Down The Math Door

Numbers? What exactly are numbers?

In a world filled with random nonsense do numbers really mean anything? Are mathematics and their workings simply a human fantasy? Would math exist if there were no people? Just another chicken or the egg debate?

And what about this: is absolutely zero actually possible? Is the number one the only actual true number? How can any whole exist at the same time as zero? Do the zero and the whole cancel each other ou—

The wheels of Frank's chair inexplicably locked, jolting him from his thoughts. He shot out a hand and grabbed the edge of his desk just in time to avoid crashing over backward.

It was the third time this week his chair tried to spill him to the floor, and three times was enough. Frank decided it was time to quit messing around and examine the chair.

Always something!

A guy couldn't even let his mind wander without some damn thing pulling him back to reality. Who's to say he wouldn't have discovered some elusive mathematical truth while rolling around in his cube?

No, not the chair.

Frank noticed a flap of carpet had come unraveled. Bunches of thread and string were caught in the chair wheels.

Wow, Frank thought, do I really roll around in this cube that much?

Nah, cheap carpet, that was all. The kind that was made for an office building. Added a perfect foundation of bland.

Frank sighed. He gripped the frayed threads and yanked them free from the wheels. When he did, a section of carpet under his desk lifted away from the floor, and underneath was something...

He peeled back the carpet further and exposed a wooden disk embedded in the concrete, just large enough for a person to fit through.

Like a manhole cover.

In the middle was a pair of indentations—a place to grip. And Frank understood the slab of wood sealed off a passageway beneath his desk.

Now here was an item for small talk with the colleagues. Sure, it was an oversight by the engineers, an old abandoned tunnel leading down to a crawlspace, or to... well yes, maybe even to the sewer.

But if it turned out that Frank had been working all these years on top of a crudely sealed sewer line, did it matter?

Puzzled, Frank waited out the remainder of the afternoon.

At 5pm his colleagues threw things into briefcases and shut off computers. Frank's boss Steve paused on his way past Frank's cube.

"Frank, don't tell me you're staying late again."

Frank eyed the huge stack of computer printouts on his desk. This massive report was over a foot high. He had moved the ridiculous pile of paper there a half an hour earlier in anticipation of this exact conversation with Steve. Now he tapped his pen on the top page of the pile and said, "One more hour and Q4 will be ready to fly."

"You're the best number cruncher on the payroll, Frank."

"Don't mention it."

"Hell with that, you're the glue holding it all together," Steve said, pointing a long finger at Frank. "Especially with all the late hours you've been putting in."

"Glue, huh? I don't know about all that," Frank said, wishing for an end to the chit chat.

"You just don't want to get burned out, Frank."

"Nah, not me."

"I'd say you oughtta find yourself a wife, but I've been married to mine for about a hundred years."

Frank smiled and said, "And a hundred more to go!"

"Don't stay too late."

"Course not."

Steve left.

Frank wanted a better look at the floor under his desk and he wanted to do it alone. A line to the sewer would likely have to be sealed off with something more substantial than a circle of wood. He'd have to relocate his cube, which might put him behind by a week or longer. That was the opposite of what Frank needed. What he needed was a vacation. The hefty pile of paperwork on his desk was proof. He'd spent the past three months compiling the data for that report and doing very little else. Now it was complete and just in time to start gathering a fresh army of figures for next quarter...

Six years it was since Frank took a vacation.

Six years meant twenty-four quarterly reports.

By last count in might actually be seven years. And now that it was January, did the New Year actually make it eight?

Six, seven, eight, back to numbers again, Frank thought, always the same damn numbers.

If it turned out there was a manhole to the sewer under his desk, he would leave a note for Steve asking to have the engineers seal it up. Frank would add to the note that things would go much smoother if he took the rest of the week off. Even better—next week, too.

Finally, it was here—a vacation.

The last employee was leaving. Frank crawled under the desk to pry up the wooden slab. At first it wouldn't budge, but he was determined. He pulled as hard as he could, twisting clockwise and then counter. He gave another mighty heave back the other way and the wood gave grudgingly. He pulled once more and there was a hissing of air as though he'd opened the world's largest soda bottle. The rush of air hit his face and smelled so foreign that Frank seemed to feel it stick to his skin. The smell was nothing like sewer. Instead it made Frank think back to Christmas morning as a kid and the way a plastic toy smelled freshly removed from its packaging. The smell rushed up on a breeze as if through a wind tunnel.

He moved forward cautiously and peered down through the opening.

Two feet down was absolute darkness.

He started to have a bad feeling. The peculiar draft continued to rush up with enough strength to push back Frank's hair. The sound of the wind in the tunnel was eerily musical like flutes.

He backed out and reached for the jar of pens on his desk. Rooting through them he came to the pen he'd been given as a cheap going away present from his first number crunching job. It was a combination pen and flashlight.

He aimed it down the tunnel and clicked the flash to life. Weak blue light beamed from his hand, revealing a ladder of round steel rungs leading straight down into darkness.

Frank swung his feet out over the opening and touched his shoes to the top rung.

Sturdy.

Air rushed up his pants legs to his knees. Ignoring the odd flute sound he slid the rest of the way onto the ladder and began descending the tunnel.

Six rungs down his line of sight was level with the floor of his cube. He noticed a few staples lodged into the cheap carpet near his chair. He went down a few more rungs, thinking each next rung would be the ground or whatever served as the floor down here. But each step met with another rung.

He kept going, counting off a dozen more rungs, and pointed the penlight down. Nothing but black. Frank thought this was maybe the quarterly report of tunnels, it went down and down and...

Down to what?

The answer that came was: Down to forever.

But that was absurd. Not to mention impossible. Although, Frank mused, mathematically anything was possible.

He continued down this most unexpected wind tunnel beneath his desk. He would get to the ground, have a quick look around, then go back up and head home for dinner. Most likely the building had an old unused basement, some kind of abandoned storage. It would all make sense in just a few more rungs...

But the bad feeling was back. He counted off twenty more rungs as he descended, and paused for another look down.

More rungs.

How far down was he? Two stories underground?

Three?

He looked back the way he had come. Far above the circle of light from the office was now smaller than a dime. A tiny full moon of fluorescent light.

He made the next rung... and froze.

From below—impossibly far below—came the sound of someone climbing the ladder quickly and noisily.

Baffled, Frank called into the wind, "H—hello?"

No response came. The clamor grew steadily louder. As Frank clung to the ladder, the steel in his hands vibrated. The climber was coming up in a hurry, really pounding up the ladder.

Frank was on the edge of claustrophobic panic. He wasn't feeling brave—he was an accountant, after all—so he bolted back up the ladder as fast as he could, shoes squeaking on the rungs.

At the top he shot through the opening like a man fired out of a cannon. The crown of his head connected painfully with the underside of his desk—BONK!

He felt something pop in his neck. The crash of head vs desk tipped the computer monitor over the far side with a plastic crunch.

He hoisted the circular wooden slab and steadied himself to slam it back into place. But he held back for a moment, listening and rubbing his head. The only sound was the wind piping up the tunnel.

Whoever was down there had to have seen him, had to have heard his mad dash to the light. Frank thought the whole universe might have heard the collision of head vs desk. He wondered if perhaps the person below had been just as startled by Frank's presence in the tunnel as Frank had been by theirs. He sensed someone waiting in the dark below. His heart beat very hard.

Frank opened his mouth to say something, but what?

He went with, "Do you... need some help?"

After a moment, just when it seemed no reply would come, Frank heard a whisper carried up on the wind:

"Come down, Frank."

Frank's arms broke out in goose bumps. Did his heart stop? It may have for a moment, but when it resumed it was doing double time. Cautiously he peered down the tunnel.

No one in sight.

"Who are you?" he said, his voice tiny against the wind.

No answer. Had he really heard someone speak to him, or—?

Of course he did. Hearing voices was for schizzophrenics and stimulant abusers.

As if in agreement the whisper washed up on the wind again.

"Come down, Frank."

Some stubborn part of Frank's mind wanted to refuse it. Surely someone did not just address him by name from a wind tunnel under his desk.

"Yes, I did."

Frank jumped.

"Come down, Frank. There's nothing up there."

His bad feeling turned to dread. It was as though the whisperer had somehow heard his thought. Pure stupid wonder was all that prevented him from bolting down the hall, out of the building and to his car.

"How did you do that?" Frank asked, utterly baffled. "How—how did you—"

Then someone did appear... a being whose head was wrapped in tattered horizontal bandages. Only the eyes and mouth were uncovered.

The eyes!

Frank stared into those eyes. They were the craziest pair of eyes imaginable; ruined craters too close together and jittering madly.

Eyes that had seen far too much.

When they focused on Frank they seemed to bore into him with a disturbing eagerness.

Frank cut the hideous eye contact and saw the hands clinging to the rungs were also wrapped in thin dirty bandages. Several shredded ends at the fingertips whipped in the wind.

"Is this a joke?" he asked. "Did Steve put you up to this? Because you are sort of spooky."

"Frank," the creature below beckoned, grinning madly. Speaking slowly as if to a child the figure said: "Two times two—I am you."

Frank laughed at this and said, "Well that explains it. You're me, huh?" He considered and added, "Nice outfit. You're supposed to be a... mummy? Why'd Steve tell you to dress up as a mummy?"

"Two times two—I am you."

"Oh. Kay."

"When you're much older than you are now, you'll send me all the way up here to bring you all the way back down this ladder."

Frank had no reply to that.

"You don't really want to be up there, Frank," the mummy said endearingly, shaking his head.

"I don't?"

"Of course not. You belong down here, it's the way you're wired."

"This isn't really happening."

"Four times four, you opened the door!"

"I see you like to rhyme."

"Rhyme...Nine...Rhyme...Nine..."

"Guess you better work on that one."

"Frank, did you know that whatever you run past a Nine turns into a Nine?"

Frank said nothing.

"Two times two—"

"Yeah, yeah, two times two, I am you."

"Correct!"

"This is totally crazy."

"Except for Crazy Eight, there is no crazy. HAH!"

"Look, you're a little too intense," Frank said. "I don't know who you are or what's with all the bandages... or how you got under the building... but trust me there is crazy."

"Eight's the one who's crazy. I'm Nine like a mirror."

Frank couldn't help but feel a little badly for the confused fellow below. Poor guy. Eight's the one who's crazy, for sure. And nine's usually are mirrors, naturally. But something about all the crazy talk was dawning on Frank, and it sounded a brand new internal alarm bell: the mummy sounded like Frank.

Numbers.

Frank was always thinking in numbers.

"Look into my eyes, Frank."

He forced himself to meet the mummy's wonky eyes again as the creature dangled from the ladder and grinned a lunatic grin up through the bandages.

"I'm going to show you something, and then we'll eat some crunchy corn chips and crunch some crunchy invoice slips!" the mummy said. It's eyeballs swelled and jittered with excitement. "Frank, look straight into my eyes."

Frank gazed into the pair of cracked grey marbles in the thing's face. Suddenly there was a doubling, a queer sense of vertigo in which he could clearly imagine—too clearly—being in the mummy's place and looking up at himself. His vision became two overlapping images. He stared down into the terrible face below, but he also saw his own surprised face above, framed by the white circle of sane office light. He saw the way the wind from the tunnel was blowing back his hair. He blinked rapidly and it was still there. Double vision...

The eyes...

Two times two, I am—

Frank slammed the wooden slab back into place at once. He put as much of his weight on it as he could. It seemed he could not push down hard enough on the slab; he was light as a bug, weightless as vapors. The unspeakable double vision was gone. But the madness on the other side of the wooden slab was still there, and probably still grinning.

Frank folded his legs Asian style on the wooden disk. He looked around the underside of his desk, wondering what to do. For now it was enough just to keep the insanity below contained to the tunnel.

He rested his back against one side of his desk and remained there for over an hour. Eventually, he fell into a light doze that was not restful.

Not once did the mummy try to dislodge the wooden slab.

The following day was Friday.

Frank woke to the sound of office doors banging open. Coffee cradling employees with sleepy eyes arrived one after another for another day of tweaking the numbers.

He sat up and thumped his head. He was confused, trying to make sense of where he was.

"I can wait down here as lonnnng as it takes, Frank," the whisper came from directly beneath the wooden slab where Frank sat. "I don't each lunch, and I don't take breaks!"

"Go away, buddy," Frank said, rubbing his head and remembering everything. "Please go away."

"One is one, two is two, and I've got no work to doooo..."

Frank looked around, amazed that he had managed to sleep the night away under his desk. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs of sleep.

Once again he checked the wooden seal where he sat. It looked and felt solid. So he got up, pulled his chair over and took a seat. Rolling the chair snug up to the desk, he planted his feet firmly on the slab. That made him feel better. Gotcha now, mummy. He had to grin.

He wondered how it might go over if he were to mention to his coworkers that he was keeping a lid on a subterranean shaft occupied by a rhyming mummy. No worries, folks, it was nothing to be concerned with. Frank was, after all, the glue that held it all together.

Hysterical laughter tried bubbling up, but Frank realized something was wrong with the picture. Something was missing.

Then it hit him. The computer monitor had fallen off his desk.

Head vs desk.

He glanced down at the wooden slab. What if the mummy was just waiting and listening for a lapse in Frank's attention? Waiting for Frank to get up so it could escape and whisper its madness to the whole world?

Frank had no choice. His colleagues would wonder why the hell he had knocked over his monitor and hadn't bothered to pick it up.

He darted around the desk, picked up the monitor and made a frantic shoe-stomping return to the chair. The moment his feet were firmly back on the circular slab he felt better. He rolled forward until the edge of the desk dug into his stomach. He managed to fit two out of five of the chair wheels onto the wooden circle. Then he parked his feet back on top for good measure.

Someone was coming up the hallway.

Frank quickly combed his hair with his fingers. It would not do to have his good wholesome coworkers learn he'd spent the night at the office. As far as they were concerned Frank had just arrived for another day of crunching numbers and holding it all together.

Steve's secretary Suzy walked past Frank's desk to her cubicle.

"Morning Frank. You're early."

"Yeah, been swamped," he said. He stuck a pen in his hand and moved a paper around his desk. Yeah, been swamped. Better get used to it, Suzy, something tells me I'll be swamped for a while to come, just have to keep a lid on things...

Again Frank felt like laughing. Not chuckling over an amusing situation either, but cackling until his eyes watered and his abdomen ached.

Now folks, I am sad to say this. But Frank spent the next two weeks living at his desk. It was by far the most bizarre two weeks of his life. He got more work done than ever, and fortunately no assignment required him to leave his desk. He worked the numbers around the clock, floating dreamily among early morning 4's, evening 22's and midnight 98's. He compiled his reports, and kept his feet planted firmly on the wooden slab. He didn't go home. He didn't leave the office once. More often his thoughts returned to the things the mummy said.

As each day wound down he told his colleagues that he was swamped and had to stay late. Steve and the rest went out to their cars and their homes and their families and their dinners and their beds. Frank remained at his desk, a night watchman holding it all together. The doorkeeper down to madness.

He knew very well the mummy was still there. The hideous thing below was keeping time like an insane talking clock. It was only at night, long after everyone left and phones stopped ringing when it returned to tap on the underside of the wood and start in on the rhymes. Like a recording the mummy brought the same disturbing mirrored message each time: he was Frank, Frank was him, Frank come down, down come Frank.

In those godless hours as the world slept Frank would snap awake and listen, eyes wide. Tap, tap, tapping softly against the wood.

Down, Frank down. Down under the ground...

Finally came a day at the end of the second week of guarding the tunnel, when Frank found himself simply at the end of his rope. He decided he no longer cared enough to continue the routine.

This day was a Friday. Frank was completely out of gas. He was all done sleeping in a chair. Done living on vending machine Snickers and Pepsi and snack size bags of Doritos. Done with fluorescent light. Done with people telling him to take a vacation. Done joking about the beard he was growing.

Late that night after everyone had gone home for a weekend of movies, pizza, beer, joyrides in the car and barbecues with the kids, Frank heard the mummy return to the top of the ladder. Tap, tap, tap.

Right on schedule for another night of Rhyme Time.

When the rhyming began Frank hoisted the bulky Q4 report from his desk and slammed it onto the wooden circle.

There. He was going to get up and move around, god dammit.

Frank and his massive report were the only good guys left in the entire universe, and by god it was the report's turn to hold down the fort.

Frank got up, stretched. He walked around the silent office... and arrived back at his desk far too quickly. This office was one big U-turn. He eyed the mountain of paperwork sitting on the tunnel, and an idea occurred to him.

And it was perfection.

He sat down and removed the top few pages of the Q4 report and looked them over. Rows and columns of numbers assembled by him, like tiny armies attached to the paper.

You could look on these numbers horizontally or vertically. Or both at the same time if you were wired that way. You could even look on the numbers diagonally if you rotated the page just right. Three's. Eight's. Eleven's. Twenty-four's. Fifteen's. Hundred's. Hundred-thousand's.

And some sort of meaning connecting all those numbers. What was the purpose of all those numbers?

Frank thought there might be something to remember. He couldn't say for sure.

He tore a long strip from one side of the first page. He looked it over, fascinated by the jagged rip in the fibers. He noticed a "78" that had been split right down the middle.

Meaningless orphans floating through space.

He tore another shred. Another. And another. And then it was a massacre. Before long there was a swimming pool of paper strips around his feet.

There were two-thousand, seven-hundred and thirty-seven pages to the Q4 report. Papers containing numbers by the millions. By the billions. This simple repeated movement of his arms, a twitch of muscle, separated the numbers apart and rendered the information they conveyed scrambled and senseless.

Maybe... maybe there had never been any meaning there at all, no actual information conveyed in these reports whatsoever.

No meaning at all.

And in that moment Frank realized he had arrived at last: the great mathematical truth!

Ladies and gentlemen, there was never any meaning there at all.

"Hah!" he shouted into the silent office.

And then, Frank removed his clothes. He took several of the strips from the mountains of paper shreds and tied them together around his forehead like a headband.

"I'm Rambo!" he yelled, and no one was there to contradict him.

It took him five hours to finish and two rolls of 3M tape, and when he was done it was almost 4am Saturday morning. He was covered head to toe in horizontal strips of paper that had yesterday been the Q4 report.

Frank had been thorough. After wrapping on the first layer he'd added another. And another. And whaddya know, three layers was all it took—he was wearing the entire report.

It would take some getting used to moving around in his new three layers of crackly skin.

He then dislodged the slab of wood from underneath his desk. He lowered himself into the tunnel for the second time.

When he was seven or eight rungs down, he paused for one last look at the light. But the light made his eyeballs jitter. So he ducked his head, carefully spread the flap of carpet over the circle of wood and set it back into place.

Frank continued down the ladder.

Steve arrived for work the following Monday, pissed off that his Browns had lost again. Why did he like that damn team, anyway? They hadn't won anything in forever. His wife was visiting her folks out of town, so Steve had spent the whole weekend watching playoff football and drinking Coors from cans. He had done a fantastic job of ignoring the piss out of a list of chores she left for him. She was due back this evening. Steve would be getting an earful.

It was Monday. Some life.

Steve approached Frank's desk. Good old reliable Frank. If anyone could relate to the way Steve felt this morning, it would be Frank. Frank had been working a hell of a lot of overtime lately. Swamped. That's what Frank always said: I'm swamped. Steve decided he would take Frank to lunch, his treat. Ah, hell with lunch, maybe they'd knock down a few beers instead.

That was when Steve noticed Frank was not at his desk. Which was strange. Strange because Frank was... well, he kind of like a statue. And now that Steve thought about it, the Frank Statue was always at this desk. Steve eyed the paperwork, invoices, bills, reports. The Q4 report was gone.

Good old reliable Frank, Steve thought. Stayed late again to knock that monster out once and for all... and on a Friday, too.

Frank must have left his computer on all weekend. The screen saver program was running.

On the floor next to Frank's chair Steve spotted a small shred of paper. He could make out a few typewritten numbers and dollar signs. The edge of the strip was torn. Steve couldn't say why, but the strip of paper made him uneasy. He dropped it into Frank's trash bin. He thought that when Frank showed up today, he'd give him the day off.

Frank had been burning the oil late for a while now.

Maybe Steve would give him the whole week off.

Maybe the guy could use a break.