Euclid’s Postulates

 
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1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.

“Nothing works until it does,” the mechanic says, but my Mazda remains indifferent to such wisdom, stubborn on the side of the highway. It’s 6AM and I could use something sweet.

“Chetty D” rubs a rag over greased palms and gazes at the sedan, stumped. “Damn, that’s a real pickle.” Across the state, Nithya texts incessantly at me for not arriving or calling. I consider the distance between exits, always getting longer. Miles of nothingness. No matter where I am now, I should be able to get where I’m going, I think, if only because I am in love, but the Mazda overlooks this too.

Chet waddles along the dirt-worn shoulder to his battered tow truck. Does he think I’m Muslim? He probably thinks I’m Muslim. Chet grabs some flaccid rubber wand with one hand and a curved pole in another, then smiles, waving the obscure items at me as if both their disparate utilities and some logic connecting them should be obvious. He’s giddy, and I smile too, thinking: Chetty D’s clinched it, thank god, I will make it to the funeral after all.

Chet dives into the gears, then squirms wormlike and ever more snugly into the folds of metal. A hero. He enters the machine so thoroughly, in fact, that I wonder if his plan hinges merely on imbuing this engine with his whole pear-shaped body, finally sacrificing himself to my car in a merger of professional purity: The Perfect Mechanic. That I’ve approached my sex life in an analogous fashion dawns on me now and I am privately embarrassed. I hear a wrenching. Maturity comes, not gradually with experience, but in sudden bursts of rarified shame. A clinking. Nithya’s mother is dead, and I am drafting a plan to better disguise my perverse egoism as humanity. Scraping.  Examining my sleeves, I try to forget that I have lived not only this particular life but any life at all. It doesn’t work. Silence. Chet’s form slackens, save for a final tension deep in his shoulders. He emerges from the engine with a smirk as if grasping some clever joke’s elusive punchline, then pivots around the hood and into the driver’s seat. “So, are you a Muslim?” he asks. “No, Catholic,” I say. “My parents are from India.” Turning the key, he listens and waits. I too listen and wait.

The highway offers nothing but the twang of distant industry. The ground is damp. I envision the rubbery knob flopping into position along the curved pole, finally reviving the blanked engine via symmetry. I believe in an unknown narrative binding their purpose beneath the hood. Instead, a terrible wheezing begins from the engine. Will it ever stop? I don’t think Chet’s plan has worked.

Stuttering, the engine sounds as if it has learned miraculously to breathe, and as such, also to suffocate. I swear that one of us, either this mechanic or myself or the car, will cry. No tears drop, though, but a face does burst into flames. Undeniably, the hood of my Mazda is on fire. The hood of my Mazda is on fire. Chet scrambles away. My car has maybe exploded?

The phone rings. Nithya. I don’t answer. In a ball of fire, ‘maybe’ is consumed. I cannot drive a flaming car to a funeral, I think. Nor an explosion of any kind. Ill advised. A tire pops. Something shoots across the jersey barrier. To see it all before me, flames roaring into the sky, I cannot help but wonder at the awesome power of anything becoming something else. Is it always so miraculous? Chet manages, thank god, to put it out, then joins me to stare at the smoke.  “Maybe everything works until it doesn’t,” he says. I could use something sweet.

2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.

“What?” Nithya says on the phone. I steal anxious glances through Chet’s rear-view, half expecting the Mazda dragging behind us to implode, but it just bobs gently in rhythm with the road. My car will not be attending the funeral. It’s dead.

The situation provides ample room for optimism, I tell Nithya. With church services scheduled three hours off, there’s time still to rent a car and make the two hour drive. Calm and understanding, she agrees almost offhand. Grief is different for everyone. Her tone is bland to the point of absurdity in the face of her mother’s death, or any death. Nithya speaks as through a cloth around her mouth, a gauzy linen drawn about her life. She tells me about her knees, about the baked ziti, potpourri, some lamb shank, peas, children. Out of respect or empathy or social etiquette, I stuff that gauze in my mouth too. How can I tell you anything, I think, even car rentals. In a sea of barely real exchange, the actual always looks the clown, until – faced with the clown itself – our ostentation becomes ridiculous. Death’s balloon animals. I am in love, mothers die, cars explode and we speak quietly over the telephone. When the circus leaves town, there is no town. The truck jolts, my phone falls to the floor.

First it’s just bumpy, then more than that. The vehicle seizes up, violently retching. I am slammed against the window as Chet rams the hulk off the road into the dirt. The hood smokes. “Damn,” he says. “How about that.”

Yes, how about that. Is my car poisonous? Contagious? No matter, we are here, stranded. Chet laughs, makes a call. I laugh too. Nithya, when I tell her, reacts like I explained the weather, cares only that I’ll eventually arrive. Chet assures me, and I picture Nithya in the house, floating like dander or ghosts.

A larger truck arrives. Two unruly men hook it to Chet’s, pull theirs forward into the expanse. They spin wheels into the mud – so deep in fact that the large truck cannot drive or go or move. And neither can we, or the Mazda, or anything at all. Everything is here, by the highway, in the mud. We are stuck. Ha. Making it to the funeral, at least on time, is starting to seem unlikely. I laugh, sort of. Also, are we cursed?

Ten minutes later, another truck arrives. Impossibly, a bust. Then another. I am uneasy. In less than an hour, we’re four tow trucks deeper and no closer to movement. Just farther into the dirt.  I do not tell Nithya this, or that my car is a plague, always has been.

Chet, exasperated hero, calls his wife. She will drive me to the rental spot, but I feel guilty inviting another party into our improbable scenario – do we have a responsibility to warn them off? Careful, Don’t touch, Our lives are contaminated. The pattern of collapse cannot be contained. I can see a line of doom emanating from my vehicle, crossing the Cartesian plane of this town, saying: You will survive, but your car will not.

While I wait, numerous mechanics pace and loiter. Confederate flags abound. I make bets with myself about which portion of these men assumes I’m Mexican, as opposed to that which assumes I deserve this exploded car, or resents me for having caused so much havoc, now or ever. 90/50/10, maybe? One mechanic rests against his bumper, examining a notebook and gesticulating. He is young, peach-fuzzy. “There exists such a point T,” he says, “and there exists such a line L,” he jerks, “that line L intersects segment D and,” but he trails off. He starts again, waving at the sky. This is not merely late-semester cramming. Theater maybe? I assume he must be explaining ideas to a student via phone, because he keeps pausing mid-thought, as if interrupted, but there is no earpiece, and the thoughts themselves are not wholly correct or worthy of teaching, and not so much interrupted as incomplete: half-baked ramblings clawing at ideas that are not there. “Sorry if I’m driving you crazy,” he says, noting my interest, eyes like nails, “but I have to do this aloud…because nobody knows the shape of space. Not me. Not you.” Uh oh.

“No problem at all,” I say. He continues, diagramming the air. I’m afraid he’ll snare me into some pointless conversation. I can’t help but assume the words are merely decorative here, festooning the empty belief that a narrative ripples beneath the facts. Something about space, about shape, about us. He twitches, blinks, smacks his lips. Why is math so attractive to the vaguely schizophrenic? Why do we want so badly to dredge stories out of symmetries? To see correlations between people and things, often unfounded, and to wrap fiction around disparate bodies? Am I Muslim. The mere feeling of a pattern, the suggestion of one, can be as seductive as patterns themselves, I think, and note my complicity in this. Obviously, the rescue squads en route to our breakdown are not and have never been doomed from the start by a line drawn outward from my Mazda and its plight, and no underlying system of failure has threaded its way from my car to the tow trucks and beyond, nor is said line waiting patiently to embroil the nearest bystander. The pattern and its narrative is me, where it begins and ends, not the fire or the road.

Time bears this out. Soon, I am in Chet’s wife’s car, and I am waiving goodbye, and I am at the rental place, and I am filling out insurance forms, and I am driving off to a funeral, safe and steady, and to Nithya, and her mother, entirely uncursed, though I can’t shake the feeling that I have not escaped that pattern of breakdown and collapse, which does not exist, and that I have not broken off from that line of failure, which isn’t there, but that I am now simply dragging it along behind me, stretching it to capacity, hauling it straight to everyone I love.

3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.

Ha! Freedom! The open road! My arm out the window! The rental car smells fantastic: clean, fresh and safe. Like summer towels. Like fruit. Like home. Yes, this rental car is my house, I think, my bed. I gun down the highway, into the mouth of the future. It’s 9AM. I will be late, yes, but I will arrive at the funeral. I am alive and the road flies out behind me. See you in two hours, Nithya. I am in love and the earth turns around my rental car. It’s 9AM. Everything is in motion and fluid and responsive. I remember this feeling from when I was a kid, a smiling idiot imitating an action hero, swinging my arms and legs, making the weakest of sound effects: Fwoosh, wham, kathoosh. I am that motion, that sound, and so is the road.

Do I still suspect highway curses? Yes, but I’m dismissing that! It’s easy. Look: I press the gas, and I go. I press the brakes, I slow. I’m on my way – the world is as it should be. Crisis averted.

Now, though, I am tasked with the unfortunate responsibility of explaining to Nithya that I will be late. In my mind, Nithya is all hair, tossing, turning, coming to rest. A gentle breeze carries me away. I can’t conceive her body without also conceding her laugh, the best of all. And I must tell her I’ll be late. To her mother’s funeral. That I will not help prepare her, will not carry her safely from warm ambiguity to cold certainty, cannot provide a net of comfort as she falls into this world, but instead will walk in mid-service, alone, a stranger, the door creaking, the heads turning, the world ending.

But she will understand: circumstances beyond our control. What better time to invoke this reasoning than now, in that period surrounding death? Here, the impossible is revealed not only to be probable, but instead the only fact at all. Action, reaction. Death and/or Car Trouble. Imagine it: I turn the wheel, the car adjusts. I can do anything.

For example, I turn on the radio, and a pundit speaks. My body hurdles toward responsibility, mourning. I exit the highway, and the scenery changes. I am free. I stop the car, and the world stops with it. Real freedom must be measured, I think, only against that which we are expected to do. I look out of the car, and poof I see a diner among the pines. And it must be measured by the degree to which we can deviate from that expectation without incurring costs, either financial or spiritual. I enter this diner, and bam I am greeted. My body fills with lust and sadness. I sit down, fwoosh, I eat pie. Only when we commit wrongs are we free. More coffee please. I don’t cry, though I could, and a weight is lowered on a string from my throat to my bowels. I am a coward. It’s 10AM, Nithya, I say, trembling in the booth with my flaky crust, and you will not believe the situation with my car, incredible.

But of course she believes it. How could she not. Who would lie about this. About any of this. How can I tell you anything, I think, even car rentals. I do not go to the funeral, and kathoosh, I do not go to the funeral. Nothing happens. Wham. Nothing happens. Not even a breeze.

4. All right angles are congruent.

By now, services are in full swing, and I’ve already eaten pie. What else is there. Frankly, I feel like an asshole (fuck oh fuck, what have I done, Nithya shit shit, your mother, etc, etc), but I’ve already crossed the line of indecency. Time is irrevocable. In this, I recognize my transgression’s implication that I have fun, that to have anything less than The Most Fun, in tandem with the funeral I’m missing, would be a desecration. We are so rarely afforded time in our lives. To waste it is an insult. I must act. Now more than ever.

Waitress, clear my plate.

Outside, I soak up the town. A strip mall parking lot. The sun glints, wind rustles. Something is half off. Something is buy-one-get-one. Where is my adventure? The dollar store? Shoe Mania?

I enter the arcade. I play games. I waste quarters, dollars. I defeat the sea monster, the robot encampment. Hymnals ring throughout the chamber. I strut about the supermarket. I stalk the pharmacy. Somewhere, Nithya’s mother is paraded along pews, onlookers tethered to her inertia. I feel the weight of this fact on my heart and body, yet I rack up reward points via my CVS Club Card. I stand on the corner of two streets and don’t move. I consider a bench but don’t sit.

I inquire with a store manager about mountain bikes. I enter a scam contest offering two week cruises in the Caribbean, sponsored by a bogus home security outfit. Nithya must be inconsolable, which I both sense and cannot shake, while I see a movie with exorbitant CGI. I am at the center of the Earth, deep under rock. Outside in the parking lot, a family lopes across the asphalt. I balance on one leg. Nithya texts me that her own mother is really gone, is in the ground.

I have not only missed the services and burial, but I’m also not headed home for the reception, for the potpourri or baked ziti. I know too that I won’t return for the whole evening, at least until morning, that I have found this balance between choosing to do something and allowing my choices to happen to me.

I am decided, though I can’t say why. Because I entered a hollow of this earth where I feel safe and alone? No: in a gas station bathroom, I burst into tears. Only briefly. Then I giggle, kind of wildly, kind of forced. I shake my hips and smush my face. Someone knocks on the bathroom door, and I am afraid. I feel as if I’ve been discovered at the scene of the crime, that I am the body and the knife, and that it’s all so mundane. Ha! What am I doing? I’m not drunk or gambling, and I am not with another woman or engaged in any crime, I’m just quietly walking around this town, but I am here, doing this, this thing that cannot be good, which is nothing in particular.  “Just a minute.” I say. What will happen in a minute? Nothing. There can be no positive course of action. Every decision, even the most banal, is a travesty. I flush nothing. I have the feeling that I’ve woken up in this moment without ever having lived before, that my whole life has appeared suddenly before and around me in a bathroom stall, like a burst of light at the edge of a field. Like a sound.

After buying a donut, I hover in a half-wooded area behind the gas station, and Nithya says she has so much hurt that she cannot contain it. Her voice wobbles like a fawn. I place my head against the bark of a wet tree, smell the sap, and I tell her I want nothing more than to be there, to hold her, and this is true, or not at all, but still true, and I stand in a patch of pines and I do not move, though I can, and I tell Nithya I’ll have to spend the night here, though I needn’t, because the rental car, because the insurance claims, because the backlog, because whatever. I pull that gauze from my mouth and weep but there is only more gauze, my whole mouth and throat and body.

She understands.

In a motel, I watch Law and Order and sleep.

Early in the morning I return to Nithya in my rental car.

When we embrace on the lawn it’s 9:30AM, and I wait to feel terrible, to really feel it, but it doesn’t come. I anticipate Nithya’s despair at my actions, but she only holds me a little longer, because yesterday has not actually happened, is nothing, because there are no elements that can evidence its occurrence, because it is a fiction beneath the facts, (but what facts), a narrative that cannot be diffused across symmetries (but what symmetries), an unreachable conclusion on the other side of a graph (but what graph), and Nithya even if you suspect me (of what), you will say nothing, because you can point me out to yourself or to others at the risk of sounding absurd or indelicate, because there exists a set of numbers that cannot be pronounced or counted, that has no sums.

Nithya, I am impossible and you are a hick that grasps at me in a field.  Yes, I am getting closer to knowing what it means when I say I am in love.

5. If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. This is analogous to what is known as The Parallel Postulate.

I think I’ll get another drink from the lower deck bar – can I get you anything?

No, no, thanks – I’m alright. Had enough.

Good on you, darling! Don’t wanna get seasick I take it – er?

Ha, I’m Nithya. So nice to meet you, again. A pleasure. I love your bathing suit.

Likewise, I’m Erica, but don’t hesitate to ask again, Nithya. And that’s your, uh, your husband there?

Yes, the little booby.

Is he sleeping?

Ha! I’d say so. Honey? Honey? What a little boob.

It must be all this sun, it’s exhausting.

I know! And honestly, I mean, we’re pretty emotionally drained, too. My mother passed just a few weeks ago, and so this vacation is both exactly what we need right now and sort of too much to handle, you know all at the same time, Jesus, and oh wow wow – that was maybe, maybe too much? I’m sorry, er, Erica. You’re on vacation.

No, no, it’s – it’s okay. I’m so sorry to hear that, Nithya. Really. My husband’s father died just last year. Indescribable. So sorry.

Yeah, I’m, ha, I’m, you know I can’t say I’m really used to it, but all this sun is nothing to scoff at right? And the ocean? And this guy, this lug, my husband, the poor thing, little boob, he couldn’t make the funeral, he got into a car accident, if you can believe it, and the darn insurance wouldn’t cover it at first, the jerks, and he was stuck in some town in the sticks, with some real characters, and oh it was just a mess, we all felt so bad for him.

Oh lord, yeah.

But then, you know, we won this cruise, out of the blue, just like that, which is maybe bad timing, or not, and anyway it’s, I mean it’s so surreal to be here and all, with this weight and you know all this space and uh heaviness, but good too, really really good. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes nice things happen. Nice things can be painful. The ocean is really sobering.

Yeah. Do you swim?

Do I swim? Sure, I love it. Try to get – hey look at that.

What?

There, out there, you see?

Oh wow, yeah, yeah, that’s what? Like, another ship?

I think so.

So strange to see it here. There. So sudden. Where’d it come from?

I know, I’d gotten used to all this water and sky and emptiness, just floating out here alone. Or, not alone, ha what, there’s got to be a few thousand people on here, more maybe, but you know, like out in the ocean. That kind of alone, just this cruiseliner in the water in the dark, miles of nothingness all around us.

And now this new thing, out there, so close, yeah.

What’s it doing there? Is it, wait, is it real?

I feel like I’m looking at a whale or something, but it’s just people.

Is that fire?

No, that’s like fun or excitement, I think. Lights.

Where did it come from? Is it getting closer?

What do you think is happening over there?

Drinking? Gambling? Screwing? Same things we’re doing.

Yeah, but maybe it’s a different kind of ship.

Is there another kind of ship?

What do you mean, ‘is there another kind of ship’?

That’s it. Is there another kind of ship. Is there another kind of ship.

Wait, what, like what, like besides a cruiseliner?

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Just, is there another kind of ship. Or anything really. You know? Does that make sense? Is there another kind of ship, or anything. God, wait, hahaha, jesus, what’s wrong with me, Erica? Brain fart. I mean: is it going where we’re going? That ship, will it stay there like that in the water with us the whole time? I mean, where else can it be going now that it’s here? Where else can you go from this spot in the ocean once you’re here? Are you awake honey, look at the ship.

Illustration by Forsyth Harmon