999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [249]
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I am the radius. I am rational when the circle of the world is not. Of course it works the other way too: when the circumference is rational, the radius is not. Perhaps I am that radius instead.
I haven’t been to the bookstore for a week.
I could make it easier. I could move to Nevada or somewhere. Seventy towns in an area the size of a European country. But I won’t. That would be giving in. I don’t want to live in Nevada, for fuck’s sake. It’s pretty enough but there’s nothing else happening there. Going there would be allowing it to become all of my life. There’s nothing to do except go to Las Vegas, and those numbers ain’t never going to be on your side. The occasional transgression I can talk myself round from. But if I lived in Nevada, every morning when I woke up I would know there was only one reason for my being there. It would become my whole life, instead of just part of it. Why else would you live in Nevada? Plus I imagine that people there are pretty good at fixing up their own houses.
Maybe I can just keep hanging on.
Him and me, and poor little pi in the middle—waiting to make one of us irrational. Maybe they’ve stopped looking, or maybe they were never looking in the first place. Sometimes it’s very difficult for me to tell what are rational fears and what are not. It’s such a cliff to step out over—“Idid what?” Like having your heart in an elevator when someone cuts the cord holding it up. Then you reach out and steady yourself, and pull yourself back. You walk away from the shaft. But you know it’s there. Waking in the middle of the night, cold panic. Nothing happens. Eventually you get back to sleep.
But Christ, the times when I don’t have to do it. It’s wonderful. I feel so strong. When I can recall what’s happened, the things that have been done, and feel okay about them. When it just seems uninteresting and strange, and I can think to myself, I’m never doing that again. Not in the way I feel immediately afterwards, when I just feel sick about the whole thing and my balls ache and I’m flooded and sit in the living room scrubbed clean: but in a calm, dispassionate way. No, I think, I’m not going to do that again. I know I’ve done it, but that was then. This is now, and I don’t need it anymore. It was bad, but it’s gone. I did it, but I don’t anymore. It’s finished. It’s over. It hasn’t been yet, though. It’s never been over yet.
Julie and Max looked happy tonight.
More than half my mind is always somewhere else. Even my friends seem like someone else’s, because only part of me is ever really with them. The rest of me is out on the trail, walking by myself. I remember another time driving on the M11 one summer afternoon, I realized that all of the cars coming the other way had their lights on and their wipers going. I thought this was strange until I noticed that it actually was raining on the other side of the road. It was dry on the northbound side, wet on the southbound.
I didn’t mean to go in, but I had a coffee at the shop opposite and saw her in the window, serving a customer. So I finished up and went into the bookstore.
17 is prime and a perfect age. 1 plus 7 is 8, and thus the digital root of the perfect age is 8. I’m thirty-five now, in 1999, the year of 1, of starting. The digital root of 35 is 8 too—and I have this sense of someone closing in. This can hardly be a coincidence. Perhaps I’ll always be in danger when my age collapses to the same age as the girls’, when they have the same digital root. It makes sense—it makes us too closely linked. When I was twenty-six I wasn’t doing this, so I was safe. Forty-four will be dangerous. Fifty-three. Sixty-two. But I can’t believe I’ll still be