999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [248]
I had a dream once where I had a number, and squared it, and the result was 2. When I woke up I wanted to write the number down, but I’d forgotten it.
Forever the pull between what I want and the need to be nice. So many people live their lives like that. I don’t know any perfect numbers in real life. Max is married, but he wants to sleep with other women. Not because he doesn’t love Julie. He does. You only have to look at them to see how much they care about each other. But he just wants to sleep with other women. He told me this once, very stoned, but I knew anyway. You only have to watch his eyes. Hunger and guilt. His argument is that monogamy is artificial. He says that in the animal kingdom very few species mate for life, that it makes biological and evolutionary sense for the male to spread his genes as widely as possible: increase the chance of fertilization, and introduce as much variation into the gene pool as possible. Which may be true. But I suspect he just wants to bite some different nipples for a change. Meanwhile he has, I suspect, absolutely no idea that Julie throws up about one meal in three. He’s just not very observant, I guess.
I was talking with Susan again today, showing her some more number tricks. She likes the way they dance. She’s sharing a house with two other girls, but her friends have gone home for the vacation. It’s funny the way she talks to me. Careful, polite—because I’m older. But friendly too. She’s just finding her way.
I want to be whole, but you can only be whole if you tell, and I can’t possibly tell. So who is that person that people know, and if they like you, what does it mean? Most things you can confess. You can absolve yourself by mentioning it, however lightly, by saying “Oh God, you’ll never guess what I did, silly me.” Not this. You can’t absolve this. I have good friends. But not that good. No friends are that good. My secret keeps me apart from everyone. At least if you’re an alcoholic you can try to admit it in front of yourself, God and one other person. Everyone says “Hey, that’s a bad thing,” but then they want to help you. I can only admit it to the first two: and believe me, it’s the third that makes the difference. It must be, otherwise there’s no way out of this, except death. That’s why some people want to be caught: not to be stopped, not for the publicity, but just so you can get it out. Admitting it to God makes no difference. So far as I can tell, he doesn’t care.
Today was Sunday, and it was snowing. I spent all day indoors tinkering with stuff. There was a guy working on the fence of the house opposite. He didn’t look familiar. Paranoia is dangerous, because it can make you behave oddly. You have to behave properly. You have to be rational in the heart of irrationality.
It’s not like half of these little idiots matter. For a year, they’re prime. Then just machines pushing machines with baby machines in them. Not prime, not even perfect. Just blobs.
Irrational numbers are those which cannot be accurately expressed as a fraction, whose decimal places ramble randomly on. Like the square root of 2, which starts 1.41421356237 … and then goes on and on and on. Pi is also an irrational number: very fucking irrational, in fact—pi is a number that’s off its face on drugs. People have spent their lives calculating it to millions and millions of places, and still there’s no pattern, and no precise value. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius. You work out the circumference of a circle through the equation c = ?r, where r is the radius—the distance from the exact center of the circle to the ring. Of course if you have the circumference, you can work out the radius by reversing the process and dividing by pi. But whichever way you do it, pi is still involved. And pi is irrational. The length of the radius can be as precise as you like—5.00 centimeters,