INVENTION OF ZERO

Finley was walking past the Goodwill store when he got snagged by the new mannequin in their window. He slowed but didn’t stop; he just looked twice to make sure. It was the girl, all right: the long slope of the jaw, the ebony eyes. What was her name again?

            The figure’s hair was bobbed where she had to sweep hers out of the way before sitting. It was dressed in a wedding gown of lace, holding back the veil with a casual hand. The gesture was unmistakably hers: the careless wrist, the gaze set on nothing close. The lips were held in that way she had, preoccupied, with the barest glint of teeth showing. He wondered if she had ever gotten married, then he walked on, his cane swinging easily in his hand.

            At the post office, there was no line. Mrs. Peal stood with her back to the window. Finley rapped on the countertop. She turned, eyes wide with surprise, but seeing him, she smiled and said, “Howdy.”

            “Good morning.” He handed her his package.

            She turned it over, looking at both sides. “A book?”

            “An old book,” he said.

            She put it on the scale. “It in a hurry to get there?”

            “No, but I am for it to.”

            “First class, then?”

            “Please.”

            She wrote a figure on the package. “Want to insure it?”

            “Please.”

            “How much?”

            “Five hundred,” he said.

            She placed the stamps on the package, then used a red rubber stamp to hand-cancel them. She stuck the insurance sticker on and dropped the package into the mailbag. “Who’re you sending it to?”

            “A collector. In Rhode Island.”

            Starting on the insurance papers, she asked, “How much you getting for it?”

            “I’m trading it,” he said, “for another book.”

            “An older one?” She finished the papers and took his money.

            “No,” he said, “but one I want more. A first edition of Spicer’s Cycles of Conquest.”

            Her eyebrows stayed flat, her eyes uninterested. She said, “Never heard of it. What’s it about?”

            “The discovery of America.” Finley took his receipt. “Thanks.” Touching the handle of his stick to the brim of his hat as token of good-bye, he went back outside.

            He crossed the street to the used book store. Moving slowly up and down the attic-smelling aisles, he read titles at random. Finally, in the lower right-hand corner of the literature wall, a copy of Fools Crow by James Welch caught his eye. He plucked the book from its place and thumbed through it. Pleased with its condition, he headed to the counter, passing the magazine rack. A man – a grown man – leaned against the display, reading a back-issue of Playboy. Stopping in front of him, Finley rapped on the floor with his stick. The man gave no response. “Excuse me,” Finley said. The fellow glanced up. “This,” Finley told him archly, “is no library. If you read that without paying for it, you’re shoplifting.”

            The man sneered, but under Finley’s unflinching gaze, he put back the magazine and ambled away.

            Finley paid for the Welch book. As he was leaving, his attention was caught by the store’s bulletin board. Usually he didn’t pay any attention to all the flyers stapled and thumbtacked up there so randomly, but today a notice printed on screaming orange paper leaped out from the clutter. It showed a gaudy hot-air balloon floating above a line of far mountains. Silhouettes of a man looking through a spy glass and a woman pointing in the opposite direction occupied the basket of the balloon. On the side were printed a name and

phone number. Maybe Brenna would like that, Finley though.

            Brenna.

            That was her name. The face of the mannequin in the Goodwill window belonged to Brenna. How could he have not remembered that?

            He hurried home, put the Welch book on the shelf, and got out his address book. Brenna. Forbes. The phone and address were five years old – he could only hope they were still good. He punched the numbers and heard it ring on the other end one. He hung up. Outside his window, green leaves on the bushes curled in the heat. He looked at the receiver and barely touched the re-dial button. A series of tones, half a ring, and someone picked up the other end. “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice, heavy and dark. “Louie?”

            It was Brenna. Finley could tell immediately, but he still asked, “May I speak to Brenna Forbes, please?”

            Four heartbeats of silence. “Finley?” she said. “Is that you?”

            Yes. It’s me.

            “Hello?”

            “Yes,” he said. “It’s me.”

            “Where are you?” she asked. “Are you in town? What’s up? How are you?” Her voice was high-pitched, but then she paused, and her tone fell back to the same somber timbre she had answered the phone with. “Why are you calling?”

            “I just got to thinking about you.”

            “Oh,” she said.

            That was it? All these years, and it came down to oh? “So,” he said. “How are you?”

            “Good.” She took a breath. “So where’ve you been all this time?”

            “Here. I’ve never been anywhere else. Why haven’t you called?”

            “I didn’t want to.”

            “Oh.” After all these years, that’s what it came down to. He licked his lips. “Listen. How about if we get together?”

            “Why?”

            “I’d like to see you.”

            “I don’t think so, Finley.”

            “We could get together for just a few minutes and laugh about.” He licked his lips again. “Everything.”

            From the phone there came a silence like a new dam – he could feel the pressure building against his ear. “Okay,” she said at last. “I guess that’d be okay.”

            A baby started crying behind her.

            “Look, Finley,” she said. “I’ve got to go. But, yeah, I guess you can come on out.”

            “Okay,” he said. “Sunday?”

            “No! Monday. Monday’s better. Make it Monday during the day.” She hung up.

            Grinning, he put down the phone. But then he though, where? He hadn’t even asked where she was living. Well, if she were still at the same number, he could figure she was still at the same place on the reservation.

            Saturday and Sunday passed much more slowly than usual – anticipation always played havoc with Finley’s sense of time – but finally Monday came. After showering and dressing in nice casual clothes, Finley was heading out the door before eight in the morning. He stopped. What if she had made him wait till today because she wanted somebody out of the house? The fact that she had a baby ought to tell him something. Discretion might be advised for here. Maybe he shouldn’t have even called her.

            But he had – and however flexible the future might be, the past couldn’t be undone. He decided to wait and give anyone that needed it, time to get out of the house.

            He went into his bedroom, and from the deepest recesses of the trunk in his closet pulled a wooden box crammed with memorabilia. Like an archeologist sifting through years, he rummaged through the box until he uncovered some prehistoric letters he had never thrown away. Among those, he found the ones from her. He unfolded the one on top, and the first thing to catch his eye was her closing. “Yours till the end of time,” she had written in her big, round script.

            He refolded the letter without reading it and put it away again. Maybe it would be best not to go, just to let sleeping dogs lie. But, no. He had already told her he’d come. Besides. He was curious to see just how much common ground, if any, there was between memory and reality – how much the past diverged from the real world if left alone for too long.

            A couple of hours later, his roadster purred along the highway, the fresh wind tugging at his cap. It’d been a long time since he’d gotten out of the city, and he enjoyed the sun and the bowl of the sky. Cactus and scrubby hills marched up to him, then fell behind as he zoomed past. The dirt road that her house was on had been graveled since his last visit, but the same scattered, adobe-walled houses kept sentry. The land between the mountains still seemed to roll flat, stretched thin, for hundreds of miles. Houses were so few and far apart they made no impression on the landscape. Even driving in the midst of the People, it was as if no one were there at all.

            Brenna’s house was the same. All the others he had passed were adobe construction with flat roofs, but hers was brick with a sloping top. That was the only difference in the houses, though. Her yard was as bare as her neighbors’. One lone mesquite tree curled upward next to the road. A saguaro cactus stood as straight as a palace guard next to the door, and at the end of the house sat the obligatory junk truck, propped up on concrete blocks, its tires gone, its paint disintegrating under the desert sun.

            Finley pulled into the yard. As he got out of his car, a spotted dog came ambling around the corner of the house. “Mihstol,” Finley called, squatting and snapping his fingers. The name was a joke on Brenna’s part: it meant ‘cat’ in O’odham. The old hound looked in his direction; it sniffed the air; it made a feeble attempt at wagging its tail. It even seemed to smile as it tottered toward him.

            But then another cur came tearing around the corner, barking savagely, almost bowling over the older dog. Finley raised his cane in defense, but the dog stopped short and stood stiff-legged, barking as rapidly as a machine gun. Another joined it, and then others, till there were finally about six dogs in the yard, all centered on Finley like magnets on iron, all raising a ruckus. Even Mihstol was caught up in the excitement and began howling.

            Not an auspicious beginning, Finley thought.

            As always, the door of the house stood open; within its shadow a figure appeared. “Gogogs!” she yelled. Most of the dogs immediately shut up and began slinking back around the corner, but Mihstol, now that he had been started, was the most adamant in defense of the house, and kept up his howls. Brenna stepped out of the doorway and snapped a dish towel at the dog. “Shut up!” Mihstol slunk away.

            She was as dark-haired and clear-eyed as the last time Finley had seen her, but she had put on weight: her breasts had grown larger; her hips had gotten thicker. She was definitely heavier than the mannequin had seemed, but she was still well-proportioned and didn’t look bad at all.

            She stood in the yard, drying her hands with the towel, watching him. Her skirt hung full and long and as white as the morning sun. Finally, she said, “Finley.”

            “Sha p wa, Brenna?” he asked, surprising himself that he still remembered any of the O’odham she had taught him.

            “Pi has,” she replied, as if it had been only yesterday that they had last seen each other. “Come on in.” She led the way into the house.

            As Finley crossed the threshold, a sense of reverse déjà vu swept over him: he knew he had been here before, but none of it seemed familiar. The walls and doors and windows were all in the right places, but he had no sense of having ever seen them before. On the doorframe into the kitchen, a piece was still missing where Brenna’s brother had hacked it out with a butcher knife in a drunken rage, but it was like a story Finley had been told instead of having been a part of. The smell of the house was as subtle and diffuse as ever, chilies and beer, beans and cabbage, but still it was somehow different than it had been before.

            The accumulations of Brenna’s life didn’t seem to have changed that much: the curtains on the windows were colored differently, but the same framed reprints of mountain vistas hung on the walls. The plaster on the ceiling may have been a little more yellow, and the linoleum on the floor a bit more worn, but the only things really new and unfamiliar were the two children who peered around corners at him, the boy in tiny overalls and clunking boots, the girl in an outfit the miniature of her mother’s. Then he noticed the other things: the boots, the jeans, a shape-losing cowboy hat the size of Texas.

            “Your husband at work?” Finley asked.

            Brenna dropped her dish towel over the arm of a chair, swirled her long hair around her with a sweep of her head, and sat in the middle of the sofa. The girl crawled up and sat beside her. “He isn’t my husband and he isn’t at work,” Brenna said., “but he’s out of the house. Sit down.” She pulled the girl into her lap.

            Finley took the seat he always had before. The easy chair seemed to remember him – it fit him like a pair of well-worn shoes – but he couldn’t tell if the chair molded to him or he to it. He dropped his cap on the floor beside him.

            A heavy, ornate crucifix hung on the wall over Brenna’s head; in the stark light of the morning, the blood seemed too fresh. “So,” Finley ventured. “Where’s your mother?” His first meeting with Mrs. Forbes had been quiet and full of darting glances, and his interpretation of her silence as a personal objection to him had proven all too correct.

            Brenna nodded toward a doorway. “She’s in the kitchen. With the baby.” A physical sense of movement came from the other room.

            “She didn’t want to see me.” He watched the open door, leery of any sign of the enemy.

            “It isn’t that at all.” Brenna shook her head, but the quiet that formed between them told him that that was it exactly.

            “So,” he said. “The reason I thought about you.” He suddenly felt guilty, as if he shouldn’t have needed an excuse to think about her. “There was this mannequin, you see. In this store window. And it looked exactly like you. You never posed for anything like that, did you?”

            Her smile settled into more of a smirk. “You saying what reminded you of me was a dummy?”

            He flushed. “You know what I mean.”

            “No.” She shook her head. “I never posed. It must have been a sign from God. Or a guilty conscience. Maybe heatstroke.”

            The ceiling seemed to be getting closer. The room narrowed. “Did you ever finish your math degree?” His hands busied themselves with his stick.

            She looked away, out the open door. “Nope.”

            There was nothing outside the door but heat and sand with an occasional dog ambling past. “Why not?” he asked.

            She shrugged. “Why should I? What was there to do with a degree once I got it? Except get dragged even deeper into a world I didn’t really care about.”

            “I thought you wanted to teach,” he said. “Here. On the reservation. The children.” Of course, if she didn’t want academic knowledge for herself, why should she want to spread it to children? A breeze stirred through the open door, encouraging sand to settle inside. A well-worn broom stood in one corner. “What were you doing your thesis on, anyway?” Finley asked in a low voice.

            “The invention of zero.”

            “Zero?”

            “By East Indians – around 680.” A dog had wandered in. Brenna hissed at it, and it went back out. A raven glided past the door and landed in the yard. “I got to thinking,” Brenna said in a voice as smooth as steel, “about lots of things while doing research on nothing. Like how human beings had to invent zero. There’s no nothing in nature. Zero is a total fabrication. How could I spend years on something that didn’t even exist? How could I teach nothing to children? Somehow I don’t think the school board would appreciate me telling our daughters and sons that Europeans gave us nothing.” For a long time neither of them spoke; neither moved. Finally, she cocked her head at him and asked, “So. What do you do now?”

            “I’m a gigolo,” he said blithely. “My woman works Miracle Mile every other weekend.”

            She guffawed. “Liar!” she cried, and they both laughed. She clutched her girl; he gripped his cane.

            “I see,” Brenna said after a while, “that you  still carry that stupid stick.” Her voice had softened again. “I never understood why you did that.”

            His fingers traced the fading paint of Mexican serpents writhing along the cane. “Because no one else does.”

            “It’s just an affectation then?”

            He shrugged casually, as if listening to a judge who had no power to sentence him. “If you like.”

            Another tiny face peered over the arm of the couch. Brenna saw it and patted the cushion next to her, but the boy ducked away.

            “How many do you have?” Finley asked.

            “Just three.”

            “In five years? Quite a record.”

            She shook her head. “You should see some of the women around here. Linda next door has had five in three years.”

            Finely frowned. “Thirty-six months isn’t long enough.” His gaze wandered around the room while he did a little mental juggling. “It’d take forty-five months at the minimum.”

            “If you say so.” She smiled slightly.

            He shifted in the chair and gripped his cane more tightly. “What’s the fellow who’s living with you like?”

            Her smile waned. “Oh, you know. Louie’s a man. What else can I say?”

            “He’s Indian?” Finley detested people saying ‘He’s an Indian?’ as if ‘Indian’ weren’t an adjective.

            “Just half,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand a whole one. It’d be too much competition.”

            “What does he do?” Finley crossed his legs, laying one ankle on the other knee.

            Brenna played with her girl’s toes; the child squirmed with delight. “He drives a school bus when I can get him to do anything.”

            From the kitchen came a sound of pots rattling. Finley asked, “Do you love him?”

            The glare in Brenna’s eyes flared deep and sudden. “Of course I don’t love him,” she said. “I don’t need to. He’s given me children – nothing else is important.”

            Finley teetered on the edge of a deep, dry arroyo. He pinwheeled his conversational arms and fell back onto an old ploy they had both used when they were dating. “So. Want to dance?” If the talk took an unexpected turn, or if feelings were hurt, it was their way of wrenching the subject back onto something they both understood.

            And it worked again. Brenna smiled. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t dance anymore.”

            “Me either,” Finley confessed. “How about something else then? I was wondering if you’d like to go hot-air ballooning.”

            “What?”

            “You know. Up in a balloon. See the valley from a new perspective. We could even take the kids. They’d love it.”

            Her eyes lost their focus; the wrist of the hand around the baby went limp; and her lips parted, showing the barest glint of teeth. She looked back at him again, looking right through to the very back of his eyes. “You know,” she said, “at one time, I thought I knew you. I thought we knew who each other was. Now I see we never even had a clue.”

            He colored under her stare. “I’m just an ordinary guy.”

            “What’s ordinary?” she asked. Her voice had taken on its hard edge again. “There’s no such thing.” She kept staring at him. “Especially to someone like you: a man convinced of his own infallibility.” Her eyes were like thunder solidified. “You have no idea,” she said. “You can’t begin to imagine how much I hate you.”

            His heart stopped.

            “Or even why,” she said.

            He swallowed as best he could. His throat felt as dry as the yard outside. In the kitchen, a baby began crying. Finley expected Brenna to go to it – hoped she would, really – but she didn’t stir. She was playing with the child in her arms, her eyes not coming near Finley’s. From the other room came the same soothing sounds he remembered his own grandmother making with his own brother and sisters. In a few minutes, the crying stopped.

            “No, Finley,” Brenna said, her voice soft again and the barest trace of a smile dancing over her lips. “No hot-air rides for us. I want my babies to keep their feet on the ground.” She gave her head a small shake, and seismic ripple ran through her long hair. “The last time I let you make me feel like I was flying, I ended up falling too far. Now I’m going to make sure that my babies don’t ever leave the Earth.”

            For the first time, the girl sitting in Brenna’s lap – the girl whose name Finley had never been told – looked up at him. Her eyes were as black and deep as her mother’s, and Finley felt himself caught in a riptide as old and as dark as the world, an undertow he couldn’t swim against because he had no idea which way he should be going.

* * *