Moly B

A Broad Understanding

It happened every now and again that in class, in one of those huge, gently sloping stadium seated classrooms I would see her turn around and smile. I think she was just being polite because she lived down the hall, and anyway in a school as large as West Massena Tech, you have to stick together.

My hallway was highly tribal in nature. Short of the esoteric handshakes of one of the fraternities on campus, the Betas, the Deltas, and to a lesser extent, the Gammas, I could always count on the guys in my hallway to greet me when I came in. Usually they would do so with their backs, but I could tell by the glazed-over eyes reflected in the shoddy glass panels that they were always happy to see me back from class. And such were my days in the Theoretical Physics Major wing of South Hall.

The school figured that we were big enough into theory that they would give us the same lounge furniture that the philosophy students got. That is, our theoretical lounge furniture. Someday I will start a small bonfire in the middle of our empty lounge and warm marshmallows and faces around it while the tribe recounts anecdotes of experiences they have had with angry bloggers. And then, then the school will see what happens when they deprive their children of lounge furniture. Also they will have s'mores because I will have enough for everyone who comes on in. Also it will help fight back the cold that creeps in the shoddy windows on those minus X centigrade days.

So far I have seen no support for my bonfire idea, least of all from Lee the RA, who thinks I'm a little on edge because of my 17 credit hour course load and my lack of a girlfriend. I keep telling him that to get the double minor in common and uncommon sense (read: business and math) I have to take more than the I-wanna-be-a-resident 12 credit hours. No one on my floor is as good at math, except maybe Moly.

Most girls with the name spell it with two ells. Moly is different in every splendid and magical way I can think of, and at that, is one of the most frighteningly strange people I've ever met. Having a conversation with Molybdenum Anne Staniunas is like being threatened by a rabid pee-wee football star weilding a chandelier on a standard. You almost want to laugh, but are worried that if you upset her, that something beautiful and priceless will shatter and hail you with the shards of glass and fury. Such is the wondrous torture I endure each time I greet her sparkling eyes. Mo isn't autistic. I think she was just raised by the most unlikely and unique and awful parents on the planet, one of whom is my Intermediate diffEQ professor, who likely forgets that he even has a daughter, let alone that I'm her friend from school and yes I can sit on that pile of old lab reports while you straighten the room, prof. Staniunas.

It should be enough to explain that daddy dearest is a professor at West Massena Tech, and that he forgets almost everything in the most comical manner possible, and that he named his firstborn child after an element of the periodic table. Molybdenum. Really. I can only guess the other children's names. "Constantin" "Tungsten" "Ytterbium." Maybe he'll stick to a column, and the next one is really named Chromium. Even stranger than Moly's name is how easily you could mistake it for a real name. Molly-Bee, Mo, Moly. They all sound like normal girls names...even pretty names.

I don't think its that I was infatuated with Mo per-se, more like I was fascinated with the idea of Mo. That she could even exist was evidence that human knowledge has not encapsulated even a shred of the possibilities of the perceivable universe. Each time I walked down the hall, past Lee the RA, past Lon&Steve with their faces on the computer screen, past the bathroom, slowly past Mo's single on the end and to the window at the end of our tribal wing of South Hall, I would stare out at the next building, and above that about a sliver of the stars beyond, and if I was lucky, the moon. Mo would usually stop whatever she was doing and walk up behind me and say something that passed for a greeting. Either her poor imitation of a contralto singing some air from G&S, or a series of popping noises followed by an "excuse me" or an eerie "Welcome back."

This was to be a "welcome back" night:
"You know, Mo. I live down the hall."
"Don't call me that. I hate it."

"Mo?"
"Yeah. It sounds inauspicious and undignified: very unladylike."

"You mean, exactly like you?"
"Bah, you would have me a stooge. Keep it up and see if I don't defenestrate you again!"
I should add that that was no idle threat. She had thrown me out of the window at least three times. Possibly more times that I don't remember for being drunk. Did I mention the shoddy workmanship on the windows made it ideal for a sturdily-built half-pint like Mo to hoist my lanky ass out of one? It does.
"Calm down, Mo. Anyway I always call you that. What's different about today?"
"Today is Chinese New Year's Day, but what you want to know is where the fenêtre is, which lucky for you is in front of your face, not that that really means its there. It won't be there until I throw you out, right?"

"Let's leave it where it is and talk instead about the 'stooge' reference."
"The only 'stooge' reference I know is that phony book you put in your last lab report."

"Hey, that's a classic. Natural Capitalism is deeply tied to..."
"...has nothing to do with a lab where all the setup is pre-supposed and fabricated for you."

"You know as well as I that we were required to have at least three references. And anyway yours was no better."
"Hey, The Book of Tea is a fine example of..."

"...a complete schism between your lab and your write-up. Who got the better grade?"
"Ugh. It was Eni's class. You know he hates my dad."

"Woah. Woah. I know that look like I know Schrödinger's cat. Calm down Mo...I mean, Moly."
"Am I really mad? I'm sorry."
This was one of the reasons I thought that Mo couldn't exist. Here was a girl who could be fickle and even at the same time, who could apologize before lashing out, and lash out before you knew you deserved it. I don't know where she got her eyes, either: deep blue with enough dark green around the edges to make them chrome when she smiled and ice when she frowned. Most people don't actually know themselves so well. Moly knew everything about herself. Even how to trick herself into doing what she wanted, which only God knows what that is.
"So how shall I address milady?" I had heard daddy slip that article in before.
"Ha ha. Want to be funny. You can keep calling me that."

"Ouf. No thank you. You were the one who said you sounded unladylike."
"Hey, that was your moniker that I rejected. I'm very ladylike and your addressing me should reflect that."

"I can see from your toast-print pyjama-bottoms that you're serious."
"Continue to mock the toast and you can call me 'miss Staniunas'"

"You know I can't pronounce your last name. That's a foul."
"Staniunas Staniunas Staniunas"

"Hey, cut it out. How about MolyB?"
A pause, then, "Satisfactory."

And this was only a typical night. Imagine where the strange nights took me...other than out the window. Once she asked me why I walked to the end of the hall to look out the window. I told her that she has answered her first question, and should move on to ask herself why she had asked it. She told me that it was the asking that was important, and not the answering and at that we sat against the walls looking at one another blankly, passively observing the universe of thought that had come into being between us: seeing nothing and everything all at once, two minds unified and dancing in space with the bodies left totally behind. It took us fifteen minutes to come down, at which point she realized she was on the phone with her uncle, and I realized that my ass was poor support for my body. I really felt like she had joined my thoughts that night, and fused my spine.

I think randomness was a mainstay of my visits, too. Sometimes Mo would be on the floor doing pushups with her neat brown hair knotted behind her wearing a green pullover that bore yellow frat letters that, I'm told, are not a real frat. Sometimes she would be in her kimono (read: flower-print terrycloth bathrobe) serving a tea ceremony to apparently no one. Sometimes she would be throwing darts, or sneaking up behind me and belching loud, or rearranging the room, or playing with legos, or painting a banner, or or or or or. If you think she had too much energy or was too upset with her life to live a routine, then let me tell you that I met her at least as many times just sitting there reading, or playing retro video games.

"Wait. I've seen you play this one before. Who is that?"
"That's Samus, the coolest girl ever. She's a sci-fi bounty hunter raised by ancient bird-people called the Chozo and..."

"I remember now. Why do you play this game, it has to be thirty years old?"
"People still play chess. How old is that? Anyway this is the best game ever."

"Woah. What is that?"
"That's a metroid. They drain the life force from beings and generally float about defying laws of thermodynamics. They're totally evil and monstrous and cool at the same time."

My Moly meetings were further apart than I've made them sound so far. In fact I had not the balls to approach her one tenth as many times as I felt the need. If she were any other girl, I would have no problem inviting her places or dropping her instant messages, but with Mo, there was an absolute rejection of small talk. Every word meant something, or if it didn't, she would quickly snap at you. I have even seen her attack professors the same way her father attacks students.

Prof. Staniunas would attack students for reasons most professors would ignore entirely. Not for cheating or sleeping or coming to class drunk or talking out of turn or anything. But so help you if you said "uh" in his presence he would bring the lesson to a grinding halt just to let you know that communication is the duty and honor of everyone and that you are polluting the corpus of good scientific thought with every indecisive utterance you yada yada yada. Prof. Staniunas would cringe visibly when he heard what he thought was poor speech. Once for a joke, a student giving a presentation in one of his stat classes put on an old campaign video of the forty third president's state of the union speech as a prelude to some project on polling results. The student had a friend count the number of visible spasms, and to my amazement I filled up almost an entire page with tick marks.

Don't get me wrong, the man is a loony, but he's my loony. He once asked me why I thought the population of rabbits in the simple growth model was evil.

"What? What's so wrong with the bunnies that they have to be wicked?"
"I don't understand, I said that they were..."

"Enormous."
"Yes. I said 'enormous,' and that's what I think the population would be. They're the size of a galaxy in a few centuries."

"That would be bad for us, but fundamentally, is a rabbit evil?"
"Well, no, it's not fundamentally anyth..."

"Right. So why are all of them 'enormous'?"
"I don't get what you mean."

"Then 'get' a dictionary. Enormity has nothing to do with size, and everything to do with malignance."

For the prof, teaching had little to do with being in a school. He wanted to teach you about everything in every way he could, within time limits. Our class gift should be a great closet full of clean suits for him, he seems to have two of his own...

Moly had a totally different approach to reproaching you. She was far more cunning and dry. Her stare could make Iceman feel chilly, but worse than that was the burn. Instead of visibly reacting, you had to feel a MolyB attack coming on. I became the best in the school at predicting them, and for that earned a small audience of supporters and clients. Usually it would happen like the dialogue above, where I got strung along in my misunderstanding, only to be dropped in a sloppy pen. After a Prof. attack, you come out learning something and after awhile felt better. MolyB would search deep in your soul and pull out something ugly and awful and permanent about you and show it to everyone. Like the Jack.

The Jack earned his moniker by his famed hold 'em play, taking three successive campus-wide tournaments with a hand of trip jacks. Three tourneys with three jacks each time. He always said he was the fourth jack. I thought he was just a jackass. Outside of the poker world, Jack found himself well at ease in the library trying to watch and read people while looking like he was reading a book.

"The Jack, I presume."
"Too obvious. You're tell is that big breath you take before addressing people you don't really want to."

"Got me. And let me add that your tell is that you're holding that book upside-down and the group of girls at the table over there asked me if I knew you and what your deal was, and I had to level with them: you're really a test subject that escaped from the bio lab and I'm your keeper come to put the electric collar back on."
"I guess you got good mileage out of the prep-breath. Are you done?"

"I'm not 'done,' I'm Harry."
"Nice to meet you, Harry. Say, did I clean you out three weeks ago at the dorm olympics poker tourney?"

"Huh? Must've been my Canadian clone. I don't play hold'em." I bluffed.
"My mistake. Now where was I? Oh yeah, I was about to rearrange your face." Definitely not a bluff. I had about as much body mass total as he did above the waist. When he wasn't gambling he was putting our hockey team in the league records for penalty minutes, usually for the more physical penalties. Charging was his current fave.

"Calm down, the Jack." That was Mo.
"Huh? Oh hi Molly. Harry and I were going over defensive formations."

"Really? Because I thought you were about to throw him around. I mean, look at him. His whole appearance just screams 'throw me'!"
He laughed, but I knew what was coming on. She had said 'throw me' with a tone specially altered to entice. She would give the pitch a small shift downward and pick up the emphasis on the last sounds and you would think that she was coming on to you, but her eyelids tilting down an eighth of an inch confirmed for me that she was closing in on the Jack.
"Gee. Thanks, Moly. I guess you would have enough experience throwing me around to be an expert?"
"C'mon, Harry...only those eight times." She had to be exaggerating. I wasn't drunk that much...was I?
"Uh. Did I miss something?"

"Staniunas." Mo.
"What?" The Jack.

"You said 'miss something' and I corrected you by supplying my surname."
"Staniunas, eh? Are you Lithuanian?"
So the Jack really did have a trick up his sleeve. Pocket jacks again probably. That he had hit home was an understatement, and I knew from Moly opening her eyes again slightly that even she had been surprised. I begrudged him ever the more for being able to pronounce that damn name on the first try. It took me one-hundred eighty-seven tries, and from then on I missed it nine out of ten times anyway. And that's not being obsessive. I like to count things. Dammit.
"That's where my name comes from, I..."
"I thought so. One of my cousins is from there. You look like her, I think."

"Well, gee. I'm only four generations removed from the fatherland, us Lits just all look alike, then."
"Eh...no...I mean, well let me show you what I mean."
The Jack pulled out his ace, I had seen this one before. It's the "you look like my cousin the supermodel" routine. Whether he even had a cousin is of little account. The fact is that this time, even if the Jack meant nothing of it, he was right. Her eyes chromed, and she even blushed.

"What is th...? Wow. She's really..."
"...Reminiscent of you. Well, that's how I see you anyway." A line like that deserves another. I felt like punching him in the jaw, but probably he wouldn't notice, so I vetoed the motion. I couldn't help but think that they had both planned this for my sake, a big joke. How could she fall for this?

"I'll be honest. Every day when you pass through the library on your way to class, I've been looking at you. At first I just noticed, but then I started to plan to sit here just so I could watch you pass by. I even forgot to turn my book right-side-up. I guess I should plan better."
"Slow down, Jack."

"What?"
"I mean, where are you supposed to go with a story like that? 'Oh, by the way, you're hot and I want you. Have a nice day.' How can you add to that?"

"I could tell you, but I have to go practice skating. Nothing heavy, and its free skate so you could join me if you really wanted to know, but I would completely understand if you..."
"...I have my own skates."
She turned to me, dazed. Then she blinked, and her eyes now normal, went on.
"Harry. Can you take this cookbook to my Dad? He'll be mad if he gets it late and..."
"Hmph? Oh. Of course"
"Thanks."
I was baffled.

I remained baffled until the next day in the shower where I felt confusion mixed with rage and approval. And that was only the few minutes of my shower time I spent masturbating. I felt bad for having seen the Jack in my thoughts, which was only a tiny ribbon of melancholy on top of a huge pile of putrid, pitiless hatred and darkness. A blemish on my soul, and for what? For some wacko girl who didn't like me. The logic of it made me feel worse still. And that moment in the shower was the high point of many of my days.

I don't know why the hell she had called it a cookbook. I couldn't even read the damn thing, but it looked nothing like a cookbook. More like a Korean bio-chem text. And how could Moly have gotten something that she needed to give to her Dad? Where could she have gotten it?

"Where did you get this?"
"I...Moly gave it to me to give to you. She had to go somewhere else and asked me to drop by."

"Oh. Having done that, you can go. Good-day."
"There was one more thing. She called it a cookbook. That looks nothing like a cookbook."

"Hmph? Well, I see you have elected the way of pain for this afternoon. I hope you don't have another class?"
"Er, no I don't ha..."

"Then let me explain about what a cookbook is. Sit." He spoke. I sat.
"I know what a..."

"Shh-p. Now. When you want to make a cake, you find a recipe, right?"
"Yes."

"Where do you go to find a recipe?"
"A cookbook, but..."

"No! No no no. Not a cookbook. You find recipes in a recipe book. Why anyone calls it a 'cookbook' is beyond me."
"...I..."

"Shh-p. Not while I'm explaining. Pay more attention in class and you'll do better. As I was saying, this is a cookbook I wrote a few years ago about the occurrence of the golden mean."
"Why is it a cookbook and not a textbook?"

"Because I disagree with Plato's Socrates. Cookery is deeply tied to the transfer of human knowledge. So that's what a cookbook is. Good-day." On the last 'is,' he sat down.

The only escape from my darkening mood was into logical confusion. Logical confusion is a wonderful puzzlement of the mind, where your brain almost works on its own wrapping statements around in loops and kneading it into dough. Illogical confusion is an autistic shock. You go over the same statement again and again. The same memory. Analyzing, scrutinizing. Your mind is either against you or away altogether. Both of these kinds of confusion will leave you without much to share with people. As I said, it was dialogues like these that took me from one kind to the other for awhile, and abysmal as it was, I felt an aesthetic joy from it.

Over the summer I worked in a pharmaceutical factory. Mostly I worked with the dental floss, which was on these spools that were larger than you would believe. I called them enormous, but only because I felt floss was a fundamentally malignant entity. There was a soothing quality to the unskilledness of it all. I didn't have to rethink every step of the process. The process was there, the humming and whooshing sounds took me to the seashore when I closed my eyes. There is no end to the floss, and no beginning. It is a huge spool of infinity, flying though the air, being evil and cool and defying thermodynamics. Some days I would play counting games with myself. At first it would be counting static factors. Timing the belt down to the second, then to the half second. Timing the number of units my line produced, making histograms of production in my head to try and decide if the company was using a skimming or penetrating strategy. Eventually I worked my way up to nonlinear factors, like prof. Staniunas' class that I had almost failed. Well I thought I had almost failed, anyway. He graded pretty hard, but when the letter came in midsummer I saw an A next to that class. I guess I had done something well on the final paper. But the nonlinear factors!

I mean the people. It took me about a month to warm up to the other line workers, with whom I thought I shared little. Here I was a middle class college kid earning book money for his college somewhere across the country, and they were all local blue-collars working to feed their kids, or to get fishing tackle, or to finance their cars, or what. I was amazed at how much we shared. Most of it was about the work, or at least started there. There was book-reading-man, who spoke to me about Tolkien and Caroll. There was chef-woman who told me how to make my rice taste better, and how to make a leaner cake. And there were encounters all over the place with no specific aim or result. Just human connections. We could realize, if we tried, that each of us was human behind the shitty paper masks we had to wear. And for that summer, I felt at peace. The tide had ebbed my darkness into a miserable rock. Small and indignant, it remained enough to be a caricature of itself.

Of course, when I actually saw Moly again, I felt...I didn't know what I felt. It was a feeling like I had been emptied of my organs and filled with sawdust, all except for my stomach, which remained only to make me feel slightly nauseous. The feeling fell over me quickly, and subsided to a rock at the pit of my stomach. 'Laugh at this' it said to me.

"Still in the same room?"
"Yeah. I actually asked for it. Kinda' crazy, huh?"
She must have had a bad summer. MolyB never, ever asked for a judgment call, and reserved 'huh' for imitation only.

"Moly...is something wrong?"
"M...wait, Harry..." I don't know where she was going with that sentence, but her moving around all the junk in her unpacked room to come closer to me said enough to make up for it. What came next took me by surprise, which made me feel a little more at ease. Such was Mo, the idea I loved.

"Eyes forward" she commanded.
"What are you talking about?"

"It's a simple request. I say 'eyes forward' and you stand still and try to neutralize your eye muscles and stay calm."
"The eyes you can have, but I'm afraid the calm is impossible."

"Good enough."

She walked in the half circle crease in front of me, looking at my eyes from different angles. What the hell was she doing this for? What did it mean? I couldn't look at her back to try and read a response. I felt compelled to play along until she granted me the right opportunity to look. She spoke at intervals in nonsense, or at least no language I could tell. It may even have been quiet English, I felt it hard to concentrate on anything but 'eyes forward.'

"Ok. Harry. Thanks."
"Can I look at you now?"

"Sure, just keep the x-ray vision in off mode. Did they put you back in this wing, too?"
"Yeah, I even got a promotion. From 105 to 212. What was all that about?"

"I broke up with the Jack."
"And this has anything to do with the pacing and the eyes because..."

"I mean, he broke up with me, I mean. I don't know where I am. Where I was it was like I was giving up so much of my self to be around him. I could feel the attraction. Sure I could feel it, but it wasn't me. It was like there was another person who looked like me in the mirror who wanted to be with the Jack and could take control of my body. It was totally strange. I knew the first day that I saw him that he was worthless, but then he took out that picture and I could see her. She was me and I could see her."

Moly walked up to me, and grabbed my shirt and continued the speech about three inches from my face.

"There was something about that picture that threw me away. From then on I wasn't in control. It was her. Sometimes I still see her, and do I really look like that, those empty eyes in that sculpted face? I knew it was all wrong, and I hated Jack. But she wanted him. That girl was in his pocket...My Dad helped me realize what had happened to me."
"What was that?" She let go the shirt and kept the distance.

"It was about the ratio of dimensions, the golden mean. My mind was gone because in that picture was the golden mean all over the place, repeating in on itself, and I was lost trying to see every last iteration. My mind was busy calculating it while I vanished. Who the girl actually was didn't matter, she had the magic proportion that..."
"Woah. 'Magic proportion'?"

"Yes, magic. Here, maybe I should demonstrate. This was the part my Dad showed me that brought me back. I'll look for the tape measure." With that, she dove into a pile of her belongings looking. I waited.

"So. Do you find me irresistible?" Her.
"Uh, what?"

"Attractive, pretty, gorgeous, presentable. Anything?"
"That's an awkward question to ask a guy..."

"So stop being a guy and be Harry in front of Molybdenum searching for her tape measure. Am I attractive?"
"Yes." I think my tone slipped very slightly into something dreamy. I don't think she noticed.

"Of course you do." Not at all a weird statement coming from Moly.
"So..."

"Ah-hah. Measuring tape. Here, you'll enjoy this"
"Uh...what am I supposed to measure with this?"

"Its a tool used by tailors to fit garments. You, not being a tailor, will still do a fine job measuring my bust, waist, and hip."
"Excuse me?!"

"Right, the tape goes around here...now pull it tight and read the number..."
"Thirty..."

"Sh. Remember the number. Don't say it out loud. Get as many decimals as you can."
"Ok."

"Good, now the same again here...good...and here."
"What do I do with these numbers."

The only thing keeping this from being totally hot was how baffling it was, which was about as baffling as a puff of air in the eyes if you could somehow prolong that feeling of discomfort.

"Well first lets see if we can simplify. Were the first and third numbers close?"
"Spot on down to the sixteenths, what does that mean?"

"Patience. That just means I'm symmetric, which I knew already. Take out your calculator and divide the second number by the first, and you'll get a ratio. If you prefer the percentage, that will do too."
"Lucky you I have my calculator handy."

"Right, as if you didn't take it everywhere."
"Heh. Alright, looks like point six one..."

"Eight zero three three..."
"How did you know that? I didn't tell you the numbers."

"No. But my Dad did. That's the golden mean. That's why you think I'm attractive. It's in Dad's one cookbook...I think the same one that I had that day...where did it go?"
"Hnuh? Oh. That's right, you gave it to me to give to him and I did. What was that all about?"

"The book was about the mean, and Dad used it to cure me of what had consumed my logical mind. See, Dad's a witch-doctor."
"A witch-doctor and college prof. Who knew?"

"Hey, I'm serious. He knows the magic of this ratio, and even though you don't know it, so do you."
"Come again?"

"Your brain has a built-in sense of up and down, of edges and shapes, and of ratios. You can tell what is half and what is perpendicular not by experience. You just know it. The golden mean is the same way, you know it deep down, and can recognize it, but its tied to other areas of your brain than your perceptions. The mean is tied to your creativity and judgment too."
"So you're saying that I judge things by this golden mean?"

"Women aren't things, Harry."
"I didn't mean that..."

"I know. I'm teasing. But you should know that there's more about me that has that ratio. When I saw that picture, I was hypnotized because all my judgment was spent trying to rectify that ratio, and because I didn't understand what it was, I allowed the logical puzzle to continue. I was in an infinite loop, so to speak."
"Wow. And daddy rebooted you?"

"Professor Staniunas to you. Yes, in a manner of speaking he did."
"What did he show you?"

"The same thing I'm about to show you. Its a new way of seeing the world, now turn around."

She put me to the tape, too. I didn't know that the trick would work on guys, but my mind was elsewhere, and I'm not sure where. I was amazed that she had turned out to have perfect proportion, but at the same time I almost expected it, it made sense. I understood what she meant, too, with the ratio being all about her. Her eye spacing, the shape of her head, the range of pitches of her voice, her ears and nose, the wavelength difference in the shades of her eyes, her lips...Where was there anything about her that was a ratio that wasn't that ratio? She was the golden child.

"See. See. I knew it."
"Knew what?"

"Its you, too. You're it, Harry."
"What am ..."

She didn't let me finish. Apparently we were playing two-lip tag and she had to let me know I was 'it' for about three minutes. I was happy beyond words, all the cloudiness fading. I understood this perfectly. It felt like she and I existed only at that point of contact, and extended on into everything from all directions.

She let go, and looked at me with chrome eyes. What could I do? She had proven mathematically that we were perfect for each other. We were both at peace in lives of former tumult. I looked at her for a long time, but finally allowed my curiosity a peek to the right where I thought I saw some motion.

There was Molybdenum Anne putting some books on a shelf, but I could still feel her warm waist in my arms, so what was she doing over there? She responded from the bookshelf.

"Ah-hah. See. You're it, and I told you you were it."
"I don't understand, how are you..." I cut myself off there.

"Could you roll my thick blanket and put it on the top shelf in the closet?"

As soon as I looked where she nodded, I saw me doing what she had asked. What the hell was all this? It was me and Mo all over the place. I felt twisted and grand inside, like being tickled with a thousand rubber mallets.

"Shhhhhh" she said softly from in front of me. "I knew this would happen."
"What is happening to us?"

"We are the golden pair. We have found a new way to live. A new perception of life itself, everywhere at once, forgoing time."
"Forgoing time? Wait, I understand now."

"I knew you would. The ratio is part of your understanding, too. I knew it was you inherently, adding your emotions and feelings like lego bricks. Now we exist all at once, our lives complete."

I felt ever since like I was thinking and doing and speaking my entire life in an instant that stretched forever. And I knew Moly was with me and could feel it too, no longer living as human beings, but as mathematical beauties. We were no longer single, but a singularity, a wonderful phenomenon.

Moly opened me up to a new universe. We had been assumed into heaven by math, forever in love, wrapped in an instant. Dead and alive. In the end I had won her heart just by being myself. And all it took was finding the right universe where she and I could exist as a couple.