REBECCA PYLE

THE NUMBERS FOR PI

The numbers for pi always looked, she thought, like a code for being lost forever. Going in circles: no way out.

He’d left her a check for ten thousand dollars. He was a professor emeritus who almost couldn't be older: he had died at one hundred years old. A boy during The Great Depression. The same amount to ten of his students: the ten he considered most promising among his writing students, the lawyer said, ten former students or present students, all of whom still lived in town.

She was a former student. Not young, but still in her college town, which still retained, for her and for all former students, a sad cartoonish brilliance. Six weeks after his death, check already received, she saw his car from the nineteen-sixties at a car place, there for repair or for sale: parked at the edge of the university neighborhoods on Twentieth street, the far and lonely and noisy street where quaint college town faded and the street became a faster and faster street leading to a highway crossing the nation in a straight line.

His crusty, rusted, tiny red sports car was an accumulation, divine, of old paint, rust, both almost a matching dull reddish-orange, a lobster’s brave mottled red- orange. The car’s radio antenna had once been an old wire coat hanger, was almost as dull and rusted as the car. Once, long ago, the straightened coat hanger had held shirts and jackets; for him, the science fiction writer, the repurposed and humble metal had brought in news, music, or, most likely, distraction from the present and the past.

The car, to her, looked like a humble God.

Ten thousand dollars, perhaps to help us all grow up and leave, she’d thought, about the surprise of the ten thousand dollars. But how could someone as ordinary and dull as all his midwestern students, ever write novels? He (midwestern too, but who through his writing had escaped, yet stayed in place), who’d assisted with episodes for science fiction television and movies, had been the father of paperbacks and hardback novels, had known Isaac Asimov—why had he bothered to be a post-mortem step-starfather to a hopeless midwestern ten? Were all people, she’d often wondered, who sponsored scholarships only in love with inflicting their pity on underlings?

How much is the old old car? she asked, at the lot.

To her, the Spitfire had been like a sculpture, on campus, parked across the street everyday from the building his office was in. Every new car near it looked like indifference, undaring and unimaginative. Two seats, low, almost to the ground, gave its driver an almost rising-submarine lookout. Across its tiny sloped back there was the tiniest arrangement of metal bars to which one or two small suitcases could be fastened. The old man at the lot was looking at her expressionlessly. There was no sign marking it for sale. But he was dead: it was either for sale or being repaired to be given someone, a son or a nephew or a niece. Or a science fiction museum.

I’m working on it, he said. You want that.

Yes, I really do, she said. Old cars did not frighten her: they drew her like movies about war and peace, stories by Tolstoy or Jules Verne. Her great-grandfather had had older cars: Packards, Pierce Arrows, Buicks with rumble seats. All sold at auction for very little after his death. Does it run?

Runs like a bucket of gravel. You need a Miata engine. It'd fit in a Spitfire. A lot of Miata engines for sale from Japan because there’s a law you can only use one so long. Others available here because young men frequently crash their Miatas. Badly. Often they die and the engine survives. After you replace the old British engine with a Miata engine you can drive this almost anywhere. Just avoid deep snow, he said.

Sounds encouraging, she said. However much it costs. I want it. I’ve inherited a surprise bit of money, just asking to be spent.

Alright, he said. For not too much that car can be yours. If you want it. We just got it in. He named a sum: nine thousand dollars, tax, not including a used but fairly new Miata engine. He might be able, he said, to find one in a few weeks. For the car she would have to wait a month. It’s a college town. I know you’re probably not a student, but you’ll have to put money down.

His eyes looked sad as he said if you want it. She could tell part of him loved this car, too, but he was too old. But he was young, compared to the science fiction writer who had been a hundred.In the if you want it you could hear the contrition of the still-staying-in-the-college-town.

In a month it was ready. One key, no duplicates. The car looked like a time machine everyone would laugh at. To her, though, it looked, and drove, like God. She did not believe in that other kind of God.

Parking at a locksmith’s place; the car made its deep, Japanese, newish humming. People were turning to look, hearing its jubilant newer Miata engine like a new heart inside the tiny valiant battleship of its exterior. They were turning around to look through the locksmith's window glass.

That thing runs I guess, said one middle-aged woman inside the shop.

Where did you get that, said an old man in a chair.

I paid money, she said, affecting indifference.

That’s a Spitfire, said the young locksmith behind the counter. How many keys do you need?

Two, she said.

Alright, he said. But I’ll do three for the Spitfire.

When he finished grinding out the shapes of the keys he handed her all three black- topped keys, looked her in her eyes.

Wherever you’re working, quit, he said to her. You’re too good now for anyplace you're working for. Do you hear me? Quit. There was a small lilt in his voice, a slight jolliness, but his icy blue eyes were serious.

I've always wanted to do that, she said. Believe me. I hate my jobs.

Choose a place to live where this car fits in, he said. Get out of the Midwest. I'd say move to England, but the wheel's on the wrong side.

She thought of the arrogant, confident, science fiction writer's novels, and all the arrogant confident images on their covers: overly-handsome men, overly-beautiful women, their expressive faces and bodies looking very alive in front of barren planet terrain, or floating, space-suited, through liquid-looking pure blue space, in front of spaceships. This car looked, she thought, like the car that would have been waiting for them after their space-journeys were over, waiting back in time to help them recuperate from all their valiant battles and dramas. Their death-defying, vertigo-inspiring journeys. All those characters, you knew, would never become old: outer space and fiction and magic would inject them, amberise them, with youth. The car they returned to, this Spitfire, would never run out of oil. Its radio would never fail to receive. It would never sink low on its tires while they were gone. It would be back-in-time and in-the-present, forever.

You’re the mother of this car, now. And its daughter, too. Wish I’d bought it, the young locksmith said. She held out money: he waved her hand away. You haven’t won the lottery, have you? Just go and be marvelous. And beware of all the people who are going to be envious. He shot a look to the other customers, waiting in chairs for their keys to be finished, the ones who’d turned, made comments about the rusting, beautifully-humming Spitfire, when she drove up.

She looked at them, too; she almost laughed. They were trying to look as if they were not listening to the conversation. A golden ring was on the locksmith’s hand. She smiled at him, said goodbye and thank you. How did he know anything about a Spitfire, she wondered? He was not old. He was half her age. He was young.

For the next twenty years, and a few more, all the time she had left, she chose where to live by whether it was good enough for the Spitfire. A novel was even written, then more novels. By her, or perhaps, by the mute car. The car had tanks and tanks of gasoline, oil changes by admiring oil-change employees who looked, as soon as the Spitfire was driven into their garages, as if they’d suddenly awakened from a coma or from a deep sleep. Love and romances she had, too: an adopted child, even, she had, but the romances and the child were never as important to her as her own novels. This was a heresy-truth she knew was not to be spoken: novels and children were too alike to bear comparison. Novels were unmoored concoctions, like dirigibles, dangerous and floating; children were real. And daily realities, to real-worlders, ruled. Real-worlders ruled.

The first novel was born somehow from the Spitfire’s small rusted quadruplet baby moon hubcaps, but also from the numbers for pi. These numbers, with their troubling and perturbing and improbable number 4, had been in the memo line of the check sent to her by the science fiction writer’s estate attorney: in the wobbliest of blue ink, indicating the estate attorney possibly had barely managed to live as long as the science fiction author. She had had to look the numbers up, to learn they were the numbers for pi, not an account number. It embarrassed her own self-regard she’d had to look them up; how, if she could not recognize the numbers for pi, could she have deserved any gift from a famous science fiction writer? Yet, he may himself have not done well at all, ever, with math. Perhaps numbers had only even looked, to him, like characters, people who’d not been sorted into formulas or stories, failures or triumphs. But were waiting, waiting.

The numbers for pi, repeated and repeated, forming a woven, almost tapestry-look on the page, began, in fact, her first novel called The Numbers for Pi. Perhaps the only novel ever begun with numbers? Unpromising numbers if you didn’t know they were the recipe for circles: those feeble-looking numbers! The awkward four! Her novel was daring and idiotic: fictional narrative about the invention of the wheel. How strange a wheel looked when it was first constructed, she wrote; how frighteningly pure, perfect, simple. How menacing it looked, too, at first: too copy- cat round, threatening, because it was so alike the sun and moon. Threatening too to outdo, eclipse, the perfect round pupils, irises, of eyes. Circles meant a deliberately hastened progress, a steering more rapidly toward future, meant you also needed to be brave to face the rolling burdens of future. Circles, oracle of the future, could carry you. Circles a gift, but only if you were brave enough to forget old familiar pains and damages of the present and the past, forget even the old and comfortable and constant feeling there was no necessity to go anywhere—very soon.

Circles, she learned too, hate too much weight: wherever you go, circles must never be overweighted—at least not more than relatively small periods of time. They then need relief. You reward them with relief, a maintenance of calm. Tragedy was a broken circle. Always travel light, circles said. Always return.

But most importantly, always go further forward, than back, circles said. Do this, and your circle-father, Time, why, he can sleep. Waking only now and then. To wonder. Where you are. Who you are. And then, sure as rain, as tides, as the earth is round—he falls asleep whenever he hears a rumbling noise.

Novels were carried by circles. Spheres. As she worked, wrote, she almost often fell asleep. Or began to fall asleep, and she had try to sit straighter, to stay awake— trying to hear any noise, beyond terrible silence, which many considered bliss, but to a novelist is always the most threatening, obliterating thing in the world.

Rebecca Pyle is a writer of stories, poetry, essays, and reviews appearing over the past decade in many art/literary journals—mainly journals created in the United States, but also journals created in Hong Kong, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, India, England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. Her writing and artwork (see rebeccapyleartist.com) appear in over a hundred journals and reviews, including Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Underwater New York, The Moving Force Journal, Posit, Die Leere Mitte, FOLIO, The Kleksograph, Otis Nebula, Los Angeles Review, The Galway Review, The Honest Ulsterman, MAYDAY, New England Review, Terrain.org, and LandLocked. American, Rebecca has been living/working the last three months in France.