Montaro Caine A Novel

31





THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN CAINE PULLED TO A STOP IN FRONT of a modest house on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he was alone. As he approached the front door to the house, carrying a shoulder bag full of his father’s old tapes and notebooks, the door opened and there stood Tom Lund, a slender man of medium height with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes, and a warm smile. He appeared to be in his midseventies.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me. I appreciate it,” Caine said, extending his hand. He was surprised by Lund’s firm handshake.

“Come in, Mr. Caine. Welcome, welcome.”

Caine followed Lund into a comfortably appointed living room where both men sat, Lund in his favorite easy chair and Caine on the nearby sofa, setting his bag down on a plain wooden end table. Nothing in the humble room attested to Lund’s mathematical genius—no framed diplomas, no awards, no photographs of academic ceremonies. “So, how is Dr. Banks these days?” Lund asked.

“He sounded fine on the phone,” Caine said. “He’s retired now, of course, and living in Florida. You have fond memories of him?”

“He was O.K.,” Lund said flatly.

“How long did you stay in his research program?”

“Fifteen years, four months, and seventeen days.”

“That long, my goodness.”

“Wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I didn’t mind it,” said Lund. “But was it downright boring sometimes? Well, that depended on how smart the professors were who came to pump me. Your dad was special, though. I’m not blowing smoke at you. He was one of the best. I only sat with him three times, but I remember thinking I wanted to sit with him again. He was as much a professor of philosophy as he was a professor of mathematics. By the way, what you probably don’t know about me is that I wasn’t at the hospital full time like most of the others. I always lived with my folks here outside Philly. Early Friday mornings, I’d take the train into the city; Sunday nights, I’d take a train back home. I had a day job Monday through Thursday.”

“Really?” said Caine. “You’re right; I didn’t know that.”

Tom Lund chuckled. “How else do you think I made my living? I was crunching numbers, keeping books. Back then, Dr. Banks was only allowed to pay me forty dollars for three hours a day, three days a week. That was supposed to include train fare.”

“You know,” Caine said, “yesterday, I visited a friend of yours from those days, Luther John Doe.”

“No! Really?” Lund’s face displayed surprise and delight. “That little son of a gun! Well, I’ll be damned. He’s still alive?”

“He is.”

“Can you beat that,” Lund exclaimed. “How’s he holding up?”

“Fairly well, given the degree to which age and deformities have taken their toll.”

“Well—hey, that’s the process of the journey, if you live long enough. There’s not much you can do about that.”

“He said you were his friend.”

“Yeah, I was. And it was the other way around too. We just took to each other.”

Touched by the tenderness in Lund’s remark, Caine waited for the moment to run its course, then said, “When I was eight years old, he made a present for me. He asked my father to take it home with him even though he had never met my father before and couldn’t have known he had a child. And my dad died in a plane crash on his way home that very night.”

The two men slowly began drawing themselves into a meaningful quiet until Lund cleared his throat. “I was in the hallway that afternoon,” he said. “I saw Luther give that carving to your father. He told your dad that the carving was a ship, but it didn’t look anything like a ship. I remember how considerate your father was, how gracious. He tried to open it and couldn’t. Luther said, ‘It will open when it’s time.’ ”

“Did you get the sense that Luther was mentally deficient? Like he was not all there?” Caine asked.

“Not at all. I thought he was exactly like me. He could carve ordinary wood into designs like no one I’ve ever seen. Just like I could crunch the hell out of numbers. But neither of us was ever much good at anything else. That’s how it has always been for people like Luther and me. For whatever reason, that’s how we were wired.” Lund looked Caine in the eye and said, “I know you came to see me for a reason. And I’ve tried to imagine what that reason might be, but I can’t pull it up. So you might as well just lay it out for me. If I can be of any help, you got it.”

Caine paused for a moment, then asked, “Ever heard of a man named Matthew Perch?”

Lund’s brow wrinkled. “Matthew Perch? No, I can’t recall having heard that name. Who is he?”

“He’s a mystery,” Caine said.

“Oh,” Lund responded, then leaned over to Caine and asked, “What does this ‘mystery’ fellow do?”

“Things that border on the impossible.” Caine reached for his shoulder bag and pulled out a folder containing several pages of his father’s notes. “Here are the questions my dad put to you forty-eight years ago, and your answers,” he said. “May I read a few to you?”

Lund nodded.

Caine began reading: “In your lifetime and mine, two digits, a zero and a one, were recently introduced by innovators as revolutionary forces in the field of mathematics. These forces will be technologically applicable in countless ways never before imagined—in data processing, medicine, mechanics—and they will spawn new inventions that will bring abundant changes into the lives of people everywhere. These two digits may change the face of technology. Modern technology will be able to fashion, in a fraction of a second, endless multitudes of sequences out of just these two digits. Think of it, an endless alphabet of only two digits. My question to you, Tom, is, did you ever think you would see such a day in mathematics?”

As Montaro read these words, he could hear his father’s voice. In flashes, Caine saw himself as a little boy; he saw his father alive, then later, his mother reading these notes that had survived the plane crash. As Tom Lund looked at Caine, he seemed to see both men before him—the father and the son.

Montaro looked up from his father’s notes. “Tom, do you remember what your answer was?” he asked.

Lund’s face took on a sober look. “Yes, of course I knew such a day would come. In fact, I wondered why it had taken so long. Zero and one are numbers just as A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are letters. What differentiates letters from numbers? Nothing really; they’re both alphabets and they both form the basis of languages. Your father and I believed the same thing.”

“My dad told you that you probably had the swiftest mind in existence,” said Caine.

“That’s high praise,” said Lund. “But undeserved.”

“And now,” Caine pressed on, “if you will indulge me, I would like to see how swift that mind still is. At this very moment as we sit here, I would like you to think exclusively in terms of numbers, not words, in arriving at your answers. Then, when you have an answer, I would like you to translate those numbers into words. Remember: quick questions, quick answers. Sound okay?”

Tom Lund smiled. “That’s how my mind works anyway,” he said. “I always translate words into numbers; that’s the language I know best.”

“Okay, here goes: Does another universe exist aside from ours?”

“Not to my knowledge, but my guess is yes.”

“If yes, what might be the distance between them and us?”

“More than any mind can fathom.”

“Will there ever come a time when future generations will bridge that distance?”

“Future generations of other creatures and their science might. I don’t think it ever was nature’s intention for us to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were not designed for that journey.”

“Why not?”

“The carrying capacity of our home planet will soon be stretched far beyond the point at which our science and the resources of our planet could ever possibly get us there.”

“So then what lies ahead for us?”

“Clearly neither our science nor the resources of our planet will get us as far as our imagination promises.”

“So, will we blunder our way into extinction?”

“One cannot blunder one’s way into the inevitable. Extinction is only as far away as we can manage to keep it.”

“What about Matthew Perch? Does he exist?”

“Yes.”

“Where might he be as we speak?”

“Everywhere you expect him to be. Presently, he is very much in your head. What you may not know is that he may well be waiting for you to seek him out. It seems to me that among the seven billion people on this planet, you will likely find that a Matthew Perch is not all that rare.” Tom Lund began to chuckle, and soon his chuckles became infectious laughter; Caine began laughing, too. Soon, Lund and Caine were both roaring, convulsing in ways that threw each back to a time long before such deliciously unbridled behavior had to be corralled and locked away in now-forgotten trunks of memories.

Finally, the men drifted back toward silence until Montaro spoke. “You’ve never heard of a woman named Whitney Carson, have you?”

“No,” said Lund.

“Franklyn Walker?”

Lund shook his head.

“Soon, they will be having a child; you don’t know what will happen then, do you?”

Tom Lund shook his head. “But I do know this,” he said. “You’re looking for answers. You don’t know where to turn and you don’t have much time. That, I think, is why you’re here. Because you’re desperate, you’re looking in places you ordinarily wouldn’t have thought of: me, Luther, your father. And somewhere in all of this are these people you mention, in particular this Matthew Perch, whoever he is. You’ve worked your way through conventional thought and are now willing to look at other forces, other realities. Since I don’t know this Perch fellow, there isn’t much I can offer you in that regard—except that if you do meet him, and I expect you will, you should look him right in the eye and let him see who you really are. He will not be able to see who you are if you do not allow him to; and he will not be able to see you without also letting you see who he is.”

Caine stared at Lund, taking the measure of his elder. “My dad was right; you are a wise old duck,” he said. “I truly thank you for your counsel.”

“It’s been my pleasure,” Lund said. “By the way, can I have a copy of all those questions and answers from my interviews with your dad? I’d love to read all that flattery. I’d just love to stuff some of it right up some folks’ noses.” Lund grinned, chuckled to himself, then erupted into another round of full-bodied laughter. Caine tried to resist but was sucked in again. Eventually, their laughter diminished to broad smiles.

The two men stood. Caine hugged the old man, then handed him the folder of interview transcripts. All things considered, Caine thought, he had gotten what he didn’t know he had come for: a visit with a father he barely knew. The contents of his father’s briefcase had reminded him of words P. L. Caine had often said—that every man must always try to face his troubles, fight his demons, and look both friend and enemy in the eye and, as Tom Lund had said, “let them see who you really are.”

Caine started for the door, stopped, turned, then asked, “One more question?”

Lund smiled and beckoned with both hands for Caine to ask whatever he wished. Caine dug into his shoulder bag, fished out one of his dad’s old notebooks, then searched through it until he came to a particular page. He read aloud: “What each person sees with his or her eyes is instantly transmitted through highly sensitive regions of one’s internal self, across a network of instincts, intuitions, emotions, through countless chambers of our brains, and on into that most private place inside ourselves, the headquarters of our individual existence, the human mind, where a judgment is made as to the importance of what we see, and how what we see might apply to our ongoing struggle to survive as individual human beings.”

“Now here comes the question,” Montaro said. “Was what I just read your thought or my father’s? It isn’t clear in his notes.”

Lund chuckled. Then, his face turned serious. “Listen, I had it all over your father in mathematics. He was good; I was the genius. But he was the one who saw the world as a philosopher as well as a mathematician. As I’ve told you, outside of mathematics, I’m not really good at much else.”

Caine looked long and hard at Lund. “If you ever come to New York, it would be my pleasure to see you again,” he said.