Number Theory

(Love is Just a Numbers Game - Book 1)

by

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Rebecca Milton - All rights
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after the story ends
***

They say, and who “they” are is the greatest
mystery of the universe. I often pictured a room full of men, yes,
men, because men make the rules, don’t they? Men decide what we can
do with our bodies and how we should dress and... no, please don’t
get me started on that whole bag of eels. With beards. Bearded
eels. That’s not supposed to be a sexual or anatomical reference.
If I wanted to say penis, I’d say penis. Or dick. Or
Johnson
. The men in the room I picture, the ‘they’ of legend
and song, are men who sport long, untamed beards. Like Walt
Whitman. Only, Walt wouldn’t be in that room, telling women how to
dress. He’d be telling
men
how to
undress
. But I
digress. So, the bag of eels would have beards. Bearded eels.

Men.

Point being, what I started to say is that
they say there is someone for everyone. Someone, some
one
individual who is for, meant to be, set aside for some other
individual. That’s a nice notion, isn’t it? A warming thought when
things just absolutely stink, and there seems to be little to no
point in… Well,
anything
. You can at least comfort yourself
with the notion that somewhere, there is someone just for you. Very
comforting medicine. Especially when taken with copious amounts of
wine or whiskey or opiates or... ice cream.

When the fog clears, when you wake in the
morning, pee, drink a glass of water to try to clear the fuzz from
your mouth and your brain, and you look in the mirror, this
question will sometimes arise:

What if the someone meant for me is in
prison? Or on an ice floe never to be found? Or dead? After a night
of assuring yourself that you are
not
destined to be alone
and lonely, that there
is
one person out there just for you
and fortifying that assurance with multiple glasses (read: bottles)
of wine or whiskey or a couple (read: fistful) of pills, you have
to ask this type of question, don’t you?

I mean, the
someone for everyone
, is a
jolly, happy, romantic, I’m going to break into song on the subway,
fairy tale, kind of a notion, but, is it scientific? No, heavens
no, there is no science behind it at all. There are no men and
women in lab coats firing couples at each other in CERN’s large
Hadron collider, following the now-particulated remnants of the
people, seeing if they couple with other particles in a
meant-for-each-other manner. There are no labs in the frozen
wastelands of the poles, coring the ice to find examples of meant
to be together peoples at the bowels of the earth. No, that would
be insane, a waste of time and money, and a complete waste of
energy. Like sea monkeys. Still, we cling to this notion as if it
were proven and given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Actually, when I say
we
I mean...
me
. Also, when I say
cling
I mean... well... cling
really sums it up rather nicely. Huh, look at that.

Bananaway... What was I saying? Right, yes,
someone for everyone.

In the past year, I had gone to four
weddings. Three of those weddings I was part of, meaning I was an
honorable maid, a member of the bride’s retinue, and to the other
one I was a date. I was with a man who asked me to accompany him to
the wedding of his friend. I went because I liked this guy, and I
believed that this date to a wedding was a good idea. I believed, I
suppose that we would go, he would see the whole, you know,
standing up there professing undying love and attaching jewelry to
that vow and be moved. He would maybe drink a little. I would,
certainly, drink a lot.

We would dance and laugh and eat, and the
magic of the entire situation would permeate his mind and emboss
our relationship with a glow of romance that would then send him
into a flurry of wants, including - but not limited to - buying me
a ring, meeting my parents, getting a house for us to live in
together, marrying me, getting me pregnant and growing old
together. I was not asking for much.

Most of the wedding went the way I had hoped.
When I say
most
, I mean I drank. A lot. The parts that
didn’t go as planned were these parts:

He was in love with the maid of honor and
took me to the wedding so that he could go and not look like a
total loser being there alone. Another part that did not go exactly
as I planned was the dancing part. I like to dance. I am a good
dancer. I’m not talking ridiculous, stilted, arm flapping dancing.
I can really dance. I have had lessons. I took dancing lessons in
order to meet guys... who... would... maybe... be the one. Okay,
anyway...

I can dance. And I was planning on showing my
skills, using my Terpsichorean splendor to perhaps seduce my date a
little. I mean, what man can resist a woman who can really dance?
Turns out the answer to that question is: a gay man. Gay men cannot
resist that, and there were several of them at the wedding so,
needless to say, my dance card was full. Not with my date, however.
Why, you ask? Even if you didn’t ask, I’m going to tell you.

My date - we’ll call him Bradley because, his
name is Bradley - decided that the dance floor was the perfect
place to accost the maid of honor and open his heart to her.
Seriously. I am not kidding here.

He took me to the dance floor, we did one
turn and then, he broke from me, dropped to his knee and, in front
of God and the seven-tiered 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 his
excitement, I asked him what he wanted. His answer almost broke my
heart. He wanted to celebrate but, he didn’t know how and he didn’t
have anyone to celebrate with. Suddenly, Henry, this genius man,
was just a lost little boy, with no real friends, sitting on my
leather couch, his hands folded politely in his lap. I stared at
him for a moment, my mind a combination of pity and…well,
hashish.