I moved out onto the moors with the twenty-eight churches. Time passed and I became the old man I am, hobbling up and down the overgrowth waiting to come upon her. Sometimes someone comes out to see me. There was a young woman who came, blond hair and widowed; they tell me there was a war a while ago. She brought groceries and took me for rides in a car, down to the place not far from where they found me once. Then she stopped coming. I heard she’d left. People in town still think I’m crazy, I know that. But they’ve taken care of me more years than I’ve deserved. I am sixty-eight, sixty-nine.
Then this American started coming, I had seen him with the woman a couple of times. A curious fellow, but then he thinks I’m a curious fellow. Dark, with sad blue eyes that his glasses magnify; there are ways he reminds me of me, but all old men are reminded of themselves by all young ones. When we talk of America, we. . I don’t know what he’s saying. The names are. . I don’t know the names. Anyway, we talk of America. He tells me things about himself without realizing it; I think he doesn’t believe I understand anything at all. He doesn’t feel compelled to be careful about what he tells me. I told him about the city I knew, I told him about the nightsailing. He nods in that way that says he’s going along with the cracked things an old man says. He has a few cracked things of his own. Not so much the story about his mother on the railroad tracks but other things. He made a mistake once. I don’t know if he knows it. He was standing on the banks of a river listening to something from the other side, something he had never heard but had always known. And instead of crossing the river, he listened for as long as he could stand it and then turned his back and returned the way he had come. And he’s never heard it again. He should have crossed that river. Little bits of his life come out the nights he comes to see me, sometimes the bits are cracked and sharp. Off they fly into the moor skies, and we watch them go. Tonight the moor skies are filled with rain and light, and he has driven through the heath in a truck he borrowed from town, dashing from the truck into my stone house. Tonight he said the only thing he’s ever said that’s made complete sense to me. When he said it, it got me crazy; I got this terrifying feeling that all these years something had been right under my nose and I hadn’t seen it. Something that only I could have seen, the way I saw it from the window of a tower one night in a city thirty years ago. Tonight the young American told me about The Number.
One night I told him about The Number. There’s a number out there, I said, pointing to the west, another number they never found. For a long time he didn’t seem to hear me; the rain was blasting the roof and the sky was filled with sound. And then he looked at me as though he under stood perfectly what I was saying; and I wasn’t sure what to tell him, I hadn’t thought of it in close to fifteen years because I didn’t believe in it anymore. Another number, he kept saying, another number, and the more he said it the more excited he became; and I was sorry I had told him, because I hadn’t thought he would become so excited. He just kept saying, Another number! over and over. The Old World, I tried to explain, is just a number off. Yes, that’s it! he said, and soon we were talking about church steeples and lights. The Old World’s just a number off, he kept repeating, and there are twenty-seven churches in the moors rather than twenty-eight, because here they’re a number off I nodded and smiled; I didn’t see that it made any difference. But he said it made all the difference, because he and I had counted twenty-eight lights and that meant there was another light out there, the twenty-eighth, that wasn’t a church, and it had been there all along.
Then he had me in the truck driving him out into the bitter storm, heading to the point where the land ran out; the rain splashed against the window and there was no heat in the truck, and the moors were treacherous, a thousand in visible lakes. I should never have done it. Later the townspeople would say, An old man, and you took him out into the storm, it’s not enough that you drive our women from town. But they hadn’t seen the way he was, almost crazed by the idea that this other light had been there all along and he hadn’t understood it. We drove toward one light after another; we would get a hundred yards from a light and then lightning would flash over the terrain and in the momentary white glow we could make out the dim form of an old gray church rising from the waving grass. Then we would make for the next light, counting them down. We seemed destined to spend the night going from one church to another except that the old man was right, the twelfth or thirteenth or fourteenth light was not a church at all but rested out over the sea half a kilometer or so off Land’s End: the lighthouse that Anne, the old man, and I had watched and talked about that first time we drove out, the one she said had been deserted for decades. Someone was certainly there now.
A boatman lived down on the rocks above the water. I parked the truck and got the old man out the other side, and we made our way down the walk to the boatman’s house. I still remember the light from the sky swaying across the old wooden door and the knocker in the form of a cat’s head gnashing at us. The boatman was short and round, with hair putting above his ears; he wasn’t happy about being awakened and he was less happy when we told him we wanted to go out to the lighthouse. He told us we were both off our bloody nuts. He pointed out that in case we hadn’t noticed, there was a rather violent storm taking place at the moment. But the old man, blue and quaking with cold, was out of his mind to get to that lighthouse. He wouldn’t hear of it any other way. The boatman said the lighthouse had been deserted forever and the old man literally pulled him out into the rain by his shirt and pointed him toward it. The boatman discounted the light as some kind of optical illusion. “I’m tellin’ ya, there’s no one out there, “ he said. I offered him twenty pounds and he still wouldn’t go for it: “Not till sunrise anyway,” he said. Then we will wait for sunrise, said the old man. We would have stayed in the truck the next three hours but the boatman said that we could sleep in the house, assuming the twenty pound offer still stood. I had just begun to doze when dawn came through the window and the old man was shaking me by the arm, telling me it was time to go.
The storm had passed. I wanted to get to the lighthouse and back, since I had my work in Penzance and a truck to return. As we motored across the water the boatman kept advising us that this was a waste of time and our twenty pounds. “Don’t be complainin’ to me when there’s nothin’ out there,” he said. Personally I didn’t doubt he was right. In the sun over the cliffs the old man looked ghastly there on the deck of the boat: white as rock and chattering fitfully. Repeatedly I tried to get him down in the boat out of the wind, but he was mesmerized by the long white tower before us, and when I tried to shake him from his obsession he looked at me as though he were rabid. We crossed the water in a quarter of an hour; we hadn’t gotten the boat up onto the island rocks before the old man was scrambling for the door at the lighthouse base.