I guessed that one day the restrictions I imposed on myself would end. But first, it seemed that my range of possible activities would have to iris down to zero before I could turn myself around. Then, when I was finally static and immobile, I could weigh and measure every exterior force and, slowly and incrementally, once again allow the outside in. And that would be my life.
The next morning I decided to touch every corner of every copying machine at Kinko’s. Outside the apartment I ran into Brian, who was lumbering toward Philipa’s, wearing what I suspect were the same clothes he had on yesterday. He had the greasy look of someone who had been out all night. Plus he held his cell phone in his hand, which told me he was staying closely connected to Philipa’s whereabouts. His size touched me, this hulk. And after last evening, with my canny near-seduction of his girlfriend, I felt I was Bugs Bunny and Mercury to his Elmer Fudd and Thor.
I decided to pump Brian to find out how much he knew about my night with Philipa. I trudged out my technique of oblique questioning: I would ask Brian mundane questions and observe his response.
“I’m Daniel. I see you sometimes around the building. You an actor, like Philipa?”
Now if Brian cocked his head and glared at me through squinted eyes, I could gather that he was aware of my escapade with his girlfriend. But he didn’t. He said, “I’m a painter,” and like a person with an unusual name who must immediately spell it out, he added, “a house painter.” Then he looked at me as if to say, “Whadya think about that?”
His demeanor was so flat that not only did he not suspect me, but this guy wouldn’t have suspected a horned man-goat leaving Philipa’s apartment at midnight while zipping up his pants. He didn’t seem to have a suspicious bone in him. Then he rattled on about a sports bar and a football game. Staring dumbly into his face to indicate my interest, I realized Brian would not have been a cuckold in the grand literary tradition. In fact, he was more like a mushroom.
I had felt very manly when I first approached Brian, having just had a one-nighter with his girl, but now I felt very sheepish. This harmless fungus was innocent and charmless, but mostly he was vulnerable, and I wondered if I was just too smooth to be spreading my panache around his world. “Hey, well, best of luck,” I said and gave him a wave, not knowing if my comment was responsive to what he had been talking about. Then he said, “See ya, Slick.” And I thought, Slick? Maybe he is on to me after all.
My Kinko’s task was still before me, so I turned west and headed toward Seventh Street, drawing on all my navigational skills. Moving effortlessly from one scooped-out driveway to the next, I had achieved Sixth Street in a matter of minutes when I confronted an obstacle of unimaginable proportions. At my final matched set of scooped-out driveways, which would have served as my gateway to Kinko’s, someone, some lad, some fellow, had, in a careless parking free-for-all, irresponsibly parked his ’99 Land Cruiser or some such gigantic turd so that it edged several feet into my last driveway. This was as effective an obstacle for me as an eight-foot concrete wall. What good are the beautiful planes that connect driveway to driveway if a chrome-plated two-hundred-pound fender intersects their symmetry? Yeah, the driver of this tank is a crosswalk guy, so he doesn’t care. I stood there knowing that the copiers at Kinko’s needed to be touched and soon, too, or else panic, so I decided to proceed in spite of the offending car.
I stood on the sidewalk facing the street with Kinko’s directly opposite me. The Land Cruiser was on my right, so I hung to the left side of the driveway. There was no way to justify the presence of that bumper. No, if I crossed a driveway while a foreign object jutted into it, I would be committing a violation of logic. But, simultaneously driven forward and backward, I angled the Land Cruiser out of my peripheral vision and made it to the curb. Alas. My foot stepped toward the street, but I couldn’t quite put it down. Was that a pain I felt in my left arm? My hands became cold and moist, and my heart squeezed like a fist. I just couldn’t dismiss the presence of that fender. My toe touched the asphalt for support, which was an unfortunate maneuver because I was now standing with my left foot fully flat in the driveway and my right foot on point in the street. With my heart rapidly accelerating and my brain aware of impending death, my saliva was drying out so rapidly that I couldn’t remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. But I did not scream out. Why? For propriety. Inside me the fires of hell were churning and stirring; but outwardly I was as still as a Rodin.
I pulled my foot back to safety. But I had leaned too far out; my toes were at the edge of the driveway and my body was tilting over my gravitational center. In other words, I was about to fall into the street. I windmilled both of my arms in giant circles hoping for some reverse thrust, and there was a moment, eons long, when all 180 pounds of me were balanced on the head of a pin while my arms spun backward at tornado speed. But then an angel must have breathed on me, because I felt an infinitesimal nudge, which caused me to rock back on my heels, and I was able to step back onto the sidewalk. I looked across the street to Kinko’s, where it sparkled in the sun like Shangri-la, but I was separated from it by a treacherous abyss. Kinko’s would have to wait, but the terror would not leave. I decided to head toward home where I could make a magic square.
Making a magic square would alphabetize my brain. “Alphabetize” is my slang for “alpha-beta-ize,” meaning, raise my alphas and lower my betas. Staring into a square that has been divided into 256 smaller squares, all empty, all needing unique numbers, numbers that will produce the identical sum whether they’re read vertically or horizontally, focuses the mind. During moments of crisis, I’ve created magic squares composed of sixteen, forty-nine, even sixty-four boxes, and never once has it failed to level me out. Here’s last year’s, after two seventy-five-watt bulbs blew out on a Sunday and I had no replacements:
Each column and row adds up to 260. But this is a lousy 8 × 8 square. Making a 16 × 16 square would soothe even the edgiest neurotic. Benjamin Franklin-who as far as I know was not an edgy neurotic-was a magic square enthusiast. I assume he tackled them when he was not preoccupied with boffing a Parisian beauty, a distraction I do not have. His most famous square was a kingsize brainteaser that did not sum correctly at the diagonals, unless the diagonals were bent like boomerangs. Now that’s flair, plus he dodged electrocution by kite. Albrecht Dürer played with them too, which is good enough for me.
I pulled my leaden feet to the art supply store and purchased a three-foot-by-three-foot white poster board. If I was going to make a 256-box square, I wanted it to be big enough so I didn’t have to write the numbers microscopically. I was, after the Kinko’s incident, walking in a self-imposed narrow corridor of behavioral possibilities, meaning there were very few moves I could make or thoughts I could think that weren’t verboten. So the purchase didn’t go well. I required myself to keep both hands in my pockets. In order to pay, I had to shove all ten fingers deep in my pants and flip cash onto the counter with my hyperactive thumbs. I got a few impatient stares, too, and then a little help was sympathetically offered from a well-dressed businessman who plucked a few singles from the wadded-up bills that peeked out from my pockets and gave them to the clerk. If this makes me sound helpless, I feel you should know that I don’t enter this state very often and it is something I could snap out of, it’s just that I don’t want to.
Once home, I laid the poster board on my kitchen table and, with a Magic Marker and T square, quickly outlined a box. I drew more lines, creating 256 empty spaces. I then sat in front of it as though it were an altar and meditated on its holiness. Fixing my eyes on row 1, column 1, a number appeared in my mind, the number 47,800. I entered it into the square. I focused on another position. Eventually I wrote a number in it: 30,831. As soon as I wrote 30,831, I felt my anxiety lessen. Which makes sense: The intuiting of the second number necessarily implied all the other numbers in the grid, numbers that were not yet known to me but that existed somewhere in my mind. I felt like a lover who knows there is someone out there for him, but it is someone he has not yet met.