I hadn’t learned about them in school yet, numbers less than Zero, but by the time I learned to count to Ten I knew that, naturally, they were there holding the rest up. Zero wasn’t doing it all by himself. Or maybe he was. He was certainly capable. Unique as he is, Zero’s always been a quiet, reflective number resolute, if not reflexive, in holding his own place. I’ve always had a three- or more-dimensional view of the numbers in my mind, particularly in the range from negative Ten, where they break apart from all the others, to about the mid-fifties where they begin to reorganize and line up to rejoin the rest in a tidy stack. In that range, where the stack passes through my plane of existence, the number line is disrupted, broken apart from the stack but still strung on the same continuous invisible thread. Numbers drift out into my space, spiral, loop back again as if their stack is being pulled apart by the gravity of a passing star, and then reassemble again under a tightening gravity of their own. Zero, as usual, seems unaffected and continues to hold his place between negative and positive numbers without becoming a member of either set.
I keep track of the rest of the numbers outside this range, though I rarely need to. Outside my plane the numbers are not warped at all. They are well-organized and easy to locate as needed, in their tidy stack. They stick to their rules. When the numbers get to be what you might call “mind-numbingly large,” they tend to be very cumbersome; each one becomes a string in itself requiring punctuation for ease of identification or abbreviation by employing characters borrowed from an alphabet. Out there each number is represented by long strings of numerals occupying considerable space on the number line. They get in their own way so the stack widens exponentially as it moves off in either direction into infinity. Therefore, I don’t let the big numbers occupy my mind or clutter my space. I try not to deal with them often but when I do, I go to them. They’re easy to find. I can travel along the number line in either direction to any number at any time. But there’s not much to see out there. The big numbers all look the same, strings of the same ten numerals, including Zero as a placeholder, arranged in different combinations like committees consisting of the same individual members shuffled and reshuffled into different seats in an endless game of musical chairs. None of us like committees so I stay home with my familiar numbers.
Home is in my realm with the few unique numbers, some odd, some even, some prime, not too far away from where my plane intersects and disrupts the infinite number stack. Here, from my default vantage, I look to my left, somewhat behind and down a step, to the number Four, who’s always got my back. Then behind her is Three, Two, One, Zero, and beyond through the negative numbers, which at one time were in the dark, unseen, but I knew they were there. I stand with Five, sort of beside him, or slightly behind as to stay out of his way, and look over either shoulder depending on which way I need to see. Nobody f*cks with Five. He’s independent. You could say he’s odd but he only seems that way because he often works alone and he asks for nothing from the other numbers. Yet he may always be counted on when he’s needed, and that’s usually by Ten who’s an important base number in this world and who calls on Five to do his dirty but precise half work so that Ten may remain a whole, solid, steady, and even base. Ten’s a good guy and, though Five doesn’t need to be looked after, treats Five like a son. Likewise, though he never lets on about it, Five has always looked after me. We see things from the same perspective.
This perspective has been the same since I got here. I think it has something to do with age. Between Four and Five was the number of times I had been around the local star, Sol, when I was learning to count and first realized that I knew these numbers already. Somehow they were familiar to me then, before I was five. I knew them. The number line also seemed to be the trail along which time travels through my space. The number line may have been cratered and knocked out of place into this spiraling, haphazard alignment when I arrived here on Sol-3, or crashed into it is perhaps a more apt description of my arrival. I’ve always had this sense that I crashed and became trapped in the warped gravity of Here. The way I see the numbers swirling out to me, like debris, and then back again is the result of the crash I think. And that is also how I knew of the negative numbers long before I learned of them in school, being aware of times before I arrived here in this one. That is how I knew the concept of infinity before I knew your word for it.
The numbers come off the stack in my direction and then swirl around a bit in an upward spiral, a little bit like a spiral staircase, perhaps climbing its way out of the figurative crater my crash made in the number stack. My default point of view from behind Five, sometimes resting on Four, is near the bottom of the staircase looking upward along the spiral. Four is at my back, off to my left and a small step below. Then Three, Two, One, and Zero each go a step lower. Five stands just in front of me, then up to my right is Six then Seven almost directly above Six, as the number line spirals and curves nearly vertically through the single digit numbers from Five to Ten. Eight sits above Seven and then Nine and Ten sit on the spiral where it starts to lean off to the left again and continues through the Teens back towards the stack. It’s steep through 7-8-9-10 but the climb becomes more gradual with a small step or two up at Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. From there it levels off through the Teens, or at least it rises gently into the Twenties, which get steep again around 27. From there on up they spiral less and start to climb straight back up towards the stack and begin filing, folding more than spiraling, into layers of tens, loosely at first through the Thirties and Forties, then as they double back through the Fifties they begin to tighten up and stack neatly into layers of tens. Then, up at 100, each layer becomes a layer of One Hundred, followed by layers each of One Thousand, then layers each of a Million and so on. Numbers out there have less gravitational pull on me and I rarely have a use for them so I don’t travel that far up and out the stack that often. I’m good where I’m at, with the most important, most often used numbers close at hand.
There are moods and colors too. When I was a kid learning to count I personally knew some numbers better than others. Zero was always my hero because I knew he was holding an important line for everyone’s sake. He had more substance and integrity than anyone seemed to give him credit for and he always managed to be a good force in both directions, like a buffer, yet remained neutral like a mirror. One and Two always seemed boring to me, and a bit standoffish. They acted like royalty, King and Queen ruling over all positive numbers. In reality One had very little power to affect another number unless he forced himself upon it as an over-bearing numerator. But Two held some real power and, depending on her mood, could either double the strength of a friend or cut a foe in half. Our Royal Couple could not be bothered to acknowledge the existence of negative numbers, a luxury afforded them by the under-appreciated Zero. They never looked back there and they didn’t like mirrors. One and Two, clinging to their own delusions of grandeur, like to think they are the beginning and are too stubborn and simple-minded to see into the past. Three was like their kid that knew better and wanted nothing to do with being royal. He did his own thing. He knew that there wasn’t much difference between positive and negative numbers. He thought of them as mirror images of one another. Four is a beautiful shade of deep blue with slender lines. She was like a big sister to Three and always provided support for Five and me, though Five never really needed it. Five is quiet and, as I said, independent. Six struck me as somewhat daft at first but he’s actually not daft at all. Six plays a supporting role in the string usually with his back to Five, who doesn’t need support, focused on helping Seven with whatever she needs which is usually providing a solid base for Eight who’s the protector of all the single-digit numbers. Nine’s loyalties clearly lie with Ten, so Eight knew that his friends Six and Seven provided his only support until you get further up the string to his big brother, Eighteen. Nine is a generally jovial character, or numeral, bouncing around on his big smile. He means no harm but he’s a light green double-digit wannabe stuck to Ten’s coat-tails.
To me it never seemed right to call every other number odd. I get it, your unnatural propensity to segregate and delineate and the need to define even and odd, but most odd numbers are not odd at all. One of the oddest numbers in my neighborhood is Twelve. She’s odd. Perhaps her jealousy of Ten made her that way. I think it’s because she could have been a base, and almost was, instead of Ten. But thank goodness she isn’t. She retains the honor of being called a Dozen if and whenever she chooses. But you wouldn’t want to muck around in the messy math of a Base-12 world, in which 100 would be 144 which would be a gross; very messy indeed. Eleven, elegant and upright, didn’t seem to like her position sitting a step away from Twelve and Thirteen did everything he could to overshadow Twelve or separate himself from her altogether by clearly identifying himself as a Teen. I know Twelve’s even but she’s still a little odd.
I’ve always been fascinated with numbers and their math. I aced every math class I ever took, up to and including the 400-level stuff in college like Differential Equations and Calculus 4. No sweat. It all made sense. Equations were the written version of a language with which I already seemed to be familiar. I was never stymied until I tried to apply my beloved numbers to the nebulous gas of 400-level Physics courses such as Quantum Mechanics, Atomic & Nuclear Physics, and some sort of Theoretical Particle Mechanics, all of which I had spinning on my inertial plate in the same semester (along with Diff. Eq. which I aced) and that’s when I popped. I had a difficult time hanging my trusty, solid numbers on such unfathomably abstract ideas, concepts which, if I may add, the textbooks failed to convey. I love numbers but I love words too, and those Physics textbooks were bulky in the backpack and extremely poorly written with an unnecessarily wordy and passive style. The Physics department should have run them through the English department for the application of some external force before they vectored through publishing. A grammarian’s touch would have unequivocally saved an immeasurable mass of paper and conserved a considerable amount of inertia. The subject matter is difficult to grasp as it is, but having to wade through the painfully passive sentence structure to extract the substance was just too much. Seeing how a Physicist writes, which in some way reflects how a Physicist must think, made me want to change my major, which I did. I didn’t grasp physics in the abstract as well as I understood the resolute language of the numbers but then again, if I had, maybe I wouldn’t have crashed here in the first place.