Plus 1

“You know this is why you're single, right?” Jake asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Ace could have said the same thing right back at him. Jake often had a little catsup somewhere on his person.

Instead, Ace spun his butter knife on the table, as if he were going to make the stainless balance on the tip.

“You have to stop with the nonsense,” his ex-former future brother-in-law said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah you do. The numbers, man. All you do is talk to people about numbers.”

Numbers followed Ace—or vice versa. He would trace them in his mind and with his fingertips. He’d see a number randomly on a house or a license plate or a speed sign, and he’d think about that number throughout the day and see it again when he least expected it.

“Everyone has a hobby,” he said now. “You like golf.”

Jake took a deep breath. “I do like golf…”

“And that has numbers in it. Lots of numbers. Plus Birdies and Eagles and Weasels and Otters…”

Jake ignored the dig. “You asked the waitress if she knew what a Euclidean construction was.”

“I was curious.” Ace let the knife drop and leaned back in the booth. He had on a sweater—Pantone 00239c—and a pair of faded 501s. He was slim but not skinny. 29 for a few more days. He liked to eat at diners like this one, where you ordered your meal by the number. His favorite was a six with the sauce on the side. “I mean,” Ace said, “I just wondered.”

“No you didn’t. You thought she was cute, and this is what you do when you’re flirting.”

“So will you be my ‘plus one’ or not?”

“I am not going to my sister’s wedding with you. I’m her brother, dude. I’m the best man.”

The cinnamon-haired waitress came by to refill their mugs. Ace looked up at her and said, “Do you know that it is mathematically impossible to balance a knife on its point?”

She tilted her head at him. “I’d have guessed that.”

“But do you know why…” and before Jake could stop him, Ace was brushing his glossy black hair off his forehead in that gesture he did when he got intense. His eyes were the same blue as his sweater, and they gleamed as he explained unstable equilibrium, and the fact that while you could theoretically calculate a balance point… but she was off to another table.

Jake said, “Buddy, you got to stop. When was the last time you went on a date?”

Ace didn’t answer, even though he knew his last date was on 01/02/23. Because that was a great date if not the best actual date.

For a man who loved the symmetry of addition—specifically the dependability of one plus one always equalling two—Ace was remarkably in the negative when it came to women. Finding a person who would sit on his side of the equals sign was a proof he’d failed. On those very rare times he meet a random integer, he would enter her digits carefully into his phone, always paying attention to the patterns. Mary’s was a series of prime numbers if you read it right, and Eleanor’s final four were 4732, the square root of 22,391,824. Although she hadn’t been the least bit elated when he’d told her.

“The way some people practice spelling bee words,” he’d said. “Numbers are my language.” She said it was foreign to her. Their first date had been their last date.

This afternoon, he left the waitress a 28% tip, while Jake smirked and rubbed the catsup from his chin.

Back in his car, Ace repeated the words over and over: “Plus one, plus one. Damn. Plus one.”

Aside from Jake, who had stayed his friend even after the breakup, Ace didn’t have anyone else to ask. Dating Cecilia was the closest he’d ever come to being normal, Jake had said. The wife. The car. The house. The 2.3 children.

Ace hadn’t added: “The sex every fourth night at first, and then maybe once or twice a month later on.” Or “Looking forward to a mortgage with a 6.6% interest rate. Changing the oil in the station wagon every 5,000 to 7,500 miles. Living, approximately, 60 years together before being buried six feet under.”

He did his best to avoid soap opera scenarios like going solo to a wedding of the girl he’d once asked to marry. Often at weddings and anniversaries, he’d be at the table for stragglers, which he thought of as impossible numbers. The ones who didn’t add up. The odd balls. The misfits.

He’d tried to explain this idea to a fellow guest at a bar mitzvah one evening, but the woman’s eyes had glazed over when he’d gotten to the ninth Dedekind, although, he’d assured her before she left for the bathroom to never return, that had finally been calculated. He’d already explained to her the difference between imaginary numbers and transcendental numbers, and this is why, his therapist told him at a session after (one that cost him $7.5 a minute), he was generally single.

When he got home from his outing with Jake, he stared at the invite pinned to his cork board. The invitation read in cursive “Ace Radian” and then there was the space for him to check that box.

He didn’t actually mind going to events solo. He was in his prime, after all, but most of the time, he would wind up standing against the wall, counting the balloons or the bass notes. Drinking champagne, and wondering how many bubbles were in each glass. Or watching the pretty guitarist with the green hair up on stage doing 80s covers… reaching a point in the evening when he would be wishing he were home beneath his spreadsheets.

Maybe with her?

Some numbers were beautiful, more beautiful than others. He appreciated the 6 and 9 continuum. Would never admit it, but he hated fours. Why? He couldn’t tell you. He liked 8s the best, although he never had told anyone again after he’d told Cecilia.

Because the monotony wasn’t what had broken them up. He thought it was the fact that she’d tried to add a bunch of extras on to him, to see if she could make him into something else. He didn’t tell her that what you did on the left side of the equation, you had to do to the right, as well. She’d scrapped his wardrobe, moved his math books to the attic, shoved his calculators into a drawer. Finally, in a fit, she screamed that he was never going to love her as much as he loved math. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he never would. Ace wasn’t 100% sure whether or not that was true. But she was right about one thing.

He didn’t love her more than he loved 8s.

In his kitchen, Ace cut into a pie he’d been saving, and he thought about how he liked fractions better than decimals which was unusual, he supposed, but pi made him deeply uncomfortable, a number stretching out so far, even though he had learned pi to the 3,000th place. For fun. He did so after learning the world record was 70,000, but he didn’t have the bandwidth for that.

Sometimes, late at night, he fantasized about numbers. The whisper perfection of them. The way they moved.

Even when the few girlfriends he’d been able to carry over past a one-night stand had ended things, what was sadder to him than the loneliness was the solitary place setting. One is an odd number and he'd always been into evens.

He didn’t know if anyone else felt the same way about sines and cosines, formulas and equations that he did. It was why he’d become an accountant, why he’d asked for a pocket calculator when he visited Santa. “You sure you don’t want a fire engine?” He was sure. Loved those numbers. He saw them in different colors sometimes. Eights were electric blue. Sixes and nines were Pepto-pink. Threes were saffron. He had dreams that were entirely numeric. He’d wake up and think about the seventy-seven he’d seen.

Often, people made wishes on numbers. He knew this. But in his humble opinion, folks immortalized the wrong numbers. 1111 wasn’t so special. What was more special was 68,270, whose prime factors were 2, 5, and 6,827. He did square roots in his head instead of counting sheep. He loved figuring out tips. Tax season was his absolute end all and be all. April 15th made him feel sick inside because all the organization of numbers into little boxes had come to an end until the next year. Although there were always remainders who required extensions.

As a treat, he would visit his local electronics store, a gadget store, really, to peruse the calculators. He owned plenty. He didn’t like to tell anyone how many. But there was always a new one he’d be thinking about. One of his clients had said he could just use his phone, right? And he’d responded to this man, who drove a fancy sports car, that he could just take the bus, huh?

There was a woman named Octavia who worked at the store—this store that sold blenders and talking fridges, and the occasional sound system and X-boxes, and he would glance at her as he made his way to the far off corner with the little display of calculators. There was one he wanted to add to his stable. He knew men who collected watches; one of his cousins collected darts. He didn’t need another one, but he wanted it.

“Oh, look. It’s the king of the fricking calculators,” one of her coworkers said. There wasn’t anything specifically odd about Ace. It was just the way he visited the calculators. As if he were visiting a friend.

“I like him,” Octavia said. She had hair cut in a page boy, symmetrical. She always wore a ring on each of her middle fingers to be balanced.

“You what?”

“He’s intense.”

“He’s a geek.”

She shrugged and went to help him, because he was the one guy who came in regularly who never hit on her. Who never was inappropriate with his queries. So many guys would buy a new sound system and then ask her if she wanted to hear their woofers, or tweeters, or what have you.

The clerk found him staring, and she asked if he’d like to hold the piece. To stroke the equals sign, and she said the words in a way that made him stare at her a little more closely. He’d always thought she was attractive. She had buttons he wouldn't have minded pressing.

When she lifted the Rolls Royce of calculators out of the case, she got up her nerve to ask him what made this one so special. He glanced again at her quickly, hope on his face that she wasn’t teasing him. But her eyes looked clear and interested, and he said that there were different types of tools for different projects—just like when you were playing music, you might want an acoustic or an electric…

And she lit up and said she played guitar, and he said music was math in sound. Numbers on a scale. There was an overlap.

She said she hadn’t realized that, although she’d been good at algebra in school. She was only working this job to pay the bills while she played small gigs at local bars. And occasionally at weddings…

He said, “You don’t sometimes have green hair, do you?”

She said, “You were leaning against the wall, right?” and when he nodded,” she whispered, “I wear a wig. I like to have options. To transform.”

He said, “How many wigs do you have?”

“Eight.”

He swallowed hard.

Then he told her today was the day he was going to take the calculator home, to add to the ones in his own display case. And she said that she would like to see them. Ace could suddenly understand where his Y axis might intersect with her X, and that maybe 2.3 wasn’t a bad number for a family.

He said, “Have you ever heard of the Euclidean formula?”

And she said, “It sounds dirty… what’s it mean?”

He said, “It’s a formula to calculate the straight-line distance between two points.”

“Like this?” she asked, and she leaned forward across the display case and kissed him.

And that’s how Ace got his plus one.