John Verdon - Think of a Number

“So you thought of a number?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Mellery cleared his throat. “The number I thought of was six-five-eight.” He repeated it, articulating the digits- six, five, eight -as though they might mean something to Gurney. When he saw that they didn’t, he took a nervous breath and went on.

“The number six fifty-eight has no particular significance to me. It just happened to be the first number that came to mind. I’ve racked my brains, trying to remember anything I might associate it with, any reason I might have picked it, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing. It’s just the first number that came to mind,” he insisted with panicky earnestness.

Gurney gazed at him with growing interest. “And in the smaller envelope…?”

Mellery handed him the other envelope that was enclosed with the note and watched closely as he opened it, extracted a piece of notepaper half the size of the first, and read the message written in the same delicate style, the same red ink:

Does it shock you that I knew you would pick 658?

Who knows you that well? If you want the answer ,

you must first repay me the $289.87 it cost me to find you .

Send that exact amount to

P.O. Box 49449, Wycherly, CT 61010 .

Send me CASH or a PERSONAL CHECK .

Make it out to X. Arybdis .

(That was not always my name.)

After reading the note again, Gurney asked Mellery whether he had responded to it.

“Yes. I sent a check for the amount mentioned.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a lot of money. Why did you decide to send it?”

“Because it was driving me crazy. The number-how could he know?”

“Has the check cleared?”

“No, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t,” said Mellery. “I’ve been monitoring my account daily. That’s why I sent a check instead of cash. I thought it might be a good idea to know something about this Arybdis person-at least know where he deposited his checks. I mean, the whole tone of the thing was so unsettling.”

“What exactly unsettled you?”

“The number, obviously!” cried Mellery. “How could he possibly know such a thing?”

“Good question,” said Gurney. “Why do you say ‘he’?”

“What? Oh, I see what you mean. I just thought… I don’t know, it’s just what came to mind. I suppose ‘X. Arybdis’ sounded masculine for some reason.”

“X. Arybdis. Odd sort of name,” said Gurney. “Does it mean anything to you? Ring any bell at all?”

“None.”

The name meant nothing to Gurney, but it did not seem completely unfamiliar, either. Whatever it was, it was buried in a subbasement mental filing cabinet.

“After you sent the check, were you contacted again?”

“Oh, yes!” said Mellery, once more reaching into his briefcase and pulling out two other sheets of paper. “I received this one about ten days ago. And this one the day after I sent you my e-mail asking if we could get together.” He thrust them toward Gurney like a little boy showing his father two new bruises.

They appeared to be written by the same meticulous hand with the same pen as the pair of notes in the earlier communication, but the tone had changed.

The first was composed of eight short lines:

How many bright angels

can dance on a pin?

How many hopes drown in

a bottle of gin?

Did the thought ever come

that your glass was a gun

and one day you’d wonder ,

God, what have I done?

The eight lines of the second were similarly cryptic and menacing:

What you took you will give

when you get what you gave .

I know what you think ,

when you blink ,

where you’ve been ,

where you’ll be .

You and I have a date ,

Mr. 658 .

Over the next ten minutes, during which he read each note half a dozen times, Gurney’s expression grew darker and Mellery’s angst more obvious.

“What do you think?” Mellery finally asked.

“You have a clever enemy.”

“I mean, what do you think about the number business?”

“What about it?”

“How could he know what number would come to my mind?”

“Offhand, I would say he couldn’t know.”

“He couldn’t know, but he did! I mean, that’s the whole thing isn’t? He couldn’t know, but he did! No one could possibly know that the number six fifty-eight would be the number I would think of, but not only did he know it-he knew it at least two days before I did, when he put the damn letter in the mail!”

Mellery suddenly heaved himself up from his chair, pacing across the grass toward the house, then back again, running his hands through his hair.

“There’s no scientific way to do that. There’s no conceivable way of doing it. Don’t you see how crazy this is?”

Gurney was resting his chin thoughtfully on the tips of his fingers. “There’s a simple philosophical principle that I find one hundred percent reliable. If something happens, it must have a way of happening . This number business must have a simple explanation.”

“But…”

Gurney raised his hand like the serious young traffic cop he had been for his first six months in the NYPD. “Sit down. Relax. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

Madeleine brought a pair of iced teas to the two men and returned to the house. The smell of warm grass filled the air. The temperature was close to seventy. A swarm of purple finches descended on the thistle-seed feeders. The sun, the colors, the aromas were intense, but wasted on Mellery, whose anxious thoughts seemed to occupy him completely.

As they sipped their teas, Gurney tried to assess the motives and honesty of his guest. He knew that labeling someone too early in the game could lead to mistakes, but doing so was often irresistible. The main thing was to be aware of the fallibility of the process and be willing to revise the label as new information became available.

His gut feeling was that Mellery was a classic phony, a pretender on many levels, who to some extent believed his own pretenses. His accent, for example, which had been present even in the college days, was an accent from nowhere, from some imaginary place of culture and refinement. Surely it was no longer put on-it was an integral part of him-but its roots lay in imaginary soil. The expensive haircut, the moisturized skin, the flawless teeth, the exercised physique, and the manicured fingernails suggested a top-shelf televangelist. His manner was that of a man eager to appear at ease in the world, a man in cool possession of everything that eludes ordinary humans. Gurney realized all this had been present in a nascent form twenty-six years earlier. Mark Mellery had simply become more of what he’d always been.

“Had it occurred to you to go to the police?” asked Gurney.

“I didn’t think there was any point. I didn’t think they’d do anything. What could they do? There was no specific threat, nothing that couldn’t be explained away, no actual crime. I didn’t have anything concrete to take to them. A couple of nasty little poems? A warped high-school kid could have written them, someone with a weird sense of humor. And since the police wouldn’t really do anything or, worse yet, would treat it as a joke, why would I waste my time going to them?”

Gurney nodded, unconvinced.

“Besides,” Mellery went on, “the idea of the local police grabbing hold of this and launching a full-scale investigation, questioning people, coming up to the institute, badgering present and former guests-some of our guests are sensitive people-stomping around and raising all sorts of hell, poking into things that are none of their business, maybe getting the press involved… Christ! I can just see the headlines-‘Spiritual Author Gets Death Threats’-and the turmoil that would raise…” Mellery’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head as if mere words could not describe the damage the police might cause.