Having no real clue why I was in Chicago, or where to go once there, I checked out a different neighborhood each day. I, Theo Burnkey was a tourist. Not an entirely typical tourist, but one nonetheless. At least I didn’t imagine other tourists looking down from the Sears Tower and feeling the cars passing through roads like blood through capillaries, and then sensing that a more efficient algorithm for traffic flow would come by extending the green time of certain lights and surprisingly the red time of others.
One thing that I learned from my time spent in tour groups is that in 1871 The Great Chicago Fire nearly burnt this whole Polish Sausage to the ground. The fire burned a patch roughly four miles long by three-quarters of a mile wide along Lake Michigan. The Chicago River couldn’t even stop it. It just burned right across the polluted thing until it was finally put out two days later. Roughly three-hundred people were dead. Some people believe a comet actually may have started the fire. This would explain why two other fires, one of which was even deadlier, started in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan at around the same time. The comet answer is intriguing, but statistically a tough call to make. Then again the average Chicagoan has no problem just believing the legend. It blames the whole affair on a cow, and the misplaced lantern that was probably bothering his big brown eyes, and that he thus kicked over. People believe just about anything.
The only positive outcome of the fire was that the city was almost completely rebuilt. The rubble from the fire was dumped into Lake Michigan and on it the city added Grant Park where once was only lake. In the fresh start, the city would also have a chance to plan its roads in a more modern way. Without a fresh start like Chicago’s, a city’s roads can often just be the evolution of old paths that served other purposes. Hunting trails and farm animal grazing routes made sense for their time, but weren’t necessarily going to make the best four-lane roads. The fire gave the planners the chance to design on a modern grid system. The intersection that I saw as I sat in the Filter Coffee Shop near the Wicker Park neighborhood was perfect and urban and quite unsettling.
Upon arriving in the neighborhood which was now an art community and chaotic mix of astrological shops, furniture shops, unique food stores and coffee shops, I again felt a sense of vertigo. I leaned against a street sign as the sights around me swelled and a pattern, still not complete, floated into my perception. Again the highways that led west glowed before me, as if I were seeing them from a mile above, and in Technicolor. I recognized Minneapolis, Nebraska, Denver and the smaller towns in Colorado. Angles formed, connecting the cities. Dotted lines flew across the map. The highways set with their route numbers floating just above them and then I was falling back to street level. Before completely returning, though, the intersection before me glowed in its three street asterisk. Its lines glowed in the same shade as that of the view of the West. Then I was back on Milwaukee Ave, vomiting in a trash can. I have always been able to choose when to observe patterns, and I’ve always been able to draw conclusions from them. In this case neither was true, and all at a time when I was finally addressing my gift after three years in hiding. Why was I losing control of this already mixed blessing? If I wasn’t losing my mind, this was a very close approximation.
I slid into the coffee shop and onto a bar stool. I waited for service, then slowly turned back to the intersection that I now associated with nausea and potential insanity.
“It’s a powerful intersection,” a voice beside me said.
“Sorry,” I said, looking over to a thin man with drawn cheeks, colored hair and spikes of black and white bone through each ear, “what did you say?”
“At this intersection, time moves faster than it should. The people that come through here are not unaffected by it. Too much has happened here for it to be any other way.”
“I’m sorry, but I am a mathematician and I guess that I don’t really see things quite so, well, spiritually.”
“Maybe you should,” the man said turning on his bar stool to face me.
“Well, is there some history here? What’s the story of this intersection?”
“My name is Liam.”
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry, I’m Theo.”
Liam went on to explain that the building across from us was called the Northeast Tower or Coyote building possibly because an art gallery called Coyote had once been there, or because it was shaped like a southwestern drawing of a coyote howling to the moon. It seems that the original owner of many of these buildings had been a bit of a local legend. His name was Clifton Johns and he had lived in the Coyote building in the 1960’s but rarely left his penthouse apartment. Having made his money with an uncanny sense for the stock market, Johns had no want for anything that couldn’t be brought to him. When he did come down to one of the shops in the area, he had a way of clouding over when talking to people. He’d seem to go into a reverie and sometimes even lose his balance. He got the nickname “Off-a-Cliff” for the fate to which most people assumed his disposition would lead him. That wasn’t the case, though, at least not to anyone’s knowledge around here. Mr. Johns left town in the mid 1960’s and was never seen again.
“And soon, I’ll be leaving too, my friend. A person can only take so much of a place like this. This intersection and I will need to part ways.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. You say that he would cloud over when he talked to people? This Johns guy did?”
I ordered a coffee and when I looked back to Liam he had begun to write letters on a piece of paper.
“That’s what they say.”
Then he held them up to show me the word BALANCE.
“They called it a reverie. I always remember that word.”
He started crossing out letters on the page, then wrote more and finally began to draw a figure. The figure started as a letter A and then he added more lines branching from the A until it stopped being recognizable, still though, parts of it looked like they might be letters themselves. Then he tore the paper in half and handed the symbol half to me.
“This is yours. I have a feeling that you need balance, but you’ll never get it by trying. The reason is that half of you is afraid of it. That’s your ego. Look at this symbol and you’ll be telling the rest other half of you that it’s OK to let it happen. We’ll fool your ego into letting it happen by making it look so different.”
At this point, I wondered if it were good for a guy who thought he might be losing his mind to hang with others who clearly already had.
“Thanks,” I said and took the drawing.
“You’re welcome. Just keep it around. You don’t have to believe in it for it to work.”
“That’s good.”
“Oh, and you might try the library for more information on Clifton Johns. It’s two blocks from here.”
Then we said goodbye and as I watched him cross one, then another, then the third, touching each of the streets in the intersection that he so reviled, and then he was lost in the crowd.
There were just two books in the library that mentioned Clifton Johns. It was, surprisingly, a mathematical journal, and he was the feature of the issue. The bio was rather extensive, though, and I started into it. Clifton Johns was born in Colorado. He had attended the University of Denver, then the Washington University in St. Louis. It was from there that he had published the attached article. It appeared to be a multidiscipline work titled “Sensory Pattern Recognition: Clarity in the Chaos.” In the article Johns described how there was the possibility for the brain to develop “another sense” and that it would “be a great gift for the bearer and those surrounding him.” Right. Did this guy write fiction as well? The article suggested that if such a person existed, a balance could be struck in their life and that they could achieve a “numerical life balance” that would leave them “productive pillars of not just their locality, but the world itself.” The last line of the article contained this bit of apparent nonsense, “1:ic, 2:eg 3:fa.”
The other book was a financial journal praising the up-and-coming financial analyst Clifton Johns. Apparently it was the same fellow, in a later incarnation. The article mentioned that “with a near instinct for stock selection, Johns stand to form some promising portfolios as partner in the Chicago firm of Wilson and Ruffet. He was, the youngest partner the firm had ever had, and below the article was a photo of the man. He wore a thin beard, and was tall and thin, his hands seemed noticeably small as he shook the hand of the president. His hair was cut short and the expression on his was one of confidence with a touch of knowing arrogance. I knew that expression. It had graced my own face during my MIT days.
I went to put the articles away before deciding to take a final glance at the table of contents. Then something occurred to me. I copied both articles on a nearby photocopier and laid the pages of the mathematics piece in front of me. I let my eyes scan the pages until the letters began to blue then focus and finally move on the page. I sensed them pulling at the page and certain sets glowed. They were all from the quotations that Johns had given. The letters moved from the page to my mind and then marched into a glowing alignment in my mind. “1:ic, 2:eg, 3:fa” It was a key. His quoted remarks used the first letter of the alphabet, A, ninety-three times, B, fifty-seven time and C, sixty-one times. The last line was a key based on numerical position in the alphabet. The letters became numbers and the number became letters.
1=A, i=9 and c=3, thus 1 (or A) :ic (appears 93 times).
He’d left a mathematical pattern and key in his article, it didn’t make much sense, but it was there. But who else could have found it? And then I realized, only someone like me could have.
I returned to the hotel room that I’d begrudgingly checked into and sat on the edge of my bed. It was good that I was where I was when my third, unwarranted attack occurred. The dizziness returned and I fell backward onto the bed. This time, though the highway pattern mapped itself onto the ceiling of my room and it was cleared than the last time. Somehow the key that Johns had left in his article correlated to what I was seeing. When I returned from the nauseating experience, I decided that I needed to learn more about Johns, the apparent mathematician turned financier, turned recluse.
The next day, to my surprise, I ran into a surprising lack of info on the man. I used internet searches and talked to book store owners, but nothing else was readily available and so I sat in the EAR WAX café near the Coyote intersection and looked through the window. A yellow bus drove by with the number 16514 on the side. It meant nothing. A sign on the other side of the street read MYSTIC TAROT, but these letters caused nothing in my senses to respond. Then I remembered something. Johns had owned all the buildings in the intersection at one time. That was the 1960’s, though, nothing would have been left of the world that Johns saw from the Coyote building. But was that true? As I looked above the MYSTIC TAROT sign, I saw for the first time etched into the limestone, EXCELSIOR BULDING. The world of Clifton Johns was still present, it was there in the old inscriptions on the buildings. I could see the mysterious old intersection the way that he had, just by raising my eyes a little higher. I paid my check and hurried out in the street. I followed Milwaukee Ave. through the intersection and to the Coyote building. In the bustle of the noontime Chicago foot-traffic I turned around with my eyes just above the modern signage. Older signs were everywhere. I turned and took them all in. Some were in stone, some in neon, others were embossed into building facades. All these buildings had been owned by Clifton Johns. Then, without feeling a sense of vertigo, I received his message. He had the pattern sense too. Clifton Johns, the wealthy recluse and apparent local nut had left a message. It was waiting there on the buildings for someone else like him to find it. Uneasy about being part of this guild of math freaks, I was forced to acknowledge that it was there for me.
next chapter
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