“So Patrick was ready for you, knew how to deal with you and everything else he needed to know.” He nodded at himself. “Me, I only know what little I’ve heard and the few hints I’ve managed to find in dusty old books I’ve peeked at in libraries.” Dom took a breath and dipped under the water one more time, then waited for the time to count down. As the last digit faded away the water went from still hot to ice cold, and with a childlike squeak and a shudder he stood and jumped onto the towel on the floor, testicles shrivelling and goose bumps rising everywhere.
He towelled down and then quickly pulled on his shirt and ran straight to the bed, climbed under the covers and shivered uncontrollably for almost a minute. When he was finally feeling warm again he sat up, still trying to keep as much of himself covered as possible, turned on the TV with the remote and popped open a can of beer. After a long drink he dug into the now-lukewarm chicken and fries, relishing every bite and surfing the channels in between swallows.
When he finished the one beer he casually smeared away the UPC on the can with his thumb, then opened another, drinking this one more slowly. There was a ball game on, Cubs hosting the Dodgers, which he watched with mild interest. On the screen numbers constantly floated by, pitchers and fielders and batters all doing their unconscious calculations, digits doing battle with each other as simple formulae fought to come out on top; baseball players, even those who had been idiots in school, were among the strongest in latent ability. Only snooker and pool players showed more talent, but since baseball was a team game, and one that welcomed fanaticism about stats and figures, many more of its artefacts could be made useful.
Finished with his food and second beer, he put the garbage on the table beside the bed and leaned back against his pillow. Numbers quietly fluttered through the air above his head, some of them bumping against the lampshade like lost moths at night. He closed his eyes.
3
We won’t be able to fly out of here,” said Dom. He had finished off a fine breakfast at a local greasy spoon, and was now walking across a large park that surrounded the local Mormon tabernacle. Expanses of green and healthy grass were punctuated by large leafy trees, everything pleasant and orderly, enough so that Dom almost felt guilty for walking on the grass instead of on one of the paved paths.
“I agree,” said Billy. “You’d only succeed in lighting up the sky. Perhaps if we went south again, to Salt Lake. The flights are large and anonymous enough from a big city.”
Dom shook his head. “South is where we came from, and I’m not interested in heading back to whatever it was that woman had until I’m ready for it.”
“You could purchase an automobile.”
Dom shrugged and sat in a shaded patch of grass. Still fairly early in the morning and already it was getting hot. “My license got fried with all my other cards, and I don’t have anything nearby to replace it. With a little work I could probably reconstitute some of it, but I don’t really want to have to worry about insurance. I’m not from these parts.”
He actually felt his body sigh and then his head shook. Obviously Billy was trying to make a point.
“What?”
“How long have you been actively numerate?” asked Billy.
“Close to fifteen years.” Dom scrunched up his face, thinking. “Yeah. About that. I could always see numbers and make them work for me, but the breakthrough happened about then.”
“And you’ve been on your own all that time?”
Dom nodded. “The closest contact I’ve had is in some anonymous chat rooms online with some folks.”
There was a pause. “Chat rooms? Online?”
“Uh, yeah. I found some ciphers left on a website that directed me to them. So far the times have all been random; I’d say there’s probably about a half-dozen of us who stop by, now and again.”
“You’re saying that someone has taken the time to set up a numerate presence on the web? Has anyone discovered you there?”
Dom shrugged. “I dunno. I imagine that they wouldn’t be too successful if they did. We talk to each other in coded binary.”
Billy closed Dom’s eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. It felt very peculiar, like he was being frustrated with himself.
“What is it?”
He shook his head. “All that time that Patrick thought the two of us were alone, just cryptic hints about lives lived in dusty old university library books, mysterious numbers fluttering away just at the edge of the horizon, but nobody to confide in, no way he could find anyone. It was pure luck my previous host had found him, and it looked unlikely any others would ever crop up.” He fell on his back, lying in the grass and looking up at the green trees and blue sky. “It can be a lonely life, especially since you’re almost always competing with the other guy. Trust is difficult to come by, difficult to even fathom. It took forever for Anders to convince Patrick that he was sincere about handing me over.”
“No family, no friends, just a never-ending search,” said Dom. “It’s still like that, even with a lousy hour chatting online every month or so.” He laughed, a sharp bark that turned heads twenty yards away. “Hell, this is the most conversation I’ve had since I started this loony trip.”
He felt his mouth grin in response. “We should—” started Billy, but he stopped short as suddenly he caught a glimpse of himself from nearby. Just as suddenly he was back in his own body, confused as all hell, and above them a girl was leaning over and looking down, hair lit up like a halo by the hot sun behind her.
“Go on,” she said, sitting down on the grass beside Dom. He sat up and squinted at her, finally recognized her as the cute cashier from the grocery store. She was about twenty, he figured, not skin and bones, but with a pleasant bit of heft to her. Her glasses were different than the ones she’d had on at work, round spectacles like John Lennon used to wear instead of those heavy black rims. She wore shorts and a loose-fitting white t-shirt and sports sandals, and her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail.
“Um, what do you mean, go on?” He picked at the grass, pulling up blades and rolling them between his fingers before tossing them to the negligible breeze, avoiding her eyes and instead reading the pseudo-patterns of chaos they made as they fell back to the ground.
“Whatever your friend was saying,” she replied, and he looked up at her so suddenly he felt his neck crack. She tried to smile, but he could see that she was feeling uncomfortable.
“Friend?” Dom looked around, trying his best to act in the dark. He wiped fresh sweat from his forehead.
“It’s like a blurry shadow, hard to tell exactly what it is,” she said. “But I see it slide in and out of you, and I can see even from a distance when it’s the one doing the talking.”
Dom fixed her with a stare. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what it is you think you’re seeing or hearing, but I’m just mumbling to myself, going over some ideas about where I want to visit next. Nothing else.”
“My mother used to tell me that when she was a kid in school,” she said, seemingly ignoring him, “that if they wanted to show movies they actually had to get out a big old projector and thread the film in and feed it through the reels, and then sometimes the projector made such a noisy clackety-clack sound that she could barely hear what was coming from the speaker.”
Dom blinked at this sudden change in conversational direction. “And I should care how?”
“But when I was in school, we always watched movies on video, even back in elementary. I guess that makes me pretty young compared to you.”
Still unsure of where this was going, Dom shook his head. “I’m not that much older than you.”
She shrugged. “I don’t mean you, I mean the other you. But anyway, I remember watching one movie that Mom had told me about before she disappeared. I was in fifth grade—when I watched the movie, not when she disappeared—and then I knew what she had been talking about.” She paused again and picked some grass of her own, rolled it between her fingers and tossed it in
to the air. “When you were a kid, did you ever see that short movie with Donald Duck called Donald in Mathmagic Land?”
Dom nodded, suddenly struck dumb.
“My life is sort of like that,” she said. For a second she turned her gaze to the tabernacle, then back to him. “There are these patterns that I see all the time, floating through the air, patterns that my mind finally realized were numbers. It sometimes feels like I should be able to control them, although every time I try weird things happen. But I’ve never in all my life seen numbers do something for someone else.”
“The money in the store,” whispered Billy.
She frowned. “You have an accent now.”
Dom waved his hand in the air. “That’s the blurry shadow you say you can see. Get on with it.”
She nodded, and the look on her face was a cross between confusion and excitement. “It was the money. I don’t know exactly what it was you were doing, but I could see the numbers float away when you were paying for your food. Like the money had never even been there in the first place, and you kept fading in and out of view, like you were there but my eyes didn’t want to look at you.” The girl stared hard at him. “I see those numbers all the time, but they’ve always been random, confused, sometimes just in the corner of my vision. Like they were trying to avoid me. Until yesterday. The numbers I saw moving around you and, and, even through you, those were numbers moving with a sense of purpose.”
Dom pursed his lips. Suddenly he thought he could see where this was going, and he didn’t like it.
“I want you to teach me. I want to learn everything I can about how to use numbers like you can. To use them the way I know my mother could.”
“I don’t think—” Dom started, but then the sky exploded in a bright flash of integers, logarithms, algebraic formulae, more. Entire sequences plummeted from the sky, dropping and screaming like Nazi Stukas, twisting and pulling up at the last second to avoid hitting the ground, ripping through people, cars, buildings, trees and birds, before climbing hard back into the sky and breaking up in lightning-bright explosions. And even though Dom knew they were invisible to everyone else in the park and on the street, the numbers were so powerful that people were flinching and waving at them like they were especially pesky mosquitoes and flies.
“Search numbers!” shouted Billy over the din, but Dom was already ahead of him, up and running across the grass, reeling off primes and grabbing them before they got away, smearing them against his skin and clothes.
But that would only help for a few minutes, he was sure. He’d never seen any patterns so strong, so large.
The girl was running beside him now. “What’s wrong? What are those numbers doing?” She sounded breathless, panicked.
“Someone we’re not prepared to meet right now is looking for us,” said Billy, squeezing in words over Dom’s desperate counting. Dom ducked as an especially loud sequence screeched through the air, sailing just barely over his head and bumping off some already frazzled primes. “We won’t get away,” said Dom, panting.
The girl grabbed his arm and pulled him to the right, pointing to the street. “My car!”
He nodded and they both ran madly, Dom stutter-stepping twice to avoid more numbers. She reached the little red Subaru wagon first, flung the door open and jumped in, Dom jumping in right after her. Before he had the door shut she was peeling out of her parking spot, forcing an oversize RV with Arizona plates to slam on the brakes.
“Where to?” she yelled. Even with the windows rolled up, the screaming of the numbers as they dived was overwhelming, crashing against their ears in deafening waves.
Dom scratched more primes on his window. “North!” yelled Billy.
The girl turned a hard left, followed the block, then left again. Directly ahead there were more numbers plummeting from the sky and with a brief muttered curse she turned right, followed a one-way road that curved up a hill.
“We’re leaving them behind,” she said, voice cracking. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.
Dom looked back, saw that the sky above the tabernacle was still thick with numbers, a flock of insane numerate crows circling as they searched for prey. But many were now streaking high into the air and flying north. Looking that way, he saw that they were gathering, circling like a low storm cloud, probably readying for another search.
“We can’t go north now. She’s trying to squeeze off our escape route.”
The girl leaned forward against the steering wheel, looked up and ahead. “I see nothing towards the canyon. We’ll go that way.”
“How long until we’re in the canyon?”
She passed a slow-moving car, ignoring the horns from oncoming traffic. “Five minutes. Maybe ten.”
“The primes won’t last that long,” said Billy. “We’re bound to show up before we reach it.”
Dom spun around, saw that the back seat was loaded with junk and papers. “What do you have back here?”
She glanced around quickly. “Stuff. Stuff to help me with numbers.” She managed to force a wry smile. “A little obsession that guarantees I don’t ever get to keep a boyfriend.”
Kneeling on the seat and leaning over the back, Dom started rifling through things. “Have you got a . . .”
“A what?”
“Fucking great!” he yelled, turning back around. In his hands he held what looked to be almost twenty feet of tape from an adding machine, random numbers cooing softly at him.
“I was looking for patterns,” she said. “But I couldn’t find any with that roll.”
“Ideal,” said Dom. He started wrapping the tape around his waist and right arm and as quickly as he could brought it up towards his head. Ignoring the looks he was getting from the people in the car beside him, he started wrapping it around his neck and head, a numerate mummy preparing to meet his own version of Osiris. The harsh glare of the sun was now softened as it shone through the paper and ink, and the smell of sun-baked paper was thick in his nostrils. It was small mojo, but better than the makeshift stuff he’d been running with.
Finished, at least as best as he could be, he then leaned down, put his head on the girl’s lap as she drove. “Just keep driving,” he said, voice sounding hollow inside his makeshift wrap of numbers. “We don’t want to be stuck in town waiting for them to find us.”
“There are some skimming the streets not too far behind me,” she said, fear raising the pitch of her voice. He felt the car accelerate more.
“Are they coming our way?”
“Sorta.” He felt the road dip; they were going downhill now, a fairly steep drop. There was a long pause, and when the road levelled out again she breathed a heavy sigh. “No. I don’t think they’re following us anymore.”
“I’ll give it a few more minutes, I think.” He closed his eyes, relief starting to sink in, the roll of paper rustling loudly in his ears. “I hope you don’t mind me being down here like this.”
She tried to laugh. “I just hope the Highway Patrol doesn’t decide to pull me over. This would look bad enough anywhere else, but in Utah . . .” Her voice trailed off.
After another couple of minutes, Dom asked, “What’s your name?”
“Jenna. Yours?”
“Dom.”
“Billy,” said the shadow.
“Okay, I’m feeling a bit weirded out,” said Jenna. “One guy wrapped in paper with his head in my lap is bad enough, but two in the same body is too much.”
The car slowed down, and the steady whine of tires on pavement was joined by the rumble and pop of rocks underneath. Dom sat up and peeled the paper off his body, then opened the door and stepped out. They were in a half-full parking lot on the side of the highway; down below people fished at a small lake surrounded by trees, and above and around him there were steep grey cliffs and mountains, as close as the other side of the highway. A semi rattled by, four cars and minivans jostling anxiously behind it. “This is part of the canyon?”
Jenna climbed ou
t as well, nodded. “Logan Canyon.”
“Where does this take us?”
“Does that mean you’ll take me with you?”
Dom frowned. “Give me a minute, will you?” He walked over to the far side of the lot. “So what do we do?” he asked, and immediately noticed how easy it was to say we instead of I.
Billy scratched his head for him, and he turned and looked back at Jenna, who was standing watching the traffic go by. “I’ve already figured out that you aren’t the type to just kill her and leave her at the side of the road.” Dom flinched at this; the thought would never have occurred to him, but he knew there were numerates out there who wouldn’t hesitate. “Take her along. We have no real idea of what the landscape is like, how far we are from anything, and no transportation other than her automobile.”
Dom nodded. “I guess I can teach her some stuff.”
“But keep it elementary, Dom. Don’t give up too much information; you don’t want her to end up knowing all your secrets and stealing some mojo.”
“Right. And maybe I can get rid of her when we know we’re in the clear.” He paused, scratched his chin. “Have you noticed something weird about her?”
“How so?”
“Like a couple of times it felt like I was looking at things from Jenna’s eyes. Just for a tiny second each time.”
Billy shook his head. “No, I haven’t.” He smiled. “Don’t go getting all infatuated with this girl.”
“That ain’t the problem,” muttered Dom. He turned and walked back to the car. “Okay, here’s the deal,” he told Jenna. “I need your wheels, and you need my expertise, right?”
She nodded.
“Then we get in and drive. Let’s get away from here, then I’ll take the time and teach you a few things, all right?”
Jenna smiled. “All right.”
“But in the meantime,” he said as they got back in the car, “I have some other things I’m doing. So the stuff you learn will be from following along and paying attention, not from me pretending I’m up at the front of the class.”
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