He waved the marker around, possessed; his body limp except for his furiously moving right arm. The equation was so elegant, how it all fell into place, unfolding like the Buddha’s own lawn chair. The numbers — they halved, rearranged, shot up, toyed with infinity’s black expanse before falling back down to zero and disappearing, only to reappear again, this time as concepts, thoughts, symbols.
They spilled from the tip of his marker, they grew out of the board, fell to the floor and filled the room. They poured out the door and into the streets, inundating the world with definite precision.
I looked down at the sheet in front of me and found a reproduction of the problem that was scrawled onto the board. I put my sad little graphite nub down to the sheet, leaving an uneven trail. I made a line dividing the universe I’d just created, and populated it with numerals. The seed was planted. I felt like God himself on the first day of Creation. What came next should have been automatic, self-powered. The numbers should have spilled out, changed, disappeared, following the smooth rails of logic to some point on the Cartesian plane.
That was when they started laughing. The five was the first to give in, he began with a quiet chortle but it soon devolved into raucous belly laughter. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere with this, that five minutes from now I’d be frantically erasing, re-writing, rounding, dividing, all at random, trying to make the problem look like the one on the board. Three was the next to go, doubling over when he saw where I’d put the decimal point. It didn’t take long for the word to spread; soon all the odd numbers were peering in, filled with a kind of fascination that was found only in a spectator’s box at a Victorian surgery.
Pi was the worst, surprised and appalled that I’d summoned him for this. He had no place here, nor did any of his infinite progeny, their tiny wispy laughs echoing off into endless shame. If the imaginary numbers could laugh, they would too. They would look down at the mess I’ve made — the arrows, the marks, the wrong orders of magnitude; they’d look and they’d shake their heads and chuckle, whisper “amateur” quietly under their breaths. That is, if they could feel anything analogous to emotions on their side of the logical barrier. Maybe if they one day breach the dimensions separating us, they might explain what their feelings are like, what fiendish logic drives the plane that doesn’t (and can’t) exist.
I’d argue with them sometimes, at home, when I was certain I was alone. The debates were always one sided, but I never really felt like I’d won. “You don’t mean anything!” I’d yell as I slammed my textbook shut and tried to shake them out of my head. I would go lie down, only to have Pythagorean triangles, Euclidean geometry and old, kindly Mandelbrot’s set quietly whisper in my ear “We’re right here . . . we’re right here . . . here . . . here,” through rays of sunshine and growing leaves, through splashing water and rubber ball.
When it was quiet, Zero would speak, sometimes for days at a time. I couldn’t understand a word he said — he speaks only Arabic you see. They’d argue, him and Infinity. They were too much alike, spent too much time together; it was starting to affect them both. I’d have to go count then, spend some time with the Roman Numerals. They were rowdy, but at least I almost knew them by name. They’d accept me only begrudgingly; I often got them confused. They would play cards, mostly. I pretended I knew what I was doing, that I could remember the orders that meant something, and that I knew which numbers went where. They knew I was lying, but they were too kind to turn me away . . . or they just took advantage of the cold beer in my fridge.
