Gematria

The Hebrew dictionary was his passport to another land.

“If I had a photographic memory,” he thought, “I’d have but to glance at it—but where would be the merit in that?”

And he felt a kind of self-indulgence, a sumptuousness, in fact, reading through the words, knowing he could not retain them, that they were his for the moment only.

“There is that of cultism, of the Mandarin, in the perusal of the ancient, accidental text,” he thought. “For though it has come down to us in this form, the form was, we would have to say, arbitrarily fixed, and errors in the typography have been canonized and studied.

“On the one hand, could we not extrapolate truth from an error? Gregor Mendel did. And, on the other hand, might we not be as likely to arrive at nonsense, and, aha, are these two cases not in fact equally likely outcomes of the study of Scripture?

“Having arrived at that, how have I spent my morning?

“Might we not study any text? And where would that lead us?”

He signed. He swung his legs down to the floor and looked at the floor, and then up at the bars. Cast into the bars was the manufacturer’s mark: “Ginnett and Hubbard. Penal Engineering. Booth, Ohio.”

“Let us, then,” he thought, “lay this out upon a grid.”

He counted the letters and found forty-two.

“If we add in the punctuation marks, we arrive at fifty, which is five by ten, and may be arrayed thus:

The word NALXE presented itself to him. Turning the first block through ninety degrees, he saw the word AGROO in the second square, and his mind caught upon the phrase “The letters of the First Square suggest themselves to me as more probably containing reason than those of the Second Square. But perhaps this is a trick played on me by the inevitable connotation of hierarchy in the terms ‘first’ and ‘second’ square.” He studied the squares, and rotated them to form diamonds, yielding:

And he realized he had come to suppose and expect that the squares would resolve themselves, and that even this consciousness would not dispel a conviction that they would do so.

He began to translate.

“God, the (thy?)—xnn, ruae—Dobent? Dabent? …”

It would require work and, obviously, dedication, but given both, meaning would, he was sure, be found.

“But why,” said the voice of reason, or, as he thought of it, “a detractor,” “would a message be impressed into the bars of a cell.

“There are two reasons,” he thought.

“One: It seems that any science is the attempt to wrest meaning from the superficially random. All great advances in the fields of …,” he thought, “medicine, chemistry, and …” He was reluctant to include physics, as he was unsure of precisely in what it consisted. “Surely, physics, though, whatever it contains, must advance through the connection of previously unconnected facts, else what is the good of an equation?

“Most of human thought, in fact,” he thought, “is the attempt to find a hidden meaning. My second assertion is this: If the meaning does not exist, then there is meaning in our attempts to create it.”

“This assertion on my part is either very wise or foolish,” he thought. “What of a grain of sand? And what fool would be fool enough to study it? And yet. And yet … And yet there exists such things as crystals, and many have learned from them.

“Now: four men went into the garden, we are told—Azai, Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiba. One became mad, one took his own life, one became a heretic, and one, Akiba, went on to glory as a Teacher of the Soul. Now: Could that very garden be contained in these squares? Why not?

“Or else, in what did it consist, save in the arbitrary arrangement of matter which they believed would hold a secret.

“Will I say that these men, Hubbard and Ginnett, were put on the earth to place their names upon that bar to instruct me? No. I will not. Will I say I was not put upon the earth to find a meaning in their names? I cannot discount it. For is that not the enterprise in which I find myself? And, if it’s ludicrous, how much more so is my incarceration for a crime simple right reason knows me innocent of having done? And if I may assume that it is not ridiculous to state that there may be reason in the words on the bars, then may I not extrapolate that it is not beyond the realm of reason to assume that those men had been put upon earth in part to furnish the material of my investigations?

“Now, I know that to be false, for I cannot fix myself as the center of a universe which, aeons ago, gave rise not only to the alphabet but to my disposition to reorder it in equilateral components. There is nothing in that—I cannot go that far.

“But now I am lost, and to what must I cling in order to both navigate through and gain instruction in the Garden?

“What if I were to look once again at the names in the bars, and to discover that I had misread them?

“What if it pleased God to keep me in this cell for sixty years, and I employed the time to create a cosmology based on the meaning in those words, and after that time I looked once again and found I had mistranscribed them, and all of my elaborations were based upon error—would not that error have meaning? And if so, meaning sufficient to justify my—we must say—misguided efforts?

“And if the error were not misguided, of what use the original words upon the bars? And if they have no worth, why do I find myself studying them?

“Is it, then, the exercise of my capacity that pleases me, and the notion that it has significance merely the goad to that pleasure?

“Perhaps it is our gift to reason merely to the extent which would outwit the beasts of the field, and any further or greater employ or elaboration of that gift must lead to evil.

“And then, perhaps, it is the purpose of what we have come to call ‘pursuit of knowledge’ to countervail the exercise of that evil propensity. Could that be the case? And then, perhaps, it is the meaning of ‘knowledge,’ ‘to do no evil,’ and that is why it pleases.

“For how can we posit an ultimate Good, or own an Improvement, as we know we are both bound to die and likely to inflict misery during our life?

“But surely there are medical advances which have lessened pain and lengthened our lives.

“But again, perhaps, if we would follow out thoughts to the end, it is a greater good to pass quickly and be done with it. Can we say that without demeaning that force which gave us our life?

“Would it be better if those two deluded men, Ginnett and Hubbard, who divert themselves in what they choose to style ‘Penal Engineering’—would it be better if they had not lived? If they had not lived, I would not be drawn to this line of reasoning. Has this reasoning made me better, or worse?

“Better or worse for what?

“To what end?

“Beth-Lechem,” he said. “House of bread. The breadhouse. Certainly the home of a baker. Elizabeth, God-is-my-pact. Daniel, God-is-my-judge. Bethel, the house of God. Salem, Peace.” He looked at the Hebrew primer in his hand.

“‘Who rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered.’”