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counting love
by erin mcclusky

n equals what is left

There was no way to solve for n. They had tried, but the papers had been wrong; an algebraic equation does not always yield the same result in Wisconsin as in California. In his last letter to her he went over the proofs he had done in California and she couldn’t find anything wrong with his math, but in Wisconsin the variable n came out different. She held his letter and his answer for n and knew things would have to end between them. She knew this was emptiness but she couldn’t make herself believe this was 0; the round parallel curves seemed too smug to her. She liked the resignation of 5, the swagger of 7, the lank stance of 1. He is 1, she thought. His thinness never stopped her from wanting more of him.

She knew she would have to write to him. She had found his kidney in the toe of her running shoe and she wanted to know where she should send it to or if he would rather come and get it himself. He was already missing 5 inches of intestine that he had left with his last lover and she thought he would probably want his kidney returned. When they met he told her about the missing intestine and the 2.4 grams of skin tissue gone from his thigh and the piece of rib and he asked her if she would fix him, make him whole. She was always breaking the ends of pencils and the edges of her fingernails, so she told him she couldn’t help. She thought that would be the end of him. But he sent her lists of square roots and radicals and mixed fractions and she started to bend to him. He stood outside her apartment and recited finite equations up to her window, and after a while she let him come inside, sit at her table and talk.

He told her about how he died for the first time. He fell in love with a beautiful accountant who would have nothing to do with him and his imaginary numbers. He begged and pleaded for the accountant’s love but the accountant would not have him. The accountant wanted numbers to be real, to be whole, and divisible by 2 if at all possible. Over coffee, the accountant told him their love would never make sense, that there was no sense in their going on like this. The accountant got up from the table to leave and he, in a fit of desperation, grabbed onto the accountant’s bag. He and the accountant struggled over the bag, the accountant finally yanking it from his hands. The accountant’s payroll book slid out of the bag and fell open on the ground. The shock of seeing the perfect whole numbers written neatly in rows and columns in the accountant’s even hand killed him instantly. The accountant felt bad about killing him and brought him back to life but still refused to see him. He left California and moved to Wisconsin because, he said, when you die once you want to die again.

In Wisconsin he gave 5 inches of his intestines to a nun who prayed to St. Erasmus. The saint was martyred because he spoke too often of a theory that was a loose thread which, if tugged, would unravel everything that passed for the fabric of reality. The nun who prayed to St. Erasmus believed in the saint’s brilliance and directed her prayers to an image of him next to a ship’s windlass. St. Erasmus had escaped from persecution on a ship sailed by angels and, when they saw him depicted next to the windlass, his believers thought he had been martyred by having his intestines wound like the ship’s rope around the windlass. The nun who prayed to St. Erasmus believed that St. Erasmus had come back for her and that, to maintain the image of sainthood, he imitated the saint’s wounds and pulled out 5 inches of his intestines and wound them around a spool for the nun. The nun begged him to leave her and to carry his thread into the world. So he left the convent and the nun had the 5 inches of his intestine wound on a spool placed in a reliquary.

He told her that prayers to St. Erasmus will ease abdominal pain and he said that he always thought love would be like the loops of paper that his mother taught him to twist once and tape together at the ends. He could trace the entire circuit of the paper with his pencil and the line would travel inside and outside the paper curves. His mother said that this was infinity: the ability to draw a line and not stop.

The stories he told sitting at her table were like this. She didn’t need to say anything. She listened carefully and sat with him while he talked. When he was done he stopped talking and she pulled out a pad of legal paper, yellow with red lines, and they worked on proofs, silently, until they were tired. She didn’t regret bringing him into her life as long as he did not ask her a second time to fix him, to make him whole.

There was an evening when he sat down and told her that he had to leave because he did not think he would die in Wisconsin. He told her about his room in California with a bed and a 75-gallon fish tank for his two carniverous fish. He shared sushi with his fish; he ate the rice and nori and they ate the flying fish roe. He asked her to keep the things from his room in Wisconsin; there was a bed and a one-eyed toad in a jar and a one-eyed python in Tupperware under the sink. After he left, he started to send her proofs, he didn’t write about his past loves and what he had lost, the things he talked about when they sat together at her table; he only wrote numbers and variables. She went over his equations carefully and sent him new proofs and corrections. She bought a pink-toed tarantula because she started to miss him. The tarantula had two eyes and the python slid into a funk because he was envious.

He sent her a telegram like they did to announce a death in the Civil War and it said,

I always wanted STOP love to be STOP something I could keep STOPbut love is STOP nothing but water and stars STOP n equals what is left STOP Read More »Issue 3: Counting Love, by Erin McCluskey