Carmela’s constant refrain throughout our marriage: “It’s just a number.”
Carmela doesn’t believe in numbers: Natural numbers, whole numbers, decimal numbers, integer numbers, real numbers, imaginary numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, prime numbers, complex numbers, composite numbers, cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers. She doesn’t believe in any of them.
“Stripped of their showy pretensions, all numbers really do is represent a quantity,” she argues, “And only a tiny percentage of reality can be reduced to a quantity. Numbers are like strings woven together in a net. The net can capture a fish, but it can’t capture the water the fish swims in. The net can’t capture the totality of the fish.”
“Numbers aren’t just quantities,” I counter. “They’re essential tools in our struggle to reign in the chaos we see in the world around us. Numbers don’t quantify reality, they define it. They draw boundaries around it and create connections that allow us to make sense of the universe we live in.”
Back and forth, this argument has gone for years. Carmela, the artist, versus me, the mathematician.
Now the artist is laying on a gurney in the recovery room, clutching my hand, a plastic ID tag wrapped around her slender wrist.
“They say less than a 10% chance,” she says, her voice flat and empty.
“It’s just a number,” I try to reassure her.
I squeeze her hand and whisper a desperate prayer that, in our longstanding disagreement, it will be her argument that prevails.
Grey Sparrow Journal 