He was bent and sucking like a landed carp. His eyes vacant, peering out at the canvas from looped bruise – oddly, it reminded him of the sail of his father’s old ship, blotted with dry salt stains. The crowd was a raucous din, waiting for the final blow. It was just the fourth round of his amateur career as a lightweight boxer. His moustache, usually oiled, scrolled and pointed, was a snarl of bent bristles. And even as his plump trainer and best friend flung a grey rag in the ring, the crowd called for more blood.
It’s over, thank god, it’s over.
But it wasn’t. The hammer was ceremoniously jogging against the bell, officially ending the bout. But it wasn’t over, not for Humphrey’s tattooed and taut opponent. As Humphrey straightened, with his long arms hanging and his V of chest hair dyed bloody, he spat a molar, not one of the gold ones, though. Then came a crunch, one last fist hurled in angst. When it hit he was vacant. His knees voided. He watched as the rapturous crowd, the dimly lit room, the ring belts, turned. The bell still jogged but he couldn't seem to hear it. And like that, the bout was decided; his first and last win, by disqualification.
And while he was down he was awake. His body didn’t respond but his mind was unbridled. He thought things he hadn’t thought in twenty years. It was as though the force had shifted a frayed wire, reclosed a dislodged connection. A voice resonated. A long forgotten scene reeled. His father was carried like a four poster bed frame through heavy asylum doors, and on the last breath to depart his mouth before the doors slammed was a series of numbers, 13-8558-91-8180.
***
He could barely open his eyes when he woke. They were red creases with blue moons sliding about slowly. His nose was sharply kinked and his breath passed in and out of it like a wind chime. One cheekbone had fallen part way down the side of his face. Estaban waited with his cheese-cutter hat in his fiddling hands, and his eyes dolefully casting about.
“How did we go, Esteban?”
His eyes kept moving, finding everything, except Humphrey.
“We, err- ” He paused, and finally met the red slits. “We won.”
Humphrey slowly pulled his arms over his head in painstaking celebration, revealing a jagged purple patch peeking out from the white bandage around his ribs.
"I won, that's impossible."
Then Esteban, who saved generally saved his voice for yes, sir or no, sir spoke, "And a man discovered that tiny particles, you can't even see, are forever popping in and out of existence, that's also impossible."
Humphrey knew he was home, in his bedroom, he could see his violin case propped against the wall, he could see his bicycle which was set on its seat and handlebars, and when – with an agonizing lurch forward – he sat up he could see his decks of cards, collapsible flowers and cape . He cast about over all the relics of his once endeavours.
“The pile diminishes, Esteban,” he began, leaking saliva through his broken half-smile, “Sell the ring and the gloves and everything else.” His voice changed, his usually subtle cadence and mellow tones broke to a nasally whine. “I’m squandering my father’s fortune, and still I have nothing.”
Esteban had the big, dark, glazed eyes that some fish at the bottom of the sea have and now they were pandering about the floor, searching for consolation. But before he could find something to say, Humphrey continued.
“Fetch my notebook downstairs,” he said and Esteban scurried away. Then when he returned with the leather-bound note book Humphrey told him to write down a series of numbers 13-8558-91-8180.
He replayed another scene. It was long after his father was toted away through those steel doors. He was an adult this time, sitting before half a bottle of gin, his mind toiling over the series of events that led to his marriage to, then his divorce from, Anna Callous, a South African acrobat. A knock had sounded at the door and he left his bottle of gin, promising to return to finish it off when he got rid of who ever was thudding on the door. But he didn't keep his promise. A telegram was shoved into his hand by a broad man in a woollen overcoat and a bowler hat.
For: Humphrey Wolf Adam
Dear sir,
Your father has passed. Please come by to discuss his estate.
P.T
He still had that telegram, somewhere.
***
Humphrey had been rereading the numbers for the seven days he had spent sinking into the mattress. Studying each number, the infinite curls of the eights, and the hard edges of the ones. He carefully traced the black ink with a fingertip, dully waiting for a spark of recognition. Nothing. He thought about the old ship again, the last relic of his father’s fortune. He could sell it and probably get enough to get by for a couple of months more. It was dipped with green slime and barnacles, which clung even in the hardest storms with Edmond’s Endeavour scrawled in flaky ink on the side. It was a grand old thing.
Humphrey at last managed to slide out from beneath the covers. Esteban had been carting mashed potatoes and other steamed and mashed meals (meals which can be consumed through a straw) up the stairs. So when his foot lowered, he didn’t feel the cold hard wood, but rather a slimy mashed pea mix press between his toes.
“Esteban!”
Rolling footfalls up the stairs preceded Esteban’s wheezy entry.
“Yes si-” he began, before his fish eyes fell to the green mess sprouting between Humphreys toes, “ Let me get that sir, my apologies.”
“No leave it Esteban, I need a shower anyway.”
***
Humphrey was in the same shape he sported in his twenties, his belly tight as stretched rubber and his arms lean and taut. But when he looked down it wasn’t the same. He saw purple bruise and liver spots like coffee stains. He tossed on his dirty-blonde chinos, tucked in a blue plaid shirt with his sports coat. Add his smoking pipe and he was a figure of his father, well how his father may have looked before he lost his mind.
He sat with his pencil sharpened to surgeons’ precision and the numbers 13-8558-91-8180 on yellow pad. And so he began. First it was equations, simple stuff
13-8558-91-8180
=
-16816
13-(8558-91-8180)
=
-274
13+8558-(91+8180)
=
300 (curious, Father’s maids raised me in a house at 300 Digby Way, is this of any consequence?)
Then he pondered the individual numbers, the sequence itself.
1-3-8-5-5-8-9-1-8-1-8-0
Then with languid strokes he wrote them bigger and linked them like cursive. Then he wrote them fast and slow, taking his time to make a perfect circle out of the zero. Then he listened, as though his father’s desperate voice came from the hollows of his chest.
“Thirteen-Eight thousand five hundred and fifty eight-ninety one-eight thousand one hundred and eighty.”
He whispered, then it grew louder, then it grew louder than his thoughts.
“Thirteen-Eight thousand five hundred and fifty eight-ninety one-eight thousand one hundred and eighty!”
“Tea, sir?” Esteban had sheepishly crept in, with a pot of loose-leaf earl grey and Humphrey’s oak pipe, tightly jammed with tobacco, and set on a silver tray.
“Thank you, Esteban, place it on the side board, down there in the sun.”
He glanced back over the numbers, the pages screaming in black ink. He sighed, a long resignation. He considered the debtors who would come knocking, considered the ants marching to work, paying mortgages, pouring their own tea, stuffing their own pipes.
There was an empty thud on the wooden door.
“Esteban, get that would you?”
He had been running every day and throwing his hands at a hard leather bag for the past eight weeks, and he hadn’t puffed his pipe for longer yet, so as he drew in the dense tobacco smoke, he relaxed and almost slipped off the leather seat.
The door clicked open, then slammed shut and Esteban trotted back.
He placed a cheque on the silver tray and Humphrey glanced down between tea sips and pipe tokes.
Two-Hundred and Fifty dollars only
Match Winners fee
He quickly scribbled a fresh equation.
-$12,500 (ring and building lease)
-$1,400 (equipment and registration)
+$250 (winners fee)
= -$13,650
Humphrey’s gaze moved around the room over the copper framed fireplace, the gold chandelier and finally resting on the far wall. Above the ski set, piled in the corner, he found the atlas. Ten feet wide and four high. Mossy amoebas in a coffee-and-cream sea. And subtle lines like incisions dividing meat portions of the earth.
It was a queer moment, like a dry thunderclap. A moment that may have passed without significance, may have receded into all the other moments that day as a failure. But it didn't. The Atlas.
13-8558-91-8180
“thirteen-eight thousand five hundred and fifty eight-ninety one-eight thousand one hundred and eighty.”
He let the silver tray slip from his lap. It all hit the hardwood like a lonely widow’s leap. Broken bone split tealeaf guts, tea slowly seeped beneath Humphrey’s moccasin. But it didn’t matter. Humphreys gaze denied the peripheries; it was set on the atlas. He moved with slow short steps, his eyes framed with deep creases. And Esteban stood at hand seemingly disinterested. He was close to the atlas, his nose touched.
“thirteen-eight thousand five hundred and fifty eight-ninety one-eight thousand one hundred and eighty.”
But there was nothing, he shuffled across.
“thirteen-eight thousand five hundred and fifty eight- negative -ninety one -eight thousand one hundred and eighty.”
There. The Galapagos Islands. Then closer. Latitude, Longitude scaled down to minutes, then down to seconds if there is such a thing, but it doesn’t matter. There it was, close enough, an island the size of a thumb tack. According to the scale, it couldn’t have been bigger than five miles by five miles; it might have been a salt stain, like the ones on the sails of Edmond’s Endeavour or the boxing ring’s canvas. But something told him it wasn’t, something punched in Times New Roman across the tiny island. A name Wolf Is.
Humphrey Wolf Adam.
13-8558-89-8180. Wolf.
“thirteen-eight thousand five hundred and fifty eight-ninety one-eight thousand one hundred and eighty.”
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