American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  The third session found Jim unfocused, distrait.

  “What’s the matter? Why can’t you concentrate?” asked the teacher.

  “I’ve been noticing: there are no pictures on your walls.”

  “No. I’m not an aficionado of the visual arts, of any of the aesthetic arts. Seeking beauty in an ugly world is, to me, a fairly unavailing occupation.”

  “I mean, Dr. Kleerekoper, that there aren’t any photographs—no photographs of people on your walls. Or anyplace else.”

  The boy was restless. He wandered around the room, touching its naked, empty paneling.

  “My family is dead. I choose to remember them only through my memories.”

  “My mother told me this—about your family. Last night.”

  “What else did your mother say about my family?”

  The boy sat back down. “It doesn’t matter. I’m having trouble with problem number four. Can you help me with number four?”

  “I’ll help you with number four if you’ll tell me why the subject of my family came up last night.”

  Jim took a moment to answer. When he spoke, he withheld his gaze. It was hard to look at Kleerekoper as he said it. “We saw pictures of some of those men in the camps. The ones who survived. They looked like skeletons.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “My mother prayed last night with me. She prayed to God that He won’t let this ever happen again.”

  Kleerekoper sat down at the table next to Jim. He put his palm under the boy’s chin and raised his face to look at him. “I regret to inform you, James, that her prayers are in all likelihood falling on nonexistent ears.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  The professor allowed the question to answer itself.

  “I sometimes wonder if there’s a God myself,” said Jim. “I haven’t told my mother.”

  “It’s best to keep such musings to yourself. James, I want to show you something.” Kleerekoper got up from his chair and fetched a folder from his desk across the room. “You’re the first to see this,” he said, opening the folder. “I spoke of pi the other day. Do you remember?”

  “It’s a number that has no end. It goes on and on like eternity.”

  “That’s right. I’ve calculated this unending number to the 761st decimal place. See?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you calculate a number that has no end?”

  “I happen to derive some measure of satisfaction from it. Why do we do any of the things we do?”

  “Are you looking for something, Professor?”

  “What do you mean, ‘looking’?”

  “Numbers that continue on and on like that, at some point something has to happen, right?”

  “I still don’t get your meaning, boy.”

  Jim wriggled slightly in his chair. “I don’t know how to say it. You say they’re just a bunch of numbers that don’t make sense. What if they did make sense? I mean, all those numbers—they have to be coming from somewhere.”

  “They’re coming from nowhere, Jim. They’re already here. I just want to find out what they are. I’m inquisitive. Most mathematicians are.”

  “What if God put them there?”

  Kleerekoper smiled. “I thought you weren’t sure if there was a God.”

  “I’m playing the devil’s—what?”

  “The devil’s attorney, I think it is. Yes, you are, James. But there is no God. Show me the proof of God’s existence against all evidence to the contrary, my boy, and I will engage you further in this discussion. But for now, we must return to our far less fanciful discussion of binomial coefficients. What’s giving you trouble about problem number four?”

  Two weeks later, Barend Kleerekoper took pi to the 762nd decimal point. The number was 9. A week after that, he calculated pi to the 763rd place. Another 9. He’d seen double 9s before. Nothing unusual here. School was back in session. The next decimal place wasn’t reached for another couple of weeks: a third 9. Interesting. There had only been three previous appearances of numerical triplets up to this point: a trio of 1s, then 5s, then 0s. A week and a half later, very early in the morning, Dr. Barend Kleerekoper made a rather startling discovery: a fourth 9. Quadruplet 9s! The very first appearance of a numerical foursome. He celebrated his discovery by eating a whole plate of brownies left by Mrs. Fairfax when she picked up Jim the night before.

  It wasn’t over.

  Place number 766 was also a 9. Astonishing. Remarkable. Five 9s in a row! How far, Barend wondered, would this phenomenon extend itself?

  Farther still, it turned out.

  Place number 767 was a 9 as well. Six 9s all lined up together. It was beyond remarkable. It was unbelievable. Kleerekoper calculated the odds of any chosen number sequence of six digits occurring this soon in the decimal representation of pi at 0.08 percent. “Quite unusual, yes?” he put to Jim with a level of giddy animation the boy had never seen from him before.

  Jim nodded and grinned. “Do you think the nines will keep going on and on?”

  “I rather doubt that.”

  “But what if they do?”

  Kleerekoper thought about this. He shook it off. “Nonsense.”

  It was nonsense. The next number wasn’t a 9. It was an 8. Still—all those 9s—a sextet of identical numbers appearing so early in this seemingly random sequence of digits that was supposed to go on and on and on into infinity…

  Like God.

  “Pi is God?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Professor.” Jim looked at the number, which Kleerekoper had typed up on a piece of paper and put before him. Kleerekoper had circled the six nines and underlined them, had even put an exclamation point beneath them.

  “Then what are you saying? And what have I told you about speaking clearly and precisely? There is no room for ambiguity in our discussions.”

  “Pi isn’t God, Professor. But I think God is there. Those six nines—I think that was God, um, winking at us.”

  Barend Kleerekoper smiled and scratched his head. “Interesting deduction. So this God of ours—he sets the universe in motion, and then he steps back and allows what will happen to happen, except that…”

  “Except that sometimes He, well, winks. To let you know He’s still there.”

  “Absolutely ridiculous and end of discussion,” said Kleerekoper with finality. “Let’s have a slice of that cake your mother left. Why do they call it ‘pineapple upside-down cake’? It looks right-side-up to me.”

  At some time between 1961, when an IBM 7090 computer in New York City calculated pi to the 100,265th decimal point and 1966 when an IBM 7030 computer in Paris calculated the number to the 250,000th decimal point, the important decimal place of 193,034 was reached. It is important for this reason: it is the point at which the next sequence of six identical consecutive numbers finally makes its long-delayed appearance.

  You may be interested to know that this second set of sextuplets also happens to be…nines.

  Wink.

  1947

  RACIST IN TENNESSEE

  There were three men in the room. The oldest was in his late seventies. The other two were significantly younger. The old man sat behind a desk. The other two men, having just entered the room, gravitated to the window.

  It was a fine view.

  The three men were meeting on the top floor of a building which, while not the tallest skyscraper in town (that would be the twenty-nine-floor gothic-deco Sterick Building), did happen to distinguish itself in its own way. It was white. Shimmering white. And its architectural design was derived from one of the most famous skyscrapers in the world: the Woolworth Building in New York City. (Though it stood not nearly so tall as its five-and-dime Manhattan inspiration.)

  “Either of you boys been up here before?” the old man asked casually. Both men shook their heads. “You ever heard of Irving Block Prison?”

  One of the men nodded. The other shook his head. The old
man answered as if both had replied in the negative. “Stood right on this spot. Irving was the Union Army’s military prison after the city’s capture. One of the reasons for the second Battle of Memphis was to free the Confederate sympathizers whom the Yankees had locked up here. Of course, the attack on the prison didn’t go nearly as well as General Forrest would’ve liked.”

  The old man didn’t mention that the building from which the two visitors were presently enjoying their exalted twenty-second-story vantage point had been built by the very man whom they had come to see: Lloyd T. Binford, president of the Memphis branch of the Columbia Mutual Insurance Company. Appropriately called the Columbia Mutual Tower, the downtown structure housed not only the Memphis offices of that large, esteemed insurance firm, but the headquarters, as well, of the Memphis Censor Board. As it so happened, the insurance company president was also the head motion picture cop for the Bluff City.

  Lloyd T. Binford was a man who loved movies. Except for those movies which he, well, didn’t love.

  And that’s why the two men were here. They were emissaries of Memphis’s downtown movie houses—beautiful buildings in their own way: ornate movie palaces whose seats sometimes sat nearly empty. It wasn’t that Memphians didn’t like to go to the picture show. It was just that Lloyd T. Binford sometimes made it hard for them to see the movies they wanted to see here. In Memphis. They’d usually have to leave town—go to West Memphis, Arkansas, for example. West Memphis sat on the other side of the Mississippi River, just west of a broad, empty floodplain. West Memphis theatre owners did land-office business exhibiting all those movies that Mr. Binford had banned in Memphis.

  “I take it you boys didn’t just come for the scenery,” said Mr. Binford with a pleasant, avuncular smile. The smile came with some effort: Binford’s face drooped a little in its lower half as was its wont, partly from the gravitational pull of the aging process, but also from the tug of his permanent declivitous pout. “Nor do I think that you’re here to get me to reverse my decision on Curley.”

  “No,” said the taller of Mr. Binford’s two visitors, though his head was nodding affirmatively. “If all the powers that be at United Artists can’t induce you to change your mind about that picture, I’m sure my inconsequential little Princess Theatre could do no better.”

  The taller man moved to take one of the two empty chairs positioned on the other side of the desk.

  “But surely you must understand my reasoning,” said Binford, tapping a forefinger on his desk’s blotter. “Have I not made myself perfectly clear on this?”

  The other man, who was Jeff to the first man’s Mutt, answered for his partner: “It’s the usual, isn’t it? The picture’s got colored kids sitting side by side in a classroom with white kids. It’s because the picture’s integrated.”

  Binford leaned forward, scarcely dropping a shadow on the great expanse of oak. “Which Memphis isn’t.”

  “We aren’t here to discuss Curley, sir,” said the first man. “That horse has already left the barn. We’re here to talk about all the horses still inside.”

  “Gentleman, let us not waste time rehashing my feelings about black folk on the screen. Memphis doesn’t recognize social equality between the races, and that goes for children, too. As head of the Censor Board, I do my very best to give the people of this city what they feel comfortable with.”

  The second man—the short and dumpy one—now sat down next to his companion. “But Mr. Binford, if they aren’t comfortable with these kinds of pictures, why are they all getting in their cars and driving out of town to see them? And that’s the point of our coming to see you today. Mr. Seale and I represent the interests of nearly every theatre owner in Memphis. We’ve been losing money to theatres in West Memphis and Desoto County, Mississippi, for years—ever since you got appointed head of the Censor Board. ‘Banned in Memphis’ is big business for our out-of-town competitors. At the risk of giving offense, sir, these interdictions of yours—and your fondness for taking the scissors to movies with scenes that you don’t like—it’s all very bad for local folk in our line of work. And, to put it, if I may, into civic terms, it reduces taxable revenue for the city. So on behalf of all concerned, we implore you and the rest of the Censor Board to demonstrate a little more lenience when it comes to the films you may wish to ban or expurgate.” Turning to his companion: “Did I say ‘implore’?”

  “You did, brother. You said ‘implore.’ I second the motion.”

  Binford now stood. He placed both hands palms down on his desktop. “I do take offense, Mr. Cantor. I take offense because the board doesn’t make its rulings arbitrarily. Its members think long and hard about how a film will be received by the movie-going citizens of this movie-loving town.”

  “Two years ago,” pursued the man named Cantor, “you banned Brewster’s Millions because you said that the servant character played by Rochester—by Eddie Anderson —you said he was treated too well. What does that mean, Mr. Binford? ‘Treated too well’? I saw the picture in West Memphis, and this is by no means a remake of The Admirable Crichton.”

  “I don’t know The Admirable Crichton. Does it have Niggras in it?

  “No, it doesn’t. You’re missing my point.”

  Mr. Cantor’s partner in logic took up the cause: “Last year, Mr. Binford, your busy Censor Board cut Lena Horne’s number out of Ziegfeld Follies.”

  “The whole setup was unpalatable, sir. She was fighting with another Negress over a man in a bar.”

  Seale sighed. “You banned Curley because of harmonious interaction between colored children and white children. You snipped out Miss Horne for a reason that goes to the opposite extreme. I submit to you, Mr. Binford, that you don’t much care to see colored people appear in white movies in any context at all, other than perhaps a wholly subservient one.”

  Binford nodded. “There is no good reason to put a Niggra in a Hollywood picture, unless the Niggra’s wearing an apron or toting a bale.”

  “And acting appropriately servile,” added Seale.

  “I didn’t make the world the way it is, gentlemen. We have black folk and we have white folk, and by the way, I happen to like Niggras. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for old Niggras especially. They remind me of the servants we had down in Duck Hill. But I don’t believe in a mingling of the races and I don’t believe in putting forth this mendacious idea that Niggras have the smarts or the innate capacity to be anything more than domestics and day laborers.”

  “I think the lawyers down at the NAACP might beg to differ. By the way, Mr. Binford, is Charlie Chaplin colored?”

  “Now don’t you go and get my temperature up about that limey guttersnipe—a demonstrable enemy of American decency and virtue.”

  “Mr. Binford, you don’t even allow cowboy pictures to play in Memphis if there’s a train robbery somewhere in the story.”

  “Train robberies are frightening to young children. And I should know; I was on the receiving end of one that turned deadly when I was a boy. There isn’t a child in this city who’d derive benefit from seeing a Western picture with a vicious train robbery in it.”

  The old man pounded his fist to drive home his point. It was an anemic act and hardly made a sound.

  Binford’s two visitors passed a look of defeat between them.

  “When do you plan to retire, Mr. Binford?” asked Mutt.

  “Next year, perhaps?” sought Jeff.

  “Now you’d just like that, wouldn’t you?” retorted the old man, easing back down into his chair. “You’d like me to remove myself as guardian of the morals of the citizens of this fine town, so that you can bring communist pictures in here and pictures with chesty harlots like that there Jane Russell piece of garbage, pictures where gunslingers go about their nefarious business of robbing trains and shooting innocent railroad clerks and giving them lifelong nightmares. You’d like that pretty darn well, now wouldn’t you?”

  “No, Mr. Binford,” said Seale evenly. “We’re just try
ing to make an honest buck in this town—that’s all. And you, sir, have been tying our hands mighty tight.”

  “That’s what the miscreant did who robbed the train I was clerking on. But I didn’t dissolve into a Jell-O cup of quivering cowardice, no-siree. I held my chin up high and looked my captors brazenly in the eye. And I can tell you as sure as I’m sitting here that from the looks of those black-eyed felons, they had Niggra blood, all right. No doubt about it.”

  The two men walked away from the refulgent white Columbia Mutual Tower, built by a white man who had done well in the insurance game. Their stroll took them down Main Street and to their respective movie houses, where all the best pictures of the day played, except for those that featured Charlie Chaplin and train robbers and any character of African American descent who didn’t know his place.

  Neither man registered the passage of a garbage truck moments earlier. There were two men in the cab. The driver was a young white man. Riding shotgun was an African American man. His name was Tom Lee. The next year Tom would retire from the job he had held for over twenty years—the first African American to be hired by the City of Memphis’s Department of Sanitation. He would be stricken with cancer and die in 1952. Posthumously, he would be honored by having a downtown park named for him. Tom Lee was a hero to the people of the city of Memphis. He had rescued thirty-two people—both white and black—from the turbulent waters of the Mississippi when a steamboat, the M.E. Norman, flipped freakishly on its side in 1925.

  In the last two years of Mr.Binford’s life, he would look down upon that park from the pinnacle of his glistening white tower—look down and scratch his hoary head.

  To think that they’d named a whole park after a Niggra! It mystified the hell out of him.

  1948

  HAUNTED IN CONNECTICUT

  Ramona found her husband looking out the window at the end of the couple’s narrow galley kitchen. He had pulled a chair in from the dining room and sat there in his bed robe, the window sash raised, a cool waft of night air stroking his face with delicate, invisible fingers.