The God Of Numbers
My mother once had a job measuring penises — penises that belonged to men whose chromosomes were askew. “The trouble,” she said, “is that when I went to measure them, they’d grow!” I picture her pulling a wooden ruler from a pocket of her white lab coat. How hard we try to break the world down, make sense of it. How steadily it resists. My friend David, an astrophysicist, had a job counting the clouds of dust around stars, an assignment that, in my mind, put him in an echelon of angels just above the ones who number grains of sand. There’s something comforting about inventory, futile as it may be, the act of assessment itself a form of care. I like to imagine a God who rises before dawn, takes out the stone tablets, and starts to tally the individual hairs on each head, the number of breaths we’ve taken in the night, who counts the cilia shooting our cells through the dark galaxies of our bodies just before he gets back to work turning out the next tornado or reaching down to give the tectonic plates another good, hard shake.
Eve, After
Did she know there was more to life than lions licking the furred ears of lambs, fruit trees dropping their fat bounty, the years droning on without argument? Too much quiet is never a good sign. Isn’t there always something itching beneath the surface? But what could she say? The larder was full, and they were beautiful, their bodies new as the day they were made. Each morning the same flowers broke through the rich soil, the birds sang, again, in perfect pitch. It was only at night, when they lay together in the dark, that it was almost palpable — the vague sadness, unnamed. Foolishness, betrayal, — call it what you will. What a relief to feel the weight fall into her palm. And after, not to pretend anymore that the terrible calm was Paradise.
