I got in to town last night, I was a little late to hit the road from Cleveland. I’d slept in a bit and the maid at my hotel had knocked, waited the customary one second, then entered. My habit of sleeping naked made the experience amusing for at least one of us. Then, in short order, I was in my car, a rusting blue 1979 Ford Mustang. It had seen quite a few New England winters, but had been in storage since Chloe left, when things had grown dark for me. The car did the trick, though, and a mechanic in Cleveland mentioned that it had “surprised him for being so road-worthy.” Funny expression. I liked it. My road-worthy Ford and I dodged construction down I-71 to Columbus, letting the light-greens of Ohio’s trees and grass and the warm Spring afternoon hit us somewhere far inside. Like opening a basement door, it felt good to let the natural cool insides get a little warm. I’d bought a pay-as-you go cell phone in Cleveland and I called the home of Kenneth Wilson from the car. I’d decided a new approach.
“Hello is Kenneth there?”
A man answered, “No, Kenny is on campus, who’s this?”
I thought about fathers and remembered what predictably works with them. “Oh, this is Theodore Burnkey from the scholarship board. You have quite a young man there!”
There was a pause. I gambled that an eighteen-year-old on a college campus was ahead of the game scholastically. It was far less of a gamble, though, to compliment a father. “Yes. Yes. We are very proud of Kenny. Did you need to do more interviews?”
“In fact, I would. I am going to be down near campus today. Can I get his cell phone number?”
“Which department was this for again?” It was my turn to pause. I listened hard to the other end of the line. Just barely audibly, in the distance behind Mr. Wilson came a lively Vivaldi Sonata.
“The conservatory, sir.” I said, and tried not to let it sound like a question.
“Oh, excellent. We’ve been waiting to hear from you. Here’s Kenny’s number …” And Mr. Wilson was kind enough to end with “You know Ohio State was his first choice. Go Bucks!” and, thus, I knew which campus to visit in search of Kenneth or Kenny.
Just up from the sidewalk and my mishap with the Chrysler, I headed into the sushi restaurant. I made the mistake of getting very lost on South High Street when I should have been on North High Street and I found myself in need of directions, desperately. So desperate, in fact, that I reached into my backpack and pulled out a pink Hello Kitty address book. It was something that my ex-wife Chloe had left in her rush to get away from me. I looked up the number of her best friend from Boston University, Danielle Sims.
“Hey, Danielle.” Notice how I can sound like a regular person when I want to?
“Hello, who is this?”
“It’s Theo, Theo Burnkey.” The pause that followed was so pregnant that I, personally, expected triplets.
“Theo? This is a real surprise, how are things in Boston?”
“Well, I’m not there right now. I’m actually in Columbus.” Again with the pause. Danielle, I’m sorry, is a nice person but this girl formed the geographic center of normalcy. That placed her squarely in the Columbus suburbs.
“Theo, I didn’t know that you left home any more? Except for work.”
“Well, I’ve found a reason to, Danielle, but the thing that I wanted to ask you, what’s going on with North versus South High Street …”
It all must have intrigued Danielle just too much because before long, she insisted on getting dinner with me at a sushi place called Haiku. I had reached Kenny through his cell phone and we’d scheduled a 7:30 meeting, so Danielle and I could eat some statistically safe raw fish and then head our separate ways. It was the conversation that surrounded the raw fish that concerned me. Danielle was sitting on the right side of the restaurant as I entered.
The conversation went surprisingly well. Once Danielle stopped giving me those sad-eyed looks, we could settle into normal, clichéd adult American speech. I was in town on “special census research.” Yes, my health was fine, yes her kids were fine, yes the weather was not as warm as we’d like our Springs to be and would the sky ever be anything but grey? And then she broke from it.
“You know that Chloe was never so different from you. She understood you more than you knew, even after the whole Morton thing.”
If you ever get an ex, there is something special that becomes of their name. You hate it or you love it, but you can never hear it again without a little bit of a twinge in one of your internal organs. It’s second only to your own name in recognition.
“That may be right, Danielle. That may be right. Say, how are things at the hospital?”
And so I ended it. I steered the conversation back to safe territory, she told me about her job and how there were some amnesiac patients, and some heart patients and all sorts of medical business. It was interesting, but I was only half listening. We got the check and then I left. She called to me from the awning as I walked into the newly started rain.
“Theo, numbers are only part of life, you know.”
I knew this. Of course I knew this. It’s just that they were more consistent and still more surprising than any person I’d met, as least since Chloe. And so I nodded and left.
Kenny Wilson was not the person I expected. He sat in the library with a mohawk haircut and some sheet music.
“Hello, Mr. Burnkey?” he said in a teenaged voice that had a tonal quality that somehow piqued my curiosity.
“Yes, hello Kenny.” I sat across from him. “Look, I’m not good at lying and I’m not good at small talk either, so here’s what I have to tell you.”
I explained that I wasn’t who I claimed to be while talking on the phone. I explained the pattern. I explained how I believed he would probably disappear on the fifteenth of April and how that was my real reason for finding him.
“A girl named Barbara is missing. She is a good kid, like I’m sure you are. Her mom is frantic, and she is not a runaway. I want to find her and I don’t want you to disappear either, but other than that, I have no advice for what to do next.”
“Mr. Burnkey, you need to relax.” Somehow the tone he’d just used suggested that he was the older of the two of us and that I was due for a little bit of manly advice.
“Mr. Burnkey, I am a trusting person. I believe you. I believe everything that you are saying, even that you believe that I will disappear on the fifteenth. The problem with that, though, is that that is the future. I can’t control that. I can only control what is happening to me today.”
“Yes, of course, Kenny, but today’s actions form the patterns for the future. We make it. We send the course of events tumbling on. Either by what we choose to do or what we choose to ignore. We do.”
“Mr. Burnkey, are you familiar with music theory?”
“I am.” To some degree, that’s true. I had studied the mathematics of it and even owned a Gibson Les Paul.
“Well, good. You may or may not know that I study opera. I am just learning the basics of my singing technique and my voice is not nearly mature enough to handle any major arias yet, but I’ve been taught the building blocks to get me there. I’m learning to control my voice, my pitch and my breathing. I hold a note as long as I can and that’s a consistent frequency.”
“Yes, yes, I know all this …”
“And … if I drift off that frequency, I don’t drift away. I just drift into another note. My C becomes a C-flat. Nothing disappears. Nothing leaves us, it just changes places. Things move. But they don’t disappear.”
Kenny Wilson, whether he disappears on the fifteenth or not, is a credit to eighteen-year-olds everywhere. Or better yet, to people. He was right. Things don’t just disappear, they change form or location. It’s also the Law of Conservation of Matter. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it merely changes form. Barbara didn’t cease to exist, she was merely somewhere else. Like Schrodinger cat, she was somewhere.
43202 + 3B = 45950 : Cincinnati, OH
As I pulled my car onto I-71 and took the exit for Cincinnati, I thought about the pattern. When I looked at it from a distance I thought that I knew it. But as I got closer, and Kenneth Wilson became Kenny the well-balance mohawked aspiring opera star, the pattern started to seem to laugh at me. He took my cell phone number and told me that he’d call if anything suspicious happened, but I didn’t expect a call. All that was left for me to do was to try to see a pattern in the people that the pattern chose. This, unfortunately, is exactly my least favorite way of using my gift.
next chapter
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