The Gift of Numbers (9 page)

The Professor copied out a new tag and read it quietly to himself.

"My memory lasts only eighty minutes."

I'm not sure if they were related to his mathematical abilities, but
the Professor had some pretty peculiar talents. For instance, he
could instantly reverse the syllables in a phrase and repeat them
backward. We discovered this one day when Root was struggling to
come up with palindromes for a homework assignment in Japanese.

"It doesn't make any sense, but it's the same forward and backward:
'A nut for a jar of tuna'—what's that supposed to mean?
Nobody would trade a jar of tuna for a nut."

"Nut a for natu of jar a trade would dybono," the Professor
murmured.

"What did you say, Professor?" Root asked.

"Sorfespro, say you did what?"

"What are you doing?"

"Ingdo you are what?" said the Professor.

"Mom, I think he's gone crazy," Root said.

"We'd all be crazy if we said things backward." The Professor
sounded a bit sheepish. I asked him how he did it, but he didn't
seem to know. He hadn't practiced, he did it almost without thinking,
and had assumed long ago that it was something anybody
could do.

"Don't be ridiculous," I told him. "I couldn't reverse syllables
in my head like that. You could be in the
Guinness Book
, or on
one of those TV shows."

The prospect of being on TV seemed to alarm the Professor;
and yet, this trick came to him with even greater ease when he was
anxious. One thing seemed clear, however: he was not reading the
reversed syllables from a picture in his head. It was more a matter
of rhythm, and once his ear had caught it, he instinctively flipped
the syllables around.

"It's like solving a problem in mathematics," he said. "The formula
doesn't just come floating into your head in finished form. It
starts as a vague outline and then gradually becomes clearer. It's a
bit like that."

"Can you do it again?" Root said, forgetting his homework. He
was completely fascinated by the Professor's ability. "Let's see. Try
Hanshin Tigers."

"Gersti shinhan."

"Radio calisthenics."

"Icsthenisca odira."

"The cafeteria had fried chicken today."

"Dayto enchick fried had riateecaf the."

"Amicable numbers."

"Bersnum blecaiam."

"I drew an armadillo at the zoo."

"Zoo the at lodilmaar an drew I."

Root and I tossed out sentences for the Professor one after another,
challenging him with longer and tougher ones. At first,
Root wrote out each one and checked it, but the Professor's performance
was flawless, and Root eventually gave up. We simply
said something—anything at all—and the Professor spoke it back
to us in reverse syllables, without a second's hesitation.

"Unbelievable! It's awesome, Professor! You should show
people. You should be proud. How come we didn't know after all
this time?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," said the Professor. "What is
there to be proud of?"

"But you
should
be proud! It's amazing! People would love to
see this!"

"Thank you," said the Professor, looking down bashfully. He
placed his hand on Root's flat head—a head oddly suited to supporting
a hand. "This skill of mine is completely useless. Who
needs a lot of scrambled-up words? But I'm glad you find it interesting."

The Professor thought of a palindrome for Root's assignment:

"I prefer pi."

The Professor had another talent: finding the first sign of the evening
star in the afternoon sky.

"Ah!" he said one day from his easy chair, when the sun was
still high up in the sky. Thinking he was talking in his sleep or muttering
something to himself, I didn't answer. "Ah!" he said again,
and pointed with one unsteady finger out the window. "The evening
star."

He was not speaking to me, but to himself. I stopped what I
was doing in the kitchen to look where he was pointing—though I
couldn't see anything but the sky. Perhaps too many numbers are
causing hallucinations, I wondered; but, as though he'd read my
mind, he pointed once again. "Look, there it is."

His finger was wrinkled and cracked, and there was dirt under
the nail. I blinked and tried to focus, but I couldn't see anything
but a few wisps of cloud.

"It's a little early for stars," I said as gently as I could.

"The evening star means night is coming," he said, as if I'd
never said a word. Then he lowered his arm and nodded off again.

I don't know what the evening star meant to him, perhaps finding
it in the sky soothed his nerves, or maybe it was simply a
habit. And I don't know how he could see it so long before anyone
else—he barely noticed the food I set right in front of him.
For whatever reason, he would point his withered finger at a
single spot in the vast sky—always the right place, as I eventually
discovered—and that spot had significance for him and no one
else.

Root's cut healed, but his attitude was slower to recover. He behaved
himself when we were with the Professor, but when it was
just the two of us, he became moody and short. One day, when his
clean, white bandage had begun to look dingy, I sat down in front
of him and bowed my head.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It was wrong of me to doubt the Professor,
even for a moment. I'm sorry and I apologize."

I thought he might ignore me, but he turned and looked at me
with a very serious expression. He sat up straight, picking at the
end of his bandage.

"All right, I accept. But I'll never forget what happened." And
at that, we shook hands.

It was only two stitches, but even after he'd grown up, he still
had the scar between his thumb and forefinger—proof of how
much the Professor had cared about him.

One day while I was straightening the shelves in the Professor's
study I came across a cookie tin buried under a pile of mathematics
books. I gingerly pulled off the rusted lid, thinking I'd find moldy
sweets, but, to my surprise, the box was filled with baseball cards.

There were hundreds of them, packed tightly into the large tin,
and it was clear that the collection had been treasured by its owner.
The cards were spotless, protected from fingerprints and dirt in individual
cellophane wrappers. Not one was out of place nor was
there a single bent corner or crease. Hand-lettered dividers labeled
the players by position—"Pitchers," "Second Basemen," "Left
Fielders"—and each section was in alphabetical order. And to a
man, they were all Hanshin Tigers. They were perfectly preserved,
but the pictures and player bios on them were quite old. Most of
the photos were in black and white, and while I could follow a few
of the references—"Yoshio Yoshida, the modern-day Mercury," or
"the Zatopekesque pitching of Minoru Maruyama"—I was lost
when it came to the "diabolic rainbow ball of Tadashi Wakabayashi,"
or "the incomparable Sho Kageura."

One player had been given special treatment: Yutaka Enatsu.
Instead of being filed by position, he had a separate section all to
himself. While the other cards were covered in cellophane,
Enatsu's were protected by stiff plastic sheaths.

There were numerous Enatsu cards, depicting him in various
poses, but this was not the potbellied Enatsu I knew. In these
cards he was trim and young and, of course, wearing the uniform
of the Hanshin Tigers.

Born May 15, 1948, in Nara Prefecture. Throws left, bats
left. h:179cm. w:90kg. Graduated Osaka Gakuin High School,
1967; drafted 1st by Hanshin. Following year, broke Sandy
Koufax's record (382) for most strikeouts in a Major League
season with 401. Struck out 9 consecutive batters in the 1971
All-Star Game (Nishinomiya), 8 failed to make contact. 1973
season, pitched no-hitter. "The Lofty Lefty." "Super Southpaw."

Enatsu's player profile and statistics appeared on the backs of
the cards in tiny print. Here he was, glove on his knee, reading the
signals. Or in full windup. Or again, at the end of the pitch, eyes
boring into the catcher's mitt. Enatsu on the mound, his fierce
stance like a Deva King guarding a temple. And always on his uniform,
the perfect number 28.

I returned the cards to the box and pressed the lid down as
carefully as I'd taken it off.

Hidden farther back behind the shelves, I found a stack of
dusty notebooks. Judging from the discoloration of the paper and
ink, they were nearly as old as the baseball cards. Long years of
pressure from the tightly packed books had loosened the string
holding the thirty or so folders together, and the covers were
warped and bent.

I flipped through page after page, but I found no Japanese—
just numbers, symbols, and letters of the alphabet. Mysterious
geometric forms were followed by equally strange curves and
graphs, all the Professor's work. The handwriting was younger
and more vigorous, but the ribbonlike fours and the slanted fives
were unmistakable.

There is nothing more shameful for a housekeeper than to rummage
through her employer's personal property. But the exquisite
beauty of the notebooks made me oblivious. The formulas snaked
across the pages by some logic of their own, ignoring the lines on
the paper; and just when they seemed to resolve into a kind of order,
they would divide again into apparently random strands. They
were punctuated with arrows and
and ∑ and all sorts of other
symbols, they covered the paper with dark blotches in some places,
and traced faintly like delicate insect tracks in others.

Needless to say, I could not understand any of the mysteries
concealed in the notebooks. Yet somehow, I wanted to stay there
forever, just staring at the formulas. Was the proof of the Artin
conjecture that the Professor had spoken of somewhere here?
And certainly there must be some of his work on the beloved
prime numbers ... and perhaps the notes for the thesis that had
won Prize No. 284 were here as well. In my own way, I could sense
all kinds of things from the mysterious numbers and figures—the
passion in a pencil smudge, the impatience of a crossed-out mistake,
the certitude in a passage underscored with two thick lines.
This glimpse into the Professor's world thrilled me deeply.

As I looked more closely, I began to notice scribbles here and
there in the margins that even I could read: "Define terms of solution
more carefully." "Invalid when only partially stable." "New
approach, useless." "Will it be in time?" "14:00 with N, in front of
the library."

Though these notes were simply scrawled in the spaces between
the calculations, the handwriting here seemed much more
purposeful than the scribbled notes attached to the Professor's
suit. In these pages, the Professor had walked beyond beaten
paths, looking for truth in a place no one knows.

What had happened in front of the library at two o'clock? And
who was N? I found myself hoping that the meeting had been a
happy one for the professor.

I ran my fingers over the lines of the formula, a long chain of
numbers and symbols that flowed from one page to the next. As
I followed the chain, link by link, the room faded and I found myself
in a dark, silent place of numbers. But I felt no fear, certain in
the knowledge that the Professor would guide me toward eternal,
unchangeable truths.

As I turned the last page of the last notebook, the chain
abruptly broke, and I was left in the shadows. If I could have read
on just a little further, I might have found what I was looking for;
but the chain simply slipped from my fingers and I would never
grasp its end.

"Excuse me," the Professor called from the bathroom. "I'm
sorry to bother you when you're busy...."

I quickly put everything back in its place. "Coming," I called,
as brightly as I could.

In May, I bought three tickets for the Tigers game against Hiroshima
on June 2. The Tigers played only twice a season in the
town where we lived and, if you let the chance go by, it was a long
wait until the next game.

Root had never been to a ball game. In fact, with the exception
of a trip to the zoo with his grandmother, he had never been to a
museum or a movie theater or anywhere at all. From the time he
was born, I had been obsessed with making ends meet, and somehow
I had forgotten to make time to have fun with my son.

When I'd found the baseball cards in the cookie tin, it had suddenly
occurred to me that a baseball game might be just the thing
for a disabled old man who passed his days wandering in the world
of numbers and a boy who had spent nearly every day of his life
waiting for his mother to come home from work.

The price of three reserved seats on the third baseline was a bit
more than I could afford—especially since I'd just had the unexpected
expense of our visit to the clinic. But there would be plenty
of time to worry about money later; who knew when the old man
and the boy would have a chance to enjoy a ball game together.
Besides, the Professor had only known baseball through his cards;
if I could show him the real thing—the sweat-soaked pinstripes,
the home-run ball vanishing into a sea of cheers, the cleat-scarred
pitcher's mound—that would be a privilege. Even if I wouldn't be
able to produce Enatsu.