The Theory of Games (3 page)

“Nope. See that’s what you’re supposed to think. I had a U. S. History since 1865 test yesterday,”

“Uh huh...”

“The left little toe,” she said as she tried to wiggle just her left little toe, “is green.”

“Uh huh.”

“Green is for Grant the 18
^th
president.”

“Uh huh.”

“Next is heather. That’s for Rutherford B. Hayes.”

“Uh, it’s purple.”

“Purple is heather.”

“Oh.”

“Next is green.” Katelynn tried to wiggle her third toe on her left foot.

“James Garfield, right?”

“Yup,” Katelynn answered, “The next one is red again.”

“Chester A. Arthur?”

“Auburn is red; yup, Chester A. Arthur.”

“And, then?” I asked.

“Cyan for Cleveland, heather for Harrison, mauve for McKinley, red for Roosevelt.” Katelynn smiled a smug smile.

“But Katelynn, er Kate, your last two toes are metallic silver. How does that relate to Taft and Wilson?”

“They don’t. I just like the color. Besides, who can forget fat old Taft and Woodrow Wilson?” she shrugged, and then with that stretched her legs out over the back porch rail and wiggled her toes. Bill was romping in the back yard chasing giggling, inebriated co-eds who dropped their plastic beer cups that Bill caught in mid-air and drank the suds right down. At least his cardiologist said some alcohol was good for his heart.

I was drunk. Everything was wrong. Everything was right.

Katelynn said to me, “Jakob, now that you are no longer my advisor…”

“Now that I am no longer employed…” I interrupted, “Kate, I am unemployed and dead broke. The only money that I’ve got coming in is playing piano two nights a week and that won’t even pay the rent and keep Bill in kibble and beer.”

Katelynn persisted, “Jakob, now that you are no longer my advisor…” and she put her hand on my arm and looked at me in a way that left no doubt where she was headed.

I said, “You can call me Jake.”

•

I gotta take a break now. Can I have a cigarette?

“You know I can’t give you a smoke,” the Authoritarian Man said.

Okay, can I just rest for a minute? Is Bill okay?

“Bill’s fine. We just checked on him. Bill’s fine.”

“Don’t lie to me.” I don’t know if the words actually came out of my mouth or if I just thought them
real hard
. What I wanted to do was grab that sonofabitch Authoritarian Man by the throat but the instructions that my brain were sending to my hands were still being detoured somewhere north of the circumflex nerve and it didn’t matter anyway because the restraints held me fast to the bed.

I must have slept, now.

CHAPTER 1.2

When I awoke the shades were open in the room where I was being held.

I think it was snowing. There is a thick, white, dense feeling when it is snowing.

I couldn’t move my head much and I couldn’t see outside, but the light had that slate-gray translucence of sunlight passing through a heavy snowfall. It made me think that I was somewhere north of 45 degrees latitude. It could have been North America, Europe or Asia; I had no idea. But somewhere that it snowed.

Though I could not move and I did not know my location, the time, or much of anything else, the stentorian voice of the Authoritarian Man would not let me forget the terms of my new reality.

“It was the day after you were ‘let go’ from your teaching position,” he began today’s interrogation after the now obligatory injection of benzodiazepine, “what happened next?”

•

We had exactly four days and 15 hours of paradise before it all went to hell but I suppose you know that. I got fired on Monday about – what? – nine A.M.? The fucking package showed up on Saturday night. FedEx.

Day one:

When I awoke the next morning Bill was snoring to my right like a steam train. The CardioTronic 413 was obviously functioning up to spec. I thought, “I’ve got to send an email to Doc Farmer and tell him. Tell him that Bill is alive and well. Tell him - thank God – Bill is alive and well.”

And then I became aware of another
presence
in the bed, on my left. I slowly turned my hung-over head in the direction of the gentle breathing. It was the delicate freckled face of Katelynn, her lips turned up into a smile.

“Katelynn?” I whispered, “Kate?”

The lids over her iridescent green eyes fluttered twice. “Mmm, Jake?”

“Oh my God!” I thought it was a mental exclamation, but the words must have blurted out of my mouth.

I looked over to Bill’s gentle snoring face and then back, again, to Kate.

Oh, my God, I had slept with a student!
My mind was racing; this was the only sacrosanct tenet that could never be broken: the penalty was immediate termination. And then I remembered: I had already been shit-canned from Mount Mary College. What were they going to do to me now?

I turned and looked at her and saw the most beautiful woman that God had ever put on this earth - or more importantly - in my bed. Burnt sienna ringlets framed delicate her face, as if a Hollywood stylist had spent hours positioning each curl that perfectly described the beginning of a Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233...

“I have this problem,” I turned to look at the Authoritarian Man.

“
Go on,
” the Authoritarian Man urged, “Go on,” and the Benzodiazepine said, “
go on
,” too. So I did.

I have this problem. Sometimes I
see
things. Mathematical things. Sequences. Obvious things. Sometimes I say that I have the ability to see the obvious.

You know of Leonardo Pisano?

He was a Medieval mathematician, more commonly known as Fibonacci, and posed the problem in his 1202 treatise
Liber Abaci
: “How many pairs of rabbits will be produced in a year, beginning with a single pair, if in every month each pair bears a new pair which becomes productive from the second month on?”

Do you see the answer spiraling forever outward? Look at the pattern: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233... The third number is the sum of the two previous numbers; the fourth number is the sum of the two numbers before it.

It is in the curls that frame Katelynn’s face; each red curl is part of that sequence. That is what I see.

Her skin was the color of twice-pasteurized milk. Each freckle was a vertex in a directed sparse weighted graph…

“We’re losing him. I told you that was too much benzo!” I could hear somebody arguing with the Authoritarian Man.

“No problem,” the Authoritarian Man replied as he began to slap my face. I retreated back to the warm bed with Kate and Bill…

“Jake, don’t panic,” Kate reassured me, “you were a perfect, albeit inebriated gentleman last night. Nothing happened. Now let’s get Bill his morning pill.”

Kate put her hand on the snoring dog, “Bill?” she said, “Rise and shine, pill time.” Bill shook himself, blinked twice, and looked at her. He stretched out to his full length of six feet and slowly dragged himself off of the bed and wandered out the door his nails clicking on the wood floor. Kate - graceful as a cat – left the bed. She was wearing one of my old dress shirts; and, it is true, there is nothing as alluring as a woman wearing one of your button down oxfords. From the kitchen I could hear her opening the refrigerator door, Bill’s tail swishing on the linoleum floor, and a loud cetacean gulp as Bill swallowed the Braunschweiger with the horse pill inside. If Kate thought the smoked liverwurst was as disgusting as I did she never mentioned it.

That day Kate and I took the Holter monitor off Bill; I swabbed the goop that Dr. Farmer had given me to detach the electrodes, and Kate distracted Bill by holding his head, scratching him behind his ears and talking baby-talk. I packed the monitor up in the bubble-wrap provided and overnighted it back to Champaign; later a team of cardiologists would go over the data at a conference in Dallas. I wonder what they would think of the readings during the party the night before.

We were dead broke and ecstatically happy. It was the best week of our lives. Of all our lives: Kate, Bill and me.

Kate never went back to wherever it was she used to live.

To Bill and me it seemed like she had always belonged in the little yellow house with us.

With no money, no job, all the time in the world and only a few distant clouds on the western horizon, it seemed like a perfect day for the three of us to go to a ballgame. I went to the bottom drawer of my dresser and pulled out two authentic River Rat jerseys. I handed Kate the smaller one with ‘12’ in blue felt numbers stitched to the back.

“You know who wore that jersey?” I asked.

“Sorry, Jake, I don’t have a clue,” she shook her head.

“Kate, the only clue you need is right on the back: number 12. He wore 12 his entire professional career; well, except for at the end when he was with the Giants. Dusty Baker already had number 12.” I was flabbergasted that Kate was clueless.

“I thought the River Rats were a minor league team.”

“Minor league is still
professional
baseball,” I replied. “That jersey you are holding was worn,” and here I paused for dramatic effect, “by Shawon Dunston!”

“Who?”

“Shawon Dunston! Number 12; shortstop for the Chicago Cubs! Back in the ‘80s we were the single A affiliate for the Cubs and Shawon started off here. He had an arm like a rocket, very wild as a kid. They had to put an eighteen foot high chain link fence behind the first base bag because of him. It’s still there, I’ll show it to you.”

Kate tried to act impressed. “Wow, I’m really impressed,” she said. “Are you sure it’s okay if I wear it?”

“Yeah, it’ll be fine. Shawon won’t mind. He’s doing other stuff now anyway. He retired a couple of years ago.”

Kate demurely turned her back to me, slipped off my dress shirt, put on Dunston’s old jersey and then made a graceful dancer’s pirouette. She looked drop-dead gorgeous in whatever she wore.

“Okay, baseball time, Bill!” I announced. Bill loves a good ballgame; or maybe just the hotdogs and the people and the smell of cut grass. I don’t know; but he loves going to a ballgame.

So, with a lot of help from Kate, I got Bill - who was now all antsy and hopping - into his shoulder harness, grabbed my faded blue River Rats cap from the hook by the door and we piled into the Olds and drove down the hill to the riverfront to Lou Weissman stadium.

Andy Grudzalanek, the vice president of baseball operations (AKA head groundskeeper) for the River Rats was an old friend and would sneak us in behind the left field fence. We parked in the dusty free lot under the on-ramp of the bridge that crosses the Mississippi and made our way behind the outfield advertising signs to the shed where Andy parked the tractor. I had called ahead on my cell phone and Andy was waiting for us.

“Hey, Doc, Bill c’mon in! You playing hooky from school today, Doc?” I was pretty embarrassed about having to explain why I wasn’t teaching today but it didn’t matter because Andy didn’t wait for my reply. “Don’t worry about the boss today, Doc, he’s out of town.”

The owner of the River Rats and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye anymore ever since he tore down the old press box, put up a row of luxury suites and started charging for parking. In fact I may have made a few comments about how this behavior was un-American and contrary to the very egalitarian nature of baseball itself, which was the backbone of our republic. And, in all fairness, I admit that it was probably an exaggeration when I said that his actions were the primary factor in the collapse of modern day society and America’s loss of respect in the world’s eyes when, obviously, it was only a contributing factor; albeit a major contributing factor.

I introduced Kate to Andy and the four of us walked over to the Rat’s bullpen which was far out along the left field line. Colt Brankowsky, who had pitched the day before (a nice little three-hitter for his tenth win of the season, waved to us. “I heard you on the radio yesterday. Do you really think I’m going up?”

When I was a kid ballplayers were normal-sized people. They looked just like everybody else. That just isn’t the case anymore. I’m not going to get sucked into the whole steroid argument; I don’t know who’s doing it and who isn’t. Colt, however, was just a naturally damn big kid. He’s nineteen, six foot four, doesn’t have an ounce of body fat and can chuck a baseball ninety-five miles an hour more times than not right over the outside corner of the plate. Technically, he was once clocked at 102 miles per hour, but nobody had thought to calibrate the radar gun with a tuning fork in about a month so the speed was more than a little suspect. “Well, Bill’s pretty sure you’re going up,” I answered.

Colt looked at Bill and Bill wagged his tail. Bill had sat out in the bullpen during plenty of games and they were old friends. “Are they going to take out Bill’s pacemaker and give it to the Vice President?” Colt asked and you could see he was really worried.

“Naw, Colt, it’s Bill’s forever. Don’t you worry.” I motioned to Kate. “I’m going to show my friend around the old ball yard; you guys keep an eye on Bill for me?” Andy and Colt nodded and smiled conspiratorially. “And no more than one hotdog per inning, okay? And I’m going to count the wrappers when I get back.”

Kate and I climbed up the third-base bleachers until we got to the top row and I motioned for Kate to turn around. The Mississippi, dark and vast, curled around the outfield fences and flowed to the horizons in both directions. Below us Andy’s field was an immaculate carpet; the players were in a circle performing the ancient ritual of pre-game calisthenics.

“My God, Jake! What a view!” In the distance a tug pushing a dozen barges downriver started to make the sharp turn to skirt Dynamite Island.

I looked up and pointed to the luxury suites blocking out most of the Midwestern sky. “Yeah, well now the rich folks get the best view.”

“Jake, did you really say that luxury suites were the cause of the collapse of American society?”