When they cross in our sky, they fit perfect—our sun and moon—despite the many million miles where they each could have been. And the earth is set a just-so distance—she does not boil, only sometimes glaciates. She must know that old gravitational secret, the number that keeps us, and by which we do not collapse or explode.

+==+==+

At seven years old, Ewan was given a special test. A small boy whose boyishness was often forced, a kind of play-acting he indulged around other children. With big eyes that seemed to encapsulate as much as see. He would remember nothing about the test except the number 920, a vertiginous sum for him at the time, and yet they said his performance proved an exceptional talent in mathematics: a full grade ahead in his understanding, perhaps more. He could complete the basic problems given during a lesson with an adult-like fluency. He could acquire skill at higher concepts like long division after no more than a cursory exposure. They said it was akin to a musical prodigy playing a song after hearing it only once.

Following a brief romance with dinosaurs, every boy’s birthright, and then cowboys, he obsessed over ghosts and outer space, as if he’d decided he must explore the very edges and then map his way back to the center. He believed their house was haunted and the neighbor’s and, down the street, little Becky’s where he sometimes went to play. From his bedroom window he watched the night sky for alien ships, pretending that a simple airplane with its blinking guide-lights was a visitor from another planet deep in the loneliness of space.

At a petting zoo, a baby goat took a shine to him and Ewan sat cross-legged in the straw petting the kid’s wiry hair. He stared into those slot-like eyes, strange and yellow, and the two of them held there as if, as much as they’d peered in their short lives, this was the first mind to peer back.

At nine years old, Ewan was struck by a blue F150 with Montana plates out in front of their house. It did not scare him until years later, remembering. He broke his wrist and cracked a rib on contact with the pavement but the doctor was pleased that he had not bonked his head. There are tests one does not even know they are taking.

+==+==+

When he was fourteen years old, Ewan beat up a boy in the grade below him. This boy had called his younger sister Gwen a slut but because Ewan was not allowed to say the word, it was difficult to explain at first. He’d broken the boy’s wrist when he fell on him and the ferocity implied by this led to accusations that Ewan was a bully. But it didn’t bother him to be called a name unless it was true. He got suspended for a week and his mother asked him through fragile tears if he had an anger problem. His father did not know what to say and simply stood in the room putting his hands in his pockets and taking them back out.

Ewan was good on the computer, it all made sense to him. Devices of all kinds. He played with the combination lock on the liquor cabinet until he found the subtle click of the key: 0920. But he did not drink anything, outsmarting the secret had been his goal. He had a six-year-old calendar on his wall because all the dates aligned with the same weekday as the year he was in. He got all As but how could those be both important and easy to obtain.

He saw an odd light outside of his bedroom window and sat watching it in the quiet hours before dawn. A pale slot glowing high above their neighborhood as though a single of the day’s thousand lights was still switched on or a panel of the night sky had fallen loose. And then all at once it was gone. When he told a friend of his, they didn’t know what to say and so he kept it to himself.

He tutored a girl above him in math and she was not the prettiest girl in the school but she might as well have been and she kissed him in the book rows and pressed her breasts against him. Behind her, he could read the spine of a single book: The Trial by Franz Kafka. He didn’t tell his friends about the kiss though they taunted him in envy about the time he spent with her.  He wondered if he would have to beat them up and if he could.

+==+==+

When he was twenty-five years old, Ewan moved to Texas. There was more sky than he’d realized. He worked for a company that designed airplane parts and he had a cubicle close enough to the vending machine he could hear its electricity. Each morning before the drive, he sat with a mug of coffee and did mental math as a kind of meditation. The numbers clicked smoothly together like filling a jar with beads and when the jar was full, he stood from the table and headed out.

A neighbor warned him of ghosts in his apartment. On a few solitary nights he sat in the quiet with a candle and asked the ghost to give him a sign. One evening, the candle flared and then extinguished itself and he spent hours looking for a draft or a gas leak. Much of his world he saw in contradiction and superposition, missing a fifth axis he would find along the way.

He met Gwen, not his sister but a pretty girl who was the platonic date of a female co-worker at the Christmas Party. He’d been by himself now for months except for game night with his colleagues and so he multiplied 13 by 47 in his head and divided it down until it was a trace behind the decimal point and then he asked her if she would like to meet him for a coffee downtown.

+==+==+

He was up for another promotion and he’d promised Gwen he would find something else before this happened. It was not interesting work and there was no conceivable future in which it might be. Everyone there was good at math. He told Gwen he’d only be able to figure out his next steps if he quit and she had always wanted to live in Montana.

They moved to Montana just before his 32nd birthday. He’d been smart with his money and the houses were cheap and so they lived well on just Gwen’s income for a while. They found an eleven-year-old calendar in a closet in which all the dates lined up with the weekdays of the year they were in. One night they sat out on the porch with the stars and a candle burning and she told him that she was pregnant. Ewan cried for the first time since Uncle Dale, his mom’s sister’s husband, died of prostate cancer. The two cries linked behind the scenes, a balancing out. The numbers confirmed that life was in fact beautiful and fragile and deftly weighted like a length of thick-gauge wire teetering on one’s fingertip.

New neighbors moved in next door to them there on Glen Avenue. It took Ewan a week or two to realize, but the man was, in fact, a guy they’d lived down the street from back in Texas. They’d waved to each other a few times though they never met. There were no socioeconomic explanations for this; they’d simply moved from Ewan and Gwen’s very block and into the house beside theirs in Montana. Carl was his name.

They drank beer together in Ewan’s backyard. Though the sense of familiarity was artificial, Ewan was drawn to them by the angularity and scope of chance. Coming out onto the porch, into the oil painting light of the tiki torches, Ewan could feel this moment as if it were a suture binding his many possible lives.

Carl was an okay guy and they got along. Ewan could let politics shear around him as if he were a foil in a wind tunnel. He could watch sports and make good predictions and he had moments of wit though he had to assemble them over time.

Carl got Ewan hired in at his accounting firm, the small branch dedicated to the intermountain West, and Ewan did forensic analyses, providing reports for lawsuits. His first project was on the massive Lytle Ranch in Idaho. He was good at the work. It was almost interesting at times. They were kind enough to move the vending machine away from his desk.

Little Dale ran into the street when he was old enough to walk. A split second unsupervised and he darted as fast as his toddler legs could carry him. A pickup braked and squealed and finally carried on with the driver waving in apology and Dale unscathed. It was a blue F150 with a bumper sticker that called for less honkin’, more tonkin’. Ewan  looked up and down the street and for a moment he was a child with a broken wrist.

+==+==+

Carl’s wife left him. It wasn’t clear exactly why. Carl said she didn’t like him anymore and he guessed that that was her prerogative, but he didn’t really mean it. A while later, at the company Christmas party, he groped Gwen as she was coming out of the bathroom. He’d had far too much bourbon and he’d unbuttoned his top button and the sweat was shiny on his chest. She didn’t tell Ewan until the next day but she was quiet on the car ride home and Ewan wasn’t sure if he’d done something wrong, though it was usually the thing he hadn’t done and he could rarely see that unless he was told direct. 

Ewan found out about it at breakfast the next day, leftover osso buco with an egg. He stood from the table and found his shoes to walk next door and possibly beat up his neighbor and colleague. Gwen stopped him, though, arguing that it wasn’t worth trouble at work. She asked him if he had an anger problem though he thought he was behaving within reason. He let her convince him to say nothing about it at all. She said they should treat it as a one-off and see if anything else happened.

+==+==+

Once Dale was in middle school, Gwen filed for divorce. And not long after the split, Ewan discovered that she was sleeping with Carl. Carl had cut the booze and lost weight and was, one had to admit, more handsome than Ewan. That wasn’t all there was to it, of course. He wondered if the two of them thought it fate that they’d flung themselves across the country and found each other anyway. Somehow it was Ewan’s job to tell their son and he found the boy in his room reading The Trial by Franz Kafka and, to Dale, there was little in the moment that was less random than the events of the book.

Ewan spent an entire weekend planning Carl’s murder. It was cathartic but it never happened and thereafter he felt privately embarrassed that he hadn’t seen it through. Carl’s boss offered him a salary of $192,000 to stay but he wouldn’t fire Carl and it just wasn’t enough. So, Ewan moved to a small house and started a one-man firm. He brought some of his old clients and found a few more and he charged three times what they’d been paying him for his hours.

Ewan took Dale to the park and they flew a kite and Dale asked why he and mom never had another kid. He told him that they tried but it just never happened. His restraint was flimsy from spending his nights alone again after years and he told Dale that very little of his life had gone according to any sort of plan at all. They found a perfect vein of wind and the kite hung there improbably. After a while, it unnerved them and Dale gave the string a tug.

+==+==+

Ewan moved to California to be nearer Dale’s college—not on top of him but a half-hour away, out by Lytle Creek. He dated a woman, for a while, who seemed interested in him and then when she wasn’t he let her move on. His son liked him and made time to have lunch or come get a burger off the grill. Gwen and Carl were no longer together and Ewan spent a weekend visualizing a conversation with Gwen in which he offered that they work it out together and resume their marriage. It never happened and thereafter he felt privately embarrassed that it almost had.

He studied differential equations and topology in his spare time. There was a ghost in the numbers somewhere, a shape he could almost make in his mind that held all of his many pieces. He did, every morning, one hundred squats, one hundred push-ups, and one hundred sit-ups and on weekends he went for long hikes with his dog. One day they came across a very particular-looking kite tangled in the thorny brush and he sat there with his dog until he remembered it.

+==+==+

When Dale graduated from college he moved to the East Coast and Ewan moved back to his hometown. He didn’t much care where he lived anymore. The place seemed smaller and sadder than it did when he was growing up. He re-connected with a couple guys from high school and he felt like an alien species drinking beer on Glen’s back porch in the light of his tiki torches. But he went anyway because he was welcome there if not entirely understood. 

On a flight, Ewan sat next to a prominent topologist, a man celebrated in his small world and whose work Ewan had read. They talked about the no-wandering-domain theorem and the man seemed first thrilled by his recognition and conceptual understanding and then perplexed when Ewan asked whether one’s life was a rational map.

His ex-wife Gwen had moved back to Texas and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ewan went out to visit her and stayed for a while. He took care of her during her mastectomy and he slept on the pull-out bed while he nursed her through recovery. She apologized and he forgave her. Once she was mobile, Gwen made osso buco and playfully argued with him when he asserted it was the same meal from that breakfast many years ago. Life seemed an epiphenomenon of the past. Any room is a cell if you cannot walk out.

+==+==+

He couldn’t tolerate the cold as well as he used to so he moved to Georgia. He bought a two bedroom condominium and he bought a ridge-top cabin in the hills. He would sit on the narrow back porch of the latter and watch the night sky transpire over the valley. It seemed impossible that the ancients would know the names of dozens of stars and track night-to-night their most subtle movements. Teach their children who’d then teach their own. How valuable it is to hold a truth that can’t be written down. In the fall he chose a random star—one that caught his eye, subtly yellow, but not the brightest he could see—and decided that he’d follow its pattern. He’d use no tools but a pen and a pad and a ruler and his eyes.

He came up with his own system for measuring the position of this star from the silhouetted peak of Bachelor Hill. He anchored his chair to the porch and held his head just so to take note of coordinates and times. He tabulated the degrees and minutes of its arc without ever naming it and he had not thought to account for the way it brightened in winter. Once the numbers found their way back to his first note, he began to study the star as if waiting for it to deviate. For even a moment might it stumble from its immemorial ray or would the many parts of the universe always slide as they ought.

Though he couldn’t prove it, no astrolabe or telescope or fixed camera, one December night, clear as ice, the star did step to the side. By his math it moved two sixtieths of a degree off-track and then returned, as if in its travels there was an obstacle it had to tiptoe around.

One fall he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and he closed up the cabin. He read astronomical books until he determined that his yellowish friend was a star they called Capella. The little goat. He knew exactly where it ought to be without looking.

+==+==+

When Ewan passed, his son spread the old man’s ashes out at the cabin. He did this alone, no brothers or sisters, his mother gone a long time now. Inside, he found four years of his father’s calculations about Capella, a single number circled in red but he didn’t know why. On the refrigerator was a bumper sticker that called for less honkin’, more tonkin’, though his father had done little of either, it seemed. On the small table, like an oversized centerpiece, stood a glass jar of little metal spheres—beads or ball bearings of many sizes. His dad must have picked them up one by one over the years. Dale shook the jar and studied it. He removed a handful and let some of it fall through his fingers. For guessing or remembering or meditating. But then what was this, some anomaly: amid the thousand coeval beads, iterations unchanged, his father had hidden an object that was organic, almost warm. He pulled it free and it was a tiny acorn, no larger than a fingernail.