American Mathematic

Keith Cagney

Grady comes back to himself in the frosted velour of December. The winter settles into his psyche, its cold long-finished settling-in behind his ribs. When he walks down the street looking at the windows, he is not looking at himself like the other imploring eyes which dart doggo toward checked profiles. He is looking at us, tracing our contours and gauging the ravines of our skeletal structures, trying to render ursine shapes so he can draw us more accurately. We might shrug it off as the eccentricity of some artist, or maybe even be flattered and catch ourselves picturing the result, but Grady will never draw us. Why is he collecting faces?

His backpack is rife with American poetry. He loves its spartan words, finding some artistry in the removal of sound, ringing a blanketed coincidence with the seamy universe. Discontinuous instants. He is the type of person whose measure of mortality is standing in a bookstore and knowing that he will never be able to read everything. He will not read half of what he wants, and even less of what he thinks he should read.

Bookstores are redeeming for him because they defy statistics. Many things do, but Grady is increasingly baffled by how many percentages and risk-chance assessments make their way into his conversations. He is increasingly further inclined to ignore people altogether, but he likes the way words sound when they flow in opposite directions. The people are not the problem; if there weren't so many statistics they wouldn't get so many wedged into their brains. Picturing the valleys and cortical folds in a brain, Grady thinks that it's fairly self-explanatory how substanceless statistics are: they fit in gaps where even undeniable air can't. If only our brains were wider; then we'd speak wind.

The defiance is in how many words a bookstore holds. There is no possible way of knowing for longer than an instant. They shift; books are bought, released, edited, abridged, translated (allowing the potential for words to throw off the calculations), written in nonsense languages, phonetically, entire pages of onomatopoeia and appositional phrases made of proper nouns like towns in Texas. There can be no statistic. No formula. No range.

Grady pictures the look on pane-seen faces changing from their characteristic boredom to one of pure terror at all that people have created. The world was already full when we got here. When we started thinking it filled up a little more, and Grady remembers his poets, and spies the universal threads, but cannot find a total severance. Lines fray where each person slices his own thread; Bukowski remembers Jane the barfly after 31 years, a man proclaiming no remorse remembering the same losses we find and everyday chalk up to irrelevant numbers: 75% of young relationships, 50% of men, 1 out of 8 smokers, silly ascriptions to folk calculus, logarithmic rehearsed lines about love and obsession, finding purpose, letting this one or that one go (slowly narrowing our y-range that we can arc again—lower our standards, accept a baseline love. plateau.) so that 99.9% can find that certain someone who will look into our faces forever and be held there, soul meeting body and for one time-splitting quaver switching shifts and leaving the ground behind.

There's no statistic for the limits of human creation, nor his self-delusion. One day he will draw the look of surprise he's imagining on each and every face he's calculated, just as soon as he approaches a zero-state of disbelief in the power of such lines.