By The Numbers

BY THE NUMBERS

Eric E. Wallace

From the street to the garage, the driveway was 100 yards, 2 feet, 1.44 inches long. Vincent had carefully measured and remeasured it himself, doublechecking the estimator’s igures before agreeing to have the old dirt driveway paved. It wasn’t that Vincent was fussy to the point of being anal — though he was — or that he didn’t trust people — he didn’t — but more that, he lived for numerical accuracy. Apart from the surety of numbers, life was uncertain, capricious, unfair. A prime example was the coronavirus pandemic, which chose to commence only a week after the paving was inished. Suddenly the driveway was barely needed. Vincent and Olivia, childless, both recently retired — he from an accountancy irm, she from teaching high school biology — went into lockdown on their ive Idaho acres and dove into their individual pursuits. Olivia tended to an expanding number of garden plots, planted and nurtured an orchard, raised chickens in a PETA-approved coop, spent many hours Zoom-communing with other retired teachers and pampered her cats, Petal, Pistol and Sepal. Vincent manipulated his holdings in the stock market. He improved his chess game and competed on the internet with players from around the world, memorizing every move. He took daily walks (4) around the perimeter of the property, interspersed with laps (6) up and down the driveway. He crisscrossed the grounds along luscious curves based on Fibonacci spirals, his routes adjusted only when Olivia grumbled about intruding on her plantings. He learned the number of posts and rails on every section of fence (460), the average number of paving stones on each pathway (17.5), the height of each evergreen (range: 10 to 33 feet), the average number of twittering quail in a covey as measured against the marauding of Olivia’s cats (15/9). At supper one night, Olivia announced that his daily numerical accounts had become boring. She stretched out the irst syllable of bo-ring in a lippuckering way, holding it, by his mental clock, for a bravura 1.5 seconds.

Vincent countered Olivia with a verbal spreadsheet tallying her own yawn-inducing comments about quantities of raspberry canes culled, potatoes, onions and carrots planted, peaches, pears and apricots produced (less fruit damaged by insects or gnawed by raccoons), eggs laid per week and feline tummy troubles assuaged by sympathy, warm blankets and doses of slippery elm. Since they were boring each other with minutia, they took to reading at mealtimes. Olivia devoured novels, Vincent dined on chess histories and actuarial tables. Lockdown passed peaceably enough until Vincent, on one of his perambulations, thought he spotted an anomaly on the driveway. He stopped, stared, scowled. Venturing across part of the asphalt was a thin crack, the minutest of fracture lines, a scar on the near-perfect surface. Vincent pulled out his pocket tape measure. The crack was so small that an accurate reading of its width was impossible, but he estimated 1/4 of a millimeter. Length was easier to determine: coming from the east side of the driveway at an angle of 89.81 degrees, the whispery fault line extended 3 feet, 1 and 3/8 inches. When Vincent reported this to Olivia, her eyes glazed. Actually, they double-glazed. She said if it troubled him to have a Grand Canyon on the property, he should lex his warranty muscles. He called the paving company, but discovered they were one of those businesses whose motto was ly by night. He decided on a wait and see approach. Perhaps the crack would remain as it was, almost unnoticeable, while serving as a reminder never to trust anybody. But it was clear the crack was widening. And lengthening. And deepening. Vincent measured and charted. He acquired calipers, a depth micrometer and a inely-calibrated tape measure. He pinned 16 sheets of graph paper to the living room wall and plotted dates and times against every measurement. A nanometer here, a micron or a millimeter there, duly recorded. In multiple colors. Olivia rolled her eyes, but as she’d been rolling them for years, Vincent was immune. On the 40th day of observation, he noticed a miniscule mound of dirt

near the center of the crack. Ants. He estimated the average length to be 3 to 5 millimeters but warned himself against getting sidetracked into entomology. Not wanting to hire an exterminator — undoubtedly ly-by-night — he spread out 4.45 ounces of chili powder mixed with 3.3 ounces of Borax. By the 51st day, the crack was 3 feet, 2 and 1/4 inches long. No more ants, but earthworms (3) slid nearby. For a time, over their otherwise-quiet suppers, Vincent tried providing a daily update to Olivia. She stared, snifed, briely nodded — appearing to be somewhere between mystiied and disgusted — and ducked her head back into her book du jour. When the crack reached 3.2 millimeters in width, Olivia quit raising her head. Vincent stopped his reporting but kept measuring. Length: 4 feet, 1 and 1/8 inches. Average increase: .5 millimeters per week. Average width: 3.3 millimeters. Increase: .2 millimeters in 1 month. Average depth: 5.1 millimeters. Increase: .3 millimeters in 5 weeks. Ants: 3, lethargic. Earthworms: 1, listless. Vincent charted it all, putting up more graph paper (6 sheets). Olivia growled about redecorating the living room wall. As a precaution, Vincent memorized his igures. But it wasn’t purely about numbers. As he hovered over the crack, he imagined he could still smell the tarry odor from the paving project. Then it had been the smell of progress, the triumph of man over nature. Now he took the smell to be a taunting. And was that a whif of sulfur? His mind jumped to his Sunday school days and a fragment of a hymn, Satan crushed forever, sung, he knew, in 2/4 time. Vincent mused aloud at dinner. Were cracks in driveways really the devil’s work? He cleared his throat and repeated the question. This time Olivia lowered her Danielle Steele, gave him a long look, popped a homegrown cherry tomato into her mouth, crushed it thoughtfully, returned to reading. The crack lengthened, widened, deepened. On the 70th day, as Vincent poked and measured, his mind leapt to another boyhood memory. Digging to China. That’s what his parents said about his boyish spade work. Dig deep enough, Vinnie, and you can tunnel all the way to China.

China! Vincent laughed with a grim, wide-eyed epiphany. His tape measure, his new depth sensor and his other instruments were manufactured in China. His shirt, pants, socks, underwear and work gloves were made in China.

That was it! The Chinese had dug through from below, tunneled the 11,772.3 kilometers to Idaho. Suddenly it made sense. Those tunneling ants: Chinese. The earthworms: Chinese. The snake he’d seen slithering past the crack: from China. My God, was this the Chinese Year of the Snake? Breathless, he ran to report his breakthrough idea to Olivia. She wasn’t in her gardens. Not in the chicken coop. Not in the orchards. Not even on the back porch Zooming. He at last found her in the bedroom, packing suitcases. She muttered she was going to visit her sister in Wyoming. He needn’t worry about the cats. They were going too. So were the chickens. Estimated date of return: not established. Vincent asked whether she wanted the issure statistics emailed to her daily or weekly. She convulsed into a it of manic laughter, and he retreated, iguring she’d let him know. When Olivia drove from the garage, Vincent was crouched at the side of the driveway, using his new digital laser to conirm the current length, 4 feet, 9.23 inches. He glanced up to see Olivia’s Honda rolling directly toward him (at approximately 1.25 mph). At the last moment, the vehicle turned and crunched over the crack, the cats meowing and the chickens clucking. Vincent took out his calipers and began recalculating the average width. He stopped, dropping both the calipers and his jaw. Had Olivia mentioned Wyoming? That was it! This issure was no accidental happenstance, no devil’s work, no Chinese tomfoolery. It was a message, an alert. He’d long been fascinated by the great Teton fault in Wyoming, centered 473.312 kilometers to the northeast. He had books, videos, charts aplenty on the subject. Experts thought that with one cataclysmic eruption, the western states would heave and buckle and split asunder in a mighty rippling earthquake, Richter 9.5 or higher. This crack in his driveway was a tease, a scout, a harbinger. The Big One, the granddaddy of all quakes, was coming. Soon. And he, Vincent, would be at the forefront. He ordered a seismograph, a tent, a cot, loodlights and a generator, and he methodically planned a round-the clock vigil. He wondered anew why people said the pandemic was terribly disruptive. How could that be? By keeping him home, it had brought new purpose and focus to his life. He alone would be prepared. When the West split open, he’d be here,

measuring everything. And dancing gleefully — in 4/4 time — right on the edge of the beautiful chasm.