As we entered the bedroom, the most amazing thing about it, was how much more normal it appeared to be than the other rooms we’d gone into. I was actually a little surprised with everything. It looked like it could be anyone’s bedroom really, if anyone was a 17th century French king, that is. It had a normal bed and bed stands on either side. A well shaped head and foot board. These were actually quite fancy, and ornately decorated, but nothing unusual or strange. There was a fairly elaborate valet at the end near an almost gaudy wardrobe. There was also a nicely cut and decorated vanity mirror atop some drawers that rather looked like a desk. The chair seated beneath it, looked like something that Louis XIV would have sat in. The room all had a baroque feel to it in fact. The wallpaper around the place had a classy paisley pattern to it. The whole bedroom looked like it could have come from the palace of Versailles, with each piece containing enough flourishes to look at for hours. I went to go feel the bed and look around a little, and when I sat on it, it was perhaps the most comfortable bed I’d ever felt, I wanted to lie down on it, just to see what it felt like, and when I did, something rather interesting greeted me.
As I stared up at the ceiling, I saw the most elaborate and lifelike painting I’d ever seen in my life. The painting was very obviously of the girl I’d seen a depiction of just moments ago in the statue. She was sitting down in an open chair with the same very distinctive features she’d had in the statue, including the bent toes. She was in a costume that I could describe as ‘clothed nudity’ meaning that the loose gown she wore was quite light and showed off every part of her body. She looked lovely and actually fairly happy here. Her eyes were directed at something off in the distance, and she sat in a backdrop of an Arcadian landscape. Behind her, was a giant harp. Even among all of the brilliant things I’d already seen today, this was perhaps the most inspiring of all. It really struck out with emotion, not only from the girl, but from the painter. One could tell that the artist’s very soul went into this painting, and that whoever the subject was, wasn’t merely an artistic subject, but the object of his deepest affections. It was actually quite moving, and nearly made me weep to look at it.
“Kelly, you must see this.” I said pointing to the ceiling. She came over and looked up, sitting then lying on the bed next to me.
“Is that the girl from the statue?” She inquired.
“Yes, I said, what do you make of this?”
“Well, it’s brilliant, perhaps the greatest thing in the house so far.” She returned. “Mr. Nido sure had an affinity for this girl. I wish there were a way we could know who she was, or more specifically, who she was to him.”
After staring at the painting for a couple minutes, I decided to see if maybe we could find some of those answers in this very room. I reasoned that this must be the room where Nido spent the most time, more than any other single room, even if he were only sleeping in it mostly, so it must be the closest to him as well. I looked around, and thought to open up the night stands next to the bed. When I opened them, I discovered Nido’s glasses, and a few bottles of ointments and so forth inside. It was a little strange for me to find this, because this seemed to be the first thing Nido had in his house that had been made from a factory. I looked around on the other side, and here I found some books written a few languages, including The Odyssey by Homer in Greek, and The Metamorphosis by Ovid in Latin. Also, there were some books written in Chinese, Russian and two English books, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and The Jungle Book by Kipling. As I searched around further, I found some books in the same language I didn’t understand, except on the cover of the book, was written in English the title Niddish Mathematics. What the word Niddish meant I wasn’t sure, but when I opened the book to look at it, I could see nothing but the letters I’d seen before.
This alphabet was becoming more and more familiar to me, it seemed so simple, and I only saw nine symbols in it, I’d count them again and again, but could make no more out. It looked like there was an ‘x’ and an ‘o’, but I wasn’t sure. Everything else seemed simply like geometric shapes, like a dot, line, triangle, square, double square and a strange double diamond sort of symbol that looked like a linear 8. Sometimes they would run together with curves connecting them, like cursive. I asked Kelly about it, and she was equally as unsure of the meaning of it, save to say she figured that Niddish may just be from Nido’s last name, made into an adjective. As for the mathematical part of this book, there were certainly no discernible numbers, at least not of any numeric system I was familiar with. I asked Kelly about that too, and she said, she figured, like the ancient Greek alphabet, these letters, must have clearly doubled as the letters, she pointed out a few symbols that seemed to be acting as indicators for the mathematics part of things. This was actually really interesting, and I asked Kelly to see if we could perhaps try to figure out the mathematics part of it, that should likely be the easiest thing to decode of this strange language.
We looked through the book and there was a diagram of a circle, with a line half way through the middle, it read –p( )=(?) beneath it, and it became a little clearer what this may have meant. Kelly said that Nido was trying to explain circumference with the obviously different character of ‘p’. Examining it further, Kelly, reasoned that this must be explaining the diameter of the circle and thus the double boxes must somehow represent radius, in this formula, the line represented ‘two’ and the triangle represented diameter. We looked above that and it had the following written p= -(box)/8. We figured this must have meant that p= 22/7, but looking at the symbols, I came to the conclusion that there was something a little odd about everything, then I remembered that there were only eight symbols, so this system must be missing two of the numbers that we were accustomed to. In other words, this was a base eight number system that Nido had probably created and so instead of pi being represented by its normal quantity of 22/7, it would actually mean 26/7 in base eight. I wondered why Nido would try to make this whole thing up, and why he would use base eight instead of the traditional ten base system everyone else knows. I could only guess that Nido wanted to encrypt his work, and he probably found base eight a lot more pragmatic as far as mathematics go.
I began to think about it further and found myself actually agreeing with him. I thought about it, and when it came right down to it, using an eight base system was a lot better. With a base eight system, you would rarely ever have awkward fractions, and it would be a lot easier to understand if we had been born and raised with it. As it stood now, my head was far too ingrained with base ten, to easily learn base eight. I told Kelly about my little discovery, and she said it made a lot of sense and that Mr. Nido must have had a very engineer-like appreciation for the world. She asked me why it would be better to use eight over ten. I explained that the more you divide eight in half, the more you get whole numbers that aren’t fractions. I gave the examples in base eight as follow. 10/2=4, and 4/2=2 and 2/2=1, whereas in base ten 10/2=5, and 5/2=2.5 and 2.5/2=1.25 . Thus base eight is a lot cleaner for most functions, and I would suppose make math a lot easier for anyone who was interested. Even the fractions, I postulated, would be easier to understand and remember. For example, I said, remembering half of ½ of the base eight system would similarly be easier to divide into fractions like .4, .2, and .1 and even .04. Contrast this with base ten and you have .5, .25, .125, and then point .0625, it’s actually quite messy.
Kelly asked, why this would be a more desirable trait for mathematics, to keep it clean like that, and further why do we use the base ten system if it’s inferior? I told her that it’s more desirable because it makes things simpler for the memory, and purer too, and thus it’s easier to do, and comprehend; doing things like exponents and so on would be a lot easier in base eight, and we use the base ten system because that is how many fingers we have, so it makes counting things easier. I further explained that I’d been told we actually changed our number base system a long time ago to ten from twelve. She asked how I knew that, and I explained that the numbers eleven and twelve were distinct from the usual teens like thirteen and fourteen. Also it remained in our language through hints like the words dozen and gross. I also said that computers these days use binary to achieve the same basic purpose as Nido was trying to do here with the more human calculation friendly base eight. Something then struck me looking at these numbers again. Each character had as many points as it was supposed to represent. This meant for example that the number ? was equal to 1, – is 2, ?is three and so on, with the o representing zero. I pointed this out to Kelly, and she thought it was a clever idea for its sheer simplicity.
I decided I’d look at the book more later, but for the time being, I had earlier noticed a box sticking out from under the bed. I slid it out from the bed onto the floor and then hoisted it up on the bed to set it beside me. I could hear some things shuffling around the box when I’d picked it up but I couldn’t see any way to open it. There didn’t appear to be any lid or cover… or cracks at all. The only thing that seemed like it would perhaps get to the contents inside was a small metal circle in the center of one of the sides. The box was painted a dark majestic red, except for the metal circle and on the outside of that was written something else in the language that looked like lutaero:ku tae kutae. Naturally I didn’t know what this meant mathematically or otherwise. I fidgeted with it, but didn’t have any luck except for when I’d stick my finger through the metal hole I could feel the surface beneath it retreat slightly. I fidgeted with it more, and as I did, I finally was able to push the box up and the sides of it slid out in either direction. Inside I found many letters, as I shuffled through them, they were each dated. The dates ran from October of 1949 to December of 1955, and there were perhaps one hundred letters. I told Kelly what I had found, she had busied herself looking through some of Nido’s books, but looked over at me and asked who they were addressed to.
I told her they were all addressed to Frazer, except the last few were addressed to someone named Joy but these last few had been written by Frazer and never sent, it seemed. The others were all written by Joy herself to him. I was extremely eager to read these, I was sure they would provide a clue to Mr. Nido’s life. I started to read one aloud, the first one, and Kelly just sat there and listened intently as I began.
12 October 1949
Dear Frazer,
You made me the happiest girl tonight. I love to dance, and I didn’t know that you were so good at it. Thank you for teaching me how to waltz. I have never felt so pretty as when you said those things to me. I’m so happy you came into my life, and I feel like things are only going to get better from now on for both of us. As you read this letter, know that I am smiling right now just with the thought of you in your lovely tuxedo dressed up like a million dollars… hmmm.
Yours,
Joy
I skimmed through a few and picked out another it read:
25 December 1949
Dear Frazer,
I still can’t believe my luck to have you in my life. The hole I’ve had in my heart before I met you seems to have disappeared, and I can think of nothing better to fill it. I know it has only been a couple of months since we started going steady, but I feel like I could be with you forever and never stop smiling. My mother says she’s never seen me so happy in my whole life, like I just am walking on clouds with everything I do. I think you have helped me with my school work, can you believe it? Thank you for my Christmas gift, where did you get the money for them? I’m not trying to be rude or complain, far from it, I love them. I’ve never had a nicer pair of earrings in my life. I’m still smiling.
Yours,
Joy
Though I was sure Frazer must have had a normal life at one point, and could hardly have escaped being in love at one time or other, this was a very strange thing to actually find the evidence for after he had died.
“Wow!” Kelly exclaimed, “it is always so sweet to hear or read things like that. Read another one.”
“I know, this is very sweet, okay here’s one from about a year later, hold on.”
4 November 1950
Dear Frazer,
School is going well, thank you for asking, I can’t believe how well everything is still working out. Dorothy told me to tell you ‘hello’, so ‘hello’. I can’t believe you’re already in college, I’m so proud of you, and I’ll try to visit you every chance I get. Whenever daddy let’s me use the car, that is. We all miss you, even Rex seems to wonder where you are at times. I love having him around, but he’s no replacement for my one and only frazzled Frazer. I miss you so bad, I know you don’t like it when I call you on the phone, but sometimes I just want to call you and talk for hours. I know I know, I’m a teenage girl and that’s supposedly what we do, but Fraz, I love and miss you more than life itself sometimes, and if I could only hear your deep, strong voice, I’d smile from ear to ear. Well, I’m still smiling.
Yours,
Joy
It was really interesting to see Nido so humanized by this strange little box. Before he just seemed to live in a house of wonders, without any real coherence or meaning behind them, but now there was something else to them. It all made more sense too, with the statue and the painting. Apparently this girl had meant a lot to Frazer. I was curious to see what happened so I picked out another letter and again read aloud with Kelly watching me intently.
18 May 1951
Dear Frazer,
I’m so happy, I still can’t get over the feeling. Whenever I look at my hand, it just seems out of place, but in a good way. I sometimes just stare at it and smile, you always know how to make me do that. I think some of my friends are jealous, whenever I bring it up, Dorothy and Patricia just try to change the subject… hey, some girls are just lucky I guess. I know we’re going to be happy for the rest of our lives. I know it has been a little hard sometimes, but we’ve gotten through it all so far, especially the distance, and we’ll do it again. I love you, and in case you didn’t read that correctly, I love you, I love you, I love you. There, I figure saying it three times we’ll help, and believe me, I’m saying it out loud as I write it too. I’m smiling even wider today than usual, and I look forward to your next letter with wild anticipation.
Yours,
Joy
Apparently, Nido was engaged in his life. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but maybe he was once even married, maybe he had estranged children, or God forbid, children who had died before he did. I couldn’t answer any of these questions, but decided to read on, so it would tell me at least what happened to Joy. I found that the letters were fairly evenly dated and then suddenly the dates became a little sparser. I picked up one of the last regular ones.
15 December 1951,
Dear Frazer,
Of course I’m excited about it, you don’t need to ask me. I know that you are busy right now, but I do still want to talk to you sometime soon. My family is well, my parents say ‘hi’ so ‘hi’, Patricia and Dorothy are well, Patricia is engaged too, but I feel kind of bad for her, because her fiancée joined the army a few months ago, and now they’re going to send him to Korea. She’s really sad about it, as you can imagine. Oh, Rex wags ‘hello’ too.
Yours,
Joy
This letter seemed noticeably colder in tone to me than the last few were, and I was curious to see if there may have been a reason why. So I read another one.
23 February 1952,
Dear Frazer,
Sorry I haven’t been answering your calls, I’ve been very busy with school lately. I know you are always so restless, so it must be hard for you. You’ll be done before you know it, and then you’ll have to get a job. Do you ever worry about the future? I find myself worrying about it all the time. I hope that’s not bad… I know I know, you’ll be there, but still, I’m just wondering if I’ll really be happy. Well, I don’t want to worry about it, I’m sure we’ll be fine.
Joy
This letter just seemed plain icy, especially compared to the first ones, I wondered if she had just lost feeling for him over time, or what. I got the feeling that they didn’t stay engaged for very long after this time, so I decided to skip ahead to the last letter she had written to him, and see what that said.
2 October 1952
Frazer,
Stop writing, and stop calling please, I can’t deal with it anymore. You’re going to piss off Bob and he’ll want to beat you up, he already does. You hurt me, Frazer, very badly. I don’t love you anymore, I’m sorry, I just don’t. You’ll find someone else.
Joy
Apparently I had missed something; this was a very harsh letter to read for me, especially after seeing them in their ‘puppy-dog’ stages of love just minutes ago. I couldn’t believe just months before they had been engaged. I wondered what Frazer had done to have hurt her so badly. I also wondered when they had broken up, it seemed it was sometime between October and February. I skimmed through the letters in that time span until I came across one from June
6 June 1952
Frazer,
I told you before last Saturday, it’s over. I know you’re hurting I’m hurting too. I don’t know how you could have done that to me, I mean, Dorothy of all the girls you could have picked. Look, Fraz, I think it’s better if we don’t call each other for a while. I’ll still write you letters, but I’m still very angry. I can’t believe you. Sorry, my handwriting is so bad, I’m starting to cry again, and you know how clumsy I can be when I cry. Anyway, I need to go, Bob is coming over to take me to a movie. Take care of yourself Frazer.
Joy
It seemed so obvious what happened now, when Frazer was a young man, probably 16 or 17 he fell in love with a young girl named Joy. He went off to college and she stayed behind, they were happy for a while and even got engaged but something happened to give one or both of them doubts, and eventually, Frazer must have felt compelled to strike out and had some sort of affair with Dorothy. Joy found out about it, and finally broke up with Frazer for good, after which point she started to date some guy named Bob. I was now eager to find out what Frazer had apparently written to Joy but not bothered to send, there were only a few letters, and I suspected he wrote them more to solace himself than to actually tell her anything.
5 October 1952
Dear Joy,
I was a fool, I know it, I miss you and I love you so much, I just didn’t realize how much until after I had made everything so bad. Please, we can still be happy, I promise, just forgive me. You are my only Joy in life. I try to keep myself busy with my work, and my inventions and studies, but it doesn’t work. I always think about you, always. You must love me still. I can’t even begin to describe the pain in my heart. Whatever I can do, I would. This is one thing I can’t think my way out of, besides pleading for you to take me back. I’m weeping with every word as I write to you, and just thinking about how happy we were in the beginning, you remember, don’t you? I love you, Joy, and I shall never stop, know that, I know in your heart and soul you do and I only pray that you love me in return.
Yours,
Frazer
This was quite sad to read and the anguish of poor Frazer must have really hurt him. I didn’t know if it was for this reason that he became reclusive later on, but I had little doubt that she must have had something to do with it. I then read the next letter he’d written.
17 April 1954
Dear Joy,
It has been nearly two years since you and I broke up, and I still can’t think of anyone but you. I doubt I’ll ever send you this letter, not because I’m afraid of it getting into the hands of Bob, but more because I know it is futile, it will only stir up a hornet’s nest that shouldn’t be disturbed. I’m writing this to you because, I suppose, I want to express that I still love you, and I miss you more than life itself. I feel like there must be something wrong with me. I actually saw you and Bob together the last time I went home, it was at the green grocer, but I didn’t want to say anything, so I hurried out quickly. Dorothy says you two are engaged, congratulations I suppose. I am happy for you, really I am, but I still miss you, tremendously. I’ve tried dating other girls and some of them are beautiful or smart or sophisticated, but not like you, they’re just not the same. I love you my darling, I’ll always love you.
Yours, Frazer
This was an interesting progression but I was almost a little nervous to read the last letter, I wondered why he would suddenly stop writing, maybe he just moved on, but I was anxious to find out.
10 March 1955
Dear Joy,
I still can’t believe you’re gone from this world. It has already been two months, but I’m still totally stunned. I always hoped, Joy, that you would forgive me but now there is only one place I’ll ever learn that for sure and I certainly hope I get to go there just to see you again. You were my only Joy, I tried to fill the hole in my heart when I lost you with my gadgets, and other girls and study, but you are simply irreplaceable. I miss you more than life, itself. I went to your funeral, and I saw everyone there, people I hadn’t seen in years, like your family, and Bob, and Patricia, and even Dorothy. They just gave me accusing stares when I showed up, I’d never felt so unwelcome any place in my life. I simply wanted to crawl up in a ball and die myself when I saw everyone. I must confess, Joy, I couldn’t take it anymore, I left. I cried the entire car ride home. I kept thinking about that bridge… the one we’d driven over so many times together and how it was the last place you drew breath. My God, I can’t stop from crying now, I feel like I’ve been crying for two months straight. I always loved you Joy, I’ll always love you.
Yours,
Frazer
P.S. I look forward to the day I can meet you in heaven again, I’m no longer afraid of death if it means I can either stop this misery, or see you again or both. I hope you’ll find yourself more forgiving by that point. I love you
This was quite a hard letter to take. I felt very sorry for Frazer, and I was just happy that he may be with her in heaven now as we spoke. To see that she had died at such a young age must have hurt him greatly, and I was personally glad I had never suffered anything like that in my life. It was also interesting to see that he was so inventive at that age too.
After I had finished reading the letter Kelly said, “Poor, Frazer, that must have hurt that poor man so much, I wonder if he ever dated after that.”
“I kind of doubt it, from what I can make out, he seems like he would have been very weary of people and it would have just kept contributing to itself until he became the total hermit he was when he died,” I replied pensively.
“Yeah, but to hold that sort of hurt for fifty years seems like a bit much,” Kelly quipped.
“I agree, but one thing I could tell about Frazer, now that I remember it, is that he was a pretty sensitive person. I think he didn’t cope with things like death well. I remember even when Joe Polakos, the bust I was talking to you about on the stairs, died, Frazer seemed to take that pretty hard.” I returned.
I then figured it was time to set this box down with all of the letters in it and come back to it later perhaps. I wanted to see more of this house, and the most obvious choice was to go through a doorway I’d seen near the vanity desk. I asked Kelly if she was ready to continue exploring and she said she was, so we opened the door with no hassle and entered into what was quite obviously Nido’s office.
