The Number Game

The time is three-sixty-five on the alarm clock on top of the chest of drawers. Sheila has painted the furniture bright blue, with one yellow drawer to add color to the four maroon ones. She stares at the red-orange digits on the clockface. It is impossible for the time to be three-sixty-five in the morning. That would be more correctly four-o-five. It is not four in the morning. She has misread the clock. There again, this harks back to the time when she was newly divorced, with a new man, in a new house, in a new bed, in a new town. What a journey that had been. She used to wake up in the middle of the night every night and stare at the clock. It took on supernatural properties. The neon numbers became as significant as the number 175 which was part of the license number on her dad’s car.
It was a long time ago in another town in another country in another life. She’d been a schoolgirl attending Charles Edward Brookes near Camberwell Green (SE 5) in London, in England. She usually took the 176 bus from Forest Hill (SE 23), but once in a while, her dad, who drove a lorry and had erratic hours, picked her up after school. She was always happy to see his white Austin Martin parked outside the schoolyard. When he wasn’t there, she didn’t fret, just ripped off her horrible schoolgirl hat as soon as no teachers could see her, and hopped on the next bus--a 185--to Forest Hill.
On one particular day that she will never forget, she’d expected dad, but he hadn’t come, so she’d taken the bus home. She was upstairs at the front of the red double-decker, careening down London Road, passing Horniman’s Museum. She looked out of the window to see a white Austin Martin in front of the bus. Just like dad’s car. She could not see the driver. The car had the license plate XGW 175. That was dad’s license plate number. Something in her head, though, said dad’s car had been stolen. When she got home and rushed upstairs to the flat to tell mum and her brothers about the car, they not only doubted her, they told her she was crazy.
Dad was very late getting home that night. His car had been stolen. It was recovered in a distant part of London. It was never driven anywhere near Horniman’s Museum located at 100 (which just happens to be a perfect number) London Road. The family did not discuss this event ever again.
Sheila had simply wanted guidance after her divorce. Numbers like dad’s car license had helped bring clarity. She’d gotten information that helped her understand why the most important man in her life at that time, her dad, had not shown up. Unlike her ex-husband who had disappeared once and for all with another woman. So maybe it was not so crazy to hope that numbers on a clock could remind her of where he had gone and where she was going. Life had done an abrupt change back then. It was really not so strange to look in her numerology book for the meaning of specific numerals that glowed in the night. It had given her hope.
But why three-sixty-five now? Her life was more stable. She had married John, bought a new house, gotten an education, found spiritual guidance in a traditional religion, let go of her grief over her lost marriage, and forgiven the betrayal. Once again, though, she was experiencing a transition. She’d just left her job, had serious doubts about staying in the church, had just finished her studies for another master’s degree, and had buried her dog, the one she’d gotten right after she’d began living with John in the new house in the new state.
Still, paying attention to numbers as if they could have supernatural significance was crazy. She knew that. Yet, she never had been able to totally banish the psychic-new-age-not-respectable aspect of her personality. Like believing her mother and father had come to help her because of an impending crisis. They’d been dead at the time.
They’d shown up in a dream where she’d been swept away by rising waters into a stream. She’d had no control, and couldn’t understand what was happening. She only knew that this flood had nothing to do with her. Then she heard Mum’s and Dad’s voices: “Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right,” they’d said, their voices blended and yet very distinct.
She’d puzzled over this, but when John ended up in the hospital unable to stand, she knew those parental-dream-voices were about him. She’d felt crushed when her husband had been rushed to U.K. Hospital in Lexington (40536) for emergency back surgery in the middle of the night. She’d tried to follow the ambulance in his Geo, bouncing along I-64, but she’d not been able to keep up. When she’d gotten to Lexington (40505), she’d been so overwrought and frightened that she could not find the hospital. That’s when she remembered the voices: “everything will be all right.” She’d stopped at a 711 to ask for directions.
A teenage kid who looked like he was spaced out on drugs drew a map on a napkin. Everything, she thought, will be all right, including this kid. She had the odd feeling that her asking this boy for directions had empowered him. The kid tried hard to give her good instructions, but she was in such emotional turmoil that she ended up at Central Baptist Hospital (40503). Somehow she kept on driving and stumbled upon the UK Hospital.
After John’s surgery, while she lay on the fold-out chair in his room, she watched John crying because he thought he’d let his work colleagues down. What if John never recovered? At the very least, difficult times lay ahead. The doctors said he would have to learn how to walk again and it would be a lengthy process. How could she comfort him? How could she help, and who would help her? Everything will be all right, she heard in her head. Was she crazy or was it genuine supernatural intervention? Everything had been all right. John had recovered and she and John became closer than ever.
Still, numbers on clocks could not possibly have any meaning other than the time of day. She must be regressing, back-sliding to an old time to try to find a way to cope with the new time. Such thinking had to go. It was bordering on the delusional. It did not feel good to have insane thoughts in the middle of the night.
Sheila rolled over and checked to see if John was still in bed. Often, he got up in the middle of the night to sleep on the couch. Tonight, his warm body was still safely beside her. The cat had curled up between their heads. She felt enormously relieved and in control of her life. Resting on her back, she was aware that she was beginning to snore gently, so she twisted onto her side. Numbers on a clock in the middle of the night had no significance. Three-sixty-five. Ha ha. Ridiculous!
The next morning, Sheila couldn’t let the numbers go. So what’s in a number, anyway? she asked herself and poured some cereal into a bowl. That’s when she remembered when she’d first been with John driving in the new state without a job and wondering about money. How on earth could she live without an income, she’d wondered? She’d driven John through the bank for him to get some cash out of the machine. He’d handed her his bankcard. “What’s your pin number?” she’d asked. He told her the last four digits of her social security number. He wasn’t joking nor could he possibly have known her social security number. Every time they drove through a bank after that, they laughed. Had it been a supernatural code or a mere coincidence? Sheila always believed it had significance. If nothing else, it gave her comfort. John supported her in so many ways, but one of them was financial.
Perhaps two plus two could equal five, a total larger than the parts. Impossible arithmetic. She counted herself a math whiz since she’d once aced three calculus courses. Now she couldn’t remember the first rule of geometry. Still, actual numbers had nothing to do with cosmic reality. Or did they? After all, algebra represented reality, and so did numbers. Perhaps, she was clinging to respectability and so-called normalcy in order to avoid another deeper reality. Maybe, the supernatural was as real as the ten fingers on her hands. Or was that eight fingers and two thumbs?
She felt like a trader with insider information that gave her an edge in the stock market of life. Three-sixty-five might mean something important, but she was sure it would do no good to play it on the lottery. How come, though, she’d come up with an impossible number and time now? Perhaps it was a joke, her dad having fun with her, or her mother smiling from the heavens to say nothing is impossible, no matter the impossibility of the moment. She shook her head to try to dislodge the unreality of this reality, that life’s journey might really come down to something as insane as numbers. Of course, numbers were an abstraction. Not so very different than the idea of the Word in Christian theology. The Word equaled the Christ who equaled God.
The next day, after John had left for work, she looked up three sixty five in a numerology book. Just in case it was a supernatural message to help her. Three was all about creativity, the Christian Trinity, and the totality of beginning, middle, and end. It was also, so her book said, forward movement. She gladly accepted that interpretation. Six was even better. It meant equilibrium and balance. It also meant perfection. Zero hit the jackpot: wholeness and eternity Five divided the perfect number ten in two and also signified balance.
And if she added up three plus six plus zero plus five, she ended up with fourteen which when added up again became five. So everything led to equilibrium and balance. Five also referred to the pentagram that Greeks used to symbolize light, health and vitality. Sheila MacDougall felt a heavy burden lift. Everything would be all right. Three-sixty-five. Indeed.

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 23.11.2009

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