She was gone. He thought for a moment he saw her, there in the grass against that bottomless sky; but what he’d taken to be her hair was a once white wind gone mad in a caged place, gathering the smudge of the place’s darkness; what he’d taken to be her mouth was the clotted snarl of the pale plains. What he took to be her eyes were only recollections, psychic mementos, talismans of distance: tones across the bank, a red moon of aspirations, small footsteps that lead to the water and vanish forever. “Hello,” he called, as though she would step into view. But she had never answered before in all the times he watched her. “Hello,” he said again, without hope.
He went to town to look for her. She wasn’t in town. He went down to the docks to see if anyone matching her description had booked passage. They had seen no one like her. He asked about her everywhere; he was driven back to the moors by their reproach. He partly walked, partly hitched out to Land’s End so as to be there when the sun fell; he sat all night on the cliffs watching the lighthouse for the sight of her telltale eyes. The lighthouse was dark. He went back to the cottage and now turned the place upside down, what there was to turn upside down: a chair here and there, a deathbed. She was not to be found beneath chairs or beds. She was not to be found behind the walls or beneath the floors. He scoured the moors for the next week, and then a month, and then many months. He didn’t find her, and no one knew of her. He went back to the stone cottage again and waited there in the nights, foolishly trying to blot her from his sleep; sometimes he believed that if he slept long enough he would wake to her. Sometimes he believed that if he stayed awake long enough, he would tumble into her unconsciousness, wherever she had taken it. Those footsteps that once led to a river’s edge haunted him; he loved, as does every man who is born to a vision, that unseen future that his courage once failed. He hated, as does every man who is born in America, that irrevocable failure that his heart won’t forget.
On the stone walls of the cottage he added things, he subtracted them. He divided things and multiplied them. Sometimes he used chalk, sometimes coal, scrawling the equations the length of the room. After a couple of weeks the entire inside of the cottage was filled with additions and subtractions, multiplications and divisions; he then moved to the outside of the house. When the outside of the house was covered, he began writing equations in the earth. When he went to work at the shipping company, he began filling the company books with this arithmetic and then the top of his desk. Soon the moors where he lived were filled with arithmetic; he then took to adding and subtracting on the roads leaving Penzance, down on his knees with his back to the end of the island, adding and subtracting himself into a corner of Cornwall. The townspeople noted this behavior. They consulted among themselves and wondered what it was about this part of their country that attracted such preposterous Americans, one more preposterous than the other. Months passed, and when the spring gave way to summer, and the summer to autumn and winter, and when the year gave way to the next, Lake was still writing equations, new ones in the spaces between the old.
His was not aimless adding and subtracting, however it might have seemed to the native people. He had determined to disprove, once and for all, the existence of The Number. He had determined to show that ten followed nine after all, that the only presence between the two was the debris of fractions and percentages, nothing more, and that The Number was only a terrible delusion, a personal fable he had told himself, and that there was no reason to follow the music across the river that night years before because there was no music: that The Number did not exist and the music of The Number did not exist and the passion of the music did not exist. In this way he would justify a private collapse. While he had tried once before to so disprove this thing, he had hoped then not to succeed; he had attempted to disprove it only in order to affirm it. Now, however, he laid siege to it.
He failed. He could not disprove his number or his music or his passion. He disproved everything else. He disproved the existence of the very walls of the cottage on which he wrote the equations; he disproved the existence of the books and the desk at the company where he worked. Under his employer’s bewildered watch, he disproved the existence of the employer. He disproved the existence of Penzance. He dis proved the existence of the sea and the boats on it, and the castle in the middle of the bay. He disproved the existence of the moors and the sun in the sky. He disproved the sky. He mathematically and empirically disproved his memories, one by one, all the way back to the blonde he had loved whose name and face he couldn’t remember. But what he could not disprove was the love itself and the huge reservoir of hunger of which
