YOUR OWN ROOM
One morning, when you woke up, got out of bed and walked to the door, you discovered that it was precisely twenty-five meters away. When you opened the windows, you immediately saw that they were set at a exact forty-five-degree angle to the wall.
Everything lived a precise life of its own and would continue to do so, with or without you.
You had just moved out of your parents’ home. The furniture was still in disarray. You finally had a room that was entirely your own. The thought that it might one day become someone else’s room seemed impossible. (Like something that had to be prevented). It wasn’t big, the room, but it was yours. It might take a lifetime to expand it from twenty-five meters to twenty-six, you thought. But why not try? I was once in a tiny room; I could touch the walls. When I sang, they moved ever so slightly. Then I learned to calculate.
You got to work immediately. You multiplied the wall by the floor, subtracted the window from the wall, and added the door to the mix—and everything began to shift. Not much, but enough for you to stretch out your arms without touching anything. It was an almost uncomfortable delight. The room did as you commanded. You subtracted the ceiling from the floor to see what would happen; you multiplied the walls. You were young.
Then you let go of control entirely and divided all the corners.
Perhaps that was where it began.
A number was left over. An insignificant percentage, but enough. You measured again. You developed a fever and your hands got torn and scratched. You leaned out the window; you forced the door the wrong way.
26.3.
From then on, always the same number. You multiplied it by itself; you tried doing everything exactly as before, only with the signs reversed, but it remained 26.3. You had second thoughts. You put the doors back in. You squared all the walls; you swapped y for x. Nothing helped. You removed the windows. You started over.
26.3.
20 plus 6 plus 0.3.
You hardly slept. 0.3 is nothing, you dreamed, yet you woke knowing it was enough. You wept and fell into a rage. The round, calm zero, the mocking decimal point, the possessive, enormous 3 mm.
You installed three windows—no doors; you had removed those. You thought you heard a knock, but you didn’t open up. You thought you heard shouting and pounding on the door. You watched it all turn into millimeters between your battered hands—fractions of a millimeter—only to swell once more into that unforgivably skewed number:
26.3.
