“That’s dumb,” Quinn said at some point during the program.
“What is?” he asked. He was not even really looking at the screen at all, instead was thinking of the project he had been working on the day before in his office, wondering how much of it he could complete tonight given the materials he had returned home with. Had he remembered the last set of drawings from drafting? He was not sure.
“Four isn’t even that color really. It’s kinda more like red.”
He felt his chest tighten. He had not been paying attention to the screen but he certainly was now. Had there been a number? He thought so. The number four. An orange number four. “What do you mean?” he said.
“They didn’t do the colors right,” she said. “Four is red. Everybody knows that. Now it’s gonna be mad.”
“Because it’s the wrong color?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He might have scolded her for her tone but he was not attentive to such things now. Instead he felt a turning inside of him, a kind of excitement.
“The four was orange but it’s not really orange. It’s supposed to be red. It would be really mad if it was orange.”
“It’s irritated because it’s the wrong color?”
“Yeah, because it’s supposed to be more like red.”
He paused and then said, “Red or more like brownish red?”
“Yeah, a little like brownish red.”
“But not orange.”
“No way José, not orange.”
The television continued its sounds. He was staring at the screen now, not looking at her, the sense of what she had said flooding through him all at once.
“What about nine?” he asked.
“Yellow.”
“Two?”
“Blue two. It rhymes.”
“Three?”
“Kind like blue and green together. Like water.”
“Four?”
“Jeez, are you gonna ask me all of them?”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Probably.” But he already knew all the answers she could possibly give. The colors all the same. The colors exactly the same as his own.
This was how it would start. He knew that now, in the house in the cul-de-sac, his hands ever-flecked with paint. He knew that this had been the moment to dictate everything to come after. But he also knew — had already known — that Quinn was similar to him in some essential way, Barb even making that a household joke, laughing when their daughter’s responses were so blunt and direct, without preamble or thought or concern. “She’s just like you,” Barb would say to him. “Exactly.” He would merely shrug in response and Quinn would peer back at them both, exasperated, as if she knew there was some kind of joke between her parents but she would not deign to acknowledge it. But he knew it was true. Even as a very young child she had displayed a sense of logic and analytic skill. It was the same language Keith spoke, not the language of numbers — that would come later — but rather a language of simplicity and directness. Perhaps it would have been the same with any child, that his own tendency to speak with blunt efficiency, to cut right to the point, mirrored the way children communicated. But then this was not any child; this was his own and she was so much like him that it sometimes felt as if, finally, he had found someone he could communicate with who gave no quarter to pretense or confusion.
She shared, as well, his ability to focus on whatever task was at hand, silently and efficiently. When she had been four or five it had been building elaborate structures with Lego blocks. Much later, it would be her homework. Sometimes, in the years to follow, he would stand in the doorway to her room and watch her at work, her back to the door, and if he was quiet enough he could watch her there for a long time, her silence, the intensity of her progress. It reminded him of being alone in his office with his pencil and calculator and his numbers and with no one to disturb him. He could think of no place on Earth, no situation he enjoyed more. The only questions that existed in that room were ones he directed himself and all such questions, no matter how complicated, could be answered and in this too, he imagined, she was like him.
In the weeks following Barb’s father’s death, he had already decided that the numbers would provide a trajectory for her, a way for her to move forward, not just ahead of her peers but away from them because she had the gift. She shared the same secret and inviolable sense of numbers that he did, their personalities and their colors immutable. At first he had been too surprised — shocked, even — to think of anything beyond the moment they were in because what she had said in passing, casually, in front of the television, was something he had thought private: that the numbers themselves held within them a sense of relationship. He had known this as early as the second grade, when he had told the class that three did not like seven and that seven and eight only got along when they were seventy-eight and otherwise did not want to be neighbors at all, that this was clear from their colors alone. The other students had laughed at him and the teacher praised him faintly for his overactive imagination and Keith stared back at them, dumbfounded, his eyes not tearing up but rather only opening wide to mark his sense of incredulous confusion. What he had told them was fact, something he understood as intimately as he knew his own mother and father, perhaps even more so. He did not understand the reaction the other students had toward him. He did not understand it at all.
By the time he reached junior high school, he had learned that he had an ability that his peers lacked, for the numeric relationships he intuitively understood had made the numbers akin to friends. But perhaps even more than that, in the burning and disconsolate sexuality of his young self the numbers provided a sense of intimacy. He would not have identified it as sexual — in fact would have denied this with a vehemence fraught with embarrassment — but there was no other word to describe the clear and secret detail in which he knew and understood them. The numbers and symbols and functions were beings unto themselves and while they were often represented as stark and concrete and unchangeable forms in textbooks and on chalkboards, he never saw them that way. Even as a child, he could see them the way he believed they actually were: as part of the three-dimensional space in which they existed as genuine and independent objects that were not alive and yet were possessed of all the manifest and unmistakable indicators of that state of being, of life itself. He could see the relationships between them and could hold those individual relationships in his mind, as if they had become physical structures which floated within an infinite empty container, and he could zoom into or out of those structures as if possessed of some enormous and all-encompassing lens. Entire equations could be worked out that way: solved a piece at a time by developing the relationships between sections, for in the end they were not even equations but rather collections of personalities that could be classified and understood the way one might understand the structure of a family: in conflict or harmony or some state between and their solutions the logical endpoint of those relationships.
The strength of that feeling faded with time, replaced later with a simpler and no less profound sense of familiarity. He did not think of them as having personalities now, although he could still see their colors. Instead, what he had felt about them as a child had given way to the sense that they were actively functional and representational. And yet even now he could feel them slotting into their locations with grace, perhaps even with longing, because they needed to complete their tasks. He had learned that much from them. He owed them that much. That was why he had chosen to become an astronaut, had worked toward that singular goal for so many years, because he owed the numbers for everything he was and anything less than pushing the practical limits of human knowledge would have been a betrayal of that trust. He never could have put this obligation into words and, if pressed, likely would have denied that any obligation existed at all and yet it was there nonetheless, a kind of counterweight to balance those things he would never understand. That was his gift and it was his obligation.