Sophia A. Montz
6174
You hadn’t heard of Kaprekar’s Constant before you died. If you had, it may have given you comfort. If you had, you might have looked at me with half-hooded knowing eyes, see, I told you there was a meaning to all of this. I told you. You wanted me to believe so badly, and I called it ancient divination, desert ravings, limerence with prophecy, ketamine for the human spirit. Ah, but I’ve learned about Kaprekar’s Constant now. I would have explained it to you with all the ecstasy of the converted, the tenderness of a sermon—did you know that almost any four-digit number can be distilled into a single, ecstatic fixed point, a syllable in integers, an om ringing through the nitrate pepper of the stars?
I see why they study biblical numerology, why they find the divine hand in single and double digits, secrets in tens and hundreds and thousands. Did you know that three and a half in the Old Testament is a week severed in two, an arrest, a stopping of the heart? Three feels unfinished anyway, twin half-circles curling into nothing, dead air and absence. Is that not what happened to you and me, some ethereal tyranny that stopped us midway? I see you too in this recursion of numbers, in the dyscalculia of us. The curve of a seven is like the curve of your back, the twist of a six the round of your cheek.
I think now—too late—that there is a hidden code to the universe, some great secret underlying the surface of our lives. The script of a melody, the measures and rests of a symphony breaking like waves around the stony figures of us. Imagine hearing music, singing music, feeling and being music, with no knowledge of the notation, the written shape, the translation of sound upon the page. Kaprekar’s Constant must be that sound upon the page, the glimmer of a hidden truth just beyond the veil. Six thousand one hundred and seventy-four.
Translate us into this cosmic dialect, read our numerals in back-room tea leaves. Arrange our lives on a page in numbers—I’ll be eight, you six, my mother four, your father two. Rearrange us, subtract us, subtract us, subtract us, and you are left with this strange universal constant, this magic that underpins all the pain and suffering and joys and triumphs of it all.
One Zero Three One.
The day we met. The night rang with a tympani of plastic cups and in a single breath I was twenty-two and burning with innocent life. I was dressed as a priest in some satirical impotent rebellion and you were a rabbit, I think, but I don’t remember the costume. I don’t need to, because all I saw in the rearview of your cheap half-broken car were your eyes rimmed with plastic jewels, alive with the corona of youth. I learned the tell that you were lying that first night, when you told me that my outfit offended you but your eyes crinkled in the corners and you blew just a little too much air out of your nose. And from that too-hot fall evening I knew you weren’t much of a liar, not when a smile gave your bluff away.
One One Zero Three.
The first time I kissed you under the neon marquee of the movie theater and you tasted like popcorn and salt and benediction.
Zero Three Two Six.
We moved in together and we sat on our Ikea sofa drinking whatever liquor store clearance rack wine you picked up on the way home and I knew, I felt in the faraway blood cell spaces of my marrow that you and I were everything, everything, everything.
One Zero One Zero Zero One Zero One One …
We collapsed into binary, into infinite repetition. Alike digits, you see, escape Kaprekar’s Constant, and can’t be distilled into that single fixed point, into that peculiar universal alchemy. Our days crumpled into dyads, into routine, into a kiss goodbye and an increasingly halfhearted hello and arguments about dishes and coworkers and checking accounts. One—we fought, I raised my voice and you said I was just like my father, and I said something hateful and stupid and cruel that I regretted as pride smothered the apology in the back of my throat. Zero—I kissed your lips in the underwater light of a full moon, where your hands on my back and in my hair and over the thick denim of my pants were delirious fire. One—you stared out my sedan window, mute, arms crossed and eyes fixed on the downy gray of rain. Zero—we curled into the corner of the sofa like satisfied cats, mouths wet with gin, hands pressed together in reverent worship of each other.
Zero Two Zero Nine.
You told me that you couldn’t justify the bad days anymore, that someone else would fill your life with only good days, and that you would find them. That you had to find them.
Zero Two One Zero.
I let you.
Zero Eight Two Nine.
Calculating the collision of objects in space is an imperfect poetry, but I would have twisted any probability and committed any sin for my car to collide under that banner of August summer. I fell to my knees, crying in great, gulping anguish to something I knew did not exist, to something that I wanted so badly to exist I could collapse from hot burning want into a pillar of ash.
But now I understand what you could never make me understand together, that there is, somehow, a mysterious harmony in the bones of this world. If we are numbers, and if Kaprekar’s Constant is true, then we may change and rearrange and transform, only to be resurrected, all of us resurrected, into a single ever-burning perpetuity. I don’t pretend to know why, to be able to justify it, to be able to draw if-a-then-b-then-c. But I stare at the number two and in it I see the eighth rest in a canticle of us, consecrated in smoke and incense, the melody one day to begin again.
Sophia Montz writes legal memoranda by day and literary fiction by night. She lives in Miami, FL with her husband and two cats. Her work is forthcoming in The /tƐmz/ Review.
