I filled in a few other numbers, pausing to let the image of the square hover in my black mental space. Its grids were like a skeleton through which I could see the rest of the uncommitted mathematical universe. Occasionally a number appeared in the imaginary square and I would write it down in the corresponding space of my cardboard version. The making of the square gave me the feeling that I was participating in the world, that the rational universe had given me something that was mine and only mine, because you see, there are more possible magic square solutions than there are nanoseconds since the Big Bang.
The square was not so much created as transcribed. Hours later, when I wrote the final number in the final box and every sum of every column and row totaled 491,384, I noted that my earlier curbside collapse had been ameliorated. I had eased up on my psychic accelerator, and now I wished I had someone to talk to. Philipa maybe, even Brian (anagram for “brain”-ha!), who I now considered as my closest link to normalcy. After all, when Brian ached over Philipa, he could still climb two flights up and weep, repent, seduce her, or buy her something. But my salvation, the making of the square, was so pointless; there was no person attached to it, no person to shut me out or take me in. This healing was symptomatic only, so I tacked the cardboard to a wall over Granny’s chair in the living room in hopes that viewing it would counter my next bout of anxiety the way two aspirin counter a headache.
Clarissa burst through the door clutching a stack of books and folders in front of her as though she were plowing through to the end zone. She wasn’t though; she was just keeping her Tuesday appointment with me. She had brought me a few things, probably donations from a charitable organization that likes to help halfwits. A box of pens, which I could use, some cans of soup, and a soccer ball. These offerings only added to my confusion about what Clarissa’s relationship to me actually is. A real shrink wouldn’t give gifts, and a real social worker wouldn’t shrink me. Clarissa does both. It could be, though, that she’s not shrinking me at all, that she’s just asking me questions out of concern, which would be highly unprofessional.
“How… uh…” Clarissa stopped mid-sentence to regroup. She laid down her things. “How have you been?” she finally asked, her standard opener.
I couldn’t tell her about the only two things that had happened to me since last Friday. You see, if I told her about my relationship with Elizabeth and of my misadventures with Philipa, I would seem like a two-timer. I didn’t want to tell her about Kinko’s, because why embarrass myself? But while I was trying to come up with something I could tell her, I had this continuing tangential thought: Clarissa is distracted. This is a woman who could talk nonstop, but she was beginning to halt and stammer. I could only watch and wonder.
“Ohmigod,” she said, “did you make this?” and she picked up some half-baked pun-intended ceramic object from my so-called coffee table, and I said yes, even though it had a factory stamp on the bottom and she knew I was lying, but I loved to watch her accommodate me. Then she halted, threw the back of her hand to her forehead, murmured several “uhs,” and got on the subject of her uncle who collected ceramics, and I knew that Clarissa had forgotten that she was supposed to ask me questions and I was supposed to talk. But here’s the next thing I noticed. While she spun out this tale of her uncle, something was going on in the street that took her attention. Her head turned, her words slowed and lengthened, and her eyes followed something or someone moving at a walking pace. The whole episode lasted just seconds and ended when she turned to me and said, “Do you ever think you’d like to make more ceramics?”
Yipes. Is that what she thinks of me? That I’m far gone enough to be put in a straitjacket in front of a potter’s wheel where I can sculpt vases with my one free nose? I have some image work to do, because if one person is thinking it then others are, too.
By now the view out the window had become more interesting, because what had so transfixed Clarissa had wandered into my field of vision. I saw on the sidewalk a woman with raven hair, probably in her early forties. She was bent down as she walked, holding the hand of a one-year-old boy who toddled along beside her like a starfish. I had looked out this window for years and knew its every traveler, could cull tourists from locals, could discern guests from relatives, and I had never seen this raven-haired woman nor this one-year-old child. But Clarissa spotted them and was either curious or knew something about them that I didn’t know.
Then Clarissa broke the spell. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s a magic square.”
Clarissa arched her body back while she studied my proudest 256 boxes.
“Every column and row adds up to four hundred ninety-one thousand, three hundred eighty-four,” I said.
“You made this?”
“Last night. Do you know Albrecht Dürer?” I asked. Clarissa nodded. I crouched down to my bookshelf, crawling along the floor and reading the titles sideways. I retrieved one of my few art books. (Most of my books are about barbed wire. Barbed wire is a collectible where I come from. I admired these books once at Granny’s house and she sent them to me after Granddaddy died.) My book on Dürer was a real bargain-basement edition with color plates so out of register they looked like Dürer had painted with sludge. But it did have a reproduction of his etching Melancholy, in which he incorporated a magic square. He even worked in the numbers 15 and 14, which is the year the print was made, 1514. I showed the etching to Clarissa and she seemed spellbound; she touched the page, lightly moving her fingers across it as if she were reading Braille. While her hand remained in place she raised her eyes to the wall where I had tacked up my square. She then went to her Filofax and pulled out a Palm Pilot, tapping in the numbers, checking my math. I knew that magic squares were not to be grasped with calculators; it is their mystery and symmetry that thrill. But I didn’t say anything, choosing to let her remain in the mathematical world. Satisfied that it all worked out, she stuck the instrument back into its leatherette case and turned to me.
“Is this something you do?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you use a formula to make them?” Something about my ability to construct the square piqued Clarissa’s interest; perhaps it would be the subject of a term paper she would write on me, perhaps she saw it as a way to finally categorize me as a freak.
“There are formulas,” I said, “but they rob me of the pleasure.”
I could tell Clarissa was dying to write this down because she glanced at her notepad with longing, but we both knew it would be too clinical to actually make notes in front of me. So I pretended that she didn’t look at the notepad and she pretended that she was looking past it. Problem was, there was nothing past it, just wall.
Then Clarissa said, “Have you ever thought of using this… ability, like in a job?”
“I have, but haven’t come up with anything yet, Clarissa.” I had rarely, if ever, called Clarissa by name, and as I said it I knew why: It was too intimate and I felt myself squirm.
“If you were using your talents in a job, do you think it might make going to work less stressful?”