RUBICON BEACH

finally shook myself to consciousness in the earliest hours of the morning; I felt a rush of anxiety about Pop. I can’t be worrying him like this, I thought to myself he has nothing but me to lose anymore. The red moon was out, its tunnel gate having shifted to the other side of the river. In its red light I was surprised to see small footsteps leading across the beach to the water; I had figured the little girl for a dream like the rest of it. But there were definitely the steps, and I followed them to the river and at the edge I heard it again, the music I’d never heard before. I had figured it for part of the dream too. It was right there, coming from the other side of the river; and with the same chill as when I’d stood staring across the tracks that morning after my mother had gone, with my hair standing on end just the same way, something occurred to me. It occurred to me that this particular music was the music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond desire, beyond justice. This number was no mad fancy then, no theoretical conceit, it was out there, beyond the river that stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence; and it also occurred to me, standing where the small steps of the Indian child vanished, that my mother had heard this music too the night she left, and that at this very moment I was very close to that which had taken her. Confronted by it, courage fled. Before I bolted I listened once more to the farthest beach where the red tunnel ran to the end of the night; and it sang to me. It sang.

When the country declared war he was nearly thirty years old. Because his sight and hearing were poor he was not enlisted to fight. For a while he was a military engineer, and his facility for numbers and mathematical theory took him to Washington. He became a secret part of the dour devoted days of the country, secret even unto himself. He had been working three months on a special project when he requested an interview with the project director. He did not receive it till after a seven-week period of infuriating his supervisors by insisting that what he had to say was for the ears of the director and no one else. Late one sweltering September Friday he was ushered into the director’s office. He was seated in a chair before the director’s desk by a window that looked out to the sun setting behind a pool of water and a monument. He was there alone for ten minutes when a man he had never seen before came into the room and sat behind the desk, folding his hands on top of it. Mr. Lake, the man said. Are you really the director? John Michael asked. Yes, the man said, I really am. He waited, and John Michael cleared his throat and pushed his heavy glasses with his invisible-moon eyes up the bridge of his nose. He began slowly, trying to sound as sane as possible. Like everyone else, he said to the director, I do not know the exact nature of this project. However, I thought I might have information that would be helpful. The director waited as John Michael continued. There is a number, he said slowly, that we have never known. It is a number between nine and ten; not nine and a half, not nine and nine tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. I discovered this number some time ago and have tried in the years since to calculate an equation that proves the number, beyond the primary equation that led me to discover it. I have to tell you that I have so far failed to develop such a proof. I must also tell you, however, that I have been unable to disprove this number. Moreover, if one hypothetically presumes the existence of such a number, heretofore unforeseen possibilities come within our grasp. He stopped to see if the director was having a reaction to this; the director was not. John Michael sighed and produced a sheaf of papers which he offered the director, who took them. The director glanced over the first several and then laid them on his desk. He looked at his hands a while and then up at John Michael. He asked John Michael why it was nobody else had ever found this number, and John Michael said, Because it isn’t to be found over there; and he pointed east. It is rather, he said, to be found out there, and he pointed out the window to the sun setting behind the pool of water and the monument. I know it’s out there, said the young man, because I’ve heard it. It’s across the river. The Potomac, you mean? the director said. John Michael shook his head. The Hudson, you mean? the director said. Of course not, the young man answered in disbelief. The river, he said: it’s across the river. The director, after watching him a while, asked if he’d told anyone else about this number, and John Michael said no, and then the director said, Of course there is no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already. We know all the numbers, we found them hundreds of years ago. If that’s so, answered the young man across the table, then tell me why the Old World came to the New; and the director smiled a little, quizzically, and dismissed the young man. Thank you for your interest, he said formally; he did not return John Michael’s papers. John Michael continued to work for the project another month, when he was transferred to an accounting bureau in the