Prime

He had removed the number where he lived, prying off the digits with a simple kitchen knife he got from room service. B-something…523? Numbers were a kind of theology for him, so he was bothered at first they weren’t a more auspicious 001 or 600, at one extreme or the other of a discrete numerical spectrum, especially since it was the last door in the ship’s living quarters, at one extreme of a long discrete corridor. Then he realized it was just as well—no one would miss a number like B523.

The B was for B Deck, one level above D Deck where the engine room was, four levels below the Promenade and Sun decks where the tourists were—in the bowels of the ocean liner, then, though he didn’t suppose B really stood for bowels. That’s the thing about letters, they aren’t precise, and yet, he raged inwardly, we’ve turned over to them all the meanings, large and small, of our lives. There was no telling when anyone last stayed at this far point of the ship, where the long corridor of wood-browns and nautical blue-green carpeting narrowed and then coiled in on itself like a snake; after stocking the room with food and goods for several days, one morning he checked out at the front desk on the deck above, returned to the room, removed the number, and opened all the way to the outer threshold the stateroom door that now looked like any other wall to anyone on the opposite side. The view from the other end of B Deck’s quarter-mile corridor could barely be called a trick of the eye: People don’t know how to see in numbers let alone think in them.

Permanently moored, the boat hadn’t sailed anywhere in half a century. The sea beyond the porthole was indistinguishable from the sea yesterday and the sea tomorrow, time not demarcated in terms of place or its passage; even numbers need an equation,. The stateroom’s walls were covered with calculations; sequences circled, additions and divisions scrawled their way round the etched deco mirrors preserved from the 1930s when the British liner had crossed the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool and Southampton, and then the Channel to Cherbourg before returning to the States. “One more way fate hates me,” he seethed again, this time out loud, “and loves Mitchell Champlain!” that impostor—