John Verdon - Think of a Number

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes. Sorry to be so abrupt. I’m waiting for a call that’s supposed to come within the next minute or two. Can I call you back?”

“No problem. Just wanted to bring you up to date with some stuff, some stuff that’s happened, stuff I’m doing. We haven’t spoken in a long time.”

“I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“Sorry. Thanks. Talk to you soon.”

Gurney closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. Christ, things had a way of piling up. Of course, it was his own fault for letting them pile up. His relationship with Kyle was an area of clear dysfunction in his life, full of avoidance and rationalization.

Kyle was the product of his first marriage, his short-lived marriage to Karen-the memory of which still, twenty-two years after the divorce, made Gurney uneasy. Their incompatibility was obvious from the beginning to everyone who knew them, but a defiant determination (or emotional disability, as he saw it in the wee hours of sleepless nights) had driven them into that unfortunate union.

Kyle looked like his mother, had her manipulative instincts and material ambition-and, of course, the name she had insisted on giving him. Kyle . Gurney had never been able to get comfortable with that. Despite the young man’s intelligence and precocious success in the financial world, Kyle still sounded to him like a self-absorbed pretty boy in a soap opera. Moreover, Kyle’s existence was a constant reminder of the marriage, a reminder that there was some powerful part of himself that he failed to understand-the part that had wanted to marry Karen to begin with.

He closed his eyes, depressed by his blindness to his own motivations and by his negative reaction to his own son.

The phone rang. He picked it up, afraid it would be Kyle again, but it was Mellery.

“Davey?”

“Yes.”

“There was an envelope in the mailbox. My name and address are typed on it, but there’s no postage or postmark. Must have been delivered by hand. Shall I open it?”

“Does it feel like there’s anything in it other than paper?”

“Like what?”

“Anything at all, anything more than just a letter.”

“No. It feels perfectly flat, like nothing at all. No foreign objects in it, if that’s what you mean. Shall I open it?”

“Go ahead, but stop if you see anything other than paper.”

“Okay. Got it open. Just one sheet. Typed. Plain, no letterhead.” There were a few seconds of silence. “What? What the hell…?”

“What is it?”

“This is impossible. There’s no way…”

“Read it to me.”

Mellery read in an incredulous voice, “‘I am leaving this note for you in case you miss my call. If you don’t know yet who I am, just think of the number nineteen. Does it remind you of anyone? And remember, I’ll see you in November or, if not, in December.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. That’s what it says-‘just think of the number nineteen.’ How the hell could he do that? It’s not possible!”

“But that’s what it says?”

“Yes. But what I’m saying is… I don’t know what I’m saying… I mean… it isn’t possible… Christ, Davey, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know. Not yet. But we’re going to find out.”

Something had clicked into place-not the solution, he was still far from that, but something inside him had moved. He was now committed 100 percent to the challenge. He looked up and saw Madeleine watching him from the den door with a poignant intensity, as though she could sense in the air the escalation of his commitment to the case. He could only guess at what she was feeling, but it looked something like a combination of awe and loneliness.

The intellectual challenge the new number mystery presented-and the surge of adrenaline it generated-kept Gurney awake well past midnight, although he’d been in bed since ten. He turned restlessly from side to side as his mind kept colliding with the problem, like a man in a dream who couldn’t find his key, circling a house, repeatedly trying each locked door and window.

Then he began retasting the nutmeg from the squash soup they’d had for dinner, and that added to the bad-dream feeling.

If you don’t know yet who I am, just think of the number nineteen . And that was the number Mellery thought of. The number he thought of before he opened the letter. Impossible. But it happened.

The nutmeg problem kept getting worse. Three times he got up for water, but the nutmeg refused to subside. And then the butter became a problem, too. Butter and nutmeg. Madeleine used a lot of both in her squash soup. He’d even mentioned it once to their therapist. Their former therapist. Actually, a therapist they’d seen only twice, back when they were wrestling over the issue of whether he should retire and thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a third party might bring a greater clarity to their deliberations. He tried to remember now how the soup issue had come up, what the context was, why he’d seen fit to mention something so picayune.

It was the session in which Madeleine had spoken about him as if he weren’t in the room. She’d started by talking about how he slept. She’d told the therapist that once he was asleep, he rarely awoke until morning. Ah, yes, that was it. That’s when he said that the only exception was on nights when she made squash soup and he kept tasting the butter and nutmeg. But she went on, ignoring his silly little interruption, addressing her comments to the therapist, as though they were adults discussing a child.

She said it didn’t surprise her that once Dave was asleep, he rarely woke till morning, because just being who he was seemed to involve such a strenuous daily effort. He was so devoid of common ease and comfort. He was such a good man, so decent, yet so full of guilt for being human. So tortured by his mistakes, imperfections. A peerless record of successes in his profession, obscured in his mind by a handful of failures. Always thinking. Thinking his way relentlessly through problems-one after another-like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill again, again, again. Grasping life as an awkward puzzle to be solved. But not everything in life was a puzzle, she’d said, looking at him, speaking at last to him instead of to the therapist. There were things to be embraced in other ways. Mysteries, not puzzles. Things to be loved, not deciphered.

Recalling her comments as he lay there in bed had a strange effect on him. He was wholly absorbed by the memory, both disturbed and exhausted by it. It finally faded, along with the tastes of butter and nutmeg, and he slipped into an uneasy sleep.

Toward morning he was half awakened by Madeleine getting out of bed. She blew her nose gently, quietly. For a second he wondered if she’d been crying, but it was a hazy thought, easily supplanted by the more likely explanation that she was suffering from one of her autumn allergies. He was dimly aware of her going to the closet and putting on her terry-cloth robe. A little while later, he heard or imagined-he wasn’t sure which-her footsteps on the basement stairs. Sometime after that she passed the bedroom door soundlessly. In the first touch of dawn light stretching across the bedroom into the hallway, she appeared, specterlike, to be carrying something, a box of some kind.

His eyes were still heavy with exhaustion, and he dozed for another hour.

When he got up, it was not because he felt rested, or even fully awake, but because getting up seemed preferable to sinking back into a dream that had left him without any recollection of its details yet with a distinct feeling of claustrophobia. It was like one of the hangovers he’d experienced in his college days.