Authors: Derryl Murphy
“I’ll grab a few
things and then get a room,” he said. “We can talk then.”
“Good idea,”
replied Billy.
He
picked up a BBQ chicken and fries meal from the deli in the grocery store, as
well as a cold six-pack of Bud and apples and bananas.
As
he paid with two of the bills, he rubbed at their serial numbers and silently
muttered primes as he did so, ignoring the look the cashier, a sweet young
blonde with glasses, gave him. For a brief second as he did so he seemed to
jump outside of his body, looking at himself from the viewpoint of the cashier,
but he blinked and was back in his own body; the girl gave him a strange look
as she gave him his change, and he hurried away.
He paid the same
way at the motel, rubbing away the numbers. Little things like that made it
harder to track him down, and now that Dom was carrying an adjunct, just after
Billy had fled his host on the losing side of a duel, the winner of that fight
might be hunting for either one of them. After he staggered up to his room, he
ran the bath, stripping down and taking a long piss before climbing into the
steaming water. The first thing he did once in the tub was take a deep breath
and dip his head underwater. It was too hot to open his eyes, but he could do
this sort of thing by feel, no problem. With his right index finger he
inscribed a little curlicue followed by 1049 on the underside of the water,
then slid back up, gasping for air and relishing the coolness on his face.
Surface tension
kept the numbers in place, and when he sat back up they’d slid to the opposite
end of the tub, upside down, bumping up against each other as they counted
down, the amount of seconds a good prime number to add to his cover. When they
reached zero the water would quickly chill, chasing him out before he became
viewable from a distance. This sort of thing was needed when he wasn’t wearing
his clothes, loaded as they normally were with all sorts of numeric
talismans—his mojo—to keep him invisible to numerate eyes prying from a
distance.
“God, this feels
good.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, let the heat just open his
pores and flush the dirt and crap from days on the road from his body.
“You should eat
before you fall asleep,” said Billy.
“Well, I won’t
be falling asleep in here.” Dom sat up and leaned forward, looked at his
indistinct reflection in the tall mirror that was fogging up on the inside of
the door. “Anything special I’m going to need to know? Seeing this is the first
time I’ve ever carried an adjunct.”
He watched as
his head shook, an action that was definitely not under his own control. “Well,
with practice we might be able to communicate just by thinking at each other,
although I’ve only had two hosts who were able to do that.”
Dom blinked.
Even through the condensation on the mirror, watching his mouth move and
hearing the words come out in a different voice with an English accent of sorts
was more than strange. “Maybe it’s something we can work on,” he finally said.
“This talking to myself is likely to attract more attention than I want.”
“Patrick . . .”
There was a pause. “My last host, the two of us would often use a note pad,
write down our thoughts in a kind of shorthand. I could teach it to you if you
like.”
“Maybe so.” Dom
grabbed the little shampoo bottle and lathered up his hair, then dipped his
head back underwater for a moment. When he came back up, he said, “But I think
I’d rather be able to talk as quickly as possible.” He rubbed water from his
eyes and then grabbed the soap and started scrubbing. “I didn’t come looking
for you. Did this Patrick?”
Billy nodded his
head for him. “My previous host had found him, taught him everything he could,
because he was dying. He prepared himself to be an adjunct as well, but his
numbers must have been bad; the addition never happened, and Patrick ended up
carrying only me.”
“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.
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 into 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.”