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Vijay Fafat
- Published on
A poignant horror story (I never thought I would ever write a phrase like that!) which moves you even as you look back at the final horror at the end of story and think, “I understand why this was a sad mathematical plausibility, though not necessarily an inevitability.”
Brenda is a mathematically gifted child, though her way of visualizing and thinking about mathematics - counting process in particular - is different. As she says,
“My name is Brenda. I am fifteen years old. I learned to count when I was two, marking things off on my fingers, looking for the answers. If I counted one of something, it was mine: one crib, one bear, one mommy […]. I learned to count higher numbers when I was four […] I do not count cuckoos. Cuckoos are not part of my numbers.”
In a subtle, unwitting way, she alludes to the counting process as a one-to-one correspondence used so devastatingly by Cantor in transitioning from finite sets to infinite sets:
“I think cuckoos could be counted with owls, maybe, measured in those columns, but I do not know the rhyme,”
and then her personal mode of counting:
“ and I am happy with my corvids—my ravens and crows and jays. They know me and I know them, and I no longer need the bird books that sit in stacks around my bed to pick their familiar profiles out of the throng. There are crows I’ve never seen before, Jamaican and palm and Cuban, here in North America, and a hundred more scattered around the world, in Australia and Asia and Europe, but here, all the corvids are familiar. They are known. They can be counted. I would be a fool to change my numbers now, when I am fifteen, when I am so close to understanding their equations.”
In her own private mythology and blind belief, she starts forming her opinion about the world, particularly future events, as being linked to her specific counts of her corvids. Her avian numerology convinces her about the type of day the world - her world - is going to experience based on the number of crows she encounters and counts:
“If eight comes, I will not see it, nor nine. Some numbers are invisible, seen only in retrospect, when the day does not align with my count. Those days are the bad ones. Those days are the ones where I have to sit in my bed for hours, matching numbers to likely birds, tracing migration routes, apologizing, apologizing, always apologizing for getting the math wrong. The day my grandmother died, my count said “joy,” but when I got home, it was sorrow waiting on the phone, sorrow waiting in the deep lines of my mother’s face. One’s for sorrow, yes, but eight’s for Heaven. If I had counted that high, I would have known that my grandmother was at peace. Nine’s for Hell. If I had counted that, I would have scoured the whole city, if that was what it took, to bring the count higher, to find her a better ending. Ten’s for the Devil. I don’t believe in him, not really. Eleven’s for penance. Twelve’s for sin. There are as many numbers as there are corvids, and someday I will catalog them all, and then nothing will ever slip by me again.”
Brenda is intellectually gifted. But what she really wants is missed by the adults around her. She expresses a yearning pathos, that if only people saw her gifts differently, her mode of thinking differently, it would perhaps open up a new window of understanding::
“I am a genius, according to the people who take and review the tests, measuring minds in columns of numbers and vocabulary words. I am in the top 2 percent nationally, not just for my age range, but for high school students as a whole. Sometimes I wish they had drawn a different conclusion from my scores. With my intelligence, they argue, mainstreaming is not only the appropriate course of action, it is the only course of action. Our Special Education program is underfunded and understaffed, and its resources are better spent on those who truly need them, while those like me, who can keep up with the classwork and excel at the material, are pushed out into the “real world” to fend for ourselves. My mother attempted to contest the mainstreaming once, citing my absence seizures and my tendency to see catastrophe in the movement of the air as reasons that I needed more support. Carl put a stop to her objections. “She’s going to have to deal with the real world in three years,” […] And what I have is classes with peers who will never belong to me, for their math is too different from my own.”
From there, the story unfolds in a manner which keeps tugging at your heart, with a tragedy which brings into sharp focus what Brenda thinks she must do, and how, in the end, it comes down to the following (which might be a slight spoiler):
“and I count […] one by one, until I reach nineteen, nineteen, nineteen is for the one who wronged you. Twenty is for a place to stand. Twenty-one’s all you have to offer […] I have counted off my corvids. The math is done. [..] that was where this equation had to lead us. This is the mathematical inevitability to which I have been building all my life. I can feel the feathers under my skin, aching to be free. My fingers leave red smears on the window when I pry it open. I know I can only fly for a moment. I know that it will be enough.”
Further Commentary: I should point out that in my discussion with Alex Kasman about this story, Alex was of the strong opinion that this story should not count as Mathfiction (for good, well-articulated reasons). So let me hasten to mention that it is not my intention to convey that Brenda was thinking of Cantor or that the author intended so. It was a thought which struck me when I read the story. In fact, over the first couple of pages, I was reminded of the twins mentioned by Oliver Sachs, the ones who took great joy in thinking about very large primes (https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/oliver-sacks-and-the-amazing-twins) Indeed, my entire thought around this story was not driven by specific terms like “equation” or “math” but the alternative thought process of a child growing into a teen, the association of a personal numerology to the physics of the world, and the thoughts of a gifted child. I agree that the math content, per se, is not large but just like a few other stories, the overall impression I was left with was that the story had mathematical character to it which is perhaps not captured in a strait-jacketed manner. I really loved this story.