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By Root 2001 0

normal, and I was driving much slower than usual. But it was now at least fifty minutes since I’d passed the first exit. I couldn’t have gone by the second without noticing: the massive exit signs by the side of the road were just about the only thing which I had been able to see at the beginning of the journey. So where was the second? I drove for another ten minutes. Still no cars on my side of the road, and no headlights on the other. I drove on for five further minutes, picking the speed up slightly. I was just a little … concerned. Ten minutes later a shape finally loomed out of the fog, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The journey was halfway over, and I’d seen the second exit. As I lit a cigarette, finally able to spare some concentration from the road, I thought for a moment. How long would it have taken for me to have started panicking? How long would I have had to wait before too long became far too long, before I’d started to feel in my heart of hearts that something had gone wrong, that the exit had disappeared and I was crawling along an endless fog-buried road into nothingness, the real world left behind?

Someone is after me now. Definitely. I know they are. It’s an odd position to be in. Everyone else will always side with the hunter. Which I’m not. Some people in my position call themselves that, but it’s pure vaingloriousness. I assume he’s a policeman. He doesn’t know who I am yet, but he’s there. I’m not even sure how I know this. I’m not sure how I know a lot of things. Maybe I’m noticing little signs without really realizing what they are. I don’t really know what to do about him. I’m not going to give myself up, or give myself away if I can help it, but—maybe he could even be my friend. He must understand some of it, which would help. I don’t understand. That’s part of it. I don’t understand why I can’t just be nice. You read books and a lot of people are just 1, 2, 3 … “these are the reasons why.” An easy addition. I’m not, as far as I can remember. I don’t have the excuse. I’ve got a fair number of friends, and they come round or I go see them and we hang out, but it’s like the whole thing’s in two dimensions. It’s like a painted glass window—one stone, and it’s going to fall apart. I’m just not nice, and it makes me sad, because some people are nice to me and I want to be nice, but can’t. Not anymore. Once is enough, too much. It taints your life.

I was in the bookstore again today, bought some books and had a cup of coffee. I had a chat with Susan again too. The place wasn’t very busy. I told her a couple of digital root tricks. Like … take any number (say, 4201); add the digits (4 + 2 + 0+1 =7); take the sum away from the original number (4201 – 7 = 4194)—and the result will always have a digital root of 9. Or … take any number (say, 94213); scramble the digits in any order you like (32941, for instance); and subtract the smaller number from the bigger (94213 – 32941 = 61272). Guess what—digital root of 9 again. Those 9s, they get around. She thought the tricks were pretty cool. We got talking about symmetrical numbers, and how they don’t come along in years very often. 1991; 2002; 2112; 2222. When I got home I realized something. If you look at the digital roots, the sequence goes 1 + (9 + 9) + 1 = 2; in the same way 2002 = 4; 2112 = 6; 2222 = 8. The even numbers. Then 2332 gives you 1, 2442 gives you 3, 2552 gives you 5, and 2662 gives you 7. The odd numbers. Which is kind of interesting. Maybe.

Gerry spends a hundred bucks a month on porn. There’s a place in Greensboro. We got really drunk a couple months ago and he told me about it. Nothing weird, just people having sex. It obviously bothers him, but he can’t stop doing it. He tries, he buys, he purges. Funny what accountants get up to.

Fall in Roanoke is driving foggy roads.

My twenties didn’t make any sense to me. Or my early thirties. I used to be able to understand ages. Up until you’re twenty, they make sense. Each year from the early teens onwards is such a huge step, until you’re twenty, when they start getting smaller and