Day 23 - 23

23 

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

You notice the coincidences and somewhere deep down inside that caveman tries to see the predatory in the shadows and your brain tries to make out a pattern that might be the difference between life and death. That’s all it was – coincidences and the desire to make sense of a strange and uncaring universe.  

She told me she had figured the numbers out. The order that would reveal a truth. Patterns maybe. But a secret to the universe? I doubted it. I enjoy speculation about symmetry and the golden ratio, but I’ve never once thought that hexagons or probability thought exercises could prove the cat was live and unalive or that we were trapped in a matrix within a matrix.

Still, she had called, and I had ignored the message a moment too long, so when she disappeared, I instantly felt guilt about all my derision and poor phone-answering etiquette. She was obsessed with order and repetition, clearly believing she could find some pattern within, and within such madness she could find truth.

What was she doing? I found notebook after notebook. Piles of scrap paper. Folders. Notes in books. So much paper. So much waste. Over and over, she wrote the numbers. Again and again. Ascending. Descending. Positive. Negative. It wasn’t an equation. And the pattern, if there was one, was lost or changed on several occasions. What was it? What was she solving?

3:33. He had glanced at the clock and it was 3:33. Damn it, he scolded himself. Don’t you start this too. Never mind that 3:33 really meant 15:33, but if you’re dealing with a 12 hour cycle, then this is what you get. He also realized the date, but chose to ignore that. There was no 23^rd month, so no matter how the day or year fell, it didn’t matter. There could be no significance to the repetition of the repetition didn’t continue throughout.

But still, she had disappeared. Gone. For days now. Where could she be? Her most recent notebook was half full. And it cut off, mid-pattern. The pen still on the page, like it was suddenly dropped in a hurry. What had she seen? What had the numbers revealed? And where had she gone?

It was a maddening thought. He didn’t want to think it. But what if he came back on February Third? 2. 3. 23. Or what about March Second? 3223. Would she be back? Would something great and beyond belief occur?

He had to go. He had to get out of there. He couldn’t stand to look at the pages upon pages of numbers anymore. He couldn’t take it, that lingering feeling, that growing fear, that pressing desire to read through the pages again. He had to stop. He had to go.

Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something or someone was watching him. Any he couldn’t help put look at the calendar or count down the days as they passed, inching every closer to next repetition in the pattern.