It’s like falling in love.
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 eights, or four fours, come to that. I’m not getting involved with multiples of children. The prime numbers between ten and twenty are 13, 17 and 19. Nineteen 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 that. But it’s also the only thing that has any reality or point. If I could only lose the guilt, and remain the same person, I could be happy. But I can’t, because I want to be nice.
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 Julia. 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 Julia 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=2πr, where r is the radius—the distance from the exact centre 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 cm, twelve inches, a hundred metres exactly—but the circumference is still going to have a never-ending series of numbers on the right hand side of the decimal point, because of pi. You can use an approximation like 3.14 or 3.141592653589793, but you’re never going to know the exact value, because there isn’t one. There is uncertainty and darkness at the heart of something as simple as a circle.
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 me 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—‘I did 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 th
e 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 any more. It was bad, but it’s gone. I did it, but I don’t any more. 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 realised 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 eight. 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 co-incidence. 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 doing this then. I jog, but I can’t see me being fit enough at 62. 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 grey and every part of me is scrawning out apart from a little pale paunch? Surely something must 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 sixteen is eight. Again, rather convenient. All the eights. 23, of course. I still can’t work out whether than means I should take eight a year. It seems far too much. I’m happier with low primes, like 3, 5 or 7. Even seven seems weak and greedy. Five 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 realise 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 in to 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 for ever. 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 any more. There’s no way back. It’s tainted.
My age always reduces to eight 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 favour.
That’s all.
When God Lived In
Kentish Town
‘I’ve found God,’ the man said.
I groaned inwardly, and tried to will him not to sit at the table. I knew I was unlikely to succeed, because he didn’t have a lot of other options, but I gave it my best shot anyway. I was in the Shuang Dou, it was dark outside, and I had only just started on the mound of food that was arranged around me in a neat semi-circle. I didn’t want company. I wanted to be left alone.
The Shuang Dou is not at the prestige end of the Chinese restaurant market. Basically it’s a take-away, with an even smaller waiting area than is usual, into which they’ve shoe-horned a couple of small tables for patrons who can’t wait until they get home before eating—or who don’t have a home to go to in the first place. It looks like the interior decor was done by someone extremely lazy about twenty years ago, and I don’t expect it would survive anything more than a desultory glance from a health and safety inspector. Even the menus, which are printed—like those of every other Chinese restaurant in the land—to fold neatly into three, are rather haphazardly creased just once, across the middle. On the other hand the food is cheap and good, and the kitchen area is right behind the counter, so you can watch the proprietors cooking your dinner. It seems to be run by one small family, the youngest member of which spends the evening in a papoose on the woman’s back; her older sister taking the customers’ orders and giving back change with faultless accuracy and an eight-year-old’s engaging seriousness. Their parents are always friendly, in a guarded way, and I go in there so often that the patriarch generally has my order cooking before I’ve finished giving it, wielding wok and MSG with cheering skill and professionalism.
I was somewhere comfortable, in other words, surrounded by foil containers of food, and I wanted to just sit there and eat. I didn’t want a conversation with someone strange, especially if it was to be about God. The guy sat down on the end of the table and opened his own container, which held a large portion of something noodle-based, possibly the squid chow mein of which the owners are justifiably proud. He squirted an alarming amount of soy sauce over it from the pot on the table, and then started eating with the plastic fork provided. Another of the o
ther things I like about the Shuang Dou is that they don’t force you to eat with chopsticks. Sure, it can be fun, when you’re in the mood, or when you’re surrounded by white linen and paying £40 a head: but when you really just want to get the food down your neck it has to be said that a fork is a better tool for the job.
The man munched meditatively through a couple of mouthfuls of his chow mein and then looked up at me, still chewing.
‘I have, you know,’ he said affably. ‘I’ve found him.’
‘Hmm,’ I said, quietly, taking care not to catch his eye. While I don’t believe that madness is communicable through eye contact, I believe mad conversations most certainly are.
‘You think I’m bonkers, don’t you?’
‘Hmm,’ I said again, with a slightly different inflection, trying to suggest that while I was in no way impugning his sanity, personality or intellect I’d really rather just eat my special fried rice in peace. Special fried rice is a big deal to me. I’m a bit of a bore on the subject, to be honest. If I had to give up every other dish in the world and subsist only on that, I could do it without a second thought. At the Shuang Dou they prepare it differently to most places, cooking the egg last and laying it on top of the rice like a very thin and tasty omelette. I just wanted to sit and eat it.
‘Not surprised,’ the man continued, and I began to sense, with a mixture of relief and dread, that my participation in the conversation was unlikely to be required. While this meant I wasn’t going to have to get involved on an active level, it also meant that he was probably not going to stop talking. ‘Not surprised at all. I’d think the same thing myself.’
I stealthily reached for the soy and dripped a healthy dose over my Singapore Noodles. Perhaps if I kept my head down he’d come to believe that while God was real I was imaginary, and talk to the table instead.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 18
