Miscalculation
Suppose there is a math problem.
In the midnight, at the location with latitude of x and longitude of y, he is driving across a desolate rural place, and I am sitting next to him. The serenity of the night is singing us a silent lullaby; the headlight of the car feels somehow hypnotizing, illuminating the road ahead of us paved by dusty gravels, dried soil, and dying grasses.
He occasionally makes gentle turns along this winding road. In this endless darkness my body moves blindly with momentum, in a slow, familiar rhythm I can’t put my finger on. I close my eyes, imagining us being a satellite lost in this stygian, vast universe, travelling in curves drawn by gravity, the intangible yet substantial attraction between stars and black holes, between him and me.
He always has the power of retaining a calm but cold silence; even sharing this small space of a car doesn’t make me feel any closer to him. I begin to wonder what has led us to end up in this car, at this time, with each other, on the way to an unknown place in an unknown city. The calamity happened some days ago might only be a fraction of the entire answer. That during the disaster he saw me faltering and that I was begging for his help might be another good reason. But.
But how? I turn to look at his profile in the dark, tracing the blurred contour of his forehead, the ridge of his nose, the soft curve of his eyelashes. Everything about him looks so much more elegant than any graph of mathematical functions. How on earth, I wonder, would I have the serendipity to reunite with him after three long years?
I think about all the possible parallel universes being birthed and branching out at this moment, wondering whether there exists one universe in which he and I would be together. But looking at him lost in his own thoughts and reticence, instead of escaping from the shadow of the past, I feel like tonight we are, with impulsive desperation, simply sprinting headlong towards the end of everything.
Solve: If, starting from t0 = 12:00AM, every action made from now on adds up to a series, does the series converge or diverge? If it converges, where does it converge to?
My fists tighten. Blood drains away from my knuckles.
* * *
I was taking a nap in my car when a huge truck whizzed past and woke me from my dream. The matches shook inside the matchbox on the dashboard, and the little bells hung from the rear-view mirror jingled rather jovially though my car wasn’t even moving. But it didn’t seem strange to me; the earth was trembling was all. I knew I had a dream, but I couldn’t remember any of it. Was there a dead bird with blood-stained wings? A crimson house? Nope, no house, but there was definitely something red, I was sure. The matches rattled and the bells rang louder as I fully regained my consciousness.
I had no time to reflect on my fleeting dream because of the chaos outside my car. The hubbub was a mixture of high-pitched screaming and hysteric name-calling. People were running frantically in the same direction, pushing one another to get ahead. That was when I spot it in my rear-view mirror, the enlarging, overwhelming blue with shreds of sunlight dancing and skipping on its surface, blinding me.
I startled, turned around, and for the first time in my life I was amazed by natural scenery. I mean what’s up with all the sayings about the nothingness and vastness of deserts, the loftiness of mountains, the thick layer of canopy shunning sunlight from reaching the soil underneath, and all other miracles nature had created? They were nothing, because they didn’t post any sudden danger that I was now immersing in; I was being literal when I use this word because a gigantic wave was rolling towards me, higher and closer, threatening to raze everything to the ground.
By the time I realized that the road was too congested for me to drive, the rising wave had just devoured the tall office building a couple of blocks behind me. I grabbed the matchbox from the dashboard and put it in my pocket mindlessly as I slowly got off the car, unsure whether this would be a wise or just fruitless action. But then someone stomped on my left ankle as he rushed by.
Temporarily immobilized by the acute pain, I watched the crowd of people behind me being engulfed by this fatal force of nature. Fear and an instinct for survival kicked in; I stumbled my way forward, struggling to keep up with the running crowd.
* * *
“I wonder how people can be so motivated? I mean if they can realize about how big the entire universe is, I’m sure they can also realize how tiny and meaningless their lives are,” I said, while he and I sat across the desk in the library. Between us were piles of homework assigned by our mad high school teachers, and I wasn’t motivated at all to get the work done.
“I think it’s all because of our consciousness, you know, the concept and existence of ‘me,’” he said without looking up, and wrote another equation down on the notebook.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe the motivation to, I don’t know, work, study, be a better person, all because we want the ‘me’ to feel better,” he continued, “that’s why even though we know we mean nothing to the universe, at least we mean something to ourselves. We like to make a big deal out of ourselves.”
“That’s an interesting theory, but somehow very pessimistic.”
He laughed, “why? I just gave you a pretty convenient excuse to not do your homework.” He rarely laughed; I was stunned for a moment.
“True—wait no, you’re supposed to motivate me to do my homework!”
I touched the sand paper side of the matchbox with my thumb and played songs inside my head to kill some time. I watched him write down equations. Xs. Ys. Zs. When x = 3, what’s the partial derivative of dy/dz? If x stood for 3 years, I were y and he were z, how much would I change if he became a little different (the difference should almost approach zero)? All of a sudden tears welled up and blurred my vision. If the x domain of the equation were continuous from now to infinity, then we would be friends forever, wouldn’t we? No matter how much we changed?
“Do you remember how we became… friends?” I asked, playing with my hair to look casual. I grew increasingly unsure when I thought about the relationship between us. Using the word “friend” somehow just felt wrong.
“I don’t know; shared cynicism, I guess,” he said with a shrug.
* * *
It all began with a sparkle.
Senior year just started, and I just turned eighteen. Bought a pack of cigarettes. I wanted to feel the throat hit that so many people talked about, and fill my lungs with heated, choking smoke that would eventually kill me. I didn’t want anybody to see so I made a turn to hide in a small alley. I put a cigarette in my mouth. The acrid smell of tobacco filled my nose. I struck a match—
He bumped into me while on a skateboard. He tried to hold something to regain balance but ended up grabbing my raised hand, the one that was holding the burning match.
God I’m so sorry. It’s cool, are you hurt? No, no. I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it.
This went on until I was sure it was only a very minor injury for him: a spot of slightly burned skin on his palm and a baggy white shirt scraped on the elbow. He rubbed his elbow while staring at the matchbox I was still holding. I might have clenched it too tightly so it was pretty out of shape now. He then looked to the ground, and found the cigarette that dropped from my mouth.
“It’s not… what you think,” I said. I don’t smoke.
“Oh no, I just… spaced out. Didn’t mean to stare,” he said, picking up his board, “remember Zeno’s’ paradox about dichotomy?”
“I’m sorry…?”
“Calculus class,” he reminded me.
What…?
He shook his head and shrugged, “Forget it. Anyways, according to Zeno, if you want to smoke a cigarette, you have to smoke half of it first. But before you smoke the half of it, you have to first smoke the fourth of it. And if you think about it, there are an infinite number of subtasks you have to do. So according to Zeno, motion is impossible, and you won’t finish that cigarette, ever.”
“And lung cancer won’t happen either. So he’s wrong,” I said.
Somehow the light behind his eyes began to fade. He dropped his gaze. “Yeah, of course,” he turned and walked away, “see you tomorrow in class.”
He’s from my class?
* * *
It was ironic that the pain in my ankle somehow triggered my will to survive and hampered me from doing so at the same time. I was expecting my life to flash before me, like many stories described when they talked about death, but it turned out that I only pushed myself to successfully recall a piece of my receding dream.
A motorcycle screeched as it made a sharp turn at the intersection I was at, and that was when time dilated and finally stopped as I focused on the man riding the motorcycle. If this was not a life-and-death situation, I might think about what happened between us and chose to let him go, but today was an exception. I thanked all the supernatural existence I believed in for putting my life under such peril that I had absolutely no difficulty in throwing myself in front of him.
His motorcycle braked just before it hit me. He scowled at me and was about to curse, but he blinked immediately as he recognized me. He murmured something, his voice drowned out by the chaos. For some reason my heart ached, so I tried to distract myself by repeating words until they lost meaning, “Please, I’m sorry. Please, please help me.”
The wave was howling above us, blocking the sun.
* * *
I lose track of time in the dark. I have just sorted through things the car’s real owner has left here but found nothing interesting or useful. I put my hands inside my pockets, tired and ready to sleep. Then I felt the matchbox. I thought about striking a match just for the heck of it, to feel the warmth of fire in this freezing, deserted night and the seemingly infinite distance between us. I shudder, but soon saved by the first light from east that hits us over the horizon and spreads across the left-side window with the color of blazing orange.
We arrive at a town that looks almost dead in such an early, cold morning. He parks the car at an old restaurant. As the engine stops, an overwhelming silence fills the car and I’m too afraid of letting it last any longer. I say, “I’ll go get some refreshment. My treat.”
He sits up and is about to say something, but then he looks at me, then at the store, and finally back at the car. “Sure. Thanks. I’ll stay in the car then.”
“Ok,” I say. I quickly open the door and step outside. Chill air stings my throat.
He always likes to have more private space. I know that won’t change, especially when he’s with me, someone who used to know him unfairly well. “You know too much. I have to stop telling you so much,” he always said. To be honest it was a pleasure to hear him say that, to watch him lose control, and to know I finally needed someone less than he needed me—this turned out to be a false assumption but God what kind of friend was I?
I shake my head. Friends? Us? Two people who couldn’t stand each other and be without each other? If that was really the case, then this “friendship” was a drug, torturing but satisfying, destructive but agonizingly enjoyable.
My hands close to make tight fists. Fingernails cut into palms.
I walk into the restaurant and smell bacon and dust. Two or three people are scattered around this place, eating alone quietly. Memories of another restaurant sweep across my mind.
* * *
We were walking to the Japanese restaurant in a December afternoon. The snow was still fresh from yesterday, piling up like ashes and making the world look catastrophic and lifeless. The only sounds were the melting of ice and water trickling down the road. I watched him inhale, and exhale, puffing out white smoke into the transparence of the crisp winter air. I counted, in seconds, how fast he was breathing.
Sensing my stare, he chuckled, “What are you looking at?”
I said, “Your… you breathe very slowly.”
“You mean it’s a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Good, I guess,” I said, looking down and focusing on the movement of my legs. “You know, while you skipped school today, I learned something pretty cool in math class.”
He waited for me to go on.
“It’s something about gamma function, but our teacher had gone too far so I don’t think anybody knew what he was talking about. But I remember he said that the factorial of negative 1 is infinity.”
“Okay,” he said, slowing down a bit, thinking. “What about the factorial of negative 2 then? Or even the factorial imaginary numbers?”
I paused; I hadn’t even thought about those questions. I said, “If I know, I’ll tell you.” I’d tell you everything that’s going on inside my head, if I could measure how much you really care. “Anyways, how was your Thanksgiving break? How’re your parents?”
He stopped walking. He looked down, jaws tense. “Parent,” he said, correcting me.
Detecting a quaver in his voice, I turned to him. A snowflake perched on his eyelid as he continued, “my father isn’t really, you know, a major part of my life. When I was little he moved out from our house, and he’d come to see me once a while, with another woman. Then he moved to another state, or another country, I don’t know, but I haven’t seen or heard from him for a long time. My mom said he probably died of lung cancer from smoking too much. I don’t know. She might just say that out of spite. Things were weird.”
I listened, wanting him to keep going; he had never talked about his family before. For some reason my curious heart pounded faster when it was supposed to ache with his.
“Hmm,” he gave a little laugh, “I don’t know why I’m telling you things so irrelevant that you won’t care… Where were we? How’s my mom? Yeah she’s fine.”
As we continued to walk in silence with the same distance apart from each other, my body warmed up because blood was pumping so fast, as if I had become closer to him.
This feeling of excitement was all new to me, as someone who never believed that life had meaning. I was always oblivious to everything, both around and about me. I couldn’t remember my friends’ birthdays, the last movie I had seen in the movie theater, some secret someone told me a few hours, the last time I cried, the name of that friend I met somewhere during some time, or the hurtful things someone said about me for something. Maybe it was because the word “some” was so contagious that now my head was full of it and I was incapable of feeling anything else. Or maybe it was just my lack of motivation to care. But now I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Under the dim light in that Japanese restaurant, I was lost in my own thoughts. I was becoming someone I didn’t recognize. I stirred my drink with a straw, slightly calmed by the clinking sound of ice.
His voice startled me.
“Are you there?”
I said, “yeah, you said it before, many times, that you want to drive that black car—”
“Wrangler. Which you’ve sat in a couple of times.”
“—right, and get away, maybe become a hermit and eventually die in suffocating privacy that you love so much.”
He nodded, “You remember.”
“I know,” I said. All of a sudden the hair on my back stood up; I wasn’t even trying to remember things about him but apparently I remembered everything.
* * *
“Here’s your order,” someone says, pulling me back to reality.
My thoughts are still lingering around his desire to disappear. A lot of people died in that tsunami and their bodies will never be found; I’m sure he’d have liked the idea of faking his death with the tsunami as a cover. He will be invisible forever. I will never find him. A terrifying but plausible theory spins in my head; am I stopping him from doing that because I’m always in the car with him? But now I’m in the restaurant—oh no. No. Nononono.
I sprint out with an armful of takeout boxes and two cans of soft drink and paper-wrapped chocolate cookies. Things drop out from my arms along the way but I don’t care. I just want to make sure that he is still waiting for me. Then there’s that car we broke into after his motorcycle ran out of gas. It rests quietly in the parking lot, with him sitting inside.
I hold back my tears and return back to the car, my legs feeble. He quickly reaches over to open the door for me and puts the food in the back. We settle back to our seats.
“Is everything okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, taking a gulp of soda.
“Breathe,” he said, “I’ll go get those stuff you dropped.” He steps out of the car before I can say another word.
As I wait for my breathing to slow down, I watch him walking over to the restaurant, his body slender and his steps calm and measured. It reminds me of all those times when I walked behind him in the school hallway with a few people between us. I didn’t want to catch up and interrupt any of his random thoughts, so I simply watched, like what I’m doing right now, like what I’m always doing. A lump builds up in my throat.
He bends down, and one at a time, picks up the bag of cookies and a box of takeout food. He looks at me when he’s done, checking to see if I’m all right. I shake my head quickly, no, not yet. He nods, and starts taking time to unwrap the food and then slowly fold them up again. When I finally adjust my breathing, I wave at him, come back.
As he gets closer to the car, in my head I imagine myself asking, “Are you leaving?” But when he closes the door all I can muster is, “I was having a dream when the tsunami hit.”
He nods, motioning me to continue.
“There was a red balloon,” I say. I stare at him, waiting for a reaction, but he simply looks befuddled. So I add, “You know, the one we saw after our high school graduation ceremony.”
“…Ok,” he says, clearly not remembering any of it.
He doesn’t care. He never did.
* * *
“Help me with something,” I talked to him over the phone, “I’m filling out the family information for college application and I don’t really know how to describe my parents.”
“Go on.”
“My parents haven’t lived in the same house for seven years, but they talk, see each other from time to time, and they aren’t divorced. Should I check ‘Married’ or ‘Separated’?”
“I’d say ‘married.’ But does it even matter? It’s no use making yourself sound miserable just to create some drama so that colleges will notice you. So many people are writing how they were depressed because of some petty stuff and how they got back to their feet again. The AO are probably sick of it. And having parents like yours? Look at the bright side; I mean I don’t even know whether my father is still alive.”
I didn’t know how to make of that. I didn’t know whether it was appropriate for me to get frustrated because I was. I hung up the phone, wondering why I even thought about calling him in the first place.
He called back. I debated whether I should ignore his call or pick it up. I chose the latter because I didn’t know whether he was going to call again. “What?” I asked.
“You’re angry.”
“Not really. I triggered that switch, about your father.”
“No that wasn’t the case,” he said, “I was just… surprised, that I didn’t know that about your parents.”
“Well now you do,” I said.
“So… are we good?”
“Yeah.”
I sat on my bed after I hung up, and the room became unbearably claustrophobic and quiet. Clock ticked on the wall and my heart sank with every second that passed.
He never asked a single word about my parents.
* * *
“I’m sorry,” he said over the phone. The train took me through small towns and into the heart of the city; outside the window the scene melted from empty fields to trees to houses and to tall buildings. Through this blurred background I noticed my own reflection on the windowpane; vacant stare, lips shut and stiff, tired shoulders. Behind my reflection, the sun was setting fast.
“Stop saying sorry when you don’t mean it,” I said.
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“No you didn’t—I won’t let you. But… you know I told them I’d go to that stupid birthday party because you said you were going too. And now you’re saying you’d rather stay at home. And a few days ago you said we could meet up to study and probably go watch that movie you were really looking forward to see—obviously you weren’t interested enough. And another time… God you’re like an endless loop of making and breaking promises.”
“I know. I keep disappointing you because I have this problem. I think it’s something about my father, how he can’t take any responsibility either. But I want you to know that you really mean a lot to me,” he said. Liar.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
He was quiet, and the longer the silence was the further he seemed to recede from me. I was scared, but I didn’t know what I was scared of. Whatever it was it hid well, in a dark corner I hadn’t visited for a long time. And now it was coming out to get me. As if responding to my fear, the sun burned up two thirds of the sky like blood dying across a cloth.
“I think we’re letting ourselves get too close. And I just,” he paused, searching for words. “I mean for God’s sake we’re just friends,” he gave a little laugh, “we really should care less about each other.”
“You mean you actually care.”
“You think I don’t.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was making a statement or asking a question. “I don’t know,” I said. I thought about kiting, a game strategy that resembled the game version of our relationship so much. He had calculated the time and distance between us well, getting close to me when I stepped back, and when I thought he was in the range I came back for him, but he stepped back to keep the same distance once again. I could never get to him. The distance was like an itch I couldn’t reach. I didn’t know why we were doing this to each other, but how was I supposed to tell him? He didn’t care about me and telling this wouldn’t make him care either.
“Okay,” he said, “I won’t get too close to you or bother you again. I don’t deserve a good friend anyway.”
I panicked, but I couldn’t show that I cared and I was hurting. “Ok,” I said.
“Cool. I’ll see you tomorrow in class.”
The sun drowned below the horizon when I heard the busy tone from the other side. The train was filled with light but I was freezing. My reflection on the window looked so real, as if another train was travelling right by my side, at the same speed and with the same interior as the train I was taking. And there I was on that identical train, hunching my back and feeling weak, thinking about how much I hated this ending.
* * *
After the high school graduation ceremony, we all stuck around to take photos with schoolmates and teachers. It wasn’t hard to locate him, not because he was relatively tall or anything, but because he was the only one standing in the middle of the crowd without mixing in. He had taken off his gown and cap, and his shoulder blades protruded a little, forming distinctive shadows on his clean white shirt. He was looking at something high above.
Before I realized it, I was already walking to his side. He didn’t flinch or turn to look at me. He simply shifted his weight a little, seeming to accept my presence. Without disturbing him, I looked up into the sky with him. A red balloon was flying above us with the string fluttering in the wind.
“It’s going to hit the branches,” he muttered, still looking up. His voice was exceptionally gentle, and I loved it.
“No, it won’t,” I said, secreting tracing the sharp, strong lines of his jaws in my peripheral vision.
The red balloon flew away safely. No branches involved.
“Yeah you’re right,” he said, and finally turned away from the sky.
He was looking at me. His eyes softened.
I looked back at him. For the first time, I didn’t look into his eyes to search for something, a clue, a thought, a feeling. I simply looked. I reached out for his hand—
“Hi! Can I take a picture with you guys? It makes me sad that we won’t be seeing each other for a while,” a girl in graduation gown appeared and interrupted our gaze. Oh screw her. I had never felt comfortable staring at a camera, but I never hated it until then.
When everything was over, he and I walked back to school’s parking lot. I spot his black two-door Wrangler right away. I imagined him driving in his car, with a familiar, cold expression on his face, leaving this place, leaving me, disappearing.
I followed him to his car, trying to buy some time.
He began putting his schoolbag and graduation gown into the trunk. I stood behind him and just stared at his back. His shoulder blades shifted with each movement. When he was done, he turned around and leaned against the trunk with hands in pockets, sinking into the shadow cast by the trunk door above him.
We stared at each other. Slowly the softness in his eyes faded, and again I searched in them but found nothing, just two shallow waters filled with the familiar aloofness I had been witnessing for the past few weeks. I tried not to think about my hand touching his, so I remembered Zeno’s paradox and my thought came back to the realization that I would never touch his hand again.
He took a deep breath and sighed; his whole body seemed to be blending into the shadow. “Ok. I have to go,” he said, standing up.
“Is it just a game to you?” I asked.
A crease formed between his brows.
A tingly sensation shot up in my nose, stimulating my tear gland, and the lump in my throat hurt so much that I thought I was almost asphyxiated.
“You’ve been acting vulnerable and telling me all those things about your… for what? My attention? And now, suddenly you just give up and don’t care anymore, getting away with all the responsibilities of being a friend. Did our friendship mean anything to you? Are you playing with me?” My breathing quickened and my heart was pounding fast. I started to regret my outburst immediately, especially the questions. I didn’t want to hear the answers; I didn’t even want him to know that I cared enough to ask.
But he slammed down the trunk and just said, “Then look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t playing with me.”
I was still panting, but I couldn’t speak.
* * *
I have absolutely no appetite for food. I feel sick. I feel foolish for believing that maybe we would go back to where it all began and start over. “Anyways, thanks for saving my life, for taking me away from that city. Thanks for spending your senior year with me. Thanks for everything.”
He looks down and says quietly, “You’re leaving aren’t you.”
I wish I could stay but “Yes I have to,” because there’s so much pain whenever I’m with you, “because this game we are playing has to stop.”
He looks frustrated, “Why are you always talking about us like this is just a game?”
“Because I feel like I can never trust you, because you always seem so far away, plus, you never really cared,” I had no choice but to hold back my feelings and pretended that I didn’t care either, “And you kept saying that I was the only one who knew you, that I was important, but then it seemed so easy for you to go on without me.”
He freezes in his seat, speechless, trying in vain to make a rebuttal.
“I’m sorry,” he finally says, “I don’t know what I was doing. But I wasn’t playing any game.”
“You don’t know what you were doing because you never cared; every time you let someone down you blamed the absence of a father figure in your life. Nothing was your responsibility. You were never wrong. You were free.”
He sighs, “I wasn’t.” But his tired expression tells me that he won’t explain further. Goosebumps spread over my skin as I realize that I’ve never really known what he’s thinking all this time.
“Drop me off in the next town, will you?” I ask.
“Okay,” he says, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”
* * *
Speeding through the crowd in his motorcycle, we were leaving this city, a place filled with our memories. It almost felt like a dream to me, like I was flying. It didn’t matter the water was determined to destroy us, and it didn’t matter where we were going. All I knew was that the past wouldn’t get to us anymore, that we would start over with a clean slate.
We didn’t.