MONDAY: Becoming Louis

BY R. A. LUCAS

Copyright is held by the author.

LOUIS, OR Louie to his family, and Lou to a tight circle of friends, lived a measured life. A life of staircase math, counting telephone poles, the number of pickets in a neighbour’s fence, the click-clacking of railcar wheels over rail joints when he took the commuter that stopped at the top of his street to his monthly checkup at a family clinic one stop west. Four hundred and eighteen, if anyone asked.

It was his father who instilled in him the joy of counting everything. Sitting at the breakfast table waiting for toast, his father would count the six teaspoons of coffee being dumped into the basket.

“How many cornflakes will you eat this morning?” he would ask Louis and Louis never knew until one morning he dumped them out, counted each one and put them back in the bowl before adding the milk. He began keeping notes. Three hundred and four on Monday, 298 on Tuesday. Louis became hooked, embracing an addiction he enjoyed the rest of his life, which amounted to 287,982 sunrises and sunsets, three marriages, eight dogs, nine cats and regrettably, no children.

“That’s OK. Zero is a number too.”

I came to know him late in his life. Bored with the scientific article I needed to finish writing, I went jogging. I took a break in a downtown park before attempting the hill back up to my home. I had closed my eyes and a few minutes later a shuffling noise made me open them just as a well-dressed elderly gentleman stopped in front of me and said, “Twenty-eight.”

“Yes. Exactly. How did you know?”]

“I started counting at the entrance,” he said, “and this is the twenty-eighth bench on this path.”

 I started laughing, which caused the man to give me an angry look.

 “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me. It’s my birthday today. Twenty-eight. I

thought…” He started laughing too. “My name is Ronald. Ron.”

 “Come on, Ronald, I’ll buy you a coffee and a piece of cake. For your birthday. My name is Louis.”

Two years, two months and 18 days passed before Louis said I could call him Lou. I knew I had been welcomed into a very special friendship and we became good pals. Our age and activity levels were different enough that we didn’t hang out, but our paths would cross by accident or arrangement, and each encounter seemed to end with coffee and cake.

 “Chocolate cake nine times, carrot eight, lemon poppyseed 12 times and a fudge brownie once,” he said as I washed down the brownie with my second cup of coffee. I was about to ask how many coffees when he said, “Fifty-four,” as if reading my mind.

 “My father said the proper temperature for coffee was when the water boiled and the kettle whistled in the key of C. Every noise has a frequency,” Lou loved to explain things. “It’s just a fancy word for the number of times it vibrates in a single second. Middle C has a frequency of 261,” he paused, “point six three.” And he smiled.

Lou began to hum, adjusting the pitch until he hit Middle C. It didn’t sound like a kettle, but the sweet noise he made touched a place in my heart.

We shared a common passion for airplanes. Mine was the kind born of a desire to learn how to fly. His was as a test pilot in his twenties. We stumbled into the topic when discussing what the air force should buy to renew its fleet and I joked by mentioning the Avro Arrow. “If only,” he replied. “I knew the Canuck, the CF-100, but not as a test pilot. Fully loaded it weighed 36,000 pounds at its maximum takeoff weight.” I tried to make the conversion.

 “We use kilograms now.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “I was speaking in the vernacular of the era. Full up 16,329 kilos. They built 692 of them. First flew January 19, 1950.”

A few months later, perhaps 118 days, after coffee and a far too generous slice of Boston

Cream Pie, Lou turned his head and looked directly at me, and I hoped he might tell me more about his life as a test pilot, but he remained silent, the pause in conversation a little longer than usual. “One hundred and eighty,” he said and then looked past me and gently and slowly closed his eyes as if weighing the meaning of the number.

“Pounds? Kilos? Flights?”

“Days. I’ve been given six months, 180 days. Three full moons.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m dying in the key of C.” He looked at me for a moment, and I nodded letting him know I understood. “I’ve been up and down for a few months,” he paused again. “Good days, bad days, lately a trend of more horrible days. You want the exact count?” I shook my head.

“How about another coffee?” I asked.

“How about we have a drink?”

The leather seats at one of Lou’s old haunts were lined with miniature cracks like the skin on his hands and face. The Scotch didn’t improve the conversation, but it was clear Lou had figured it out, counted and calculated the available options and concluded if it was terminal he wouldn’t bother to get in the way of progress.

“How the hell can you call this progress?” I was angry. I didn’t have a lot of friends and of them all, I knew I would miss him the most.

“The cancer will progress until the point I will not. There’s no argument there my young

friend.” He never used my name.

***

Fourteen days after the funeral a package arrived containing his collection of notebooks; the newest labelled Pills. A note in Lou’s steady hand thanked me for my time and friendship and for caring for his remarkable yet strange life in numbers. One, much smaller and much older was his logbook. All the flights, destinations, takeoff and landing times. Forty-eight different types. His notebook on Parks listed their names alphabetically followed by the number of paths, lamps and benches, trees listed by kind and whether it had a playground. In the one labelled Bedtime, I expected a record of his sleep habits but discovered Lou had remained a true and adept lover almost to the very end, each encounter entered in surprising detail. I felt oddly ashamed to be reading the most intimate moments in the lives of two people I hardly knew.  Fifty-six minutes later my wife poked her head in.

“You OK Ronnie?”

“Lou’s notebooks. Fifteen. A total of 2,250 pages, 47 of them blank. All of them with a date and time of entry at the top. Six different pens based on the colour of the ink or the width of the nib. None written in ballpoint.” I stopped. My eyes widened to the point they hurt. I felt strange and I never feel strange. I’m a science writer.

“So . . . you want a coffee . . . Louis?” She smiled.

“You know me well enough to call me Lou.”

We laughed and I began to let go of my friend.

In the port a ship signalled it was casting off. Its horn sounded once, twice then a third long blow. Each blast a perfect Middle C, which carried across the busy city and up the hill on the cool evening air.

I began to wonder about the speed of sound.

***

Montreal-born R. A. Lucas has had his short stories and poetry published in Canada, England, the United States, India, Norway and Australia. His 2020 memoir, The Strathmore Stories, was a finalist in the 2021 Eyelands Book Awards, an English-language literary competition based in Europe. He is working on his fifth poetry collection and recently completed work on a paranormal novel. https://ralucaswriter.com