Number Nine

by Michael Gray Baughan

     You are awakened by an incessant beeping sound that cuts through the flypaper walls that separate your apartment from the one next door. It begins at seven-thirty in the morning and lasts exactly ninety minutes. You try to ignore it, but you can’t. You have sensitive ears and more than a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. You groan and roll over, pull a pillow over your head. You were up far too late and you are exhausted. The beeping persists. Try as you might you cannot get back to sleep. Every morning of the last eight days you have lost a little more of yourself to this beep-beep-beep-beep. By the ninth morning you are nothing but a fetal ball of frayed nerve endings, primed for detonation.

You say to yourself what is the matter with me? Why don’t I just go next door and tell my neighbor to shut the damn thing off. I will tell you why. Because you have never met your neighbor. Because you are new here and afraid to do anything that might upset your tenancy. Because you keep telling yourself today must be the last day of this. Somebody else in the building must be bothered. Someone else will speak up. Because today might be the day number nine finally gets you. 

Today is your twenty-seventh birthday. This scares the hell out of you. You aren’t a fearful person. No more so than most. But you believe in numbers, and patterns of numbers, and meta-patterns of those patterns. In your life the number nine has formed just such a meta-pattern. The facts are incontestable. You were born on September 9^th, 1972. Ninth month. Ninth day. In a year with integers that sum at nine. Your mother always maintained it was 9:09 when the doctor announced the crowning of your head and 9:27 when you actually popped out, but you are objective enough to consider those details apocryphal.

It hardly matters. That is just the beginning. The day you turned nine—9/9/81—you came within nine seconds of getting killed. Ridiculous! But true.

At the time, you were a very promising young swimmer. You lived in the small Florida town of Largo, where kiddie swim meets drew the kind of rabid fan support that Hoosiers give their basketball teams and Dominicans their baseballers. You even had a personal coach, one of those fanatics who had you training on your birthday for a championship meet against Pinellas Park. Thanks to the climate, the swim season lasted well into Fall, when only the first days of school were reason enough to get out of the water. It was late afternoon, a time when thunderstorms often rolled in off the gulf, but your coach wanted one last run. Pinellas Park had a superstar in the 1500 meter freestyle and to have any chance of winning you would have to come in under your all-time best of 15 minutes, 21 seconds. (I know it is impossible for you to read those integers and not add them in your head.)

A few drops of rain began to fall as you stepped up to the starter’s platform. You had enough time to think what are the odds? before your coach fired the gun. It was a good start, despite your distraction. You hit the water smoothly and fell into a natural rhythm. You felt strong and fast and you swam magnificently. You were in the middle of your last lap, about halfway to the wall, when it happened. With one ear out of the water and the other beneath, the air above your head was struck by a thunderclap so loud it penetrated the pool and set off a series of vibrations that sounded like something monstrous was in the water with you. That feeling sent you into a frenzy. Why did you make the turn instead of getting out of the pool at the far end? Was the racing habit so ingrained that you forgot it was possible to stop midway? In any case, you swam like a warhead shot from a nuclear submarine. You did not take a single breath on the backstretch. When you yanked yourself out of the pool your coach was beaming and yelling something into your ear but pool water had seeped in and it was still alive with those subaqueous echoes. Your brain was alive with cosmic vibrations. Then everything went white as lightning struck the water, throwing you both to the ground with such force that it broke your coach’s stopwatch and froze your time on its cheap liquid crystal face: 15 minutes, 12 seconds. Nine seconds better than your previous best and nine enough to save your life.

No doubt you are wondering how I know all this. Assuming I’m not some omniscient literary device. Your coach told the story to the local paper after you destroyed your competition the following week. He proudly claimed you had lightning in your blood. It was this article, discovered during one of my automated media scrubs, which first brought you to my attention.

Flash forward to your eighteenth birthday. The date is 9/9/90. You are a freshman at the University of Florida, planning to major in mathematics. Classes have just begun so you should be out having fun, but you are too scared to leave your room. With good reason. Not two weeks had passed since the discovery of eight mutilated students and though the police had a suspect in custody, you had a feeling they had the wrong man. You were correct. While most of your friends were out celebrating the lifted curfew, you sat frozen on your bed, waiting for death to make a house call.

Down the hall someone was blasting the White Album. By the time it reached your theme song, you had scared yourself into a kind of trance, and in this trance you had a powerful vision of the Gainsville Killer making his way down the dormitory hall, room-by-room, looking for his ninth victim.

You could not know that Danny Rolling was too busy getting captured during a spoiled robbery attempt to fulfill your prophecy. Among Rolling’s possessions, though, the police found stolen keys to several dormitories. One of those dormitories was yours.

     In Pythagorean Theory, the Law of Nine represents the culmination of life’s journey, the last step before ascendance to the Decad, or Divine Reality. Armenian mystic Georgei Gurdjieff developed an expression of this he called the Enneagram. Originally a sophisticated tool to holistically integrate multiple facets of the human mind, today it has been co-opted by New Age shysters to play metaphysical matchmaker.

You discovered the Enneagram during your second year of graduate school. It was a pet hobby at first, a way to calm your numerological anxieties. Before long it began to infect your work, showing up in footnotes and off-hand comments during your Number Theory seminar. The Enneagram inevitably led you to a closer study of Pythagoras, whose theories slowly but surely began to dominate your every waking thought. Last winter your application for doctoral candidacy was turned down. No one at the University wanted anything to do with what your advisor called “prehistoric mumbo-jumbo.” A few weeks later you received a mysterious letter, a letter from me, the president, founder, and sole active member of the Number Nine Society. In the letter I offered you a fellowship to continue your unorthodox research. With nowhere else to turn, you accepted and earned yourself free room and board at a run-down studio apartment in the Mission District. It’s all I can afford. You have been living here for a little over a week. You have yet to meet your benefactor, but that will change soon enough. As far as my man Friday has been able to determine, you stay up all night tweaking a prophecy engine of quadratic equations. Into which you feed the birth dates of historical personages and it spits out a death prediction that you check against the facts. Last week your algorithm achieved an unprecedented twenty-seven percent accuracy rating. With a little more time you might actually get somewhere. If only you weren’t plagued by my morning bell. If only today’s date wasn’t 9/9/99.

How could I be certain you would come on the ninth day? Overcome your lifelong inertia and actually raise a hand against your Fate? I couldn’t. But I had a hunch that terrible night of waiting in your dorm room had convinced you to never be quite so passive again. I can imagine your state of mind when you find yourself in the hallway at 8:50, confronted by a simple wooden door, behind which the infernal beeping persists. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Summoning you. Driving you mad. By your reckoning you have ten minutes to change the laws of nature.

You try the knob. It is unlocked, and swings open with a simple twist.

Inside you find a bare room. The white walls are covered with what at first appear to be black tadpoles or spooning sperm cells. Upon closer inspection you see that these squiggles are actually thousands upon thousands of overlapping nines. For a time you are unable to tear your eyes away. It is as if the skin of the universe has been peeled away to reveal the ennead skeleton hiding beneath. You bask in the beautiful mystery of that perfect number. But soon the beeping intrudes, beckoning you down the hall.

By the look on your face you are shocked to find a decrepit old man sitting at a desk. On the desk is the guilty alarm clock, which now reads 8:58. Next to it is a birth certificate, which proves that I was also was born September 9^th, but in the year 1900. Do the math and you will understand why I spent my last penny hiring a shady electrician to build a perfect mousetrap. Out of the bottom of the clock, through drilled holes in the desk, run two tiny wires. One goes to a bundle of plastique hidden in a lacked drawer. The other terminates at a massive toroidal power supply. If you summon the willpower to turn off the alarm before the magic hour you will defuse the bomb and trigger a nine hundred volt death sentence coiled into the seat of my chair. If you do not, we will both die together in a fiery blast.

I have waited one year shy of a century for this day. Everything has been arranged to within a hair’s breadth of perfection. What more can a man ask but to live as long as I have and know the exact moment of my passing? If Pythagoras was right, if the secrets of the universe hide in numbers and harmony is achieved by their proper alignment, then I will die the most harmonious death in the history of mankind.

8:59 now and you are studying my birth certificate. You keep stealing glances at my face, trying to determine if I am alive. For months on end I have practiced the art of remaining completely motionless and all my hard work is paying off. I have blinked once in the last nine minutes and I don’t intend to do so again.

* * *

     Michael Gray Baughan hails from Philly, lives in Richmond, and writes from an unmapped region located somewhere in between. Visit him online at michaelgraybaughan.com, or peruse his collection of oddities and curiosities at wondercabinet.net.