All down the street we’d been fighting ’til we passed the drug store where Mandy saw the ads in the window and they reminded her that she was having a certain female problem with itchiness so she told me to wait outside with the dog while she ran inside to buy whatever it was she needed that was advertised on special in the window. She yelled at me how her itchiness was probably my fault anyways, that I probably caught it from the bitch she was accusing me of carrying on with, that I probably passed it on to her, that it was probably one of those sexually transmitted bugs, that she was mad as hell, etc. etc. You know how they get. I settled myself on the edge of a big decorative stone planter and, noticing the dark clouds gathering in the sky, I told Mandy she’d better hurry up so we could get back to the apartment before the storm broke, while I thought to myself how this was just like one of those pathetic fallacy thingies where the weather in the external world is a projection of a character’s internal state, like Lear raging on the heath, only here it was Mandy pissed off at me on the sidewalk in front of Jeff’s Drug Mart.
There’d been a chalk artist working a patch of sidewalk further along, only he’d seen the weather turning and was packing his things. The way he moved reminded me of the Kansas farm hands in Wizard Of Oz, scurrying around, tying things down before the tornado swooshes the house away. I squinted to make out what the guy’d been drawing, but Mandy stepped in my way, one hand on her hip, the other held out in front of her. I told her to hurry up and get her anti-fungal hoo haw potion; I didn’t want to be stuck outside when the storm ripped. But she didn’t budge; she just stood there with her hand held out in front of her. Money. That’s what she was after. If I was dumb enough to spread a case of fungal rot, then I could bloody well pay for the cure. Whatever. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills and as I flattened them on the corner of the stone planter and as I counted them out for Mandy, I noticed something peculiar about the chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Normally, when a chalk artist lays something out on the pavement, it’s either a (really infantile) copy of a famous work, like a chalky big-lipped Mona Lisa or a busty cartoonish Birth of Venus, or else it’s a tromp l’oeil, a play with perspective where the drawing only makes sense if you’re standing on your head exactly 10.2 feet due west. But in this case, the drawing didn’t seem to be of anything at all, more a scribble of letters, symbols, and numbers. Granted, the whole thing had a flow to it and an overall visual appeal, but still, you couldn’t call it art in any conventional sense.
When I looked up from the sidewalk, Mandy was still there with her hand stuck out like I hadn’t given her enough money or something. I dug into my pocket again but that wasn’t it. She wanted my cell phone. I figured she wanted it so she could have a vapid conversation with one of her vapid friends, but she said no, she wanted it so she could scan bar codes and look for sales on stuff. I asked why she couldn’t use her own goddam cell phone but she whined that she’d left it back at the apartment on the side of the tub beside the toilet. So much for communication in the modern age.
Mandy disappeared through the revolving doors and it got me wondering what if, instead of doors, the revolving doors came equipped with the rotor blades from an industrial blender. People step inside and get chewed to a pulp. Everything gets strained and collected underneath, then served up as meat nuggets at the fast food place beside Jeff’s Drug Mart. When my fantasy had played itself out, I went back to the chalk scrawls at my feet. A gob-sized rain drop fell splat in the centre of the scribbles, obliterating a single digit and the lower half of a sigma. I smiled at the tug of a philosophical thought: funny how ephemeral life can be; a piece of street art gets scoured away by the elements, beauty for an instant, then nothing, the same way life has its end in death. La-de-fucking-da.
I saw it in a flash. Given the black clouds bearing down on us, one might think I saw a flash of lightning, but that’s not what I mean when I say I saw it in a flash. What I mean is more that I had kind of an epiphany. No, that’s not it either; that just sounds corny. It was more an instant apprehension of things. I looked down at the scribbles on the sidewalk and realized all at once, even with the growing spatter of rain drops, that this wasn’t some artist trying to create the look of mathematical equations like you sometimes see on blackboards in movies. No. These were honest-to-God true-as-Jesus mathematical equations that followed a logical progression from propositions to ineluctable conclusions. No. It wasn’t as vague as that either. My flash included the purpose and content of the equations. They were Newtonian equations—algebra, calculus—describing the motion of planetary bodies in relation to one another: body1, body2, b1, b2. There it was again: b1, b2. And again: b1, b2, b3. B3? The three body problem? Oh my god. This was an algebraic solution to the three body problem.
The rain was picking up and some of the equations began to smear the same way makeup smears when a woman cries. I felt all my pockets for my cell phone, thinking I could use the phone-cam to record the equations, but my pockets were empty. Shit, I gave the phone to Mandy. I leapt to the window of Jeff’s Drug Mart and banged on the glass until Mandy noticed and shrugged in a way that asks: What gives? Every time I heard the splat of a rain drop on the sidewalk, it sounded to my ears like the crackle of fire burning a pile of books or the chuff of bullets as troops looted museums. Mandy stared at me with a vacant look. Too late. Aw shit. I stepped from the window and let the rain soak my clothes.
After Mandy had paid for her anti-fungal kit, we stood outside together, sheltered by the overhang above the revolving doors. We watched the chalky water swirling down the drain and I explained that all those equations had detailed an algebraic solution to the three body problem. Mandy cupped a hand behind my neck and said what I expected her to say: that it was impossible; that Poincaré had proven at the end of the 19th century that the three body problem couldn’t be described in such a way. I said that’s what made the chalk scrawls all the more extraordinary but she only scowled. She said: some things defy description and that’s all there is to it; I just have a case of wish-fulfillment syndrome or another of her made up conditions.
When the rain stopped, Mandy held up the box she’d bought at Jeff’s and said she had to get back to the apartment; she was itchy as hell. I loitered under the overhang, waiting for Mandy to disappear before I checked my phone messages. The first thing I noticed was that, while she was in the drug store, Mandy had used the browser to surf the web. She’d left a page open at listings for one bedroom apartments. I have no idea how that makes me feel. Some things defy description.