Free Number Theory by Rebecca Milton Page B

wedding cake, he told this poor,
unsuspecting woman that he was in love with her. Just imagine her
horror, her shame, her discomfort at that moment. In the middle of
her best friend’s wedding, a man drops to his knees, on the dance
floor, in a really nice suit and just spills his ever lovin’ guts
to her. Imagine her absolute, unadulterated mortification.
    All right don’t waste your time trying to
imagine any of that because... there was none of that. None .
    She squealed like a school girl, got down on
her knees and kissed him. Just like that. She dropped down and
kissed him. Then she babbled on about him being The One , and
how happy she was and... sister, it was repulsive.
    I took comfort in an open bar and the
continuing company of well-built, exquisitely dressed men who moved
me around the dance floor like a princess, a damn princess. Bradley
apologized to me, sincerely. I forgave him mostly because I was
drunk but, also, because I hoped that, if I was nice to him in that
situation, it would make me more worthy to have my one
someone sent to me. From on high. Or wherever those things come
from.
    In retrospect, I should have drop-kicked
Bradley’s nut sack and left him incapable of seeding his perfect
someone. But I didn’t.
    Someone for everyone.
     
    ***
     
    Henry was my neighbor for some time. A quiet
guy. A shy guy. Sweet though. Pleasant, polite, held doors, carried
bags if I had too many. He was a mathematics professor at Columbia
and some sort of renowned genius on the subject of... well, math...
of some sort. But, not just, you know, everyday math, adding,
subtracting and the basic stuff that I did so poorly with in
school.
    He was into the dark math, as I call it.
Equations with letters and symbols instead of numbers. Really heady
stuff that, once or twice he tried to explain to me, and I blacked
out. I’m not kidding. I literally blacked out from absolute
boredom. He started in on it, the beauty of math, the fact that
math was in all things, and all things could be reduced to math
and, not ten minutes into it, I blacked out. Now, the half bottle
of Irish whiskey I had guzzled before he began his little lecture
may have been a mitigating factor but, still... boring.
    He loved it though, that all things can be
reduced to math. Truly, he not only believed this, he proved it . Not to me of course, but at his work and at conventions
or gatherings of math fanatics. He would prove, with chalk on a
green board, how the world, all the world, could be reduced to
mathematical equations. Patterns, he said, if you reduce and graph,
you find mathematical patterns in everything. He was sweet and got
very, very excited when I listened to him. He would start to
jabber, and his hands would flit about like birds. He made me
laugh, but then again, I didn’t. I never laughed at Henry. He was
too delicate somehow. I had this feeling, this gut feeling that, if
I had laughed at him, when he was going on about his math, he
wouldn’t be able to handle it. He would crack right in two and
die.
    One night, Henry knocked on my door. He was
all kinds of excited. He had done something, proven something, and
he had been given an award. I found out later, in doing a little
Googling, that the award was very prestigious, and Henry was…well,
famous. At the time, I had no idea. I thought he was just Henry,
the nice guy who lived across the hall. So, it was a Saturday night
and, as usual, I had no plans, so I invited him in, and he sat on
my couch and told me about his proof and his award. He named names
that - and I could tell he was disappointed - I didn’t know, but he
named them anyway. Powerful minds, he said, giants in the field. As
he went on, I pictured gigantic men standing in fields with
blackboards and books, shaking the clouds with their voices and
numbers, letters, symbols raining down on the earth. I may have
smoked a bit (read: a pound) of hash before Henry had knocked on my
door.
    Anyway, after a several minutes of