Two by two remains an equation
you could never solve
“How much of life is quantifiable?” he asked, as a superstore sign (it must have been several tons in weight) bent at the neck and fell on him, like a great flyswatter.
“Now this’s something,” said the unit commander. “This morning over coffee I never figured such a thing would happen, even could happen. What are the odds?”
The mathematics of generations (which is the mathematics of memory) is significant. At twenty, a man is twenty times the age of a newborn. Ten years later, the ratios change. This is why figuring is difficult, said the man lost in the labyrinth. He used to be a good counter, an excellent reader of myths. He turned often to the sky looking for signs.
Even love can be quantified. It’s big, for example, expansive, mountain-like, river-like, or big as a quark, or small as a cherry tomato, which is made of millions of massive atoms moving.
On the morning he died, the man ate several such fruits. We can only imagine what he thought of them but we know he counted their number and that this number had some significance, minor or grand. In the superstore days before, he held their number in his hands, shook them for some reason, put the green box in the cart, and went to the meats just to dream.
When the crane came no one actually wanted to see what was underneath it. Neither did anyone among the rescue crew and city departments know that the man had eaten eight cherry tomatoes. Some of the men and women there thought that they would value their lives more, knowing that chance can take a body any day and any time. Others didn’t think this way. They were thinking about how to get the whole nasty business over with and cleaned up, not because they were crude or inhuman but because to be on this side of the event at the moment was simply unbearable.
The unit commander knew that someone would have to make the call. They would have to find identification among the wreckage. Family would need to be notified. There would be awkward pauses, perhaps tears. Or maybe the man crushed here had no one close to him at all, he told himself, no one near enough to feel the size of the loss and the immense dimensions of memory.
