“Then I guess you were probably attacked by a tiger.”
“No. No tigers Polly. I found the house where Morton Petes grew up. I was offered tea. Then I went to see a seventy-seven year old woman named Virginia.”
“I would have backed you up if she got dangerous.”
“Thank you. She kind of preferred talking to one person at a time.”
“Huh. Well, how was the tea?”
“I didn’t have any.”
“Big mistake.”
“Why?”
“You turned down tea in the south! Where are your manners? Don’t you watch movies? That stuff means a lot to those civilized Southerners. If I were there I would have gladly had tea with the lady, and she probably would have given me more information than she gave you.”
“You may have a point. You are better with people than I am. Regardless, I am on my way to Chapel Hill.”
“Watch out for big snakes, it’s really dangerous there. Too dangerous for girls like me at least.”
Then it was her turn to hang up.
I was heading north again, through the balmy South. I envisioned the snake that Polly expected might attack me. Leaving Athens and heading north, I saw a snaking road curled all around America. It was the route of my trip. From Boston to Seattle to San Diego to Athens and now heading back home. The head always reaching for the tail. Just like Morton’s beloved oroboros. I too was on a circular path. I thought of Morton spinning his pencil, making circles. It was all just a bit too symbolic.
I remembered the way I felt as I looked back at the home where Morton had grown up. Looking at the lady of the house and how something didn’t feel quite right. There may have even been something like a pattern there, but I had been so anxious to leave that I let the door close without giving the pattern time to develop. A moment of doubt snuck into my head for the very first time. I wondered about this quest to find Morton. True, he had ruined my life and potentially that of others, but I was also heading in the direction of home and I realized that if I wanted to, I could make it home in one long drive. But who would be the next person to get caught up in the Morton Petes con? Maybe they would take the loss even harder. Then my head was clear again. I would find Morton and do what I could to stop him.
Chapel Hill was similar to Athens, only bigger and more modern. It was also more into its college sports teams. It reminded me of Columbus, Ohio in that way. A billboard on the edge of town actually advertised for this year’s quarterback. I made a note of his name, you never know when you might need to show some interest in the local fascination.
I was able to find the address of Professor Donald Wren in my laptop and so I headed directly to the place. The address revealed a small house in the neighboring town of Carrboro, 9 South Greensboro Street. The house was concealed behind some tall pines, the grass was overgrown and the white paint peeling from the building. I went to knock on the door and realized that there was a note on the mailbox. “PLEASE FORWARD MAIL TO ROOM 42, SERENE WILLOW REST HOME.” It looked like Professor Wren had moved on.
I found the address of the nursing home, drove to it on the south edge of town, entered the building and then found room forty-two. The place smelled and looked like any other nursing home that I’d seen. The room was painted the least attractive form of yellow that was known to exist and the walls were nearly empty of decor. An orderly was removing some sheets from the bed. He was a black man with the face of a child, but large hands, and he was making quick work of the bed.
“Hello, I was wondering if I could see Professor Wren,” I asked the young man.
“I’m sorry, but I’m clearing this room for a new visitor. The professor has passed on. Did you know him?” The man looked sad as he delivered the news.
I needed a second to regroup. Practically speaking, I decided that there might be more to find in his belongings. I looked around the room and saw several books and personal possessions that I decided I might want to investigate.
“We were fellow mathematicians.” It wasn’t technically a lie.
“Well, I am about to clear those books and papers into the trash, so I don’t think that it would do any harm for you to look through them. Especially since some of it might be related to your work.” He said the words and patted me on the back.
“Thank you.”
I moved over to a dresser and looked at the books on it. At first glance, the books seemed to be more about religion than math. The titles of two were “A Dictionary of Angels” and “Divine Harmony.” Upon closer inspection, though, I saw that the “Divine Harmony” was about Pythagoras, ancient mathematician and author of the famous theorem that I’d seen across America. I also noticed a book of matches, which seemed like an odd thing to find in a nursing home. I grabbed these two books and the book of matches and thanked the orderly. I was about to leave the room when I thought of an obvious question.
“How did the professor die anyway?”
The man's boyish face turned sad. “I’m not supposed to say anything, but the police think it was murder.”
I sat in my car for a minute trying to take in all that I’d discovered. When you’re looking for something and in the furthest corner of your mind you wonder if maybe you’ve exaggerated the importance of it all, a murder can give you just the sort of reassurance you need. It might also scare some of that reassurance away. Professor Wren had been murdered? Why kill an old man? And was it safe for me to continue on his trail? I decided, though, to move forward at least until things became seriously dangerous. At that point, there would always be the option of driving straight home.
The book of matches was from a bar called The Cave. It was on Franklin Street, which was the main drag through Chapel Hill. If I were a vacationing tourist and not a quest-oriented mathematician, I might spend some time on Franklin. Possibly even with a family or something. But, being the mathematician that I am, I was obligated to find out more about Professor Wren. A beer to calm my nerves didn’t sound bad either.
To get into the bar, one had to walk to address 452 ½ Franklin Street and to descend the narrow alley staircase between the street level buildings. At the bottom of the stairs a door to my left indicated that I was at The Cave, Chapel Hill’s oldest tavern. I entered and soon realized how the place had achieved its cavernous title. The ceiling of the narrow but deep bar had been intentionally rounded in a commendably but clearly homemade way, as if to say, “look, fine, we’re like a cave now sit down and get a drink.”
I took the advice of the décor and sat down in the nearly empty place and ordered a local beer. It was called The Duck Rabbit and I rather enjoyed it. It also worked to calm me a bit. Was it a coincidence that I was looking for a man and that he had just been murdered? The only person I knew who knew Professor Wren was Morton Petes, but he couldn’t have done it. Although the more I thought about it I wasn’t entirely sure why not.
“Hi, can I get you another?”
I looked up to see a young man with a friendly smile and blonde brown hair falling into his eyes. He had served me my beer, but I wasn’t paying attention then.
I mentioned the name of the quarterback I'd seen on the billboard coming into town. "How about him, huh? This is his year, right?"
"I'm sorry I don't know who that is," he replied.
“Sorry. My name is Theo. I am passing through town and I wanted to visit a colleague named Professor Donald Wren. I wonder if you’d heard of him.”
The man’s face turned to both recognition and seriousness, “I know the professor, but have you heard the bad news about him?”
“Yes, I have. I just came from the nursing home. They were clearing out his room.”
“We used to call him Luke. It was a little joke about him considering himself a fallen angel, you know Lucifer and all that. He was a regular here.”
“Nice guy?”
“Very. I could listen to his stories all day. He and I were both navy guys, so we had a certain bond that way. Oh, I’m Hoppie, by the way.”
“Hi. I’ll take another one please, Hoppie.”
“Sure. Are you also a mathematician?”
“I am.”
“Theoretical?”
“Ha. Well, yes, I was. I work for the census now. The truth is I never actually met Professor Wren. We had a mutual acquaintance, though, a strange guy named Morton Petes.”
“Yeah. I know the name. The professor used to talk about him a lot. He worried about the guy. Apparently the professor was his mentor back in Athens, but now Petes was bouncing all over the country. Dr. Wren was afraid that he’d come a bit unhinged.”
“Yeah, he was one of my students up at MIT. By the time he … left, he was unhinged and the door was swinging open. What did Professor Wren hope to do about it?”
“Well, before he got checked into the nursing home - that was only a month or two ago – he had called Morton and asked him to come to town. He had asked Morton this on several occasions in the past, but Morton had never accepted. I remember the night Professor Luke was in here saying his prodigal son would be returning. Morton had finally agreed and said he would love to ‘come full circle’ and see Dr. Wren. The professor said that more than once, that his friend was ‘coming full circle.’ Of course, he knew that he was going into the nursing home even then. He wasn’t very happy near the end. And now, he’s been killed. That sort of thing doesn’t happen around here.”
“You heard that the police think it was murder?”
“The police drink here too.”
“Small town.”
“Yep, it’s a small town. One where a nice guy like the professor should have been able to grow old and die in his sleep, not get murdered. It wasn’t like his life wasn’t hard enough already.”
“Oh yeah? What had he been through?”
“Well, let’s just say some hard times out west. He was in what he called his ‘final phase’ now. He was taking his mathematical mind and applying it to religion. But it wasn’t your Sunday morning kind of religion, he was looking for the place where religion and math combined.”
A man entered the Cave and sat at the bar a few stools away. He was middle-aged with greying hair but had a youthful face and a big smile. Hoppie moved over to him.
“Hello Jeff, a drink while you wait for Autumn to get off work?” Hoppie asked.
“Sounds good,” the man replied in a bit of a southern accent. “A bud light.” Hoppie went to open his bottle of beer and Jeff went on to say “I really do love coming up here to visit Autumn. You know, I don’t get to hang out with such interesting people down in Florida. Coming up here to see my daughter is like a vacation for my brain.”
Hoppie served the beer to Jeff, and they talked for a little while before he returned.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but do you remember anything specific about this overlap between religion and math the professor was seeking?”
“Well, you heard me call him Luke because of Lucifer, the fallen angel. Well that’s because he loved to study angels so much lately. He thought they had a tie to physics and math. He looked at his own life and what he’d been through and where he was today and thought of himself as an angel who’d made a comeback, so to speak. He isn’t very proud of his past.”
“Angels and math?”
“Yes. The professor used to use the example that Saint Thomas Aquinas, as strange as it may sound, got involved in conversations on the physical nature of angels. He set out to answer such questions as whether one could ever really know the location of an angel and whether an angel could pass from one location to another without touching the space between.”
“Heisenberg,” Jeff and I said it at the same time and I turned to him to smile. This was no ordinary bar discussion.
“That’s right,” Hoppie replied, “Heisenberg wondered the same thing about the electron orbiting the nucleus and in the end decided you could never know the location of a particle, or in this case angel, and know how fast it was moving at the same time. Electrons are also said to move between two points without touching a thing between. The St. Thomas argument happened five thousand years before Heisenberg, though. As we know Heisenberg called it uncertainty, St. Thomas just called it faith.”
I turned to Jeff, shook his hand and introduced myself, “Theo Burnkey.”
“I’m Jeff, and I tell you, I love this place. I get in great discussions like this every time.”
It seems that after a life that had a less than stellar beginning, Professor Wren had turned his attention to his faith. It was part Christian, part scientific and part mystic. Most of this so-called revolution in thinking happened after Morton had left for Boston. As such, it seems that Morton had been mentored by a “pre-enlightened” Professor Wren and this is possibly why Virginia mentioned their personal mix so ominously. Whatever Morton learned before he headed to Boston was not necessarily the same message that was coming from the new Happy Professor Luke. Hoppie knew little more about why the professor might be have been bitter about his past, just that he would get quiet whenever the topic came up.
Professor Wren had been looking forward to seeing his old pupil again, and apparently Morton had been scheduled to arrive a few weeks ago. Again the question of who could have had a motive to kill Professor Wren came into my head. Maybe the professor and Morton didn't see eye to eye after the professor’s change of heart. I wondered if I could possibly place Morton in Chapel Hill at the time of the murder. I decided to go to the professor’s house.
I began paying attention to Hoppie and Jeff again, as they were now discussing the enigmatic question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
“Guys, I want to thank you for all you’ve told me. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Theo, if you find out who killed the professor, I’d be more than grateful to know,” Hoppie said.
“Well, there might be one thing that you can do to help. Do you know if the professor had a key hidden for his place?”
I walked out of The Cave and up the stairs to my car and realized that the two hours I'd paid on the meter had expired. There, on the windshield was a parking ticket. As I reached to pull the ticket from the car, I set my other hand on the glass and was struck with a familiar feeling of nausea. I became dizzy and my surroundings began to glow red. I looked into the car and saw the reflection of a person sitting in the back seat. I walked to the side of the car and saw nothing. Uneasy, I got in and sat in the driver’s seat and nearly jumped when, through my rear view mirror, I saw the reflection of a glowing red Morton Petes in my backseat.
“Hello Theo.”
He looked like I remembered him from three years ago, except semi-transparent. He had a pencil in his hand and was, as always, spinning it. I could barely speak. I turned and looked directly into the back seat and saw nothing. I looked back into the mirror and there he was. I took a deep breath.
“Morton?”
“Well, actually I am a representation of Morton. Not Morton himself.”
“OK. And why would I need a representation of Morton unless I am actually, once again a candidate for professional mental health care?”
“Well, if I had to guess I’d say that something inside you is tired of you ignoring the patterns around you and that I am the manifestation of that denial.”
“Right.”
“It’s a guess.”
“Because I would strangle the real Morton if he were here right now.”
“Sorry, I’m quite sure you would look even more like a loon if you were to start strangling the air.”
“True.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m going to the professor’s house.”
“Cool. Take a right up ahead.”
“I know.”
“Fine. Oh, and by the way, that’s why I know. I’m just a representation of things you already know. I’m just hear to remind you of them from a new perspective. Same info, different angle.”
“Any chance you could talk less?”
The red image shrugged its shoulders and faded. I realized at that moment that I needed more rest. I had to admit, though, that it phased me less than it would have earlier in this trip.
I drove back to the professor’s house and parked the Mustang in the gravel driveway surrounded by high grass. I walked around to the back door and there was a key under a ceramic angel as Hoppie had suggested. I turned the key and opened the door. Inside I found a kitchen, with tables and cabinets and shelves covered in ceramic angels. I walked through the place and found room after room with the similar theme of angels and on three floors. Professor Wren had really embraced his new hobby. I have to say that as weird as it was, the angels were at least a positive symbol. It was sort of like Graceland. Fanaticism works for some people, but I’m more into the subtle.
I walked around the house. There was a main floor, an upstairs and a basement and I counted eight rooms full of ceramic angels. The sunlight from outside streamed in through dirty windows to catch the dust lingering in the air. Glowing lines of dust connected the windows to the coffee tables and couches and the angel covered bureaus within. Something about the arrangement of the angels struck me as interesting, but I couldn’t place it.
I didn’t see books as I would have expected for a professor's home and even the desk in the den was nearly clear. Some pieces of mail were opened and some of the drawers in the old roll-top were half opened. Laying face down was a framed photo. I picked it up and saw a high school aged Morton Petes posing with a silver haired man. Morton did not yet show the signs of premature aging. The two were smiling in the photo and the man had his arm around Morton’s shoulder. The person, whom I assumed to be Professor Wren, had a face that seemed to be hewn from old wood. His eyes looked perpetually tired and the smile, while genuine, struck me as not the pose his face preferred. I thought about how the man had recently died. I was feeling a bit lightheaded and so I moved outside to get some air.
After a few minutes, I opened the car door to find Professor Wren’s dictionary of angels. In the table of contents was a chart. On the chart was a breakdown of the hierarchy of angels according to the Bible. There are three main orders and each has a subcategory called a choir. I walked back inside holding the book in my hand. I headed up to the top floor of the house. The highest order of angels is believed to be composed of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. These choirs comprise the order closest to God. I walked into the master bedroom, climbed up onto a chair and looked out across hundreds of angel figurines. I let my mind relax as I looked down on the angels. Their faces were turned in all directions, but there was a pattern to their placement. I looked across the dresser, the night stand, the bureau, the floor and shelves. I let the angel's faces come alive in the red of my senses. Some stared at me and smiled, others looked elsewhere. Then in my head their faces showed consistency, except for one. All of the angels faced one of four basic directions, North, South, East and West, except one. It was on a shelf above the door and it faced the bed. One. The top choir of angels is known as the Seraphim and they are closest to God. They are the most powerful and are said to burn with intense purity.
I moved on to the bath. These angels had a distinctively childlike quality. They were placed on shelves, along the walls, above the mirror and even on the toilet. All faced one of the four primary directions except two that faced the door. Two. I consulted the book. The Cherubim are believed to be the childlike angels and they are the second choir. More innocent than newborn babies, this choir is nonetheless the one from which Satan departed when he left the side of God.
The guest room followed the same pattern leaving three angels facing the window. Three. The third choir were called the Thrones. The book said that these angels were used by God to accomplish his judgements.
I walked down the stairs and flipped the book to the section on the second order of angels. They were the Dominations, Virtues and Powers. I checked the kitchen and found a pattern of four, and the dining room showed five angels deviating from the primary directions. The fourth and fifth choirs. I hurried to the basement without checking the living room, anxious for what I expected below.
The basement, interestingly, was divided into only two rooms and yet there were three final choirs to discover: the Principalities, Archangels and Angels. The first room was a workroom and the dusty faces of its figurines showed a count of seven figures facing the doorway to the next room. I followed their gaze to the last room. It was a storage room full of boxes with a coal furnace door on one wall. I stood on one of the boxes and let the angel’s faces come to me. All but eight of the hundreds of innocent faces were turned in primary directions. The eight that deviated faced the coal door.
I moved boxes until I was able to stand next to it. I looked down at the latch and saw a newly installed combination lock with letters rather than numbers. The lock allowed a person to dial a letter into each of three thumbwheels. I sat on one of the boxes to think. I looked into the angel book and found nothing that was immediately helpful. I looked back to the faces of the eight that had directed me to the door. I noticed for the first time that three were taller than the rest. I flipped through the angel book, letting my mind clear and the words of the book come to me not for their meaning, but for their pattern and the number three. The book glowed in my eyes and soon I had flipped through it all and it lay shut in my hands. There were only three angels who had ever been given names in the Bible. They were Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. All three were archangels, the choir for which this room seemed chosen.
Using thier first initials, I tried the combination GRM, RMG and MRG before RGM finally worked. I unlatched the door and found nine figurines staring back at me. They were setting on a stack of Professor Wren’s books. The most interesting of these to me was his diary.
I headed up the stairs, and remembered that I had not verified the sixth room, that of the choir called the Powers. I stood with one foot on the arm of the couch and looked around at all the angelic faces catching the sun in their porcelain. I found the faces that deviated from the rest, but there were only five. I double-checked the book and confirmed that this was the sixth choir if the professor had been consistent and of course he had been throughout the rest of the house. I walked around the room until I looked onto the desk. I let the sun from the window fall on the top of the desk and I noticed a circle with less dust. An angel had be removed from the top of the right edge of the desk.
I glanced into a trash can just below the missing figure’s location and saw a receipt. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand, it was from an ATM in Seattle, Washington. Next to it was a receipt from a gas station in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Someone had thrown away an accumulation of receipts and the trail of locations led across the country from Seattle to here. The name on the receipts was Phillip Morté. The most recent receipt was only three weeks old. I walked outside. Morton had been here. Morton had been in this house. Professor Wren had been murdered and Morton had been here at the same time. I needed to sit down.
I glanced into the windshield of the car and saw the reflection of Morton Petes as if he was sitting next to me.
“I was here!”
“Shut up.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the diary you didn’t find when you were here.”
The face in the window turned sad. I skipped to the last page in the diary and read:
June 1st, 2005.
Not feeling up to snuff. It’s not a bit of fun getting old. I’ll be heading to the home soon, but I still hope to see Morton. I worry for that young man. I know that he holds on to the things that I taught him when I was younger and more stubborn. I know that he holds on to the hate. But despite all that has happened, I want to help him to learn to forgive. I want to show him that everything needn’t be light or shadow, pure goodness nor evil, nature nor math, that we can walk in both. When one is not an angel, they needn’t be a devil. I hope that he will listen and not get angry as he has on the phone.
Then I will try to get him to forgive Theo Burnkey despite all that’s happened between those two and what is my legacy. There is no sense in holding on to grudges.
I also want to show him that his old teacher still knows him well. With all his fascination on the oroboros and the cycles shown through spinning, and even though he hasn’t told me, I know where he is heading next. I will show him this drawing and he will know that his old Professor is still sharp.
I do hope he accepts my attempts to change his heart. Perhaps I will start by playing him in a game of chess, that is, if he can stand to lose without quitting. Nothing good can come from a life of sadness and anger. I must confess on the page, I do fear his temper.
Below this was the drawing he'd mentioned.
“Get him to forgive me?” I shouted at the car window, but there was no longer an image of Morton looking back at me. It was sad that the professor saw Morton coming as a chance to fix some wrongs, but also that he feared Morton’s arrival. I couldn’t imagine, though, how Morton could possible hate me or have a grudge against me. I was the only person at MIT who ever tried to help him.
I looked down at the drawing in the diary. It was the last marking in the book. The drawing was an arrow pointing toward the left of the page. Along the arrow were three small circles. Next to the circle at the base of the arrow was written the number “9.” The next circle was halfway across the arrow to the left and next to it was written “G. Washington” and next to the final circle, just right of the arrowhead was written “Washington L.” Parallel to the arrow was a dotted line and at the foot of that line was a number “1”.
I know where he is heading next the professor had claimed.
The easiest way to interpret an arrow is to assume that it is pointing somewhere. This one seemed, by map standards, to be pointing due west. The “9” at the base would correspond to the address of the professor’s house, 9 South Greensboro Street. Morton had just come from Washington, though. Could the professor really have thought he was heading back to Seattle? I supposed that depending on the route, it could be a circle and would technically keep the oroboros theme alive. The idea of heading all the way back to Seattle was exhausting just to think about. Of course Polly was there, if she was still speaking to me.
I got into the car, and backed it out into the street. I decided to head west until I had a better idea. I left town and the car picked up speed. Down the highway, the dotted lines once again found me. How many dotted segments had I passed on this trip I wondered and then I thought of the diary and turned the car around. I headed back to the professor’s house and climbed his stairs. The base of the arrow showed a circle with a number “9” and it meant this house, but not because of the address. The nine signified the “9” choirs of angels and the dotted line which was brought back to mind by the dotted highway had a “1” at its base. I went into the professor’s bedroom and looked at the one angel that hadn’t been facing in a primary direction. As the sun set through the professor’s window, I could tell the angel above his door was facing northeast.
G. Washington must be George Washington. Washington, DC. I felt relieved to have found my mistake and to have a shorter route. I walked back to the car in confidence, but in truth and unclear to me at that time, I had missed three other patterns that were far more important.
As Morton reviewed the checklist on his desk, he thought that he was going to vomit. He stopped after a few minutes and went to his bed, laid down and began to cry into his worn pillow. His body shook as he cried loudly, but the neighborhood was creating enough noise of its own. No one would hear him. Finally his sobbing stopped as he fell asleep.
He dreamt the same dream that he always dreamt. He was in a room and he approached the door of the room to leave it. He knew that he wanted to be out of the room, but he also feared what was beyond it. Before he tried the handle he put his eye to a keyhole and looked out. There on the other side and a big as the hole was a bloodshot red eye staring back. He awoke from his dream, his bed was full of sweat. He jumped from the bed and began kicking the walls of his room. His feet scuffed an area of the wall that was already heavily worn from kicks even though he had only lived here a few weeks.
Eventually he moved back to the desk, more determined than before. He reviewed the list that he had committed to memory years ago.
1) Practice answering to new name. ----- done
2) Death record @ morgue. ----- done
3) Get photos ready. ----- done
4) Hack the cops. Precinct A. ---- done
5) Take pics.
6) Call the cops. Precinct B.
7) Answer phone. You are now the new you.
8) Move stuff to morgue and catch plane.
Step five was special. After he did it, the rest of the steps would come very quickly. Step five was the step where he died. It was always very hard for him. For so many years he had been surrounded by the idea of dying. Now, sitting in his room, he knew that there was a drawer at the morgue with the name Phillip Morté on it. He knew that it was meant for him.
He moved back to the bed and looked at his ceiling and thought about his life. He once had a friend in Professor Wren, but he was gone now. He looked up to the photos above his desk, Theo on the left and the older man on the right. Sure, there was hate, but even that could bring strength for so long. He thought about what the professor had said and he took a deep breath. If there was anyone in the world whose advice he would take carefully, it would be the professor’s. But when he pictured him in that nursing home room and all that talk of angels and peace, he jumped up from his bed again. He walked over to the desk, and grabbed the photo next to that of Theo Burnkey and threw it across the room. The glass and frame shattered.
“And you!” he shouted at the picture of Theo. “Why are you out there looking for me?”
But his voice broke down into sobbing as he moved back to his bed and back to his pillow. He was not only crying because of everything that he’d been through, but because of her phone call from Athens. Soon, though, the crying would end as it always did, and then the dream would begin, as it too always did.
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