The Gift of Numbers aka The Housekeeper and the Professor

6

It was nearly ten o'clock when we reached the Professor's cottage. Root was still excited, but he was now fighting back yawns. I had intended to see the Professor home and then head to our apartment, but he seemed so exhausted that I decided we should stay until he was safely in bed.

Perhaps the crowded bus on the way home had been too much for him. He had almost panicked as the waves of people swayed against him, obviously terrified that they would tear off his tags. "We're almost there," I'd told him again and again. But he gave no sign that he heard, and he twisted and squirmed the whole way home in an effort to avoid being touched.

He hastily undressed, which I suspect was his habit. He threw his socks, coat, tie, and trousers on the floor, and slipped into bed in his underwear without brushing his teeth. I pretended to myself that he had brushed them very quickly when he'd disappeared into the bathroom.

"Thank you," he said before he closed his eyes. "It was great fun."

"Even though he blew the no-hitter," said Root, kneeling by the bed to straighten the Professor's quilt.

"Enatsu threw a no-hitter," murmured the Professor. "That one went to extra innings. It was on August 30, 1973, and the Tigers were battling the Giants for the pennant right up to the last game of the season. They were playing the Chunichi Dragons, and Enatsu himself hit a walk-off home run in the bottom of the eleventh to win the game 1 to 0. He did it all himself-offense and defense. But he wasn't pitching today, was he?"

"No, we'll have to check the rotation next time before we get tickets," said Root.

"But they won," I added.

"That's right," said the Professor. "A fine score, 6 to 1."

"They moved up to second place, and the Giants lost to Taiyo, so they're in the cellar. It doesn't get much better than that, does it, Professor?"

"No, it doesn't. But the best part was going to the game with you. Now listen to your mother and get home and go right to bed. You've got school tomorrow." He smiled faintly, but his eyes closed even before Root could answer. His eyelids were red, his lips were cracked, and he had begun to perspire. I felt his forehead and realized he had a high fever.

I hesitated a moment, but soon decided that Root and I would have to stay the night with him. I could never ignore a sick person, much less the Professor. Rather than worry about the terms of my contract or the agency rules, it was easier simply to stay and take care of him.

Not surprisingly, a search of the house failed to turn up anything that might be useful for treating a fever-no ice pack, thermometer, gargle, or medicines. I peeked out the window and saw a light still on in the main house, and for a split second I thought I saw a shadowy figure standing near the hedge. It occurred to me that I could use some help from the Professor's sister-in-law, but then I remembered my promise not to involve her in any difficulties that might occur in the cottage. I drew the curtains.

Realizing that I would have to manage for myself, I crushed some ice into a plastic bag, wrapped it in a towel, and set about trying to cool the Professor's neck and back. Then I covered him in a heavy winter blanket and made tea to hydrate him. This was my usual routine when Root had a fever.

I put Root to bed on the sofa in the corner of the study. It had been covered with books, but when I cleared them away it proved to be comfortable enough. Root was still worried about the Professor, but he fell asleep almost immediately, his Tigers cap perched on a stack of math books.

"How are you feeling?" I asked the Professor. "Are you in pain? Are you thirsty?" He did not reply, and as he was sleeping soundly I assumed the fever would pass. His breathing was a little irregular, but there was no sign that he was in any pain. He looked almost peaceful. Even when I changed the ice packs or wiped down his damp arms and legs, he remained limp and did not open his eyes.

Out of his note-covered suit, his body was surprisingly thin and frail. His skin was pale and soft, the flesh on his arms and thighs and belly was wrinkled and slack. His fingernails seemed old and tired. I remembered something the Professor had told me, something a mathematician with a difficult name once said: "Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it." The Professor's body had been consumed by the devil of mathematics.

As the night wore on, his fever seemed to worsen. His breath was hot, sweat poured off him, and the ice packs melted quickly. I began to worry-should I run out to the drugstore? Was it wrong to have forced him to go to the game? Would the fever do more damage to his brain? Eventually I consoled myself with the thought that he was sleeping peacefully, and I decided everything would be all right.

I wrapped myself in the lap robe that we'd taken along to the stadium and lay down by the bed. Moonlight shone in through a crack in the curtains. The game seemed a distant memory. The Professor was asleep to my left, Root to my right. When I closed my eyes, the world was filled with sound. The Professor's soft snoring, the drip of melting ice, Root muttering in his sleep, the creak of the sofa. The sounds comforted me, allowing me to forget about the Professor's crisis, as I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, before the Professor woke up, Root left for school. He took the Tigers megaphone to return to his friend and promised to stop at the apartment to collect his books. When I went to check on the Professor, he was still in a deep sleep, but he seemed less flushed and his breathing was steady and calm. I began to worry that he had been asleep for too long. I gently touched his forehead and rolled back the blanket. I tried tickling him on the neck and chest and under his arms. I even tried blowing in his ear. But there was no response, other than a slight twitching of his eyes under their heavy lids.

Around noon, as I was working in the kitchen, I heard a noise from the study, and when I went to see, he was sitting on the edge of the bed dressed in his usual suit, his chin drooping down on his chest.

"You shouldn't be up," I told him. "You have a fever and you need to rest." He looked at me for a moment without saying anything and then looked down again. His eyes were full of sleep, his hair was wild, and his tie was badly askew. "Let's get you out of that suit and into some clean underwear. You were all sweaty last night. I'll go and buy you some pajamas later. You'll feel better when we get you fixed up and change the sheets. You were exhausted-from the long ball game. I'm sorry we tired you out, but I think you'll be fine now. If we keep you warm in bed and properly fed, you'll be as good as new in no time. That always works when Root has a fever… So, let's start by getting something in your stomach. Would you like some apple juice?"

Before I'd finished, he pushed me away and turned his back; and as he did, I realized I had made the most basic mistake: he no longer remembered the baseball game, or even who I was. He sat on the bed staring down at his lap, his back more hunched over than it had been the day before. His tired body remained still, his mind wandered in a fog. All passion had deserted him, and even the affection he showed toward Root was gone.

A moment later, I realized he was sobbing quietly. At first, I couldn't tell where the sound was coming from him-it sounded like the stuttering of a broken music box. These sobs were very different from the ones he'd cried when Root cut his hand; they were private, desolate, and for no one other than himself.

The Professor was reading the note clipped in the most prominent spot on his jacket, the one he could never avoid seeing as he got dressed. "My memory lasts only eighty minutes." I sat down on the edge of the bed, unsure whether there was anything more I could do for him. My mistake had been the simplest one-and perhaps the most fatal. Every morning, when the Professor woke up, a note in his own hand reminded him of his affliction, and that the dreams he'd dreamed were not last night's but those of some night in the distant past back when his memory had ended-it was as though yesterday had never happened. The Professor who had shielded Root from the foul ball last night was gone. Somehow, I had never quite understood what it meant for him to wake up alone each morning to this cruel revelation.

"I'm your housekeeper," I said, when the sobs had subsided for a moment. "I'm here to help you." He looked up at me through his tears. "My son will come this evening. We call him Root, because his head is flat. You gave him that name." I pointed to the picture of me on his jacket, grateful it had survived the bus ride home from the ballpark.

"When is your birthday?" he said. His voice was weak from the fever, but I was relieved to hear a sound other than sobbing.

"February twentieth," I said. "It's an amicable number, 220, good friends with 284."

His fever lasted three days, and he slept nearly the whole time. He didn't wake up for meals or show any interest in the snacks I left by his bed, so finally I was forced to feed him bite by bite. I would prop him up in bed and pinch his cheeks, and when he opened his mouth, I was ready with the spoon. He could barely stay awake for a full cup of soup, nodding off before I'd managed to feed half of it to him.

In the end, he recovered without seeing a doctor. Since going out had caused his fever in the first place, I felt that the best thing was to keep him at home in a peaceful place. Besides, it would have been all but impossible to get him up and dressed and out to the clinic.

When Root arrived from school, he would go straight to the study and stand by the Professor's bed, watching him sleep until I told him he had to do his homework.

On the morning of the fourth day, the fever finally broke, and he soon made a quick recovery. He started sleeping less, and his appetite returned. Soon, he was well enough to sit at the dinner table, and then to tie his own tie; and before long he was back in his easy chair reading his math books. He even resumed working on his puzzles. I knew he was fully recovered when he began scolding me for interrupting his work, and when he started greeting Root at the door again with a hug. They took up their math drills, the Professor rubbed Root's head-everything was normal again.

Not long after the Professor had recovered, I received a message summoning me to the office of the Director of the Akebono Housekeeping Agency. It was a bad sign to be called in when it wasn't time for a regular performance review. It could mean that a client had complained and you were going to be reprimanded, or that someone was demanding a formal apology, or that you were about to be fined for some transgression or for damage to the client's property. But I knew that the Professor's limited memory made a complaint from him unlikely, and I had kept my promise to his sister-in-law to avoid bothering her; so, I reassured myself that the Director probably just wanted to know how I was managing with a client who had nine blue stars from previous housekeepers.

"I'm afraid this is serious," he said almost before I'd taken my seat, bursting my little bubble of self-delusion. "There's been a complaint." He was rubbing his high forehead and looking terribly pained.

"What sort of complaint?" I stammered.

I had been the subject of complaints before, but in each case the Director had seen immediately that it was the result of a misunderstanding or some eccentricity on the part of the client, and he had simply told me to make the best of the situation. But this time was different.

"Don't play dumb with me," he said. "You spent the night at your client's house?"

"I've done nothing wrong. Who made such a ridiculous, disgusting suggestion?"

"It's not a 'suggestion.' You stayed there, didn't you?" I nodded meekly.

"You know perfectly well that you must let the agency know if you plan to work overtime, and in the case of an emergency, you have to get the client's written approval for overtime pay."

"Yes, I know," I said.

"Then you broke the rules, and the accusation is not 'ridiculous.'"

"But it wasn't overtime. I was just taking care of my client… though I might have gone a little overboard."

"If it wasn't overtime, what was it? If you weren't working when you stayed the night at a male client's house, I think you'll agree it sounds a little suspicious."

"But he was ill! He had a fever and I couldn't leave him alone. I was wrong to ignore the rules, and I'm sorry. But I was only doing what any good housekeeper would do."

"And what about your son?" The Director changed tack, tracing the edge of the Professor's client card with his finger. "I made a special exception for you. I'd never allowed anyone to take a child along to work, but since it seemed as though it was the client's wish, and it was an unusually difficult situation, I decided to let it go. But I immediately started getting complaints from the other girls that I was playing favorites, so I needed you to be beyond reproach on this job."

"I'm sorry, really I am. I was careless. And I'm grateful for your help with my son…"

"I'm taking you off the job," he said. I started to object but he went on. "You're done there. Take today off, and then tomorrow you'll go for an interview at a new place." He turned over the Professor's card and added a tenth blue star.

"Wait a minute. This is all too quick. Who wants me fired? Is it the Professor?"

"It's the client's sister-in-law."

"But I haven't seen her since the interview," I said, shaking my head. "And I don't remember having done anything to offend her. She made me promise not to bother her with the Professor's problems, and I haven't. I realize she pays my salary, but she doesn't know a thing about what goes on in the Professor's house. How can she fire me?"

"She knows you stayed overnight with him."

"She was spying on us?"

"She has every right to keep an eye on you while you're at work."

I remembered having seen someone by the gate in the hedge that night.

"The Professor is sick, and he needs special care. If I don't go to him today, he'll be in a bad way. He's probably getting up right now, all alone, reading his notes…"

"There are plenty of other housekeepers who can look after him," said the Director, cutting me off. He opened the drawer in his desk and filed away the card. "This is not negotiable," he said. "We're done here."

And that was how I came to leave my job at the Professor's house.

My new employers were a couple who ran a tax consulting service. It took more than an hour by train and bus to reach their home, and my duties often lasted until nine o'clock at night. They tended to blur the line between tasks I would normally do in the house and things they asked me to do for their business, and the woman had a cruel streak. But worst of all, Root was once more a latchkey kid. It was the Director's way of punishing me.

In my line of work, you get used to saying good-bye to employers, and all the more so when you work for an agency like the Akebono. The clients' needs change constantly, and you almost never find a truly ideal fit between housekeeper and household. What's more, the longer you stay in the same job, the greater the potential for conflict.

A few of my previous employers had been kind enough to give me a going-away party when I left, and I'd been quite tearful once or twice when a child had brought me a good-bye present. But just as frequently a job would end without so much as a parting word, and sometimes I would even receive a bill for damage I had allegedly done to dishes, furniture, or clothing.

However a job ends, I had always tried to take it in my stride. There was nothing personal about it, no cause to feel sad or wounded. To them, I was just one more housekeeper in a long line, not someone to be remembered after I was gone. I usually forgot them, too, as soon as I was out the door. And by the next day, I was too busy learning the rules and expectations for my new job to have time to feel sentimental.

With the Professor, however, things were different. And to be honest, what bothered me most was knowing that he would have no memory that we had ever been there. He could never ask his sister-in-law why I had quit or what had become of Root; and he would never remember us as he sat watching the evening star from his easy chair, or when he paused in the middle of a math problem. It was painful to think about. I was sad, but also angry with myself for having broken something that could never be fixed.

My new job was mindless but physically demanding (washing five fancy imported cars, mopping all the staircases in a four-story building, making dinner for ten), but I still found it difficult to concentrate, since one corner of my brain was always occupied with thoughts of the Professor. And I invariably pictured him as I'd seen him during his illness, sitting on the edge of the bed, bent almost double. Preoccupied as I was with this thought, I made a number of minor mistakes at work, and I was constantly in trouble with the lady of the house.

I didn't know who had taken my place at the Professor's. I hoped it was someone who looked enough like me to match the portrait on the Professor's suit. Was he asking her telephone number or shoe size and then expounding on the mysteries hidden in them? I have to admit that I didn't like to imagine him sharing his secrets with my successor. When I thought about it, the pleasures of our shared mathematical discoveries seemed to fade-though I knew from the Professor that the numbers themselves went on just as they always had, regardless of changes in the world.

Sometimes I imagined that the new housekeeper would be completely overwhelmed by the challenge of working for the Professor, and that the Director would realize I was the only one for the job. But I forced myself to give up such daydreams. It was vain to assume that he couldn't get along without me; the Director had been right, there were plenty of other housekeepers for the job.

Root would often ask why we weren't going to the Professor's anymore.

"The situation changed," I told him.

"What situation?"

"It's complicated." He shrugged, but I could sense his disapproval.

A week after I left the Professor's, the Tigers' Yufune pitched a no-hitter against the Hiroshima Carp. Root and I skipped our baths and listened to the game on the radio after dinner. Mayumi had three RBIs and Shinjo hit a homer. It was 6-0 in the bottom of the eighth-same score as the Nakagomi game. When the Carp went down in order, the noise in the ballpark and the announcer's tone seemed to ratchet up a notch, but Root and I grew quiet. The first Hiroshima batter in the ninth grounded out to second. Root sighed. Each of us knew what the other was thinking, the memories that this stirred up. No need to say anything.

Then Shoda, the last batter, made contact, he popped it up into the outfield, the roar of the crowd drowned out the announcer, and when he finally broke through again, he was still yelling "Out! Out! Out!" over and over again.

"He did it." Root's tone was subdued. I nodded.

"This is the fifty-eighth no-hitter… in major league history." The announcer was coming through fitfully. "And the first for the Tigers… in nineteen years, since Enatsu in 1973."

We weren't sure whether we were happy or not about Yufune's achievement. The Tigers had won, and it was a great feat to pitch a no-hitter. But somehow the achievement had left us depressed. The excitement pouring from the radio had brought back the game on June 2, and along with it the realization that the Professor, who had sat so happily in seat 714, was far away from us now. And I couldn't help feeling that the foul ball off the bat of that nameless pinch hitter in the ninth, the ball that had nearly hit Root, had been an ill omen.

"Okay, time for bed. You have school in the morning," I said. Root grunted and turned off the radio.

The foul ball foretold the end of Nakagomi's no-hitter. But more bad luck had followed close behind with the Professor's fever and then my dismissal. Of course, there was no way to know if it was all due to the curse of the foul, but to me it certainly felt that way-at that moment, everything had turned for the worse.

One day, at the bus stop on my way to work, a strange woman tricked me out of some money. She wasn't a pickpocket or a purse-snatcher. I willingly gave her the money, so I couldn't go to the police; if she was practicing some new sort of swindle, then it certainly was an effective one. She marched straight up to me, held out her hand, and without any preamble said just one word: "Money." She was a large, pale woman in her late thirties, and other than the fact that she was wearing a spring coat in summer, there was nothing odd about her appearance. She was too neatly dressed to be a vagrant, nor did she seem to be deranged. Her manner was as calm as if she were simply asking directions-in fact she behaved as though I had asked for directions from her.

"Money," she said again.

I took out a bill and laid it on her palm. I have no idea why I did it. Why would someone as poor as I am give money to a stranger, short of being threatened at gunpoint? But I did, and having slipped the bill into her pocket, she walked off as grandly as she'd come, just as the bus pulled up to the stop.

All the way to the tax consultants' house, I tried to imagine what my money would mean to this woman. Would it feed her hungry children? Or buy medicine for her ailing parents? Or was it just enough to keep her from going crazy, committing suicide and taking her whole family with her? But no matter how much I tried to convince myself that she really needed it, I couldn't get over my anger at what had happened. It wasn't the loss of the money that upset me; it was the miserable feeling that somehow I was the one who had received some sort of handout, not the other way around.

A few days later, Root and I went to tend my mother's grave on the anniversary of her death. In the thicket behind the gravestone, we discovered a dead fawn. The body was quite decayed, but strips of spotted fur clung to its back. Its legs were splayed out under it, as if it had struggled to stand up right to the end. The organs had liquefied, the eyes were black holes, its jaw was slightly parted, revealing little teeth.

Root found it. He gave a stifled cry, but then stood there frozen, no more able to open his mouth and call me than to look away.

It had probably come running down the mountain and crashed into the stone, dying on the spot. When we looked closer, we could see traces of blood and skin on the grave.

"What should we do?" Root asked.

"It's okay," I told him. "We should just leave it."

We prayed longer that day for the fawn than we did for my mother's soul. We prayed that the tiny life could go with her on her journey.

The next day, I found a picture of Root's father in the local paper. It seemed he had won a research prize given by some foundation. It was just a short article with a blurry picture of a man ten years older than when I had known him, but there was no doubt it was him.

I closed the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the garbage. Then, thinking better of it, I fished it out, smoothed the wrinkles, and cut out the article. It looked like a little piece of trash.

"What's the big deal?" I asked myself. "No big deal at all," I replied. "Root's father won a prize. Happy day. That's it."

I folded the article and put it away in the box that held the stump of Root's umbilical cord.