One, Two and Three

The neon tube above the sink did not buzz; it throbbed at exactly sixty hertz, matching the pulse in Matteo’s left temple.

Matteo was a silvering man who collected empty frames. His apartment was not small, but it was narrow, shaped like the inside of a clarinet. Every surface was covered in brushed aluminum foil, which he applied daily with a soft felt roller to ensure no seams showed. Seams allowed the outside to leak in.

He sat at the zinc table. On the table sat a single, unpeeled hard-boiled egg.

"One," Matteo said to the egg. The egg did not reply, which was the highest form of loyalty Matteo had ever known. It occupied its volume of air with absolute precision. It did not expand. It did not sigh. It did not ask if he had considered going out into the rain.

"One is a company,"

Matteo whispered. He liked the word company. It derived from the Latin cum pane—with bread. But there was no bread. Only the egg, the foil, and the sixty-hertz hum. In the reflection of the aluminum wall, his face looked like a wet spoon. He was perfectly, beautifully sufficient. He was an island with a population of exactly one, which meant there was no one to vote him off.

Then the floorboards beneath the radiator gave a dry, splintering cough.

A line of black dust rose from the gap. Matteo did not move his eyes from the egg, but his ears grew wide and thin, like dried apricots.

The dust reshaped itself. It did not crawl; it condensed. From the shadow of the baseboard emerged an entity that looked remarkably like Matteo, though it was roughly the size of a celery stalk and lacked nostrils. It wore a tiny, immaculate suit made of gray lint.

It climbed the table leg using small, suction-tipped fingers that made a sound like pulling tape off cardboard.

Prip. Prip. Prip.

It sat on the opposite edge of the zinc table. It looked at the egg. Then it looked at Matteo.

"Two," the lint-man said. His voice was like two dry leaves rubbing together in a pocket.

"Two is a crowd."

Matteo felt his chest tighten. The air in the room suddenly felt twice as heavy, though the volume had not changed. The presence of the second entity displaced nothing physical, yet the room was suddenly choked with potential history.

"You are taking up my syntax," Matteo said, his voice flat.

"I am dividing the silence," the lint-man corrected. He reached out and touched the egg. He did not break it; he merely indexed it. "Now there is an observer and an observed, and then there is me, the witness. The room is teeming. It is positively vulgar."

"Go back into the lath," Matteo said.

"Can't," the lint-man dry-chirped. "The ratio has shifted. Once you notice the second point, the line exists. You can't un-know a geometric progression, Matteo. Look behind you."

Matteo did not want to look, but his neck was no longer entirely his own. It turned with the slow, jerky torque of a clockwork key.

The aluminum foil on the back wall was bulging. Not outward, like something trying to burst through, but inward, like a vacuum pulling the room into a knot. The silver surface puckered, forming a metallic throat.

From the throat issued a sound. It was not a scream. It was the sound of three hundred cocktail glasses clinking simultaneously in an empty swimming pool.

Tink.

A woman stepped out of the silver fold. She was normal-sized, but she had too many elbows. Where her left arm should have been, three distinct joints bent in a zig-zag pattern, allowing her to hold a cigarette, a lighter, and a small glass of green fluid all at once without crowding her own chin. Her dress was made of woven magnetic tape that hissed as she moved.

"Three," she announced, her voice a cocktail of static and honey.

"Three is a party."

Behind her, the wall didn't close. It began to pour.

Not people. Not guests. But the behavior of a party.

The room didn't grow larger, but the space between Matteo and the zinc table began to stretch and curdle. The smell of cheap gin and spilled cologne evaporated directly out of the aluminum walls. A laugh—a sharp, brassy laugh belonging to a woman who died in 1974—detached itself from the ceiling and bounced across the floor like a dropped coin.

"Who invited the geometry?" the elbowed woman asked, gesturing with her triple-jointed arm toward the lint-man.

"He grew from the floor," Matteo said. He was trying to keep his fingers pressed against the zinc table, but the metal was growing warm. It shouldn't be warm. Aluminum is an excellent conductor; it should only reflect his own skin.

"Nonsense, darling, everything is invited once there are three," she said. She threw her head back, and a stream of black confetti drifted out of her open mouth, settling into Matteo’s hair.

"We’re celebrating the breakdown of the perimeter! Introduce me to your egg."

The lint-man stood up on his celery legs. "The egg is an anchor," he hissed. "If she touches it, the nouns will become verbs. We won't be able to stand still."

"Oh, look at him, he's so linear," the woman laughed. She didn't walk toward Matteo; she simply occupied the positions between him and the door in rapid succession, like a strobe light trick. "Let's turn up the music."

There was no radio. There was no gramophone. But the room began to vibrate with the low, wet thud of a bassline that felt like a finger poking Matteo in the center of his forehead.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The aluminum foil began to peel away from the walls in long, silver ribbons, revealing the wet, red brick underneath. The bricks were sweating.

"Stop it," Matteo said. His voice was swallowed by the sound of forty people he couldn't see discussing a film they hadn't watched. The air was thick with phrases like "but the cinematography, darling" and "of course, the subtext is purely monetary."

"You can't stop a triad," the elbowed woman shouted over the din of invisible glass-clinking.

She was dancing now, her three-jointed arms carving strange, non-Euclidean shapes in the smoke that had appeared from nowhere.

"One is an accident. Two is a dilemma. Three is a destination! Drink?"

She held out the glass of green fluid. Matteo looked down. The fluid wasn't liquid; it was a dense cluster of very small, green numbers, spinning so fast they looked like a paste.

"I am a company," Matteo muttered, his eyes wide, staring at the egg. The egg was his only static point. It remained white. It remained oval.

"You were a company," the lint-man said. He had climbed onto Matteo’s shoulder now. His tiny suction fingers were pulling at the skin of Matteo’s earlobe.

"But you looked at me. That made us a crowd. And once you have a crowd, the third one always smells the blood of the crowd from three miles away. She’s the consensus, Matteo. You can't outvote a consensus."

The room was hot now. The invisible guests were arguing about politics. A phantom cigarette burned a hole in the sleeve of Matteo’s shirt, though there was no ember, only the smell of scorching cotton and a small, perfectly round circle of black ash.

The elbowed woman grabbed Matteo’s hand. Her skin felt like a warm, wet magazine page that had been left in the sun.

"Come on, Mattie," she purred. "Let's mingle with the walls."

"No," Matteo said.

He reached out with his free hand and grabbed the hard-boiled egg.

He didn't peel it. He threw it into his mouth whole.

The shell was sharp. It cracked against his molars with a sound like a small dry branch breaking underfoot. The calcium shards cut his gums, but he didn't swallow. He kept the egg in his mouth, a great, suffocating bolus of white and yellow and sharp, chalky shell. He filled his entire oral cavity with it until his cheeks bulged and he couldn't breathe through his mouth.

He was re-establishing the boundary. He was packing the volume.

The elbowed woman froze. Her triple joints locked mid-swing. The invisible chatter dropped by ten decibels, then twenty, like a radio being turned down in another house.

The lint-man on his shoulder stiffened, his linty suit turning brittle and gray.

"Mmph," Matteo said through the egg.

The room began to contract. The red bricks hid themselves behind the silver foil again, though the foil was now wrinkled and creased like an old dress. The smell of gin turned back into the smell of damp plaster.

The woman didn't disappear; she simply shrank back into the wall, her magnetic dress flattening into a single, dark smear on the aluminum surface, like an old oil stain.

The lint-man dropped from Matteo’s shoulder, hitting the table with a soft plop before dissolving into a pinch of gray dust that the sixty-hertz draft blew away.

Matteo stood alone in the narrow room.

The silence returned, but it was a bruised silence. It had teeth marks in it.

His mouth tasted of sulfur and iron from the blood where the shell had pierced his cheek. Carefully, using his tongue, he moved the crushed mass of the egg to the front of his mouth. He didn't want to spit it out. If he spit it out, the table would have two things on it again: him and the mess. And two was a crowd.

He swallowed.

It went down slowly, a jagged, heavy lump that scraped his esophagus all the way down to his stomach. He could feel the exact shape of it sitting behind his ribs—a cold, dense weight of calcium and protein.

He sat down at the zinc table.

The room was perfectly still. The neon light throbbed. Sixty hertz.

Matteo looked at his reflection in the aluminum foil. His face was still a wet spoon, but it was slightly wider now. He placed his hands flat on the zinc.

"One," he said.

His voice didn't sound like his own. It sounded slightly deeper, with a faint, metallic hiss underneath it, like woven magnetic tape.

He waited for the egg to answer. It didn't, because it was inside him.

Then, from the deep, dark interior of his own stomach, Matteo heard a tiny, muffled sound. It wasn't the sound of digestion. It was the sound of a very small, lint-covered finger tapping against the inside of his ribs.

Prip.

And then, from a little higher up, near his lungs, a brassy, distant laugh echoed through his windpipe.

"Oh, Mattie," a voice whispered from his own throat, though his lips didn't move.

"You didn't get rid of the party. You just moved the venue."

Matteo looked down at his own chest. His ribs were beginning to vibrate to a low, wet bassline. He reached into his pocket to find his aluminum roller, to smooth out the seams, but his left arm bent in three places before it reached his hip.

He sat very still, a perfect company of three, waiting for the music to stop. It never did.