RUBICON BEACH

it was a part. In the end he hoped to disprove his own existence and the huge hungry place of which he was a part and which was a part of him. But he could not. When he had disproved one, two and three, when he had definitely ruled out four, five and six, when he had banished from all conceivable reason seven, eight and nine, and every exponent thereof, there was still his awful number left, the last number in the world, The Number of No Return. The next year passed into the next, and the next into the next. Five passed into ten, and he hurtled through his middle ages past his half-century mark. People around him came and went. In this time the company for which he worked declined and failed, a new company flourished and vanished. The Blue Plate Inn changed to some other inn, which did not matter because he had proved, certifiably, there was no such inn. All the things that he had proved to himself never existed passed in the manner of things that never existed.

When fifteen years had gone by, and the mathematically disproven end of the empirically disproven Old World was mad with his numbers, he had no choice but to believe that which he had spent a life trying to disbelieve. One morning he woke, closed the door of the old stone house behind him for the last time, and went down to the sea where he bought a ticket for home.

There was a number for everything once; there was a number for justice. I remember men half-crazed with it. They counted to it in their sleep and went no higher because there was nothing higher. It was a number that couldn’t be divided by any number other than itself even though every other number was a component of it. Mathematically this is impossible but that’s the sort of number it was. That’s the sort of place it was, where dreams had the precision of numbers and passion was a country, and the country was called…

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what it was called. It’s like forgetting the last line of a joke and trying desperately for a lifetime to remember; and then it comes at the end, right before you go, and it isn’t the same. It isn’t the same because in the forgetting of it, it has changed to something else. It’s hard to decide what’s the worst thing, whether it’s that justice does not have a number anymore or whether it’s that those who lived where passion was a country forgot their dreams and so scrambled to invent the memory of insomniacs, the small stingy arithmetic that counts no higher than avarice and betrayal.

I’m going back. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long. I don’t pretend to be strong enough for it. I don’t pretend to have the passion my dreams once had. I don’t pretend I’ll hear the music I once heard or that I’ll even reach the place where I heard it. Entering the last half of my life I could feel myself tire; entering the last quarter I feel myself succumb. I’ve tried every way to disprove what, in my heart, I knew to be true; I suppose it’s in the nature of most men to spend lifetimes trying to do this. I cannot watch, sitting on the shores of the Old World, the ripples of my country going down for the third and last time. I would rather know, when I die, that faith betrayed me than that I betrayed it.

In the mornings, as Lake was shaving, he would look up from the white round sink to the blue round hole in the wall which was the sea; the boat slipped slowly to America. Sometimes at night he woke with the urge to fill the walls and ceiling and floor of his cabin with equations; he resisted this. There were no equations left, and he didn’t want trouble with the ship’s crew; he imagined being put in a small boat with a compass as the captain pointed vaguely back in the direction of England. So he simply sat on deck facing the west waiting for the sight of land and always listening carefully, should he hear something.

He spent no time in New York except what was necessary to cross town and get a train out of Penn Station heading west. Within the hour the train was past Newark. During the night the train came to Pittsburgh. The train continued across country; the morning of the third day Lake arrived in Chicago. In Chicago he found the buildings painted with pictures of human parts. On the side of a store would be an open hand and on the back of a gas station would be an open eye. There were human parts set against backgrounds of rainbows and ocean waves, desert plains and outer space. Walking to his old room between the railway tracks and the university, Lake went down a street of mouths painted in wilted colors, and from every mouth came bright splotches of sound like electric word balloons. None of what he heard was the music he was listening for; none of what he saw that he remembered was anything but a trapdoor for him. An old store sign, a familiar archway, the perennial sound of a bus stopping at a certain corner, the smell of beer in the wind, sometimes even a long-forgotten face now many years older: these were all trapdoors, opening beneath him and sliding him down a chute to 1934, 1935. I should have been more careful about time and dates. Crossing an old bridge, he would feel the falling black rush and find himself standing where he had stood thirty years before, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and a dead blonde lying at his feet.

He went back to the station. He asked for a train west. They