Chapter 8 - Minneapolis

Delirium tremens is a condition that occurs only to the hardest of alcoholics. It’s called the DT's for short. A person’s hands shake with desire for the next drink and in memory of the last. Here in Minneapolis, it’s also a delicious brand of beer. I should know. I had five since I’d arrived in the bar. My very good new friend Adam, tattooed and stern, yet unexpectedly warm, suggested the beer. I suggested the quantity.

I’d met Adam at a house in St. Paul and, through a series of events, he was now sitting next to me. Perched at the bar, he was following a pattern: American Spirit cigarette, Beer, American Spirit cigarette, Beer. The pattern revealed (hold on to your seat) nothing. Just that he’d only had two beers compared to my five. Maybe it was the drinks or Adam’s unpredictable nature or maybe it was just finally having someone to talk to, but I really started saying things.

His response to my rant was measured. “You’re driving across the country in a ’79 Mustang alone? Man, what are you crazy?”

“Hey, that’s not funny. I may be.”

I held my best serious expression for about a second, then laughed, slapping his back.

“Ha. None of us are ever completely sure of our sanity, my road friend."

"Speaking of the road, piece of advice – watch out for rest stop bathrooms,” I opined.

“OK. Why is that? The vending machines?”

“No, my man, do you have any idea how many people go missing in this country and how many of these people disappear from rest areas? Wash your hands and get the hell out of there.” Since when did I call people "my man?"

“You wash your hands? I’m kidding, I take care of these babies. Have to. I’m an artist. In fact, I was working on something today when you knocked on our door. You never did fully explain why you were at Number Three. Are you one of us?”

“Sorry, what?”

“A Freemason, you must have seen the symbols.”

My father had been a Freemason when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know much about them. Just that it’s a rather private organization with historic ties back to the Crusades and based on traditions of math and good deeds. The true nature of the Mason’s mission has been the topic of conspiracy buffs through the centuries. They believe that the Masons may practice dark arts and may be anti-Christian. The fact that their Shiners branch alone does such good for burned kids suggests otherwise. You usually need to show serious interest before they’ll let you join. Even though math was at its roots, it was my dad's organization and what teenager thinks his dad's club is cool enough to learn more about?

“No, Freemasonry was not the reason I was there.” But learning the house was a temple was very interesting.

“I had the address.”

Number Three was a pillared building on 1004 Howell Street, St. Paul. I’d deciphered the letters and numbers of the address from the side of the Coyote building in Chicago. It wasn’t written there directly, though, Clifton Johns had been more clever than that. I walked the streets of that weird intersection for hours before I got all the pieces of his pattern and then, finally, it seemed to float down off the building and into my head. Lights, special effects, you know the drill.

“Okay, where did you get the address?”

“A friend in Chicago.”

“Do I know this friend? Is he a Mason?”

“I don’t think you know him – some guy, Clifton Johns.” I decided to lie.

Adam’s posture straightened and he was suddenly very sober. “That’s not funny. Clifton Johns is not a name you mention lightly. And you are a liar, because Clifton Johns has been dead for fifty years.”

I looked Adam in the eye, then I looked at the size of his forearms. It was about then that I switched plans and started telling the truth. Even with the DT's, I could still see some reason.


Back in Chicago, I’d been walking the intersection, taking notes, and then walking more, until some of the regulars started to offer me strange glances. Once I had all that I needed, I got in my car and headed to a book store, and then to a diner near the west side of town. I had a feeling that I’d be heading that way soon.

In the diner, I unfolded a map of the United States. Many people don't notice, but there is a mathematical sytem to the numbering of highways. It's called the Eisenhower Interstate System. The system numbers the American Interstates with two-digit numbers. The even numbered roads head East and West. The odd numbers travel North and South. The route numbers start in the nineties in the North (I-94) and get lower as you head South, to I-8. They start high in the East (I-95) and get lower as you head West (I-1). Thus the highest numbers intersect in New England, and the lowest in Southern California. The map formed a grid system across the US, not unlike the one used when kids play the game Battleship. I pulled out my notebook, a pencil, ruler and geometric compass and got to work. I had two locations: the Coyote building intersection in Chicago and Howell Street in Minneapolis/St. Paul. I began drawing a geometric shape on the map. The shape connected Chicago and Minneapolis and then got bigger.

The symbolic markers in the Coyote intersection had consistently stopped about one-hundred yards from the center of the intersection. If you could look from above at the region where Clifton Johns had left his signals in the signage, and connect the symbol-covered area, you’d see an elongated hexagon. Beside the address that came from the pattern in the signs, a word message arrived:





Time to leave, geometry guides us, the gifted follow,
minds never rest, We are the sighted.


Was this guy a nut or what? I drew the hexagon across America using the geometric compass. The Chicago intersection formed one point, Minneapolis the other, the rest of the corners of the hexagon fell across the US. I believed it was a geometric travel plan. The destination? I didn’t know, but I hoped that it wouldn’t leave me reclusive and giggling at strangers saying things like “we are the sighted.” My social life was bad enough.


I explained much of this to Adam, leaving out the parts that suggested the deepest nuttiness, and he stopped me occasionally to clarify some points. By the time that I was finished, my head was spinning and I’d grown rather tired.

“I’ll take you there tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“I’ll take you inside Number Three, third numbered, but first formed Temple in the area. I’ll take you inside.”

“Why?”

“Because, we Masons try to offer our services privately to those who need them. We seek self-improvement through the principles of mathematics and the lessons of ancient numbers, which suggest the proper distribution of our time and energy in life. Masons are mathematicians when we’re at our best. And you know the geometric compass that you used to draw that hexagon?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s one of the three parts of the classic Mason seal.”

He was right, but it was just a coincidence.

"Do you know what the letter 'G' within the compass and ruler stands for?"

I stared blankly.

"It stand for two things: God, but also Geometry. Besides, if you are traveling in the steps of Clifton Johns, you won’t want to head out without seeing some things and hearing some good advice.”

“I’ll take it.”


“Now sleep in your car, or sleep on my couch, but get some rest.”

I chose the couch, but much of the DT's decided to leave me before I got home. Good thing we were still walking and the city of Minneapolis uses a regular pattern of storm drains. After getting up from one near Adam’s house, he remarked that I could use a little bit of balance in my life. Balance. True. But tonight I’d lose it a few more times before finding the couch.

Adam’s apartment was a strange mix of expensive appliances, stereo equipment, books and art. I sat on the couch, waiting for it to stop spinning, as a thin, long-haired fellow named Axl, prowled around the room. He spoke quietly, and I didn’t hear much of what he said, but I had a feeling that he didn’t trust me. Adam worked on painting a black pagan symbol in the next room and before I fell asleep, I heard him tell Axl that things “were all good.” Somehow in the fantastically random house, I managed to be both drunk, inspired and surprisingly at peace. Then, predictably, I passed out.



My cell phone woke me at 8:00. The sound felt like it was peeling my brain apart. The voice on the phone was my boss Arthur Milner. He was a young, nearly obese man, who easily found himself exasperated. Now was one of those times.

“Theo, Art Milner. Question: Where the hell are you?”

“Hello Art, I am actually in Minneapolis at the moment.”

There was a pause during which I could nearly hear his mouth open and shut, trying to phrase a response to such an unexpected answer. “Theo, your job is here in Boston, the database is going to go beta soon and cross-referencing is still not using the newer efficiency algorithm.”

I’d translate this, but it really has no bearing on anything. I told him that I wanted to start using the months of vacation time that I’d amassed having never wished to pull myself from my work or home for the last three years.

As socially inept as Art Milner was, he could occasionally surprise me.

“Don’t go chasing for patterns in places where they aren’t.”

And then he hung up. Surprisingly good advice from a man who is known to answer questions with the word “correctamundo.”


The Howell Street Masonic temple, or Number Three, is unexpectedly nested in a residential neighborhood in St. Paul. It is a dark stoned two-story building, pillared with two columns and holding turrets on each corner. A close look at the facets under the turrets revealed symbols of the different divisions or appendant bodies of Masonry. The symbols were five-pointed-stars, the standard compass and measure, a nearly complete triangle and others. They each symbolized a regional division of Masonry around the world. These guys loved their symbols.

Adam led me up an unassuming staircase to several rooms with impressive décor. Paintings and sculptures were prominently placed in many of the rooms. Themes continued throughout; the number three was prominent, the square, compass and letter 'G' were commonly found also the representation of the rose was in much of the art, but the highest placed symbol was that of the All-Seeing Eye. The place was impeccably clean. Adam led me from room to room, specifically avoiding certain locked doors, until he got to one on the back corner of the top floor.

“Theo, by the time that Clifton Johns got to us, he was a bit, well, confused.”

“I’m ready to see the room, Adam,” I replied.

Adam produced a key, unlocked the door, and I entered.

The room was almost completely covered with paintings. The small gaps between them were painted in deep red. The paintings themselves shined with bright shades of blue, green, red, yellow and orange. Clifton Johns had mastered the geometric painting form of the art-deco 1930’s. In it, the figures are composed of near-perfect shapes. The effect of the room was that of overwhelming brightness and yet unease. Adam, who stood next to me, just nodded when I looked at him. Each painting depicted one figure. The figures were beautiful women in hats, men on motorcycles and even one of a parachutist in mid fall. They were posed in dramatic style, many with their arms across their foreheads or faces gripped in action. Mason symbolism was clearly integrated into the figures, but this wasn’t unusual. The thing that made them all unusual, and caused the unease, though, was that Johns had left the lower right cover of each empty. It was unnerving and one’s mind wished it could center each figure in their frame. At least, my mind wanted to. After the initial impression, I started to wonder if Johns might have had a purpose in the empty space. Upon walking up to one painting I noticed that he had changed his brush stroke near the corner. I held my head close to each and allowed the one light in the room to strike the painting from a cross-angle and discovered a number or letter was hidden in the paint of each. I began writing them down.


I intentionally chose not to look at the numbers and letters that Johns had left in his paintings until I’d said goodbye to Adam and Axl. They’d wished me well, but both seemed to look at me just a little sadly as I backed my car out of their driveway. I was sitting in the Mustang near a bowling alley a few minutes later, uncertain if I should open my notebook and let my head swoon at the pattern that Johns had left. I looked down at a small piece of paper in my ash tray. It had been given to me in Chicago and contained a symbol. It didn’t say it, but I knew its purpose was to remind me to stay balanced. In that spirit, I forced a chuckle, and did my best to act light-hearted before opening my notebook and looking at the numbers. It was good that I’d prepared myself. After cross-referencing the number with a the map that I’d bought in Chicago, and some knowledge that I had of history, I realized how badly Johns had fallen.





Time to leave, geometry guides us, the gifted follow,
minds never rest, We are the sighted.


John was clearly cracking by the time he left Minneapolis. What kind of gifted person would follow? My fingers tapped at the steering wheel until, they decided for me, and the car was in gear heading for the West, a point on a hexagon, and the historic secrets of cold war America.

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Story inspired by ... Adam Minneapolis, MN Adam is a tattoo artist and renaissance man in Minneapolis, MN. His full Bio can be read at his site, but in short he's a great guy.

Chapter 7 - Chicago

As I’m driving to Chicago, nearly every half hour I think about turning the car around. It is clear to me that I am starting to act a little bit like a crazy person. Have you noticed that there aren’t very many rusted cars on the roads anymore in America? With the exception of mine. The one that I sleep in. The one that I’ve driven from town to town for nearly two weeks now. The one that I leaned against in Detroit when my senses suggested that I needed to get to Chicago. Is this not classic crazy person stuff? But finally at around Gary, Indiana (sing the song, I do.) I start to forgive myself for all of this and acknowledge that we found Barbara. What’s more, I discussed Morton for the first time in years. I looked around the interior of my car, to the fast food bags and the toiletry kit that I kept on the passenger seat and I decided that I was either going nuts or getting better.


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.

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Story inspired by ... The Coyote Building and Wicker Park Chicago, IL The Coyote Building is the cornerstone of the "Around the Coyote" art area in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. It is a revered and historic intersection and as a building, a great example of early art-deco influence. I actually met the Witch Doctor from this chapter as well, but sadly never got a signed release form from him.

Chapter 6 - Detroit

There's something I’ve noticed being out here on the road. Something about the open space of it. In a way, I guess it symbolizes options and the future. If I were back in Boston, and since it is Sunday, I’d be sitting in my underwear in my dark bedroom, working at my computer. I’d have gone to my kitchen and grabbed one of the dice that I have sitting on the counter and tossed it clicking across the pink and green-flecked counter. If I’d rolled one, my breakfast would be composed of Cheerios. Two: Wheeties. Three: Corn Flakes. Four: Honey Nut Cheerios. Five: Oatmeal (roll the die again to choose between instant flavors) and Six: Waffles. Six used to be “Fibo’s Choice”. That’s when I let my dog decide breakfast, but he had an affinity for the syrup in the waffles and we fell into a real waffle rut. Fibo is probably happier with me gone. He’s staying with my neighbor Mr. Giles. In that house, they eat waffles every day.

So, despite my sore body and my cut face, I was probably better off out here in America than at home with Fibo rolling the breakfast dice. I headed west out of Cincinnati and found Oxford, Ohio before heading north and into Indiana, and eventually into a town called Richmond. Sitting at a red light in what appeared to be a town, like so many others in America, dying from the inside and being reborn on its edges, a father and son crossed the street in front of me with fishing poles in their hands. The face of Morton Petes came to me as it often does. Did he like to fish? Maybe with his dad? I didn’t know. And then a gentle honk of a horn suggested that I should acknowledge the now green traffic light.

I decided to pull over and get my head straight. I heard a church bell ring and it reminded me of Sundays as a child. Sliding on the vinyl back seat of my dad’s Buick as he cornered like a racecar driver (for my benefit) on the way to church. I thought for a second about church, and then looked at the one next to me. St. Mary’s. In the absence of the dice, but in the spirit of my own Sunday habit, I pulled out a penny. Heads, I went into the church, tails I headed north. Abe Lincoln thought it best that I get back to the house of God, not surprising considering his character. I complied.

An hour later my Ford sighed as I gave it gas and we were on our way to Detroit, now holding a small flyer and a bit of unease. It read “YOUR LIFE IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR. Suicide prevention hotline.” The number had a Detroit exchange. I had been sitting in the last pew of the Catholic church, when I found the hotline ad. I was looking for something in the church, something to calm the feelings from my past. For some reason, today Morton was on my mind more than usual.






*


Morton Petes was a gifted student, if a bit of an irritant. I can say that despite everything that happened, because it’s true. He was. As a grad student at MIT, I worked as a teacher’s assistant for a differential equations class. This was complex math for undergrads and many saw it as a “make or break” course. Looking at Morton, you might have guessed it might break him, but I didn’t think so. Teacher’s assistants at MIT have open office hours. During these two hours a day, students asked me their specific questions. Morton was a regular at my office hours.

Typical undergrads I assist are around twenty years old. Morton was not an exception in age, but he was in appearance. He looked like he was in his late forties. His messy brown hair was graying and his tall body was thick with what looked like middle-aged decline. His face was often patched with red blotches, but his eyes were the great equalizer in his appearance. Bright, green and alive they could have come from someone else. They didn’t seem at home in this prematurely aging frame. I’d watch him work, and help him along to the complex solutions with a mix of hints and suggestions, and the rest was his own work. The work he did was solid, but it came rarely. Much of the time, I thought I was helping him with things that he already knew. So why was he coming to my office hours every day? He’d often change the subject.

“Do you know that Catholics believe in heaven, hell and purgatory?”

“I do, Morton,” I’d replied, ready for a subject change myself, but finding his timing annoyingly predictable. It was just before the hardest part of the particular problem.
“I was raised Catholic.”

“Oh, a follower of the Vatican, excellent.”

“Well, I was raised …”

“Did you know that suicide victims are not allowed into the esteemed Catholic heaven? Does that seem fair to you?”

“Morton, I’m not sure that that is really the sort of topic that we …”

“We deal in math every day. It’s logical. Solutions are the result of the scenario we’ve arranged. One leads to the next, correctly. Yet some lives lead to solutions that are no less true, no less logically derived by the system that is life. Sometimes the solution is that it is time to die. For some of us, it’s the only choice. X = death”

“Well, the patterns of life are still within our control, Morton.”

“Are they? I don’t know. With the way that I’ve been feeling lately, don’t be too surprised, Theo, if one day I’m heading off to your Catholic hell.”

“Morton, are you suggesting that you are considering something drastic? Because the school has counselors.”

“I believe we were about to look at these equations, Theo.”





*


The church was surprisingly calming to me. The design fit well with my personal sense of aesthetics. It wasn’t cluttered with unnecessarily ornate knick-knacks. The stained glass had deep shades of red and blue and the walls were plain white. It was clean. Simple. Like faith. A concept I found intensely predictable. In the absence of the facts, people will create a solution. That solution should manifest itself in something greater than themselves and something with a happy ending for the righteous, and another for those who stray. Life was valuable. End your own and you’ve strayed. I looked into the slot in the back of the pew in front of me, the corner of the small flyer peaked out. I tugged at it and found the suicide prevention number. On the back of it, though, was written a name. Mike Vestal. Yes, faith is predictable, but God, if you believe in Him or not, now He could be random.





*


“It just doesn’t seem right to me that the people in the deepest despair, should be met with the harshest ending,” Morton had said in another study session, weeks later.

“It’s a device to keep people from killing themselves, Morton. Does it surprise you that the harshest of punishments should be threatened for things a religion least wants its members to do? Suicide is embarrassing to a religion.”

“Hell is more than just a threat, Theo.”

And so, my conversations with Morton went on for weeks. His obsession with the fate of suicide victims grew. Another thread that grew was his own talk of depression. Yet something wasn’t right. I looked at Morton and I let my mind relax. My memories of the things he’s said came back to me, words, quantifiable degrees of emotion, and I saw no pattern that led to anything drastic. Nothing. It didn’t end there. The main thing that kept me from fully believing his threats of suicide were his eyes. They entered into the math in my head as a large, nearly infinite quantity of life. With them in the pattern, nothing he said led anywhere drastic. I believed in my ability. I believed that human beings could easily be quantified, that patterns formed and that they then could be predicted. My talent told me Morton was bluffing. I was wrong.





*


I passed through Toledo on the raised highway near its automotive billboards and across the Maumee river and into Michigan. The car plants started to surround me like giant land masses. I laughed and felt proud to be driving a Ford. I rolled on through downtown Detroit, where little can be seen from the highway, and into its northern suburbs to a place called Royal Oak. I spent a few days exploring the area, avoiding a certain address, but on Wednesday I looked it up and drove there. The address on the anti-suicide flyer.

Detroit is a city that very well typifies the concept of “White Flight.” That is, as the center of a town begins to decline for economic reasons, and certain less privileged classes find areas more affordable to live, the affluent class moves. Usually outward and toward the suburbs. Detroit has a series of lines that mark distance from the town center. These lines are roads called, appropriately, Six-Mile, Seven-Mile, Eight-Mile, etc. depending on their distance from the center. After the race riots of 1968, Detroit’s upper class fled so far north as to be quantified there, Eight Miles from down town. And so the line was drawn. There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern, but sometimes we need to speak in terms of the average and not the exceptions. The whole process of flight wasn’t unexpected given the model and the variables that had been presented. Detroit was fighting the pattern even now and many claimed it was losing.

Royal Oak was far from the center, though, and was a pleasant mix of urban-styled life and unique stores with just a hint of suburban isolation. The roads formed square blocks, a sign of earlier American urban planning, and the streets were tree lined. The effect was a pleasing environment, even in front of the suicide prevention center.

I walked through the center’s glass door, with stickers placed in several locations, each supporting a cause in keeping with their aims. Amnesty, Humanity and the like. I approached a receptionist and started to ask to speak to the Mike Vestal. I realized, though, that she was currently on the phone.

“Are you sure that that’s what your father meant when he said that? Tell me how you felt after that …”

She was not a receptionist. She just had the desk closest to the door. I fell for a stereotype. Note that, Theo, I told myself. She motioned I could come in, and so I did. And I wandered to a desk with the name Mike Vestal marked on it. I sat at a chair by the empty desk and waited.

Morton Petes killed himself three years ago this June 11th. The police kept most of the details secret, but they were clear on the outcome. Morton apparently slit his wrists while in his bathtub in his Cambridge apartment. He was found three days later as he had no roommates, just a landlord who periodically stopped by and was alarmed at the break in their routine. Then Morton was gone. But I remained. He suggested he was ready to die, but I didn’t see it as likely. Improbably. Not within the pattern. After that, things began to fall apart for me.


“Hi, sorry I was out, can I help you?” The man asked as he got into his chair.

I brought my head back from the June memory and turned to face a smiling man. He had a kind face and wore thick glasses with black frames. His hair was black and curly and he gave the impression of being both sensitive and artistic. He was probably in his early thirties. He held out his hand.

“Mike Vestal”

“Hi, Theo Burnkey,” accepting the hand.

“Are you alright, Theo? Is there something you’d like to talk about? You look like you’ve been in a fight!”

“Yeah, I was more the observer of a fight waged on me, but it’s all fine.”

I spoke with Mike for a little while about the nature of suicide. I told him I’d been close to it, and that it was a big part of why I wasn’t home in Boston right now. He explained they offered support to people that were near suicide as well as those contemplating it. I assured him that I was only in the former category. I told him about the flyer I found in the church in Richmond.

“That’s funny, well just a coincidence, but we deal with a church nearby named after St. Mary as well. My flyers are often in their pews from what I understand. The priest there, Father John, is an old friend of mine.”

“Any idea how it might have made it to Richmond?”

“No. It’s not impossible that someone could have carried it there. Just unlikely. Richmond is a four hour drive and not on the main highway. Do you know the statistics for things like that?”

“I do. Too well.”

I left the office without further elaborating on Morton or the way that I was at least a part of the equation that led to his death. I held onto the brochure, though, and told Mike it should not be surprising if he hear from me soon. I told him I had more to say when I was ready.

I stood for a moment at the doorway of the center just before leaving. I thought about the hell that suicide victims went to. I was a mathematical man, and a scientist. I didn’t put a lot of credence in hell or the devil. In fact, if my spirit had any room for the plausibility of God, it had much less for that of the devil. Evil just always struck me as the opposite of good. Positive numbers had negative counterparts, but they only described how far you were from zero. They weren’t bad or wrong, just negative. If there were no hell, though, then where had Morton gone? Just into the Cambridge ground? I wasn’t sure, but I put the small flyer into my wallet for safe keeping.

I walked back to the streets of Royal Oak just as the sun emerged from some Great Lakes cloud-cover, turning grey back into blue. As the sun hit me, though, I started to become dizzy. I approached my car and when I got to it, I had to lean against it. My head was rushing through patterns I had not suggested to it. I could see the highway maps of the area, Detroit to Chicago to Minneapolis and on to Nebraska and Colorado. Like links in a chain. The lines of the highways wiggled and glowed, and I sensed a pattern on the verge of forming. It wasn’t clear yet, but I felt an urgent need to get to Chicago, and that if I didn’t soon the rest of the numbers may never align. Perhaps it could only become clear once I joined the equation. If Barbara Arnoff were the B in the pattern of the missing, perhaps I was the T in another. Maybe I had to be in place for the rest of it to be revealed. And so I climbed back in to my Mustang, its white interior smelled familiar and like a surrogate home.

I-94 headed west and soon, so did I.

next chapter

Story inspired by ... Mike Detroit, MI Mike is an artist and a member of the Royal Oak Gusoline Alley writers guild. (my name for it.) He is the inspiration for the physical characteristics of the character Mike.

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.

next chapter

Chapter 4 - Columbus

“I’m fine, thanks!” I yelled to the back bumper of one of Chrysler’s larger creations. From my vantage point, laying on the sidewalk, the Ohio State University bumper sticker moved away from me quickly, but the deafening sound of the thing lasted much longer. I got up and dusted off my jeans. The way the car handled that last turn and the resulting oscillation was my only bit of satisfaction. “Your suspension is screwed! That piece of shit won’t last the summer.” Cursing people to have expensive car repair bills wasn’t much, but it would have to do. Columbus was busy tonight, and I was a bit distracted.



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

Story inspired by ... Jon Columbus, OH Jon is a microbiogist turned aspiring opera singer. He is also a very kind person and you know this after talking with him only a short while.

Chapter 3 - Cleveland

I sat in my hotel room. Just me, sitting there, looking at the horrible wallpaper for about twenty-minutes, letting the floral pattern slide in and out focus, before snapping my head up and deciding to take stock of things. I was in Cleveland, Ohio, six-hundred miles from my home and trying to substantiate my theory about a pattern in a census database through this missing girl. Yes. That was it. Pretty clear, really. Borderline mentally ill behavior and surprisingly exciting, but pretty clear nonetheless.

Barbara Arnoff’s mother thought I was insane and, despite her lovely purple hat, was typical for her type: housewife. “Get off my property! You’re a psycho. My daughter is fine.” She went on to offer more uninspired ranting. All I could manage to do was write my phone number on a receipt and slide it in her mail slot after she ran inside to “Call the police.”


That was last night, though, and this morning when her daughter didn’t return home, Mrs. Arnoff finally saw the merit in some of what I had to say. She mentioned the Beachland Ballroom. Barbara had tickets to tonight’s show, and her mother was now willing to trust even a raving mathematician to bring her loved one home. She told me that she didn't think that Barbara had run away, and I didn't think so either. The pattern suggested otherwise. Poor woman. I know how she feels, losing someone, that is.

Before she hung up the phone, Mrs. Arnoff paused for a moment then said, "Mr. Burnkey, I don't know if you are who you say you are, but when it comes to Barbara and her safety, there's no option that I won't try. The girl you want to help find is not just a girl in a database. When she was thirteen years old, for Mother's Day, she wrote me a story. She made a pretty yellow cover and bound it herself. She dressed up that morning, made me breakfast and laid the book on the table. The story was about a mother and daughter who live the cycle of life. They moved from support in early life to friendship in the middle, then later back to support as the mother aged. The daughter became a mother and life's cycle carried on. She was thirteen when she wrote this, Mr. Burnkey. Not a typical girl. Keep that in mind as you look."

I brought my laptop with me from Boston. I sat in my room pulling in the numbers from the glowing screen, seeing the pattern, now like a fickle old friend. If you look at the database of the missing people in America, you see certain consistencies: ages, numbers of parents at home and the like. This data forms a pattern, but not a very interesting one. It points you in no direction other than to remind parents that if you mistreat your teenager, they’ll run away. Common knowledge, I’d hope.

The more interesting pattern, my old friend, runs through that data like your name across a crowded room, somehow clearly. All is chaos until you know what to listen for. Or look for, in this case. The pattern pays no attention to your gender, income or name, this one cares about age, birth date and zip code. Somehow, eighteen year olds across America, seventeen days after their birth date, are disappearing. Being eighteen-year-olds they blend in with the other runaways. The ones who had this in mind. They are, however, different. Disappearing wasn't their idea.

The zip code pattern looks like this:

First Missing Location Zip + (3 x B) = Second Missing Location Zip
Second Missing Location Zip – B = Third Missing Location Zip
Third Missing Location Zip + (3 x B) = Fourth Missing Location Zip
Fourth Missing Location Zip - B = Fifth Missing Location Zip


The pattern: +3B, -B, +3B, -B or +3, -1, +3, -1. B is the constant in the equation. It is 916 and I named it B after Barbara. By plugging in American Zip Codes (a system set up in the 1960s to better route the mail and basically divide the country by the available post offices in an area), I was led to Cleveland. University Heights, specifically.


38622 –B = 37706 : Crowder, MS – Josh Small – age 18 – missing
37706 +3B = 40454* : Mount Vernon, KY – Pamela Glandle – age 18 - missing
40454 –B = 39538* : Diberville, MS – Tony Neil Summers – age 18 – missing
39538 +3B = 42286: Trenton, KY – Felicia Johnson – age 18 – missing
42286 –B = 41370* : Saint Helens, KY – Matthew Warner – age 18 – missing
41370 +3B = 44118: University Heights, OH – Barbara Arnoff – age 18 - missing?

Then I only had to look for the birth dates sub-pattern. The missing people all disappeared on the fifteenth of the month. They all had celebrated their eighteenth birthday seventeen days earlier. Barbara’s eighteenth birthday was April 28. Seventeen days later it was May 15th, and she was gone. Last night.

Look, I am not a complete nut. I know how weird this all sounds, but when you have a hunch that a girl might go missing from her family. That they might never be able to see their daughter, the one that they brought up with dreams of a bright world and chance to cause her own patterns in it … well, she deserves a chance to live. Just like an MIT student named Morton deserved his chance. Some patterns need to be broken.


The Beachland Ballroom looks like it came right out of the 50’s. I mean, if I were alive then, I think that things would have looked like this. I paid my $8 admission and walked into the smoky bar. The band playing on stage was composed of a guitarist and a drummer. The drummer was shouting some nonsense about God and the devil and I realized that this was the first act. Some sort of Jesus revival themed rock experiment. They were mildly amusing.

The entire place was cast in red light and divided into three sections: seating to my left, the bar to my right and the stage at the far end. The room couldn’t have been bigger than my apartment in Boston. Boston, where it’s illegal to smoke in bars. I was far from Boston. I asked a group of tattooed young men if they’d heard of Barbara Arnoff, and they replied with “Sorry, dude,” and returned to their bottled beer. I approached the colorful bar, leaned across it and waited. No service just yet, so I turned to a dark haired woman to my left.

“Excuse me.”

“What?”

“Excuse me.”

“Oh, sure,” she turned to face me.

“Do you know a girl named Barbara Arnoff?”

“Who are you? What’s with the old-school glasses?” her makeup-black eyebrows pointed back at me.

“My name is Theo, and I’m afraid she might be missing,” I adjusted my glasses.

The girl was wearing a denim jean jacket and had her hair pulled back in a 1950’s style. Her hand was on her hip and her posture leaned into a commonly used pose from the present day. It said, without speaking, that I needed to prove my case.

“My name is Lacey. But why should I tell you anything?”

“Well, I work for the census bureau in Boston and I have reason to believe that …”

“The census? You came all the way from Boston to count this girl tonight?”

“Well, I have a certain talent for spotting things. And I have reason to believe that Barbara might be in trouble.” Since when did working for the census bureau offer one so little credit? I considered Lacey, thinking I knew her type, predictable, I decided to go slow with her. But before I could start …

“And your census job has led you six-hundred miles for no apparent reason other than to find a girl in a bar and you think that I should give you information regarding one of my friends with nothing more than your unsubstantiated talent?” Now she was really leaning back on that hip and I was becoming intrigued. Maybe I’d misjudged the girl with the pierced nose and make-up like my grandmother once wore.

“My talent, well I can spot the patterns that lead us …”

“Yes, prove it.”

“Well … the truth is … that I look at this place differently than, maybe, you do.”

“Go on, tiger.”

“OK. See the bartender girl? While poring dark beers, she consistently checks on her lipstick, and while poring light beers, she taps at her right hip.”


“Big deal …”

“The last band’s drummer was reliably falling off tempo until his guitarist faced him, at which time he found his beat again. Looking through the doorway to the street outside, you will notice that a red Ford Mustang has been driving around this block every fourteen minutes. I suspect that they are under-cover police. The blonde sitting alone in the both over there is alternating between smoking a light cigarette, a menthol cigarette and checking her cell phone messages, consistently for the past hour. The male bartender checks the cash the register every twenty-minutes, but he secretly moves a twenty dollar bill under the one-dollar pile each time he does so. He will most likely avoid the manager’s forty-minute checks this way and successfully steal $240 tonight. And you, Lacey, are about to …”

The girl raised her right arm to twist some hair around it.

“… play with your hair.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It’s creepy, I know. My wife always thought so, at least. So what can you tell me about Barbara?”


For all the time spent at the Beachland Ballroom, I had surprisingly nothing to go on as I headed back to my hotel room. No sign of Barbara Arnoff, just my name was on the guest list to Saturday’s Burlesque show. Besides being witty, Lacey was a college graduate and a strip-tease revivalist. At least it had been a good night for unpredictability. Lacey told me that Barbara was also in the strip-tease act, The Pussyfoot Girls, but that she was basically a good girl. They were mostly the sort of girls who dressed in a way that made you think that they were a lot less innocent than they really were. Barbara, if I find her, will look older on the outside than her eighteen years within.

I consulted my laptop with the portable version of the missing person census database that technically I had illegally removed from federal property -- an offense punishable by prison time –- and looked again at the pattern. For lack of finding Barbara, I decided to head to the next city where it predicted a disappearance. The pattern moved on and so, I guess, should I. Maybe getting a jump on the next one would offer more about Barbara.


44118 – B = 43202 : Columbus, OH

I consulted the birth dates for Columbus. There was a hit. Kenneth Wilson, whose birth date wasn’t until later in May will be surprised at the early present that I have for him.


* The last two digits of the zip code indicate the post office. Certain rural areas have less post offices. In these cases, the zip codes were rounded by two to find the closest post office.

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Story inspired by ... Lacey Cleveland, OH Lacey is the inspiration for Chapter 3, with her friendliness and unique style, she made a fine representative of Brave Cleveland.

Chapter 2 - Boston

Barbara Arnoff can’t be counted. If she were where she was supposed to be, I’d count her. One. If she were dead, I’d enter a zero, then I’d check the box marked “deceased.” That's my job. Barbara Arnoff celebrated her eighteenth birthday two weeks ago in University Heights, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. Barbara still lives at home with her mother. Earlier tonight she called down the basement stairs to her mother to say that she was heading out. She won't be coming home.



“Hello is Mrs. Arnoff there?”

The whole reason we have to go field counting is because people have not responded to their census forms. This suggests one of two general things: they didn’t return the survey through some fault of their own, or they just weren’t there. When no forms come in to our office, out go the counters. This leads us to places where people’s lives can interfere with their ability to reliably mail forms and it leads us to places where people are more likely to go missing. These are often the same neighborhoods.

“Hello Mrs. Arnoff, my name is Theodore Burnkey.”

Field counting is the only reason that I got out from behind my desk. It’s the only reason that I started talking to people again. Every ten years we need to count you suckers. Even desk zombies like me have to go out and one-two-three your asses. I’ve learned to love it. Of all the people in the world, I love strangers most. And the rest not at all. Strangers can still surprise me, even if just for a moment.

“No, you don’t know me, I work for the Census Bureau.”

When I’m not talking to strangers, though, my desk job suits a guy like me. I get all the numerical data of all of America at my finger tips. I don't decide what it means, it just is. If you have three children, you have three children, that’s a fact. No one can debate one of your children away or even pull that “2.8 children” hilarity. I look at the data and I see more. I see truth. I see the numbers wiggle and jump. I see them like I once saw some liquor bottles on some yellow stairs. When I was four and needed to answer to the patterns. The numbers fly across the screen and my eyes stop seeing, but start feeling. It was in the middle of this that I started noticing some strange things.

“Is your daughter named Barbara?”

The missing. These are the people that never get counted. These are the holes where data should be. These are the missing pieces in the middle of Mickey Mouse’s face, in the puzzle you thought you’d finish tonight after work. And that mouse is just staring at you with that stupid smile. The missing people hurt because they are the lack of data. I know what it's like to lose people. I took their database on as my own project.

“The Census Bureau, Mrs. Arnoff, in Boston, Massachusetts. I’m afraid it’s important.”

I was working at my desk when the cleaning crew came through the office. That’s normal. They are consistent, I hate that. It happens at the end of the night. I will be at the office for only four more hours. A man named Jesus wished me a happy birthday. And that was surprising. That was nice. I looked back to my data, and then to Jesus and he glowed like his very Namesake. Birthday. What about census data changes every year? Ages. The images in my head shifted based on the new information. I felt the answer. It was the missing part of the pattern. Mickey Mouse with a full stupid smile. I slapped Jesus on the arm. “Gracias! Gracias!”

“Your daughter isn’t home right now is she? Her birthday was exactly seventeen days ago. Am I right?”

The ratio of female to male runaways is approximately two-point-five to one. Of those who call runaway hotlines, most stop calling after the first week they've been gone. Some never call at all. The pattern I found applies to this unfortunate second set. The unexplained. Those who never get a chance to call. Once I saw it, I just needed to see where it would move next. Patterns move onward. Always. To mathematical infinity. Or they wouldn't be patterns. Where would this one lead? Maybe not to anyone. Birthdays, after all, are random (except for seasonal mating patterns, of course). I scrolled through the dates. April 28th. Seventeen days ago. University Heights, OH. Arnoff, Barbara.


The pattern that wove through the census data, and that was now clarified by the perspective of dates, led right to Barbara. Seventeen days ago it was her birthday. The pattern hated that about her.

“Mrs. Arnoff, don’t call the police, they won't believe you, but your daughter won’t be coming home tonight. I’ll be there by midnight to try to help you. Yes, Saturday.”




A physicist named Schrodinger had a famous pet cat. He placed this cat in a box with a radioactive particle. I know. Weird. Stick with me. The particle had a 50% chance of killing the cat and a 50% chance of doing nothing but make the cat perform his normal routine of licking his rear end. Schrodinger closed the cat in the box. He enjoyed asking people if the cat was alive or dead. Some people would answer "alive!" or would say "surely he's dead." Schrodinger would just laugh. The answer? Barbara, please hold on for a little while longer. The answer is that the cat is neither alive nor dead. This would continue to be true until someone finally looked in the box. Looking kills or saves the cat. Schrodinger, as far as I know didn’t really have a pet cat, but Barbara is very real.

I'd helped a Florida office with some counting a few months back, but that was business and I flew down. This was different. For the first time in three years, I packed my own car and left Boston.

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Chapter 1 - Boston

If people are going to care about you, I mean even at all, you have to give them something. A reason. People need to feel something, learn something, laugh at you, want you to get the girl, notice that you came so far or that you have a secret. People are predictable this way. We're all predictable this way.



My mother used to keep some bottles at the top of our basement stairs. The bottles were all started or empty and somehow both my parents thought it in bad taste to display them in the house. My mom would line them up there at the top of the yellow linoleum-covered stairs.

I was three years old and was normally left alone for short periods of time. One day while my mom was cutting carrots in the kitchen, I grabbed a full gin bottle and tossed it down the basement stairs. Little three-year-old me, chubby knees with pencils in my pockets. The whole house winced as the crash moved through the lime green paint touching every room. My father was not home. I'm not sure what he'd have done. But my mom ran over, grabbed my arms, and screamed, "What the hell did you do?" She was trembling, but I wasn't afraid. I remember I felt relieved after I tossed that bottle and heard it gurgle across the basement concrete. Mom may have been furious, but things were better with it smashed down there on the basement floor. The feelings passed. The dizziness was corrected. A calm fell across my pink face.

I was a quiet kid, prone to hours of silent adult-watching. An only child, I wasn't "bad". My mom hadn't made a mistake by leaving me at the top of the stairs by the bottles. She made a mistake by making changes.

My father and mother's drinking life was anything but random. (We were Methodists, after all.) And because we lived directly next to Elliot's Liquor Store we methodically replaced our bottles. The following was the standard Week in Alcohol for Mr. and Mrs. Simon Burnkey...



(* Mom was raised Catholic.)

What resulted, at the top of the stairs, was a predictable progression of bottles. A beer bottle arrived on the steps every weekday. A bottle of wine every four weeks, Gin every twenty weeks and a bottle of Tom Collins Mix every seven. She wrapped the JD bottles discretely in newspaper and disposed of them at the center of a trashcan (Every fourteenth Tuesday: trash night).

The top of the basement stairs was the same place where I would suit-up in multiple layers to face the New England winter with my sled and my Dad. The small space had three coat hooks, various cleaning supply bottles on a shelf and on the stairs, the assortment of alcohol ranging from empty to full. The entire arrangement was completely random, to them.

It was around the time that my father received his promotion that the change occurred. My father, a soft-spoken man prone to an array of brown clothing options, was not the stuff of manageria. He couldn't mutter more than a whispered request to any of his fellow postal sorters. The only person to whom he actually had the nerve to delegate was my mother. It was near this time, and before he changed jobs to recreational boat sales, that my mother began to feel some domestic pressure. In search of an extra bit of padding from my father's delegation (which honestly was quite mild), she increased her secret Sunday allowance. Switching to a top-off of gin with her JD shot, she drank from a slightly larger glass. Specifically, the glass with the orange tiger prowling around its hemisphere. The one from the San Diego Zoo. Roughly a five-percent increase.

The result, though, was the closest thing that a four-year-old can come to blind rage. That is, a kid who perceived the world the way I did. The way I still do. I saw the saw-tooth pattern of slow fluid decline, followed by respondent refill. It was like a dance. Events turned to numbers that turned to images with hearts of enumeration and they moved just behind my eyes. As the weeks went by, the mathematic image of refill moments, empty bottles and slow decline danced before me like a television signal slowly correcting itself from misalignment. Even at this age, I realized the pattern was heading in a noteworthy direction. The pattern was due for a very rare moment. The time of Complete Emptiness. Based on Simon and Evelyn Burnkey's drinking and refill patterns, it would arrive only every 34 years. It would arrive that Saturday night. I knew this without yet knowing original ideas. It was instinct. I waited for months for it. Like Halley's Comet. Without even fully knowing how to talk, I knew this.

Mom removed the bottle of gin from the brown Elliot's Liquor Store bag and placed it on those yellow stairs. Then she walked to the kitchen to cut carrots for our typical American dinner. I sat next to the lime green labeled bottle on those stairs. My rage mixed with the smell of cleaning supplies, and then in a moment it was gone. Down the stairs. A solid arc. Floating in space as Force equalled mass times accelleration, where acceleration was that of gravity. A direct hit. To this day, I still don't think she knows why. After she shook me, though, in a sudden movement she stopped. She looked me in the eyes and her eyes said that I was little and didn't know. She loved me and forgave. Forgiveness was a fine way for the situation to turn, but I wasn't wrong.



That was something that happened when I was a kid. People need to hear that stuff if they're even going to care a little. I'm not going to recite the litany of similar events. Of progressions. I grew up. I adapted. Real life isn't about the clean comparison. Real life is where the ideal, like math, and the chaotic collide. Real life is the stuff that's left after the collision. This is real life.

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Story inspired by ... Maywood Dr. Youngstown, OH Written in: Boston, MA 250 Maywood Drive. Youngstown, OH. It's the place where I grew-up. That's my little brother Gregg on the yellow floor mentioned in the story. Somehow whenever I think of a kitchen, the floor it has is this one. Even though I was writing in Boston, my head was back in Ohio.

Prologue - Fort Meyers

8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2. Do you see it? The pattern? Here’s a hint: it will always end in 0.



I was in this tired strip plaza coffee shop looking at this woman, with her short dark hair. She was sitting across a kid-sized plastic table from me but I couldn't think about the hard plastic chairs just then. I couldn't look at anything but her face. I couldn’t hear anything but the words. They flowed out of her mouth and headed in all directions. I didn't know what she'd say next. It was glorious.



“Is it OK that we walked to this place? I mean, you won’t get in trouble or anything will you?” her finger walked the lip of the paper coffee cup.

“No. It’s fine. I’m a field counter, and I think that this place counts as the field.” I am pathetic, I thought. Good pun, but pathetic. Honestly, though, we almost never interviewed outside of the homes. This was huge. And then she did the stranger's prerogative, the "unexpected personal insight."

“It’s just that I don’t want to be home right now. Someone was supposed to stop by and I don’t think that I want to be there when he does.”

“Oh,” Crap. I was suddenly embarrassed for the way I felt crossing the street to get here. Swept along for the ride. What I sensed now was a cliché forming. Local evening news stuff. Domestic trouble. It happened in every third house in this income bracket. She was probably hiding from someone who "really loved her." Too bad, and now that I noticed, she wasn't as cute in the indoor lighting.

“I’m afraid of how great I've been feeling when a certain friend stops by.” I heard the words and she had me again. Feeling "great" around here usually only came with a lottery scratch card. I noticed her breasts for the first time. They seemed to be nearly perfectly round. Four-thirds pi times the radius, cubed.

“You see, he’s a photographer and he’s been taking these photos of me.”

“Oh? Well, I mean, Mrs. Kelley this is really none of my …”

“At first I just pulled my shirt up on the side, but you know, the more you do it … the more you want to take off. It's surprisingly sexy, you know?”

I had no earthly response to this. If you'd have told me that morning that by noon I'd be talking about secret nude photo sessions, I'd have bought you another round. My head was getting the floating feeling. I smiled and noticed she smelled good too. I waited for more.

“Anyway, the pictures are really beautiful and he tells me that he wants to take more. Really great shots."


And?

"And he says that he’ll have the time to do more shoots as soon as he leaves his wife. He’s gonna leave her really soon he says." Now she's tugging at her wedding band. "It's one of the reasons I'm nervous. Excited but nervous.”

That floating feeling ended and my brain dropped to the bottom of my skull and rolled around a bit. We were home. Back in the garage. This was what I knew. This was the stereotype in action. She had been doing so well too. It’s not her fault, though, the charm of strangers can only last so long. Then you see them. Their patterns. And I noticed she had this creepy mole on her cheek anyway.

“Well, we’d better get to these census forms then, OK?” I said.

She shifted in her seat and straightened her back, smoothing her skirt with her hands. “Of course. Of course. What’s the first question?”



8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2, 0. The patterns are always there. Sometimes it’s all in how you look at them. Try squinting an eye. Turn your head at an angle. Try turning your brain in the opposite angle. These numbers are in alphabetical order. Eight, five, four, nine … Tricky. Yeah. This one took me a few seconds, but then, I’m a bit weird that way. My question, though, now that you can see it, now that I've told you the trick, do the numbers seem any less special? The joy gone from them? I bet it is. I know this feeling all too well.

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Story inspired by ... Kelley Ft. Myers, FL Kelley, who confesses to drinking way too many lattés in real life, was kind enough to go first and to provide the picture from myspace. Thanks, Kelley. Visit her shop in Ft. Myers, pronto.