush from the deep red well of her face.
There is a number for everything. There is a number for defiance. There is a number for the lethal vertigo one feels when a bash of brain matter floods the inner ear. Once I would have supposed that the number of every demise was nine, including the demise of the New World. But then I became older, and found it wasn’t so.
And she was forty-one or — two; I was twenty-two or — three; and I saw her on the tracks that night, the moon too full for my eyes to play any sort of trick. For a moment he thought he was back in the college dormitory, looking out the window at the trains of the city; he woke many nights this way, gripped in the six-month fever of Leigh’s death: the fever hadn’t stopped when he came home. Absently he reached his fingers to his brow to feel the bandage that hadn’t been there for at least four months. Absently he clutched his nose and his mouth so as not to taste or smell the smoke of the riot. Then he remembered he was in his father’s house, and that was when he looked out the window and saw his mother on the tracks that ran by the road down which Bart and Jack Senior had returned from the west many years before. She just stood on the track staring at the fields; and out of the red moon of the east, as though it were a tunnel, the train was suddenly there, insidious and silent. John Michael screamed to the glass. The train screamed back.
She must have heard it, he thought later. But then perhaps she hadn’t. Over the following three days, as men paraded up and down the rails looking for a sign of her, while his father stood devastated among them, hands in his hair, the son crossed the rails to gaze out at the same fields that had entranced his mother and, with a chill, every bit of the down on his flesh standing on end, considered the hush. The hush. Where is the music? he thought to himself: The music’s gone. Did she come out here that night to hear it? Did, in the face of everything’s decomposition, she wish to hear the music of dreams, when no one could dream anymore? The son’s guilt was immense. Had I only kept it a secret, he anguished; had I only never spoken of it. Then he wondered if she had heard it; and wherever she had gone, back through the underwater cave of herself, he wondered if she had taken it with her.
He came to the field every day after that, but the music was gone for good. His father languished awhile, then slowly took himself back to the tasks of the newspaper. The fervor of the past was gone for good; but John Michael didn’t ask that everything be the same as it was: he would accept it that anything could even be similar. He thought of changing his name back to Jack Mick Junior and decided this would somehow make it worse. His father, as he had done in the case of Bart upon comforting Melody the prodigal wife, would not insult or demean his tragedy by calling himself a victim. For his father the concept of victimization would always belong more appropriately to others of even more unfathomable tragedies. Intuitively Jack Mick Senior understood that the greatest tragedy was not the loss of Rae but of the music she had taken with her, even though it was music he had never heard or perhaps even believed. In the sense that she was the last to hear the music, John Michael thought one day, my mother was the last American. In the sense that he must now survive never having heard the music at all, John Michael thought, the last American is my father.
One day in 1937 he had walked from his house a mile down the track to catch a ride on the same train he had watched from the dormitory window of his Leigh-madness, the same train he had watched take his mother. He rode it across the state about a hundred miles, which was ninety-nine farther west than he had ever been before. He came to a wide river that ran to his left. He believed he should have come to this river about ten years earlier. He walked down the beach looking to the river’s other side.
He fell asleep on the banks of the river in the last light of the sun and woke that night to a sound he’d never heard. He couldn’t tell if this sound came from the sand beneath his head or from the river, or from the other side of the river or the very air itself. The night was cold and, pushing the palms of his hands into the sand, he shook his head slowly to the sound, rousing himself and saying, or perhaps someone said it to him, Nothing swims in the dust.
Or perhaps someone said it to me; and I looked up and there were men carrying torches, and debris scattered over the sand, and the dark form of something in the middle of the river. Its sail draped the beach and the remains of the ship washed to shore bit by bit: there’s been a wreck, he told himself. And then, standing there by his head, he saw the little girl gazing at him intently, a little girl who seemed to belong to no one. She wore no shoes and had a tangle of black hair that fell over her face; she was a very serious little girl, three or four years old, and she didn’t smile. She looked as though she might be Indian. I don’t know if she saw me looking at her in the dark, I could barely open my eyes. I managed to say, “Did you speak to me,” but when I opened my eyes again she was gone. I felt the weariness of this far journey and slept some more.
When I woke again none of it was there, no men with torches, no ship in the river, no sail on the beach. I was still exhausted. I finally shook myself to consciousness in the earliest hours of the morning; I felt a rush of anxiety about Pop. I can’t be worrying him like this, I thought to myself he has nothing but me to lose anymore. The red moon was out, its tunnel gate having shifted to the other side of the river. In its red light I was surprised to see small footsteps leading across the beach to the water; I had figured the little girl for a dream like the rest of it. But there were definitely the steps, and I followed them to the river and at the edge I heard it again, the music I’d never heard before. I had figured it for part of the dream too. It was right there, coming from the other side of the river; and with the same chill as when I’d stood staring across the tracks that morning after my mother had gone, with my hair standing on end just the same way, something occurred to me. It occurred to me that this particular music was the music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond desire, beyond justice. This number was no mad fancy then, no theoretical conceit, it was out there, beyond the river that stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence; and it also occurred to me, standing where the small steps of the Indian child vanished, that my mother had heard this music too the night she left, and that at this very moment I was very close to that which had taken her. Confronted by it, courage fled. Before I bolted I listened once more to the farthest beach where the red tunnel ran to the end of the night; and it sang to me. It sang.
When the country declared war he was nearly thirty years old. Because his sight and hearing were poor he was not enlisted to fight. For a while he was a military engineer, and his facility for numbers and mathematical theory took him to Washington. He became a secret part of the dour devoted days of the country, secret even unto himself. He had been working three months on a special project when he requested an interview with the project director. He did not receive it till after a seven-week period of infuriating his supervisors by insisting that what he had to say was for the ears of the director and no one else. Late one sweltering September Friday he was ushered into the director’s office. He was seated in a chair before the director’s desk by a window that looked out to the sun setting behind a pool of water and a monument. He was there alone for ten minutes when a man he had never seen before came into the room and sat behind the desk, folding his hands on top of it. Mr. Lake, the man said. Are you really the director? John Michael asked. Yes, the man said, I really am. He waited, and John Michael cleared his throat and pushed his heavy glasses with his invisible-moon eyes up the bridge of his nose. He began slowly, trying to sound as sane as possible. Like everyone else, he said to the director, I do not know the exact nature of this project. However, I thought I might have information that would be helpful. The director waited as John Michael continued. There is a number, he said slowly, that we have never known. It is a number between nine and ten; not nine and a half, not nine and nine tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. I discovered this number some time ago and have tried in the years since to calculate an equation that proves the number, beyond the primary equation that led me to discover it. I have to tell you that I have so far failed to develop such a proof. I must also tell you, however, that l have been unable to disprove this number. Moreover, if one hypothetically presumes the existence of such a number, heretofore unforeseen possibilities come within our grasp. He stopped to see if the director was having a reaction to this; the director was not. John Michael sighed and produced a sheaf of papers which he offered the director, who took them. The director glanced over the first several and then laid them on his desk. He looked at his hands a while and then up at John Michael. He asked John Michael why it was nobody else had ever found this number, and John Michael said, Because it isn’t to be found over there; and he pointed east. It is rather, he said, to be found out there, and he pointed out the window to the sun setting behind the pool of water and the monument. I know it’s out there, said the young man, because I’ve heard it. It’s across the river. The Potomac, you mean? the director said. John Michael shook his head. The Hudson, you mean? the director said. Of course not, the young man answered in disbelief. The river, he said: it’s across the river. The director, after watching him a while, asked if he’d told anyone else about this number, and John Michael said no, and then the director said, Of course there is no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already. We know all the numbers, we found them hundreds of years ago. If that’s so, answered the young man across the table, then tell me why the Old World came to the New; and the director smiled a little, quizzically, and dismissed the young man. Thank you for your interest, he said formally; he did not return John Michael’s papers. John Michael continued to work for the project another month, when he was transferred to an accounting bureau in the Pentagon where he added numbers of tanks and divided them by numbers of platoons. On the seventh day of August in the year 1945 he was released from service and returned to Chicago, where his father was dying.