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By Root 2082 0

doing this then. I jog, but I can’t see me being fit enough at sixty-two. It’s no walk in the park, this kind of thing. And will it make any sense to be doing this when my hair is gray and every part of me is scrawning out apart from a little pale paunch? Surely something will have burnt out by then. Interestingly, if you follow Wilson’s test for primes, taking (p – 1)! to be congruent with —1 mod p, we find that the primeness of 17 leaves us with 16 as the value (in base 10) of-1 modulo 17. Half of 16 is 8. Again, rather convenient. All the 8s, 23, of course. I still can’t work out whether that means I should take eight a year. It seems far too much. I’m happier with low primes, like 3, 5 or 7. Even 7 seems weak and greedy. 5 is better. It’s worked for me so far. I don’t like 2 as a prime, even though it passes Wilson. It just doesn’t feel right. The heart of 2 is irrational. The heart of a seventeen-year-old makes sense. To them. To me.

* * *

I don’t really remember the first time. You’d think you would. I remember little flashes of it, little sparks of darkness, but I can’t really remember the whole thing. I remember where she’s buried. I remember that all too well. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed and I feel okay, I slowly start to feel something reaching out for me. I realize that there’s a bit of my brain which will always be standing in a patch of forest a little way from Epping, watching over a grave, standing guard over a woman maybe no one else even misses that much. She was short on family. She wasn’t 17 of course, but she was 29. She was still prime, albeit a higher prime. But the actual doing of it, not really. I tend to remember the more recent ones most. You do, don’t you. Because it’s more recent. But even they are just a few still images, like I was really drunk. I wasn’t. But it’s like that. It’s not like the normal things you do. I guess that’s kind of funny, in a way. It’s really not like the normal things you do.

Susan was kind of glum today. She’d had an argument with her landlord or the guy who owns the house they let or whoever he is. Leaking roof, which is no fun when it’s this wet and this cold and going to get wetter and colder. I told her that I know something about such things. You should have seen her smile.

I tried to work out once, from first principles, how you find the square root of a number. Without a calculator. It did my head in. From school I distantly remembered that you think of a number close to it, whose square you know, and adjust it up and down by trial and error, until you’re pretty close. But that’s not very precise. It’s not very attractive. It’s such a simple thing, squaring something. Such an easy step. You take a number and multiply it by itself. Anyone can work that out. But finding the square root, reversing the process? There must be a way back, I thought. Once you’ve walked down a road, there must be some way home. I found out in the end. You use the Newton-Raphson equation for successive approximations:

xi+1= (xi + txi)/2

It bites its tail. You feed a number into the equation, then feed the result back in, and feed that result back in—and keep working it, and keep working it. Until you stop. Except that with many numbers, even a simple number like 2, you never do. You never stop. The result is irrational, and goes on forever. I can put as many primes through the loop as I like, and the decimals will never stop. I can never find the number that I squared to make 2. It’s not there anymore. There’s no way back. It’s tainted.

My age always reduces to 8, when the year root is 1. The root of 17 is 8. 8 plus 1 is 9, which casts itself out. The sum of me is always on the other side of the barrier, cast out. Nothing can be done about it. Always driving in the rain, with no turning in sight.

Tomorrow evening, at eight o’clock, I’m going to an address just outside of town. To fix a roof as a favor.

That’s all.

Joe R. Lansdale

MAD DOG SUMMER

The highest compliment one writer can pay to another is to admit he wishes he’d written something by the other