The Stone Loves the World

a small plaza oddly removed from foot and vehicular traffic, down an access road that curved behind a hotel. At night it was badly lit and forlorn. When he entered the Wok Inn to pick up his order, no one was ever sitting at any of the tables. A woman would come out from the kitchen and hand him his food and ring up the amount. After stepping out, he would sometimes stand for a minute under the flat concrete awning that ran part of the way around the square. The plaza was so isolated, you couldn’t hear the traffic along the road on the far side of the hotel. With a step forward he could look up and see Vega or Sirius or Rigel, depending on the season, and those stars seemed less isolated than this parking lot. No one else ever arrived while he stood there. Yet the bag of food was warm in his hand. If he looked back at the Wok Inn, the lights were on, but no one was visible, not even the woman who’d served him.

It led to fanciful thoughts. It felt as though the Wok Inn had sprung into existence a moment before he’d arrived, and would disappear as soon as he left. Or maybe what gave him such a happy thrill was the opposite notion: that the Wok Inn existed without any need for him, or apparently for anyone else; that it was always there, whether anyone visited it or not, like prokaryotic life on exoplanets, which probably existed in some form, but which humans might never discover. Like virtually everything in the universe, for that matter, galaxies and radiation and cubic kiloparsecs of expanding space, the whole shebang—out there for certain, but just as certainly not there for us.

One night after he’d returned to his office with his order, he sat in front of his computer and contemplated for the umpteenth time that nameless feeling—the mystery of ordinary moments that seemed “pregnant with meaning,” as some people liked to say. This was poetry’s domain, as he understood it. He had never much cared for poetry. Most of it seemed unnecessarily obscure. Yet life did offer up moments of intensity, whose precise meaning was ambiguous. He wondered if it might be possible to convey the phenomenon in words, but without using all that annoying poetic language. Since the feeling was engendered by simple real-world facts, why not simply list those facts? Mightn’t such a list engender in the reader the same or a similar feeling?

He opened a new document on his computer and wrote down the sort of list he had in mind. He read it over, discarded it, tried again, read again, rewrote, and eventually had something that roused in him a feeling not dissimilar to the one he often had outside the Wok Inn. Of course a better test would be to find out if it had such an effect on a reader who hadn’t experienced the antecedent moment. However, he felt abashed at the thought of letting anyone else see it. Probably it would mean nothing to them. Probably it would seem simple-minded.

He decided to send the list to his daughter, who was eleven years old and precocious. She didn’t live with him, so he and she mainly communicated by email.

11:49 p.m., April 30, 2006

Dear Mette,

I hope you are well, and that you’re still having fun with algebra. Please say hello to your mother for me. Here’s an amusing proof that all numbers are equal:

Let x and y be any real numbers.

Let z = (x + y)/2

Multiply both sides of the above equation by 2, to get: 2z = x + y

Now multiply both sides by (x−y): 2z(x−y) = (x + y)(x−y), or 2zx−2zy = x²−y².

Rearrange: y²−2zy = x²−2zx.

Add z² to both sides: y²–2zy + z² = x²–2zx + z².

Factor both sides: (y−z)² = (x−z)²

Take the square root of both sides: y−z = x−z

Add z to both sides, and voilà: y = x!

Can you figure out where I cheated?

Also, I wrote a “poem.” Or something, anyway. I’m not sure what to call it. It reminds me a little bit of a data set, except here each datum is a descriptive sentence. Anyway, here it is:

Walk In, Take Out

The parking lot is at the end of an access road that curves behind the hotel.

You would never find it if you didn’t already know it was there.

At night the lot is always dark and empty.

There are six other shops that appear to still be in business, but they’re always dark.

The Wok Inn has a dining area that is narrow and deep.

There are eight tables and twenty-eight chairs.

The fluorescent lights in the drop ceiling are always on.

The plastic red lanterns on the tables are never lit.

The room is always empty.

No one is ever at the cash register.

In front of the cash register is a bowl of after-dinner mints.

When I call to order take-out, the phone is always answered promptly.

When I park in the dark lot and come into the empty room, I always call out, “Hello?”

A woman always comes immediately out of the kitchen at the back with my order.

She never asks for the name on the order.

The order is always correct.

She rings me up at the cash register.

She always offers me a mint.

I sometimes glimpse a child at the back of the kitchen in the back of the room.

I’m never sure if it’s the same child or the same woman.

love,

Your Father

2006

Secrets of her solitary life:

Her age is the smallest nontrivial palindromic number. Her nest is behind her computer, between two bookcases, against the window. She crawls into it through a foot-wide gap. Wishner waits on the windowsill. Her school is P.S. 17Q. Q stands for Queens, 17 is a prime number, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. The windowsill is 14 inches above her mattress. Her apartment is on the third floor, which is also the top floor. When she lies