999

by Al Sarrantonio

  Gerry spends a hundred bucks a month on porn. There’s a place in Greensboro. We got really drunk a couple months ago and he told me about it. Nothing weird, just people having sex. It obviously bothers him, but he can’t stop doing it. He tries, he buys, he purges. Funny what accountants get up to.

  Fall in Roanoke is driving foggy roads.

  My twenties didn’t make any sense to me. Or my early thirties. I used to be able to understand ages. Up until you’re twenty, they make sense. Each year from the early teens onwards is such a huge step, until you’re twenty, when they start getting smaller and smaller again. The teens. So many things become possible. Each year is like a quantum leap. After that—you just keep getting a little older and smaller. You have birthdays, and sometimes people remember them and sometimes they don’t. When you were sixteen, and one of your friends had a birthday and became seventeen, you sure as hell knew about it. It meant your friend had gone to another planet. They stood taller than you. They were older. There’s no difference between being twenty-seven and twenty-eight. Or forty-three and forty-four. You’ve been around the ring too many times. Forty-four is who-gives-a-shit, whatever modulo you’re on.

  It’s like falling in love.

  The Greeks knew a lot about math, but they didn’t know about zero. Seriously. They had no 0, which meant they didn’t understand how numbers relate to people and what they do. The difference between 0 and 1 is the biggest difference in the world, far greater than that between 2 and 3; because they’re just additional counts, whereas 0 is never having done it at all. They knew very little about the irrational, and nothing about the quiet that lies beyond even that. They liked perfection, the Greeks. Perfect numbers, for example, which are the sum of the numbers that you can divide them by: 6 = 1 + 2 + 3; 28 =1+2 + 4 + 7+ 14. They are also, as it happens, the sum of consecutive whole numbers: 6 = 1+2 +3; 28= 1+2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7. Kind of neat. But perfect numbers are very, very rare: irrationality is far more common. They say Pythagoras just pretended irrational numbers didn’t exist. Just couldn’t handle the idea. Shows how you can be a really bright guy and still know shit.

  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 8s or four 4s, come to that. I’m not getting involved with multiples of children. The prime numbers between 10 and 20 are 13, 17, and 19. 19 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 which 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 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 th
e 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, 12 inches, 100 meters 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 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 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 wr
itten something by the other scribbler. Joe Lansdale has written two things I fervently wish I’d written. One of them is the piece you’re about to read. If you look up the phrase “Southern Gothic” in the future you’re likely to find “Mad Dog Summer” reproduced in its entirety as the definition. I do not say this lightly.

  Anyone who hasn’t been in a cave for the last fifteen years knows that Lansdale has excelled in the horror, western, suspense, and comic book fields; much of his work exhibits “crossover” features which blur (annihilate might be a better word) the distinctions between genres. This is a very good thing—not because it’s a gimmick but because there are no reasons for those distinctions to he there, except to limit less masterful writers.

  The other piece of Joe’s I wish I’d written? “The Night They Missed the Horror Show.”

  News, as opposed to rumor, didn’t travel the way it does now. Not back then. Not by radio or newspaper it didn’t. Not in East Texas. Things were different. What happened in another county was often left to that county.