The word odometer dates from 1791, but mileage indicators didn’t appear as standard equipment on automobile instrument panels until after the First World War. George Parker’s memory, therefore, of his parents bidding him and his older sister, in the rear seat of the family sedan–the big black Buick, it must have been, the family’s first post-war conveyance, and most likely during one of their ritual Sunday-afternoon drives down-county–to ‘Watch, now: she’s all nines and ’bout to come up zeros,’ can be dated no earlier than 1919, George’s eighth year and sister Janice’s eighteenth, nor later than 1922, the year newly-wed Jan moved with her husband from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to upstate New York. And Jan is very much a feature of this memory; more of a mother to him through that melancholy period than his disconsolate mother was (still grieving for her war-lost first-born), it could even have been she who called her kid brother’s attention to that gauge on the verge of registering its first thousand or ten thousand miles. In any case, in his eighty-fifth year George well recalls a long-ago subtropical Delmarva afternoon (automotive air-conditioning was yet another world war away), his Sunday pants sticky on the grey plush seat, the endless marshes rolling by, and that row of nines turning up not quite simultaneously from right to left to what his father called ‘goose eggs’.
For our George–who just two hours ago (at a few minutes past nine p.m. on Sunday 7 September 1997, to be more if not quite most exact) was prepared to end his life, but has not done so, yet–each of those limit-years has its private significance. Certain sentimental reasons, to be given eventually, incline him to prefer 1919, in particular the third Friday of that year’s ninth month: tidewater Maryland could well have been still sweltering then, and the new Buick might feasibly have been turning up its first thousand. But 1922 (though not its summer) was likewise a milestone year, so to speak, in what passes for this fellow’s life story.
A consideration now occurs to him: Wouldn’t the digits 9999, for reasons also presently to be explained, have ‘freaked out’ his mother altogether, as Americans say nowadays? Perhaps she had already taken to the bed whereof she became ever more a fixture, tended first by Janice and their tight-visaged father, subsequently (after Jan’s escape to Syracuse) by a succession of ‘coloured’ maids, as Americans said back then. In which case it would have been Jan herself in that front passenger seat, ‘playing Mom’ (it was no game), and not impossibly young George who, bored with counting muskrat-houses to pass the sweatsy time, leaned over the front seatback, noticed the uprolling odometer, and said ‘Hey, look,’ etc. It doesn’t much matter, to this story or generally; George just likes to get things straight. 1919 was the second and final year of the great influenza pandemic, which killed perhaps twenty-five million people worldwide (more than the Great War), including some half-million Americans–among them young Hubert Parker, who was serving in France with the American Expeditionary Force and was felled in ’18 not by the Hun but by the deadly myxovirus. Baseball players in that season’s World Series wore cotton mouth-and-nose masks, as did many of their spectators; ‘open-faced sneezing’ in public was in some venues declared a crime, as were handshakes in others. George’s odometer memory includes no face masks, but then neither does his recollection of the family’s home life generally in that glum period.
In a misanthropic mood, Leonardo da Vinci called the mass of humankind ‘mere fillers-up of privies’. True enough of this story’s mostly passive protagonist, George supposes; likewise even of his (late, still inordinately beloved, indispensable) spouse, their four parents and eight grandparents and sixteen great-grandparents et cetera ad infinitum, as far as George knows; likewise of their middle-aged son (his wife felled by a heart attack before his mother succumbed to a like misfortune) and their sole, much-doted-upon grandchild. Prevailingly, at least, they have all as far as George knows led responsible, morally decent if perhaps less than exemplary lives: no known spouse- or child-abusers among them; no notable greedheads, programmatic liars, cheaters, stealers, or exploiters of their fellow citizens. One drunk bachelor uncle on George’s mother’s side, but he injured none except himself. George and Pamela Parker, we can assert with fair confidence, in their lifetimes have done (did…!) no or little intentional harm to anybody, and some real if not unusual good. Pam by her own assessment was a reliable though unremarkable junior-high mathematics teacher, George by his a competent though seldom more than competent public-school administrator, the pair of them at best B-plus at worst B-minus parents and citizens, perpetuating the cycle of harmless fillers-up of privies, all soon enough forgotten after their demise. If anything at all has distinguished this pair from most of their fellow filler-uppers…
There on his night stand is Cabernet Sauvignon to dull his senses for the deed. There are the sleeping pills, of more than sufficient quantity and milligrammage; the completed note of explanation To Whom It May Concern (principally his retirement-community neighbours and his granddaughter) and the sealed letter to his Personal Representative (George Parker, Jr.). There is the plastic bag recommended by the Hemlock Society to ensure quietus, but which our man fears might prompt an involuntary suffocative panic and blow the procedure; he may well opt not to deploy it when the hour arrives.
And what, pray, might be that Estimated Time of Departure?
If anything, we were saying, has distinguished this now-halved pair of Parkers from the general run of harmless, decent folk, it is (was…!) their reciprocally abiding love–which psychologists maintain ought most healthily to extend outward from self and family to friends, community and humankind, but which in George and Pam’s case remained for better or worse largely intramural–and a shared fascination with certain numbers, especially of the calendric variety: certain patterns of date notation. If one could tell their story in terms of such patterns–and one could, one can, one will–that is because, as shall be seen, after a series of more or less remarkable coincidences had called the thing to their attention, they saw fit to begin to arrange certain of their life events to suit it, telling themselves that to do so was no more than their little joke, a romantic game, an innocent tidiness, a kickable habit.
But let’s let those dates tell their story. The late Hubert Parker, George’s flu-felled eldest sib, happened to be born on the ninth day of September, 1899: in American month/day/year notation, 9/9/99; in the more logical ‘European’ day/month/year notation, also 9/9/99, or 9.9.99 (we now understand the possibly painful association of that on-the-verge odometer reading back in the family sedan). Very well, you say: No doubt sundry notables and who knows how many mere privy-fillers shared that close-of-the-century birth-date, as will a much larger number its presently upcoming centenary. But did they have a next-born sib who first saw light on New Year’s Day, 1901 (1/1/01 American, ditto European, and a tidy alternating-binary 01/01/01 by either), birthday of the aforementioned Janice Parker? The coincidence was a neighbourhoodwide How-’bout-that and a bond between brother and sister, even before its remarkable compounding by George Parker’s birth in 1911 on what, beginning with his seventh birthday, would mournfully be dubbed Armistice Day and later, on his forty-third, be grimly, open-endedly renamed Veterans’ Day.
By either system, 11/11/11: the century’s only six-figure ‘isodigital’, as a matter of fact. (It will be Pam, the seventh-grade-math-teacher-to-be, who early on in their connection offers George that Greeky adjective, together with the datum that his birthday’s ‘precurrence’ in the twelfth century–11/11/1111–was the only eight-figure Isodigital in their millennium. Work it out, reader, if such things fascinate you as they did them; you may note as well that no date in either the preceding or the succeeding millennium of the Christian era will exceed seven isodigits.) Not surprisingly, even without those parenthetical enhancements George’s birth-date was the occasion of considerable family and neighbourhood comment. He recalls his parents joking, before Hubie’s death ended most levity in their household, that they had planned it that way, and that they were expecting young Hube to supply their first grandchild on either Groundhog Day (2/2) or George Washington’s birthday (2/22) in 1922.
When those dates arrived, Hubert Parker was dead; sister Jan (nicknamed for her birth-month) was a registered nurse whose chief patient was her mother and whose impending marriage would soon leave the family ‘on its own’; and young George was a somewhat introverted fifth-grader in East Dorset Elementary, his fascination with such calendrics understandably established. It was on one or the other of those two February holidays that he reported to Miss Stoker’s class the remarkable coincidence of his and his siblings’ birth-date patterns, called their attention to the phenomenon of ‘all-the-same-digit’ dates, projected for them the eleven-year cycle of such dates within any century (2/2/22, 3/3/33, etc.), and pointed out to them what the reader has already been told: that the constraints of a twelve-month year with roughly thirty-day months make 11/11/11 the only six-figure ‘same-digiter’ in any century. Miss Stoker was impressed. Nine months later, on that year’s Armistice Day, when like every elementary-school teacher in America his (then sixth-grade) teacher, Miss Scheffenacher, observed to the class that the Great War had ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month just four years past, they sang a mournful-merry Happy (eleventh) Birthday to our protagonist. After everyone had stood with heads bowed as the town’s fire sirens sounded that eleventh hour, the boy responded with the observation that even those few of his classmates who hadn’t turned eleven yet were nevertheless in their eleventh year; additionally, that while the date of his war-lost brother’s death in France had not been a Same-Digiter, it had been the next best thing (for which George hadn’t yet found a name): 8/18/18– when, moreover, luckless Hubie had been eighteen years old.
His comrades regarded him as more or less special, whether charmed or spooked. Miss Scheffenacher (having provided the term ‘alternating-digiter’, which George shortened to Alternator) opined that he would go to college and become somebody some day, and then set the class to listing all the Samers and Alternators in the century, using the American style of date notation. Not even she had previously remarked the curious patterns that emerged from their blackboard tabulations: that among the Samers, for example, there were none in the century’s first decade, four in its second (all in 1911, culminating in George’s birthday), two in its third (the aforenoted February holidays of their present year), and only one in each of the decades following. She thought George should definitely go on to college, and would have declared as much to his parents had the mother not been an invalid and the father a non-attender of parent-teacher meetings and most other things.
Except for the Miss Stokers and the Miss Scheffenachers, however, who ‘went off’ to the nearby State Normal School to become teachers, not many young people in small-town tidewater Maryland in those days were inclined or able to pursue their formal education past the county school system; most were proud to have achieved their high-school diplomas instead of dropping out at age sixteen, by choice or otherwise, to begin their full-time working lives. But with his family’s blessing George did, in fact, complete his first year in that little teachers’ college and begin his second before the combined setbacks of his mother’s death and the Great Depression obliged him to leave school–on 1/31/31, he noted grimly–and work as bookkeeper and assistant manager of his father’s foundering car-sales business.
There he might have remained and our story be stymied had not his ever-more-dispirited father committed suicide on the first or second day of May 1933. Shot himself in the starboard temple with a small-bore pistol, he did, late in the evening of 5/1; lingered unconscious in the county hospital for some hours; expired before the dawn of 5/2, his son at his bedside, his harried daughter en route by train and bus from Syracuse. Although the date was numerically insignificant (so George thought), he happened two months earlier to have sighed, in his bookkeeper’s office, at the approach, arrival and passage of 3/3/33, the first Samer since Miss Scheffenacher’s fifth-grade February. The fellow had attained age twenty-one, still single and living in his parents’ house, now his. The tidy arithmetic of double-entry bookkeeping he found agreeable, but he had neither taste nor knack for selling motor vehicles, which few of his townsfolk could afford anyhow in those hard times. On a determined impulse he sold the automotive franchise that summer, rented out the house, and with the meagre proceeds re-enrolled to complete his interrupted degree in secondary education.
Three years after his receipt thereof, our calendric love-chronicle proper begins. Twenty-six-year-old George, having mustered additional accreditation, is teaching math and ‘science’ to the children of farmers and down-county watermen in a small high school near his Alma Mater; he looks forward already to ‘moving up’ from the classroom (which has less appeal for him than does the subject matter) to school administration, for which he feels some vocation. He has dated two or three women from among the limited local supply, but no serious romance has ensued. Is he too choosy, he has begun to wonder? Are they? Is he destined never to know the experience of love? In early March 1938, he surprises his somewhat diffident self by inviting his principal’s new young part-time secretary, barely out of high school herself and working her way through the teachers’ college, to accompany him to a ham-and-oyster supper at the local Methodist church, the social hub of the community. Despite the eight-year difference in their ages and some good-humoured ‘razzing’ by the townsfolk, the pair quite enjoy themselves; indeed, George feels more lively and at ease with pert young Pamela Neall than he has ever before felt with a female companion. On her parents’ screened front porch later that evening, he finds himself telling her of his calendrical claim to fame: his and his siblings’ birth-dates, his brother’s death-date, the Alternator 1/31/31 that marked his leaving college, and the Samer 3/3/33 that prompted his return. Miss Neall’s interest is more than merely polite. Her ready smile widens in the lamplight as he runs through the series. All but bouncing with excitement beside him on the porch glider, she challenges him to guess her own birth-date, and when he cannot, offers him the clue (she’s a quick one, this hard-working aspirant to math-teacherhood) that just as he was born on the century’s only six-digit Samer, she was born on its only seven-digit Alternator.
George feels…well, beside himself with exhilaration. ‘Nine Nineteen Nineteen-Nineteen!’
Moved by the same delight, they kiss.
Did the course of true love ever run smooth? Now and then, no doubt, but not inevitably. The couple were entirely pleased with their ‘first date’ (George’s joke, which won him another kiss; but it was Pamela who remarked before he did that the date of that date was another Alternator, 3/8/38) and no less so with their second and third. Pam’s mother and father opposed any sequel, however, on grounds of their daughter’s youth and the age differential. Common enough in that time and place for girls of eighteen to marry, but they had hoped she would finish college first. A firm-willed but unrebellious only child who quite returned her parents’ love, Pam insisted that the four of them reason it out together, listening with respectful courtesy to all sides’ arguments. Hers and George’s (they’re a team already): that their connection was not yet Serious and would not necessarily become so, just a mutual pleasure in each other’s company and some shared interests; that should it after all develop into something more (they exchanged a smile), she was determined not to be diverted from the completion of her degree and at least a few years’ experience of teaching–a determination that George applauded and seconded. Her parents’: that they had no objections to George as a person, only as a premature potential suitor of a girl who one short year ago could have been his high-school student; that however their daughter might vow now her determination to finish her education (for which she was largely dependent on their support), love ‘and its consequences’ could very well override that resolve, to her later regret. Better to avoid that risk, all things considered–and no hard feelings, George. In the end the four agreed on a compromise: a one-year moratorium on further ‘dates’ while Pam completed her freshman year at the normal school, spent the summer camp-counselling up in Pennsylvania as planned, and returned for her sophomore year. During that period the pair would not refrain from dating others, and if next spring–at ages nineteen and twenty-seven, respectively–she and George inclined to ‘see’ each other further, her parents would withdraw their objections to such dates.
Each repetition of that word evoked the young couple’s smiles, as did such now-voltaged numbers as nineteen; without knowing it, Pam’s well-meaning parents had undermined their own case and increased the pair’s interest in each other. When the girl agreed to have no further dates with Mister Parker before the date 3/9/39, George understood that the campaign which he had not till then particularly set out to wage was already half won. As good as their word, for the promised year they refrained from dating each other, though not from exchanging further calendrics and other matters of mutual interest in their frequent letters and telephone conversations; and they dutifully if perfunctorily dated others–Pamela especially– with more or less pleasure but no diminution of either’s feelings for her/his predestined soulmate.
Quite the contrary, for so they came ever more to regard each other with each passing month. Had George noticed, Pam asked him in one letter from Camp Po-Ko-No, that if his sister Jan had managed to be born on the first of October instead of the first of January, then her birth-date (10/1/01) would be the only ‘patterned’ date, whether Samer or Alternator, in the century’s first decade? And would he please please believe her that although the senior counsellor with whom she had dutifully ‘gone out’ once or twice had proposed the fancy word isodigitals to describe what they called Samers, she had found the fellow otherwise a bore? He would indeed, George promised, if she would ask him the Greek word for Alternators and not date him a third time, as he was not re-dating his history colleague Arlene Makowski. Meanwhile, had Pam noticed that the date of her latest letter, 8/3/38, was a Palindrome, a numerical analogue to ‘Madam, I’m Adam’? And that her remarkable birth-date, 9/19/1919, could be regarded as a Palindromic Alternator, as for that matter could sister Jan’s? And that he loved her and missed her and was counting the days till 3/9/39?
One weekend shortly thereafter he drove all the way up into the Pennsylvania mountains in order to see and talk with her for just one surreptitious lunch hour, the most they felt they could allow themselves without their meetings becoming a ‘date’. They strolled through the little village near Pam’s camp, holding hands excitedly, stopping to kiss beside a shaded stream that ran through the tiny town park with its monuments to the Union dead and the casualties of the Great War.
‘Sequentials,’ he offered, ‘like Straights in a poker hand. The first in this century was One Two Thirty-Four, and there won’t be another till One Twenty-Three Forty-Five.’
She hugged him, pressed her face into his shirt-front, and reckoned blissfully. ‘But then the next one comes later that same year: December Third!’
He touched her breast; she did not move his hand away.
‘We give up,’ her good-natured parents declared that fall. Their daughter was back at the normal school, their future son-in-law back in his high-school classroom, and the pair were still not actually ‘dating’, but telephoning each other daily and seeing each other casually as often as manageable on the weekends. ‘You’re obviously meant for each other.’
But it pleased the couple, perversely, to let their reciprocal desire ripen through that winter without further intimacies until the agreed-upon date, meanwhile reinforcing their bond with the exchange of Reverse Sequentials (3/2/10, 4/3/21, etc.) and the touching observation–Pamela’s, when George happened to recount to her in more detail the story of his father’s suicide–that the date of that sad event was not as ‘meaningless’ as he had supposed, for while it might be tempting to regard 3/3/33 (George’s ‘career change’ day) as marking the end of the century’s first third, the actual ‘thirty-three per cent date’ of 1933–i.e. its 122nd day–would be 2 May, when Mr Parker died. Indeed, since 365 divided by three gives not 122 but 121.666…n, it was eerily appropriate that the poor man shot himself on the evening of 1 May and died the following morning.
Much moved, ‘The fraction is so blunt,’ George almost whispered: ‘One-third, and that’s that. But Point three three et cetera goes on for ever.’
‘Like our love,’ Pam declared or vowed, thinking infinite isodigitality–and herself this time placed his hand, her own atop it, where it longed to go.
On the appointed date, 9 March ’39, they declared their affiancement. In deference to Pam’s parents’ wishes, however, they postponed their marriage nearly a full two years: not quite to her baccalaureate in May 1941, but to the first day of the month prior, trading off their friends’ April Fools’ Day teasing for the satisfaction of the American-style Alternator plus European-style Palindrome. Moreover, just as George felt his ‘true’ eleventh and twenty-second birthdays to have been not the November Elevenths of those years but 2/22/22 and 3/3/33 respectively, so the newly-wed Mr and Mrs Parker resolved to celebrate their wedding anniversaries not on the actual dates thereof but on the nearest Alternator thereafter: 4/2/42, 4/3/43, etc.
And so they did, though not always together, for by the arrival of that first ‘true’ anniversary the nation was at war. Not to be conscripted as cannon fodder, thirty-year-old George enlisted in the Navy and after basic training found himself assigned to a series of logistical posts, first as a data organizer, later as an instructor, finally as an administrator. Pam’s profession and the couple’s decision to put off starting a family ‘for the duration’ made her fairly portable; although they missed their first True Anniversary (George couldn’t get leave from his Bainbridge boot camp) and their fourth (story to come), they celebrated 4/3/43 at his base in San Diego and ‘the big one’, 4/4/44–their third True Anniversary, George’s thirty-third True Birthday, and their first Congruence of Samers and Alternators, a sort of calendrical syzygy–at his base in Hilo, Hawaii, where Pam happily taught seventh-grade math to the ‘Navy brats’. Whether owing to the tropical ambience, the poignancy of wartime, the specialness of the date, or the mere maturation of their love, she experienced that night her first serial orgasm; it seemed to her to extend like the decimal equivalent of one-third, to the edge of the cosmos and beyond.
4/5/45 saw them separated again, this time by a special assignment that George was dispatched to in the South Pacific. Forbidden to mention to her even the name of his island destination, much less the nature of his duty there (it will turn out to be to do with logistical support for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki four months later), all George could tell her was that while the first of that year’s two Straights (1/23/45) saw the war still raging in both the European and the Pacific Theater of Operations, he wouldn’t be surprised if the show was over by the second. And did his dear Pammy remember first flagging that notable date during their non-date in that little park near Camp Poke-Her-No-No?
How swiftly a good life runs. By their first ‘irregular’ or ‘corrective’ anniversary (4/1/50: the zero in any decade-changing year will spoil their romantic little game but remind them of their wedding’s actual date) they were resettled in Pam’s home town, George as assistant superintendent of the county school system, Pam as a teacher in that same system on more or less open-ended leave to deliver–on an otherwise ‘meaningless’ date in May–their first and, it will turn out, only child, George Junior. He grew; she returned to teaching; sister Jan’s husband deserted her in Syracuse for a younger woman; all hands aged. Some calendar-markers along their way, other than their always-slightly-later True Anniversaries: 7/6/54, a Reverse Sequential on which George Junior’s baby sister miscarried and the Parkers called it a day in the reproduction department; 5/5/55, their Second Syzygy (fourteenth True Anniversary and George’s forty-fourth True Birthday), when thirty-five-year-old Pam enjoyed by her own account the second best orgasm of her life; 23 November 1958, when George came home from the supervisor’s office (he had been promoted the year before) to find his wife smiling mysteriously, his third-grade son bouncing with excitement as Pam had once done on her parents’ front-porch glider, and on the cocktail table before their living-room fireplace, champagne cooling in a bucket beside a plate of…dates. The occasion? ‘One one two three five eight,’ she told him happily when he failed to guess: ‘the only six-number Fibonacci in the century.’ ‘Get it, Dad?’ George Junior wanted to know: ‘One and one makes two, one and two makes three, two and three makes five, and three and five makes eight!’ ‘You can pop my cork later,’ Pam murmured into his ear when he opened the bottle, and they happily fed each other the hors d’oeuvre.
By their Third Syzygy–George’s fifty-fifth True Birthday, their Silver True Anniversary (a full two months later now than their Actual), and the twenty-second of the D-Day landings of Allied invasion forces in Normandy–George Junior was a high-school sophomore less interested in the Fibonacci series or any other academic subject than in getting his driver’s licence, his girlfriend’s attention, and the Beatles’ latest album; Pam was recovering from a hysterectomy; George Senior had taken up golf and looked forward already to retirement in Florida, like Pam’s parents. No orgasms that night, but contented toasts to ‘the Number of the Beast and then some’ and the True end of their century’s second third (its Actual .6666…n point, they would have enjoyed pointing out to young George if he ever stayed both home and still long enough to listen, was not 6/6/66 but the year’s 243rd day, the last of August).
Life. Time. The Parkers subscribed to both, enjoying the former much more than not while the latter ran in any case. 7/7/77 ought to have been their luckiest day: the expense of their son’s lacklustre college education (Business Administration at the state university) was behind them, as was the suspense of his being drafted for service in Vietnam. Now twenty-seven, the young man was employed as an uncertified accountant at, of all history-repeating businesses, a large Chevrolet-Buick dealership–across Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore, where he lived with his wife and baby daughter. George himself was retired more or less contentedly and in good health though somewhat pot-bellied, eager to move south (Pam’s parents, alas, had died) but resigned to waiting four more years for his wife’s retirement and Social Security eligibility at sixty-two. They doted on their grandchild, wished that Baltimore weren’t so long a drive and that their daughter-in-law weren’t so bossy, their son so submissive. In the event, nothing special happened in their house that July Thursday except that George Senior managed a usable morning erection despite his hypertrophic prostate; aided by a dollop of personal lubricant to counteract Pam’s increasing vaginal dryness, they made pleasurable love. Lying post-coitally in each other’s arms three dozen years into their marriage, they agreed that every day since 3/8/38 had been a lucky day for them.
8/8/88 already! George’s seventy-seventh True Birthday, the couple’s forty-fourth True Anniversary, Pam’s sixty-ninth year! They’ve settled in a modest golf-oriented retirement community in south-west Florida and would normally be Back North this time of year, escaping the worst of the heat and hurricane season and visiting their granddaughter (now twelve) and her maritally unhappy dad. But George Senior is in hospital, pre-opping for the removal of a cancerous kidney (he’ll recover), and so they’re toughing out their Fifth Syzygy on location. Pam limps in at Happy Hour (arthritic hip) with a smuggled split of Piper-Heidsieck and a zip-lock plastic bag of dates; they kiss, nibble, sip, sigh, hold hands, and reminisce about that Big One back in Hilo back in ’44, when she went Infinitely Isodigital.
‘I wonder what ever happened to that handsome Senior Counsellor at Po-Ko-No,’ she teases him, and crosses her heart; ‘the one that never laid a digit on me.’
‘Maybe he ran off with my alternative Alternator,’ George counters: ‘Arlene Whatsername. Did I ever tell you she was born on One Six Sixteen?’
In their latter age, Pam busies herself volunteering at the county library and playing bridge with other women in their retirement-community clubhouse. George, as his body weakens, has in his son’s words ‘gone philosophical’: he reads more than he ever did since college days–non-fiction these days, mostly, of a speculative character, and Scientific American rather than Time and Life–and reflects upon what he reads, and articulates as best he can some of those reflections to his mate. His considered opinion (he endeavours to tell her now, lest he happen not to survive the impending surgery) is that like the actual alignment of planets, these calendrical ‘syzygies’ and other date-patterns that he and she have taken such playful pleasure in remarking are as inherendy insignificant as they are indeed remarkable and attractive to superstition. Human consciousness, George Parker has come to understand–indeed, animal consciousness in general–has evolved a penchant for noting patterns, symmetries, order; in the case of Homo sapiens, at least, this originally utilitarian penchant (no doubt a great aid to survival) tends to acquire a non-utilitarian, ‘gee whiz’ value as well. Certain patterns, symmetries and coincidences become fascinating in themselves, aesthetically satisfying. Even non-superstitious folks like himself and Pam, if they have a bit of the obsessive-compulsive in their make-up, may take satisfaction in noting correspondences between such patterns and their significant life-events, and be tempted to jigger such correspondences themselves into a pattern–which may then become causative, influencing the course of their lives in the same way that superstition would maintain, but for opposite, non-mystical reasons.
‘You know what?’ said Pam (for so swiftly does time run, this pre-op tête-à-tête is already past tense): ‘George Junior is right.’
Operation successful, but along with his left kidney the patient lost much of his appetite for both golf and food. Pam underwent a hip replacement, also reasonably successful. George Junior’s wife’s heart without warning infarcted; she died cursing God and her milktoast husband. The latter within the year remarried (a divorcee five years his senior, with two teenagers of her own) and moved the ‘blended family’ to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he took a job in his new bride’s father’s accounting firm. Granddaughter Kimberly pleaded with her paternal grandparents to rescue her from her stepfamily; aside from their increasing frailty, however, they thought it best for the girl to accommodate to her new situation. In just a few short years, they reminded her, she would be off to college with their financial assistance and virtually on her own.
‘Are we aware,’ Pam asked George on April Fools’ Day 1990– their ‘corrective’ forty-ninth anniversary–’that our Golden True Anniversary will also be my very first True Birthday?’ For so indeed 9/1/91 would be, within the parameters of their game: a Syzygy of a different stripe! They would celebrate it, they decided, by taking fifteen-year-old Kimberly to Paris, the first trip abroad for any of them if one discounts a Caribbean cruise the February past. The girl was thrilled, her grandparents if anything more so; the three made plans and shared their anticipatory excitement by telephone and e-mail, crossing their fingers that the Gulf War wouldn’t spoil their adventure. More charmed by the date-game than her father had ever been, Kim proudly announced her ‘discovery’ that the Golden Alternator 9/1/91 would in France become a Golden Palindrome: 1.9.91.
‘That girl will amount to something,’ George proudly predicted. Amended Pam, ‘She already does.’ In mid-August, however, shortly before Kim joined them in Florida for their departure from Miami to Paris, Pam suffered the first of what would be a pair of coronaries. It left the right side of her body partially paralysed, impaired her speech, cancelled all happy plans, and constrained the ‘celebration’ of her True seventy-second birthday and their Golden True Anniversary to a grim reversal of 8/8/88: Pam this time the pale and wheelchaired patient; George the faux-cheery singer of Happy Birthday, their granddaughter harmonizing by long-distance telephone.
Through that fall and winter she regained some range of motion, but never substantially recovered and had little interest in continuing so helpless a life solely on the grounds of their surpassing love. Together they discussed, not for the first time, suicide. Neither had religious or, under the circumstances, moral objections; their impasse, which Pam declared unfair to her, was that George made clear his resolve to follow suit if she took her life, and she couldn’t abide the idea of, in effect, killing him.
‘Couldn’t you have lied,’ she complained, ‘for my benefit?’
Her husband kissed her hand. ‘No.’
On the last day of February, her second and fatal stroke resolved the issue for them before it could harden into resentment. The widower postponed his own termination to see the last rites through, for which his son and granddaughter, but not the rest of that family, flew out from Santa Fe (sister Jan was ten years dead of breast cancer; her grown children had never been close to their Aunt Pam and Uncle George). Kimberly, tears running, hugged her grandpa goodbye at the airport afterward and pointed out that by European notation, it being a leap year, Nana Pam had died on a five-digit Palindromic Alternator: 29.2.92. George wept gratefully into her hair.
Through half a dozen hollow subsequent ‘anniversaries’, mere dumb habit has kept him alive after all, though ever more dispirited and asocial. George Junior’s second marriage has disintegrated. Feeling herself well out of that household, Kim attends a branch of Florida State University, in part to be near her grandfather, and in fact their connection, though mainly electronic, remains the brightest thing in the old man’s life. Plump and sunny, more popular with her girlfriends than with the boys, she discusses with him her infrequent dates and other problems and adventures; she visits him on school holidays, tisks maternally at his bachelor housekeeping, and cheerily sets to work amending it. And without fail she has noted and telephoned him on 9/2/92, 9/3/93, 9/4/94, 9/5/95, 9/6/96–not to wish him, grotesquely, a happy anniversary, but merely to let him know that she remembers.
It is the expectation of her sixth such call that has delayed George’s calm agenda for this evening, his and Pam’s fifty-sixth True Anniversary. The man is eighty-five, in pretty fair health but low on energy and no longer interested in the world or his protracted existence therein. His son and namesake, nearing fifty, currently manages a General Motors dealership back in the tidewater Maryland town where he was born and raised; the two exchange occasional cordial messages, but seldom visit each other. Granddaughter Kim, having spent the summer waitressing at a South Carolina beach resort and the Labor Day holiday with her bachelor father (‘a worse housekeeper than you, Grandpa!’), should be returning to Orlando about now to begin her junior year in hotel management; as a special treat from her grandfather she’ll spend part of this year as an exchange student in France. Usually she telephones in the early evening, just after the rates go down. Last September, though, come to think of it, she merely e-mailed him a hurried THINKING OF YOU, GRANDPA!!! KIM:-) XOXOXOX 9/6/96.
He has eaten, appetiteless, his microwaved dinner, cleaned up after, poured himself a second glass of red wine, made his preparations as aforenoted, and rechecked the computer (YOU HAVE NO NEW MAIL). Kim’s recent messages have spoken of a new boyfriend, one of her co-workers at the resort, whom she’ll ‘miss like crazy’ when they return to their separate colleges and has hoped to touch base with between her visit home and her rematriculation; perhaps in the unaccustomed excitement of romance she has lost track of the date. She knows that he goes to bed after the ten o’clock news; he’ll give her till then, although his self-scheduled exit-time was 9.19. A touch muzzy-headed from the wine, as that hour approaches he changes into pyjamas (wondering why), wakes the computer one last time, then shuts it down for good–a touch worried, a touch irritated. Call George Junior? No need to worry him; he’ll know nothing that Kim’s grandfather doesn’t. Call the college? She has no new phone number there yet. Her summer workplace, then. But this is silly; she simply though uncharacteristically forgot the date, or remembered but got somehow sidetracked.
Now it’s half past nine, and he’s annoyed: if he ends his life per programme, the girl may blame herself for not having telephoned. So he’ll leave her a message, reassuring her of his love and her non-responsibility for his final life-decision. All the same, she’ll feel guilty for not having spoken with him one last time. So what? Life goes on, and on and on.
It’s just a senseless pattern, he reminds himself: he doesn’t have to turn himself off on 9/7/97 or any other ‘special’ date. He can wait to be sure that Kim’s OK, tease her for forgetting her old gramps, then do his business when he’s sure she won’t in any way blame herself–on 9/20,10/2, whenever. Not doing himself in tonight simply for the sake of repudiating the Pattern, he recognizes, would be a backhanded way of acknowledging the thing’s ongoing hold on him; but he has these other, perfectly reasonable reasons for delay…
Or is he merely temporizing, rationalizing the Pattern’s grip? Mightn’t his freedom be better demonstrated (to himself, as no one else will know or care) by going ahead now as planned, following the Pattern precisely in order to prove (to himself) that he’s under no compulsion either to follow it or not?
Our George is sleepy: the uncustomary wine, the hour, the weight of these considerations. He could get a good night’s sleep and kill himself mañana, with a clear head. He could do it next May, the sixty-fifth anniversary of his father’s suicide. He could put it off till 9/9/99, his and Pam’s fifty-eighth Anniversary, his eighty-eighth True Birthday and his brother’s one hundredth Actual. He could for that matter put it off till the next 11/11/11, the ultimate full cycle, and be the first centenarian ever to autodestruct.
Sitting up in his half-empty bed at ten past eleven, with his left foot he pushes off and lets fall to the hardwood floor his right bedroom slipper, the better to scratch a little itch on his starboard instep. 9/9/99, he wearily supposes, would after all be the aptest date for his final Date: the next day his life’s odometer would roll up straight zeros, as the calendar’s never does.
Or he could do the damned thing right now.
