TheBanyanTree: Numbers

[Monique]

She sees the signposts and thinks of rain. The wires overhead remind her
of dead birds. And she counts. Each car has its own numerical value
assigned to it, each vehicle has its own deeper meaning. She could never
stop counting. Each license plate with numbers had to be calculated.
License plates with words, and no numbers, were a nuisance because they
did not say anything. Only numbers spoke. 
 
When she was seven, she found a spider on her bed. She was in the bed at
the time, the covers drawn up tightly around her because she felt safe
that way, when she saw it. Right on her belly, a spider as big as her
thumb. In later years she would remember it being as big as her hand.
She pulled the pink floral bedspread up around her even more, as if this
would make her safe. She considered trying to scare the spider off, or
somehow getting it to fly off the bed by moving her belly, but thought
she'd be just as lucky to have it come flying at her face. She thought
of inching up, from underneath it, but when she started to, the spider
moved forward also. 
 
She couldn't call for help. She never called for help, no matter the
circumstances. It wasn't allowed. 
 
Instead, she fell asleep, as if she could just take a break from spider
watching and when she woke up it'd be right there, waiting for her to
take action. But when she woke up it was gone. She looked around the
bed, thinking it had come up closer to her face. When she saw nothing,
she jumped up quickly, certain it was in an even worse place. She tossed
the blankets aside and saw no sign of it. She looked on the floor, and
still no spider. She ran her hands through her hair, certain it had
gotten in there somehow. There was nothing. 
 
For days afterward she would look for that spider, certain it had not
left her alone. She could not be that lucky. No, the spider was still
there, somewhere, hiding, waiting, and at night she would lie awake and
wonder if this time, this night, the spider would come back and watch
her sleep. 
 
Years later she would recall the spider and think of it in the present
tense, as something that was always with her, though it had no doubt
died long ago. She knew it was still there, somewhere, waiting for her,
and so it never left her.
 
She sees numbers in people. There, that person over there? With the
baseball cap and the cigarette? That's a 7. The short woman with the
heavy makeup and the orthopedic shoes? A 4. The little boy with half his
ice cream cone on his shorts, the other half melting on his hand? A 12. 
 
The numbers don't mean anything, at least nothing she's aware of. It's
not as if she's grading them on appearance, intelligence, age, wit, or
vitality. She's not even assigning the numbers herself. The numbers are
just there for her to see. When she first realized that no one else
could see these numbers she was astonished, perplexed, and more than a
little frightened. Her mother had always said she was odd, and wasn't
this the proof of it? 
 
"The proof was in the pudding," her mother had always said, which meant
nothing to her at the time and even less so now, and seemed to have
nothing to do with anything at all, but it came back to her anyway. The
mournfulness of her mother's tone, the heaviness that seeped through the
air, the displeasure on her mother's face whenever she looked at her. It
was not a pleasant memory, nor was it painful. If anything, she found it
a comfort. Things were what they were, and she had reality to hang onto
when there was nothing else but numbers to keep her mind occupied.
 
"An idle mind is the devil's playground," her mother also said, usually
when she, the child, was daydreaming, a habit the mother said was good
for nothing but trouble. But daydreaming was one place where she felt
welcome, so she did not stop, and didn't care whose playground it was.
Even now, in her twenties and driving down the highway counting cars,
she still daydreamed. She imagined places where there were no numbers,
where the sky never had that grayish cast that indicated rain on the way
and, even worse, sadness, and where she did not have to get up early
every day to drive to work. 
 
She daydreamed about leaving home, though she'd done that years before.
She dreamt of not just leaving home, but being free of it, free from the
strictures of expectations, free from the knowledge of who she really
was. She dreamt of the possibility of change within herself. 
 
And when she arrives at Pt. West, she sighs. She gets out of her car and
into the rain, which has begun with a steadiness that defies the
randomness of rain, and she goes in to begin another day behind a desk
with numbers her one constant friend.