Free The Gift of Numbers by Yōko Ogawa Page B

hurts, take the
medicine the doctor gave us. I'll get you some water."
    "No," he said.
    "You really should," I coaxed. "You don't want it to get infected."
"I said it doesn't hurt."
    He clenched his bandaged fist and rapped it against the desk,
using his good hand to hide the tears welling up in his eyes. This
clearly had nothing to do with the Tigers.
    "Why are you doing that?" I said. "They just finished stitching
you up. What am I supposed to do if you start bleeding again?"
    Tears streamed down his cheeks now. I tried to check whether
blood was soaking through the bandage, but he brushed my hand
away. Cheers erupted from the radio—a two out single.
    "Are you mad because I went out and left you with the Professor?
Or are you embarrassed because you couldn't handle the
knife? Or because you made a mistake in front of the Professor?"
He'd fallen silent again. Kameyama was up at bat.
    " Kuwata has been nearly unhittable.... He's struck out his last
two at bats ... will it be another fastball? ... Here's the windup ...."
    The cheers rose again and again, drowning out the announcer,
but Root seemed indifferent. He sat perfectly still as the tears continued
to roll down his cheeks.
    I realized I had seen two men cry this evening. I had, of course,
seen Root's tears countless times before—as an infant, when he'd
wanted to be held or fed; and later, during tantrums, or when he
lost his grandmother. And, for that matter, at the moment he came
into this world. But these tears were different, and no matter how
I tried to wipe them away, they seemed to flow from a place I
could never reach.
    "Are you mad because the Professor couldn't dress the wound
properly?" I asked at last.
    "No," said Root. He stared at me for a moment and then he
spoke so calmly it seemed as though he had completely regained
control of himself. "I'm mad because you didn't trust him. I'll
never forgive you for that."
    Kameyama hit the second pitch into right center, and Wada
scored from first to end the game. The announcer was shouting
and the roar of the crowd swept over us.
     
    The next day, the Professor and I recopied his note tags. "I wonder
where all this blood came from," he said, checking himself for
a cut.
    "Root, my son, hurt his hand with a knife—but it wasn't serious."
    "Your son? That's terrible! It looks like it bled all over."
    "No, he's just fine, thanks to you."
    "Really? I helped?"
    "Of course. How do you think the blood got on you?"
    I pulled the notes from his suit one by one. Most were covered
with an incomprehensible scrawl of math symbols—as though few
things other than numbers were worth remembering.
    "And when you finished helping Root, you taught me something
important in the waiting room."
    "Something important?"
    "You taught me about triangular numbers, and the formula for
finding the sum of the natural numbers from 1 to 10—something
I could never have imagined, something sublime." I held out the
most important note. "Shall we start with this one?"
    The Professor copied out a new tag and read it quietly to himself.
    "My memory lasts only eighty minutes."

5
    I'm not sure if they were related to his mathematical abilities, but
the Professor had some pretty peculiar talents. For instance, he
could instantly reverse the syllables in a phrase and repeat them
backward. We discovered this one day when Root was struggling to
come up with palindromes for a homework assignment in Japanese.
    "It doesn't make any sense, but it's the same forward and backward:
'A nut for a jar of tuna'—what's that supposed to mean?
Nobody would trade a jar of tuna for a nut."
    "Nut a for natu of jar a trade would dybono," the Professor
murmured.
    "What did you say, Professor?" Root asked.
    "Sorfespro, say you did what?"
    "What are you doing?"
    "Ingdo you are what?" said the Professor.
    "Mom, I think he's gone crazy," Root said.
    "We'd all be crazy if we said things backward." The Professor
sounded a bit sheepish. I asked him how he did it, but he