“What is the very last number?” Dario asked at bedtime. I thought I was clever when I said:
Zero.
He objected and said he wanted the biggest number. He was disappointed to learn there was no biggest number, or at least that it was too big for even me, Mom, to know. We settled for 999 quintillion, 999 quadrillion, 999 trillion, 999 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine. It bothers me that I can only see this in dollars and light years. I cannot see the theoretical size of a number. Just the practical ways we get as far as possible.
Our horizons are universal because the world is round and the world is round because our horizons must be universal. A limited perimeter can mean either the specialization of the globe is contained by purpose, or that even the all knowing center of the universe does not know how to compute farther than what it knows. I think of Buckminster Fuller’s dialectic of Generalists and Specialists.
Making art has been hard this year, but this morning Dario brought me my phone and asked for the passcode which I obliged him after months of his pleading, because I was giving up (so tired, I am…) but also because he’s matured enough that I know to trust him not to accidentally email the Democratic National Convention or Ticketmaster or whoever is spamming me these days. He lay in bed and from what I could tell was recording voice memos of himself humming. I’ve watched him do this before. He looks at the frequency monitor fluctuate to his changing volume and pitch and uses this as an interactive form of entertainment rather than to record anything.
I lull between states of consciousness. He gets quiet and plays a recording. It is something that jolts me out of sleep and has me upright in a split second. A recording of music I’d recorded twelve years ago. It was jarring to hear something from so long ago, feeling alien to it but recognizing the unmistakable hand of my guitar and voice (To be clear, though, I am in no way a guitarist. Just a guitar owner.)
Dario and I stare at each other as the music plays, and smile. The many things I feel in this moment included sadness because the melody was melancholic, and shame because I was so piqued by my own music when even panic-inducing headlines from the DNC can’t elicit so much as performed interest of me these days.
This is the perimeter of my universe, it turns out, and I know a much bigger number than what I’d imagined hours earlier. The universe is around us.
