Albert was not a bad man; he was an accountant. Staid verging on stale, yes, but not a bad man, just a quiet one, a small one. A lot of people said he was dull, but none of them knew the first thing about accounting so he paid them no heed and got on with his life, which was mostly columns and rows. He loved them as some people loved trees: tenderly, but without overt sentiment, as he did his children, who subsisted on a series of good firm handshakes and level-headed compliments throughout their more difficult years in school.
And then one kindly Monday morning, everything changed – at least for Albert. He was walking to work one day, to a big sweeping skyscraper with a stuffy little room for him hiding somewhere in its esophagus, and a street was blocked off for construction. As it happens, there was a little park down the side path he hurried through, and there was a little pond in that little park, and Albert’s eyes did alight upon a rather smaller pair of eyes in that little pond.
They went “chugga-rumph” and vanished with a plink of water.
Albert stood there for five seconds, then went to work and made an inquiry of the security guard about eyes in pools and chugga-rumph.
“Frog,” said the guard. “The park’s been doing nice this year then. They like clean water. They can take in the sick real easy through their skin, y’know?”
Albert y’knew – at least, now he did. So he went upstairs to his office and locked the door and did all his work inside one hour, so that he had the rest of the day free for a sudden and somewhat bigger problem. And most of the evening, and a good bit of the night until the security guards came upstairs and kindly but firmly turfed him out onto the street with a bit of money for cab fare to skip the muggers. Albert slipped the money back under the front doors and went home by the long way again, stopping by the pond to peer with wary eyes for a glimpse of a hint of a theory.
The glimpse went “ribbit.”
Albert slapped his forehead, let fly with a volley of cursing that would’ve made a twelve-year-old blanch, and ran home in a mist of numbers and calculations and division thick enough to slice timber with. He dashed through his door, up the stairs, and sealed himself in the bathroom, where he covered both sides of each and every sheet of toilet paper with notes.
Albert took the next day off, then rethought that and made it the next week. This was easy as he had accidentally performed all of the week’s work the day previously, before he began work on his little problem.
His oldest child phoned him in the late afternoon.
“I thought you’d be at work. Are you sick?”
“Mmmm,” said Albert. “Busy.”
“More work?”
“No! No, not really. I’ve got to solve for it, that’s all. I’ve got to solve for it, and it won’t add up.”
“Well, if you’re not working, you should get some fresh air. You spend all week cooped up indoors, you should get a bit of a breather while you’ve got a chance.”
Albert smoothed down the frantically rumpled remnants of his hair and looked out the window. The sun was shining firmly, if a bit murkily.
“Yes!” he agreed, and he hung up.
Then he went to the zoo. For a bit of research and experimentation. It had been years and years since the family’s membership had expired, and it took him three tries to find the exhibit he was seeking, two of which ended up with him lost in the restroom near the orangutans.
He squinted carefully against the glass, read the placard thoroughly three times, cleared his throat, and cautiously enunciated “chugga-rumph?”
A pair of tiny glossy eyes peered back at him from a stretch of preserved bark and replied “cree-ree” with piercing disdain.
Albert said some strong words loudly enough to attract cruel looks from a nearby zookeeper, and began making furious notes on his arm. He moved from exhibit to exhibit. Cree-ree, ribbit, chugga-rumph, each dialect was tried and discarded in kind against case study until the gates closed and he was guided with firm not-quite-anger from the premises, shouting questions to the zookeepers all the way about nutrition and sleeping habits and the level of activity during the summer.
Cut off from that particular route of research ‘till past the next dawn, Albert grew restless and fierce with inactivity, prowling the extremely small and tidy halls of his home through the evening. His eyes alit at last upon his salvation: a tome of mathematics dense enough in volume to kill a horse, and filled with enough formulae to pop clean of skull the average brain.
He’d read it long ago in school, and discarded it soon afterwards. But if you’ve got to learn something new, best to start over at the bottom…
Dawn found Albert already wide awake, fortified at his breakfast table with a pot-full of coffee, hold the mug, and no fewer than six textbooks of mathematical and biological knowledge, with an eye to the amphibious. His eyes were jumpier than a fat summer fly, and skimmed from page to page with a peerless disregard for the boundaries of cover and spine. Entire paragraphs were ignored, chapters parsed with a glance. His fingers ached with neglect, but his mind was as limber as a preschoolers and a million times more trained.
“Yes!” he said at last, past nine o’clock, making dusty vocal chords shimmer and shake. “Of course! Exactly!” And then he jumped up from his desk with the force of joy only to be found in the freshly awakened, and nearly broke both his kneecaps due to stiff muscles.
Some hours later Albert made his way once more to the zoo, and a few scantling minutes more took him to the cages containing his test subjects.
“Ribbit,” he proclaimed with confidence empty of any trace of presumptuousness, firmness without arrogance.
A chin inflated at him lazily, then gave up halfway through for want of motivation. “Gluk.”
Albert walked home that day slumped with despair, his shoulders stooped under the burden of a much larger and crueller world than he had ever dreamed. Every other block his head would lift, buoyed up by a hopeful thought, then a shadow would cross his face and his chin would sink to his chest once more, tugged down by blackest reality in all its pendulous grotesqueness. His feet were his visible world now, one step two step look at the crosswalk, three step four step hear the stoplights talk, five step six step where’d that grass come from.
The grass had come from a little park, with a little pond, and Albert had almost walked into it. He raised his eyeballs to it, reddened with exhaustion and unshed tears, and met a very small pair of clear dark eyes that were resting quite comfortably on a rotten yet pleasant log.
Albert opened his mouth, to speak what he could not guess, but all that emerged from his raw and aching throat was a feeble croak.
The eyes blinked once. “Ribbit?” they replied.
Albert stood there, poleaxed.
“Ribbit?”
The rest of Albert’s trip home was unknown to all, including himself. What mattered was that he was back in minutes and scribbling calculations with a pen in each hand and one in his mouth, tongue protruding from the corner of his lips only to stab in anger at its inability to grasp a fourth pen. At one point in a burst of maniacal energy he attempted to write with his feet, and found to his astonishment that he could. This redoubled his efforts, and soon not a scrap of his office, then his bedroom, then bathroom, then his living room lay unmarked by scrawling ink. Tile, linoleum, boards, drywall, sofas – all was blank medium to be marked clear with math and mindpower. He had to invent over fifteen new symbols and double the size of the greek alphabet on his way, doing the math on the fingers and fingernails of his left hand. There was material in that for a book of essays large enough to crush a coffee table.
At last it was done, as much as done could be, all but for one thing.
Albert stood there, triumphant in the middle of the floor, stood at that final pair of parallel lines engraved at his feet before his favourite chair, and wrote one word.
Then he vanished.
Along with the house.
There was quite a ruckus when word got out that Albert Pendmuss had got missing. He had not been a volatile or extraordinary man, and the abruptness of his departure was a shock to his neighbours and workers. His children, at least, took it in stride. There was always something that had been cooking under Dad’s flat hair and quiet voice, and if it chose to express itself in his up and disappearing one day and leaving a pretty nice little pond where his house had been, well, so be it. And they made sure nobody thought of putting harm to that pond, though only the most soulless suit-wearer would’ve ever dreamt of it.
It was a nice little place, on a nice little lot, and the water was strangely kindly and clear, warm enough for little lily-pads to sprout up (look, if you turn them over, you can see little veiny squiggles that could almost be words: ‘zetta,’ ‘rana’) clean enough for frogs to pop up with little inky spots all over them, like pen blots.
And there was one big fellow right there in the center of it, fat and pleased as a king on his throne. And when we asked him if he’d solved for it, well, all he said was
“Chugga-rumph!”
and that’s a good enough answer for anyone.