Chapter 5 - Cincinnati

I look at the world and I see are patterns. I peel it apart and arrange it in compartments. Sometimes I even forget that there are things that don’t fit. Sometimes there is no order. My latest such moment came with the taste of blood in my mouth and it’s what finally led me to the answer to the pattern of the missing. Random acts of violence can be just what you need.

43202 + 3B = 45950 : Cincinnati, Ohio – Tamara Alberts

I called Tamara from my car. Last night I slept in it, rather than deal with another hotel. I pulled off the highway near the King’s Island amusement park and slept next to some truckers with the Mustang seats reclining the way car seats used to: far back and getting that way quickly. I find that small inconveniences, like not having a bed, are easily overlooked when compared to saving a few dollars, and especially as this pattern showed no signs of ending.

“Hello is Tamara there?”

“Who is calling?” responded a woman’s deep voice.

“My name is Theodore. I have some important news for you.”

“Theodore? I don’t want to talk to you, Theodore.”

Then the phone hung up. I called back.

“Ms. Alberts, this is important.”

“I’ll tell you what’s important. What’s important is that you quit dialing my damn number, that’s what’s important!”

“But, it’s about your safety and your upcoming birthday.” There was a pause, and the phone hung up again.

I called a third time and got her voicemail. I left my number and mentioned that I’d be at the Cincinnati Museum Center in the afternoon and that she should call me. I needed Tamara. Without her I couldn’t observe the pattern through the people it chose.

I found a truck stop with a shower. After the shower I learned a bit of highway-code from a polite driver named Ozzie. He explained that my four wheeler (car) should avoid being a bumper sticker (tailgater) on the highway. He also pointed me to a rack of brochures of things to do in Cincinnati. In exchange, I told him the pattern I noticed the State Police using in Ohio to try to catch speeders. When I left he was still smiling, and I had the brochure to the Museum Center in my hand.

Cincinnati has a surprising amount of art-deco architecture. The deco period was a time of optimism in America. Precise angles, curves and proud heads of goddesses adorned even the modest apartments of the era. The new modern look told of a different way of thinking, in contrast, as it aged and was abandoned, it suggested the loss of the dream. Cincinnati has gone some ways towards restoring some of it, though, and the best example is the Union Station Terminal downtown which is restored partially in its rail station theme but also houses the Cincinnati Museum Center. The building looks like a gigantic, perfectly rounded curve emerging from a valley of rail tracks. It reminds me of the old semicircle radio designs from the same period.

The attraction to deco may not seem obvious for a math dork like myself until you see the geometry from the outside and hear the acoustics within. As you enter the museum center and look up, you first see the murals that were a critical part of the era. Muscular and handsome Americans were building a new country through sweat and good looks. And together they’d beat the Great Depression. Artists were also employed by the projects of Johnson’s New Deal. Walk in a few paces, then turn around and look up, and you’ll see the gigantic arc that is the main reason that I decided to visit. The problem was that the fun with this bit of math required two people. My phone rang.

“Theodore?” It was Tamara's voice.

“Yes, this is he.”

“I decided to talk to you. Are you at the museum like you said you’d be?”

“Yes, I am. I’m glad that you decided to talk to me Tamara …”

“What do you look like?”

It made sense if she was going to find me. “I’m about five-eleven, have short blondish-brown hair, and am growing something of a beard.” Then I remembered Lacey and added, “Oh, and I wear old-school glasses.”

“We’ll find you.” Then the phone hung up. Again. That was becoming an annoying pattern.

We’ll find you?

I walked forward until I was back to the entrance doors, then turned ninety-degrees to my right. I walked to the point where the semi-circle met the earth and looked directly at the wall. Then, remembering the story of a Mother’s Day at the Arnoff house, I spoke the word “Barbara” into the wall. I heard nothing. The brochure referred to it as the “Whispering Arc” and you really need two people to enjoy the mathematics of it. The design of the building caused the waves of sound generated from your voice to disperse across the room. They traveled through the air, apparently lost in chaos, and then converged at the opposite end of the arc. You could talk in a normal tone into the wall and hear your friend some seventy yards away who was standing in the counterpart corner. Despite the crowds in the room and the distance between, vectors of sound regained order and reformed as words.

“Theodore?”

I turned to the opposite side of the arc, and saw a dark skinned teenaged girl wearing what appeared to be a white church dress. It was at this moment that I smelled something like limes and felt a gun pushed into my ribs.

I turned to see a muscular white male with a shaved head sneering at me. “Listen Theodore, we don’t like to be threatened. Tamara and I are going to be perfectly safe without you around.” Tamara made her way across the room. The man, tattooed and with holes the size of nickels in his ears, walked me to their car with the gun concealed, and then told me to get into the back seat. I climbed into the back seat and waited. Normally I would have been thrilled with the unpredictable nature of these strangers, but then I remembered Barbara and Kenny.

“Is he the guy?” the young skinhead asked Tamara.

“He’s the guy who called, so he’s the guy. He's got the right name, Theodore. But he ain't no five-eleven.”

"True that, my lady, he's more like five-nine on a good day."

“What smells like limes?” I asked.

Tamara looked at her man and seemed a bit annoyed. “My man Xavier has the pleasant scent of Tropical Paradise, thanks to the cologne that I bought him last week.”

“I do smell like limes, though baby, he’s right.” Xavier added.

“It’s Tropical Paradise, and can we please take care of this business?”

Then the man turned around in the driver seat and said, “We were gonna get you the money, bitch, you made this happen yourself.” Then he cocked his elbow and I was surprised to feel my head first impacted from one side, and then again on the other. I was hit first by his gun, then slammed into the window of the car. Tamara and Xavier were an unlikely couple, I thought, and managed to grin as I passed out.


The first thing I remembered returning was the pattern. It came to my mental vision before I opened my eyes. It rolled around from Mississippi to Kentucky, back to Mississippi and then finally to Ohio. I pictured it rolling over the whole United States, but something was wrong.

The next thing I saw was the face of Kenny, smiling and telling me that nothing was ever lost. I saw the pattern as its +3, -1, +3, -1 … +, -, +, - Then Danielle was back, sitting in the sushi restaurant, talking and talking and finally only one word came to me through the din. Amnesia. Then my head started to clear and I heard the sounds of the highway and of birds and tasted blood in my mouth. I thought about birds and the +, - of the pattern and I realized where Barbara was.

I don’t believe that Tamara and Xavier ever really meant to beat me up and leave me along I-71. Not me specifically at least. I honestly think they were in a situation poised at the moment of action, and I wandered into it haplessly. Randomly.


As you drive along urban highway stretches and have the opportunity as a passenger to look down to the edges along the road, you can often see piles of garbage. These piles aren’t as obvious to the people near them as they are often only visible from the highway. Out of sight and mind. Grocery carts, mattresses, rusted bicycles and sometimes mathematicians line these highways. Today I was the mathematician. This is where Xavier and Tamara dumped me, not far from the Over The Rhine neighborhood, and the scene of the riots in the early 2000's.

I climbed out of the smelly mess and laughed as I counted my cuts and bruises. I straddled a fence and my breath came quick as I felt a pain in my ribs. Still, I laughed. I started to walk back downtown to the Museum Center, assuming my wallet was empty. Xavier and Tamara surprised me again by taking only two of my three credit cards and leaving my ID and ten dollars. My phone was even still in my pocket. I hailed a cab, found Danielle’s number and dialed it.

“This is Danielle, can I help you?” She was at work.

“Danielle it’s Theo again, can you tell me what you usually do when you find people in the hospital?”

“Hi Theo, sorry, find them how?” She sounded busy.

“The amnesiacs, what do you do?”

“We have a database. We called it the database of the found.”

+, -, +, - Nothing ever disappears, it only changes.

“And how far away from home do you check for these people?”

There were still sounds of bustling behind her “We check within a twenty mile radius. People can’t get far with amnesia. Usually it is caused by trauma to the head and a nearby accident. Why?”

“Because I have a database of the missing that should meet your database of the found.”


Barbara Arnoff was found within eight hours and Danielle called her mother to explain the news. She was found in an urgent care center with the 43202 zip code. The same zip code where Kenny lived. Like those birds that finally complete the image, I was reminded of migration. It seems that’s what Barbara Arnoff did. Whether knowingly or otherwise, whether by her own means or by luck or by some numerical calling, the pattern held. Tracing the pattern backward, at least one other missing teen was found. Databases of the found, like Danielle’s, weren’t as common in other states, and so it could take years to track the missing. But Barbara was found, and Kenny’s future was more certain.

The only thing that didn’t fit was the pattern. As I was laying in that pile of garbage, picturing it stretching across the country, it hit me, and I confirmed it on my laptop. It was ending in Cincinnati. The numbers stopped working. The zip codes it produced after Ohio were, for the most part, not registered. Hole in the numerical fabric. But how could it end? Patterns move on into mathematical infinity. How could this stop? And then I remembered the sight of the horizon across the Ohio River, how it seemed flat as it extended off into the distance, but in fact, the world was still round. Up close, we sometimes perceive a pattern that is entirely true, but that doesn’t apply from a distance. The number pi as it is calculated out to infinity, occasionally seems to repeat for several digits, but then it is random again. If we were to only look at these few digits, we’d think it were a pattern. The same must be true when looking at pattern of the missing. Things that are true for short periods of time, are still no less true.


I limped to my car and found the key I’d hidden magnetically under the left rear fender. I started the Mustang and thought about Boston. I thought about the missing and I thought about my job at the census. I realized that going back right now would be the practical and expected thing to do. Still, though, even as my bruised body screamed from my bucket seat, things felt pretty good out here on the road. Pulling my car out of the museum lot, I got on to I-75 rather than I-71 and headed north toward Dayton, then Detroit.

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