The Gift of Numbers (15 page)

"Lightning tends to strike high places, so the mountains are
more dangerous than down here," he said. As a mathematician—
a scientist—I thought he would have known more than I did
about lightning, but I was wrong. "And the evening star was hazy
this evening, which usually means the weather is taking a turn for
the worse." There was none of the Professor's usual logic in his
pronouncements on the weather.

As he spoke, the rain fell hard. The lightning flashed, the thunder
rattled the windowpanes.

"I'm worried about Root," I said.

"Someone once wrote that worrying is the hardest thing about
being a parent."

"His clothes are probably soaked, and he's there for four more
days. He'll be miserable."

"It's just a shower. When the sun comes out tomorrow and it
warms up, everything will dry out."

"But what if he gets struck by lightning?"

"The odds are very low," he said.

"But if he does? What if lightning strikes his Tigers cap? It's
flat and shaped like the square root sign; it could attract lightning."

"Pointy heads are more dangerous," he said. "They're like
lightning rods."

The Professor was usually the one to worry about Root, but this
time he was determined to comfort me. A gust of wind twisted the
trees, but as the storm raged on, the cottage seemed to settle into
silence. There was a light in a window on the second floor of the
widow's house.

"I feel empty when Root isn't here," I said.

I hadn't really been speaking to him, but the Professor murmured
in reply, "So, you're saying that there's a zero in you?"

"I suppose that's what I mean," I said, nodding weakly.

"The person who discovered zero must have been remarkable,
don't you think?"

"Hasn't zero been around forever?"

"How long is forever?"

"I don't know. For as long as people have been around—wasn't
there always a zero?"

"So you think that zero was there waiting for us when humans
came into being, like the flowers and the stars? You should have
more respect for human progress. We made the zero, through
great pain and struggle."

He sat up in his chair and scratched his head, looking utterly
disheveled.

"So who was it? Who discovered zero?"

"An Indian mathematician; we don't know his name. The ancient
Greeks thought there was no need to count something that
was nothing. And since it was nothing, they held that it was impossible
to express it as a figure. So someone had to overcome this
reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express
nothing as a number. This unknown man from India made nonexistence
exist. Extraordinary, don't you think?"

"Yes," I agreed, though I wasn't sure how this Indian mathematician
would calm my worries about Root. Still, I had learned
from experience that anything the Professor was passionate about
was bound to be worthwhile. "So, a great Indian teacher of mathematics
discovered the zero written in God's notebook, and, thanks
to him, we can now read many more pages in the notebook. Is that
it?"

"That's it exactly." He laughed. He took a pencil and notepaper
from his pocket, as I'd seen him do a thousand times. The gesture
was always refined. "Take a look at this," he said. "It's thanks to
zero that we can tell these two numbers apart." Using the arm of the
chair to write on, he scribbled down the numbers 38 and 308. Then
he drew two thick lines under the zero. "Thirty-eight is made up of
three 10s and eight 1s; 308 is three 100s, no 10s, and eight 1s. The
tens place is empty, and it's the 0 that tells us that. Do you see?"

"I do."

"So, let's pretend there's a ruler here, a wooden ruler thirty centimeters
long. What would be the mark all the way at the left
here?"

"That would be zero."

"That's right. So zero would be on the far left. A ruler begins at
zero. All you have to do is line up the edge of what you want to
measure with the zero, and the ruler does the rest. If you started
with 1, it wouldn't work. So it's zero that allows us to use a ruler,
too."

The rain continued. A siren wailed somewhere; the thunder
drowned it out.

"But the most marvelous thing about zero is not that it's a sign
or a measurement, but that it's a real number all by itself. It's the
number that's one less than 1, the smallest of the natural numbers.
Despite what the Greeks might have thought, zero doesn't disturb
the rules of calculation; on the contrary, it brings greater order to
them. Try imagining one little bird sitting on a branch, singing in
a clear, high voice. He has a pretty little beak and colorful feathers.
You stare at him, enchanted; but as soon as you breathe, he flies
away, leaving only the bare branch, and a few dried leaves fluttering
in the breeze." The Professor pointed out at the dark garden,
as if the bird had really just flown away. The shadows seemed
deeper and longer in the rain. "Yes, 1 - 1 = 0. A lovely equation,
don't you think?"

He turned toward me. A loud clap of thunder shook the room,
and the light in the main house blinked off for a moment. I
gripped the sleeve of his jacket.

"Don't worry," he said, reaching over to stroke my hand. "The
square root sign is a sturdy one. It shelters all the numbers."

Needless to say, Root came home safe and sound when his camping
trip was over. He brought the Professor a little figurine of a
sleeping rabbit he had made from twigs and acorns. The Professor
set it on his desk, and at its feet he attached a note: "A present
from
(the housekeeper's son)."

I asked Root whether the storm on the first day of his trip had
caused problems, but he said they hadn't had a drop of rain. In
the end, the only damage from the lightning had been done to a
gingko tree at a shrine near the Professor's house.

The heat returned, and with it the buzzing of the cicadas. The
curtains and the floor were dry by the next day.

Root's attention turned to the Tigers. He had apparently hoped
they would be in first place by the time he got back; but things had
not gone his way and they had fallen back to fourth after losing to
the first-place Swallows.

"Did you cheer for them while I was gone?"

"Of course we did," said the Professor. Root seemed to suspect
that his team's problems had been caused by the Professor's negligence.

"But you don't even know how to turn on the radio."

"Your mother showed me."

"Really?"

"Really. She even tuned in the game for me."

"But they don't win if you just sit there and listen."

"I know, and I truly did cheer for them. I talked to the radio the
whole time. I prayed Enatsu would strike out the side every inning."
The Professor did everything he could to placate Root.

Soon, we were back to our evenings in the kitchen listening to
the radio. The receiver, which was perched on top of the dish cupboard,
had worked very well since the Professor had it repaired;
and the terrible static that occasionally drowned out the game was
due to the poor location of the cottage rather than to the radio itself.

We kept the volume low until the game came on, so low you
could barely hear it over the everyday sounds—my puttering in
the kitchen before dinner, the motorbikes on the street outside,
the Professor muttering to himself, or Root's occasional sneeze.
Only when we all fell silent could we hear the music, which always
seemed to be some nameless old song.

The Professor was reading in his easy chair near the window.
Root was fidgeting at the table, working on something in his notebook.
The previous title on the notebook—"Cubic forms with
whole-number coefficients, No. 11"—had been scratched out and
replaced with "Tiger Notes" in Root's handwriting. The Professor
had given him a notebook he no longer needed to record data on
the team. The first three pages were filled with incomprehensible
equations and the later ones with other esoteric bits of information,
such as Nakada's ERA or Shinjo's batting average.

I was kneading bread dough in the kitchen. We had decided to
have fresh bread, something we hadn't had in a long while; topped
with cheese or ham or vegetables, it would be our dinner.
The sun had set, but the air was stifling, as though the leaves on
the trees were breathing back the heat they had absorbed from the
long, hot day. A warm blast of air blew in through the windows.
The flowers on the morning glory Root had brought home from
school had closed up for the night, and cicadas were resting on the
trunk of the tallest tree in the garden, a grand old paulownia.

The fresh dough was soft and supple. The counter and floor
were white with flour, as was my brow where I'd wiped the sweat
with my sleeve.

"Professor?" said Root, his pencil poised above the page. Due
to the heat, he wore a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of shorts. He
was just back from the pool and his hair was still wet.

"Yes?" said the Professor, looking up. His reading glasses had
slipped to the end of his nose.

"What does 'Total Bases' mean?"

"It's the number of bases a player earns from a hit. So you'd
score one for a single, two for a double, three for a triple, and ..."

"Four for a home run."

"Right!" The Professor was delighted by Root's enthusiasm.

"You shouldn't bother the Professor when he's working," I
said, dividing the dough into pieces and rounding them into little
balls.

"I know," said Root.

The sky was clear, without a wisp of cloud. Sunlight filtered
through the brilliant green leaves of the paulownia tree, dappling
the ground in the garden. Root counted out the bases on his fingers
as I lit the oven. Static crackled through the music on the radio
and then faded again.

"But what about—" Root spoke up again.

"What about what?" I interrupted.

"I'm not asking you," he said. "Professor, how do you calculate
'Regulation at Bats'?"

"You multiply the number of games by 3.1, and discard everything
after the decimal point."

"So you round down for .4 and up for .5?" Root asked.

"That's right. Let me have a look." He closed his book and
went over to where Root was working. The notes on his jacket made
a low, rustling sound. He rested one hand on the table and the
other on Root's shoulder. Their shadows merged, with Root's legs
swinging back and forth under the chair. I put the little loaves in
the oven.

Soon, the music on the radio announced the start of the game.
Root turned up the volume.

"Got to win today ... got to win today ... got to win today." It
was his daily incantation.

"Do you suppose Enatsu will be starting?" the Professor said,
taking off his glasses.

As we listened, I remembered the pristine pitcher's mound at
the center of the infield, neatly rounded into a cool, damp, black
mass awaiting the start of the game.

"Pitching today for the Tigers ..."

Cheers and static drowned out the voice of the announcer. The
smell of baking bread filled the room as we pictured the trail left
by the pitcher's cleats on his walk out to the mound.

One day toward the end of summer vacation, I noticed that the
Professor's jaw was badly swollen. It was just as the Tigers were returning
from a successful road trip on which they'd managed to
go 10 and 6, vaulting into second place just two and a half games
behind the division-leading Yakult.

The Professor had apparently been hiding his problem from me
and had not said a word about the pain. If he had given himself
one-tenth of the attention that he paid to Root, this sort of thing
would never have happened; but by the time I noticed, the left side
of his face was so swollen that he could barely open his mouth.

Getting him to the dentist proved easier than our trips to the
barber or the baseball game. The pain had taken the fight out of
him, and his stiff jaw prevented him from making the usual objections.
He changed his shirt, put on his shoes, and followed me
out the door. I held a parasol to protect him from the sun, and he
huddled underneath, as though hiding from the pain.

"You have to wait for me, you know," he mumbled as we sat
down in the waiting room. Then, unsure as to whether I'd understood
or whether he could trust me, he repeated himself every few
minutes while we waited.

"You can't go out for a walk while I'm in there. You have to sit
right here and wait for me. Do you understand?"

"Of course. I'm not about to leave you."

I rubbed his back, hoping to ease the pain a little. The other patients
stared at the floor, as embarrassed as I was. But I knew from
experience what to do in this situation. You simply had to be resolute,
like the Pythagorean theorem or Euler's formula, and to
keep the Professor happy.

"Really?" said the Professor.

"Of course. Don't worry. I'll be right here waiting for you, no
matter how long it takes."

I knew it was impossible to reassure him, but I repeated myself
anyway. As the door to the examination room closed behind him,
he turned around as if checking that I'd keep my promise.

The treatment took longer than expected. A number of people
who had been called in after the Professor had already settled
their bills and gone home, and still he had not reappeared. He
rarely brushed his teeth and did little to care for his dentures, and
I doubted he was a particularly cooperative patient, so the dentist
probably had his hands full. I got up from time to time to try to
peer through the receptionist's window, but I could only see the
back of the Professor's head.

When he finally emerged from the examination room, his
mood was even worse than before. He looked exhausted, and his
face was bathed in sweat. His mouth, still numb from the anesthesia,
was pinched into an annoyed pout, and he sniffled constantly.

"Are you all right? You must be tired," I said. I stood up and
held out my hand to him, but he brushed me aside and walked
away without a look.

I called after him, but it was as if he hadn't heard me. He shuffled
out of the office slippers, pushed on his shoes, and walked out the
door. I paid the bill as quickly as I could and chased after him down
the street.

He was reaching a busy intersection when I finally caught up
with him. He seemed to know the way home, but he had charged
out into the street, oblivious to the traffic and the signals. I was
surprised to see how quickly he could walk.

"Wait!" I called out to slow him down, but this only succeeded
in drawing wary looks from the people nearby. The heat and glare
of the summer sun were dizzying.

I was starting to get angry. He had no reason to be so rude to
me. It was hardly my fault that it had been so painful; and it would
have been far worse had we ignored it. Even Root was braver than
this at the dentist.... Of course! That was it! I should have
brought Root along. The Professor would have felt compelled to
behave more like an adult with a child present. To treat me like
this, after I'd kept my promise and waited for him the whole
time....

I knew it was cruel, but I had half a mind to let him go off on
his own. I slowed my pace and he charged ahead, apparently
determined to get home as soon as possible, ignoring the oncoming
traffic. His hair was wild, and his suit was rumpled. He looked
smaller than usual as his tiny, receding figure disappeared in the
evening shadows. The notes on his jacket, catching a glint of sunlight,
helped to keep him in sight. They blinked like coded messages,
signaling the Professor's whereabouts.

Suddenly, my hand tightened around the handle of my parasol
and I checked my watch. I calculated the time from the moment
the Professor left the waiting room until he returned. Ten minutes,
twenty, thirty ... I ticked off the intervals. Something was wrong.

I ran after him, shuffling to keep my sandals on my feet, my
eyes fixed on the bright scraps of paper clipped to his suit as they
disappeared around the corner into the shadows of the city.

While the Professor was taking a bath, I tried to straighten up his
issues of the
Journal of Mathematics.
He seemed to live for the
puzzle problems it published, but he didn't pay much attention to
the rest of magazine and left the barely opened copies strewn
around his study. I gathered up all the issues and arranged them in
chronological order; then I checked the tables of contents and
pulled out the ones in which the Professor was mentioned for having
won a prize. That still left quite a few issues. The names of
prizewinners were printed in bold type and boxed in a fancy border,
so they were easy to spot. The Professor's name seemed especially
grand to me, printed there in magazine after magazine; and
the proofs themselves, though they lost the familiarity they had in
the Professor's own handwriting, seemed all the more impressive
in print, the force of their incomprehensible arguments all the
more powerful, even to me.

The study was hotter than the rest of the house, perhaps because
it had been closed up and silent for so long. As I packed
away the issues of the journal that did not mention the Professor, I
thought about the dentist's office and I calculated the time again.
With the Professor, you always had to keep in mind his eighty-minute
memory. Still, no matter how many times I added it up,
we'd been apart less than an hour.

I told myself that the Professor was only human, and even
though he was a brilliant mathematician, there was no reason why
the eighty-minute cycle should be entirely reliable. Circumstances
change from day to day, and the people who are subject to them
change as well. The Professor had been in pain, and strangers
were poking around in his mouth; perhaps this had thrown off his
inner clock.

The stack of magazines containing the Professor's work was as
high as my waist. How precious they were to me, these proofs he
had devised, studded like jewels in an otherwise featureless journal.
I straightened the pile. Here was the embodiment of the Professor's
labors, and the concrete proof that his abilities had not
been lost in that terrible accident.

"What are you doing?" He had finished his bath and was back
in the study. His lips were still slack from the Novocain, but his
jaw was less swollen. He seemed more cheerful, too, as if the pain
had eased. I glanced quickly at the clock on the wall; he had been
in the bath for less than thirty minutes.

"I'm straightening up the magazines," I said.

"Well, thank you, I appreciate it. But I don't think I really need
to keep them. It's a lot to ask, but would you mind throwing them
out?"

"I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because they're full of your work," I said, "the wonderful
things you've accomplished."

He gave me a hesitant look but said nothing. The water dripping
from his hair made blotches on his notes.

The cicadas that had been crying all morning suddenly fell
silent. The garden baked under the blinding glare of the summer
sun. If you looked carefully, you could see a line of thin clouds beyond
the mountains at the horizon, clouds that seemed to announce
the coming of autumn. They were just at the spot where
the evening star would rise.

Not long after Root started school again, a letter arrived from the
Journal of Mathematics.
The Professor's proof, which he had
worked on all summer, had won first prize.

The Professor, of course, showed no sign of pleasure. He barely
looked at the letter before tossing it on the table without a word or
a smile.

"It's the largest prize in the history of the
Janaruobu
," I pointed
out. Afraid I would mangle the pronunciation of the long foreign
title, I had taken to calling it simply the
Janaruobu
.

The Professor gave a bored sigh.

"Do you know how hard you worked on that proof? You barely
ate or slept for weeks. You literally sweated out the answer—and
there are salt rings on your suit to prove it." Knowing he had forgotten
all this, I wanted at least to remind him of his efforts. "Well,
I remember how hard you worked," I said. "And how heavy the
proof was when you gave it to me to mail, and how proud I was
when I got to the window at the post office."

"Is that so?"

No matter what I said, he barely responded.

Perhaps all mathematicians underestimated the importance of
their accomplishments. Or perhaps this was just the Professor's nature.
Surely there must be ambitious mathematicians who wanted
to be known for the advancements they made in their field. But
none of that seemed to matter to the Professor. He was completely
indifferent to a problem as soon as he had solved it. Once the object
of his attention had yielded, showing its true form, the Professor
lost interest. He simply walked away in search of the next challenge.

Nor was he like this only with numbers. When he had carried
the injured Root to the hospital, or when he had protected him
from the foul ball, it had been difficult for him to accept our
gratitude—he was not being stubborn or perverse, he simply
couldn't understand what he had done to deserve our thanks.

He discounted the value of his own efforts, and seemed to feel
that anyone would have done the same.

"We'll have to celebrate," I said.

"I don't think there's anything to celebrate."

"When someone has worked hard and won first prize, his
friends want to celebrate with him."

"Why make a fuss? I simply peeked in God's notebook and
copied down a bit of what I saw...."

"No, we're going to celebrate. Root and I want to, even if you
don't." As usual, I played the Root card. "And now that you mention
it, we could combine this with Root's birthday party. He was
born on the eleventh. He'll be delighted to share the celebration
with you."

"And how old will he be?" My stratagem had worked. He was
finally beginning to show some enthusiasm.

"Eleven," I said.

"Eleven." He sat up and blinked, then ran his hand through his
hair.

"That's right. Eleven."

"An exquisite number. An especially beautiful prime among
primes. And it was Murayama's number. Truly wonderful, don't
you think?" What I thought was that everyone has a birthday once
a year, and that was far less interesting than a mathematical proof
that had won a major prize; but of course I held my tongue and
nodded. "Good! Then we should have a party. Children need to
celebrate. Nothing makes them happier than some cake, some
candles, and a little applause. That's simple enough, isn't it?"

"Yes, of course," I said. I took a marker and drew a big circle
around the eleventh on the calendar, big enough to catch the attention
of someone as distracted as the Professor. For his part, he made
a new note—"Friday, September 11, Root's eleventh birthday
party"—and found a spot for it just below his most important note.

"There," he said, nodding in satisfaction as he studied the new
addition. "That should do."

Root and I talked it over and decided that we would give the Professor
an Enatsu baseball card at the party. So, while he was napping
in the kitchen, we crept into the study and I showed Root the
cookie tin. He was immediately fascinated and seemed to forget we
were keeping a secret from the Professor. Sitting on the floor, he
began to examine each card, reverently admiring their every detail.

"Be careful with them," I fussed nervously. "They're important
to the Professor." But Root hardly seemed to hear me.

It was the first time he had really had a chance to look at baseball
cards. He knew that people collected them—his friends had
shown him theirs—but it was as if he had avoided developing an
interest in them. He was not the sort of boy who would ask his
mother for something frivolous.

But once he had seen the Professor's collection, there was no
going back. Another part of the world of baseball had opened up
before him, and it held a very different appeal from that of the real
game. Each card was a talisman of an imaginary game that was
separate from the one he saw played out on the field or heard on
the radio. A photograph capturing a crucial moment, an inspiring
story, and the historical record inscribed on the back—all captured
on a rectangular card in a clean plastic case you could hold
in the palm of your hand. Everything about the cards fascinated
Root, and this particular collection was all the more delightful because
it belonged to the Professor.

"Look at this Enatsu! You can even see the sweat flying off
him." "And this one of Bacque—look how long his arms are."
"And this one's unbelievable! When you hold it up to the light,
you get a 3-D picture of Enatsu!" He stopped to show me every
new discovery.

"I know," I said at last. "Now put them back." I'd heard a
creak from the easy chair in the next room. The Professor would
be getting up soon. "You can ask him to show them to you sometime
soon. But be sure you put them back in the right order; he's
got a very special system."