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By Root 2269 0

smaller again. The teens. So many things become possible. Each year is like a quantum leap. After that—you just keep getting a little older and smaller. You have birthdays, and sometimes people remember them and sometimes they don’t. When you were sixteen, and one of your friends had a birthday and became seventeen, you sure as hell knew about it. It meant your friend had gone to another planet. They stood taller than you. They were older. There’s no difference between being twenty-seven and twenty-eight. Or forty-three and forty-four. You’ve been around the ring too many times. Forty-four is who-gives-a-shit, whatever modulo you’re on.

It’s like falling in love.

The Greeks knew a lot about math, but they didn’t know about zero. Seriously. They had no 0, which meant they didn’t understand how numbers relate to people and what they do. The difference between 0 and 1 is the biggest difference in the world, far greater than that between 2 and 3; because they’re just additional counts, whereas 0 is never having done it at all. They knew very little about the irrational, and nothing about the quiet that lies beyond even that. They liked perfection, the Greeks. Perfect numbers, for example, which are the sum of the numbers that you can divide them by: 6 = 1 + 2 + 3; 28 =1+2 + 4 + 7+ 14. They are also, as it happens, the sum of consecutive whole numbers: 6 = 1+2 +3; 28= 1+2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7. Kind of neat. But perfect numbers are very, very rare: irrationality is far more common. They say Pythagoras just pretended irrational numbers didn’t exist. Just couldn’t handle the idea. Shows how you can be a really bright guy and still know shit.

There’s one under the kitchen floor. It’s not even a very big kitchen. But there’s one under there, about a foot under, lying face up. It’s covered in concrete, and there’s good quality slate laid on top. But sometimes when I see one of my friends standing in there I think, Jesus, that’s really bad. Last time it happened was when Max and Julie were round, and Max was fixing us drinks in the kitchen. It’s like the floor goes transparent for a moment, and I can see her lying there, below people’s feet. Not literally, of course. I don’t get visions. If anything, I’m too rational. Other times, for longish stretches, I just forget, and then the remembering is very bad. It’s like, Jesus, what have I done? What can I do about it? And the answer is always—nothing. It’s too late now to go back. It’s always been too late. On the one hand it’s disgusting, and pathetic and sick. But in everyday life images will pop into my mind, pictures, memories of things I’ve done. I push them away, but the pictures and memories feel warm and comforting and glorious, like the robes of a king in exile. After a while they come more often, and the sense of glee will start to strengthen, and that’s when I know it’s going to happen again. The dance begins, a dance where I’m my own partner, but I can’t work out who’s leading. It’s a wonderful dance while it lasts.

Slim, slender, small. The little ones are like the digital root of breasts. You don’t need great big lumps of flesh to prove you’re a woman. It’s in the face, in the nature. Stripped down to the essential.

Imagining is okay.

I would have to be very careful. Because of this guy. I wonder what he’s like. I wonder what’s going to happen. Whether he’s righteously angry or just doing his job. And I wonder why I’m so convinced he’s there, whether there’s some structure that I’m sensing but just can’t see. Maybe I need new sums.

So locked up that even when drunk you never get near it.

17 is prime. If you think about it, if someone’s seventeen they’re not yet an adult but they’re no longer a child. Not least because it has no factors. 16 is two 8s or four 4s, come to that. I’m not getting involved with multiples of children. The prime numbers between 10 and 20 are 13, 17, and 19. 19 is too old. 13 is a child. 17 is indivisible by anything except 1 and 17, which is right, because there’s one seventeen-year-old there. One real person. It is disgusting. I know