STEVE SEINBERG - 3, 2, 1...

Steve Seinberg is a transplanted east coaster who has now spent half of his life in his beloved California. He fell in love with the fantastical upon receiving his first superhero comic at the tender age of 5, and he still hopes to gain full-blown super-powers one of these days. In the meantime, he works as a lawyer by day, and a writer and astrologer by night. He lives in Los Angeles, where he enjoys exercising, occasionally playing music, and talking to various animals...who sometimes talk back.

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3, 2, 1...
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​“It's not like this place is any better than all the other casinos on The Strip... Because it's really not. And it's not like I have better luck here...I mean, hell, you saw how I did in there just now...” 
     “So, what, then?”
     “You mean, why do I like it so much?”
     “Yes.”
     “Well... This is a little embarrassing. I know it's hokey and all, but...truth is, I'm just a big sucker for an Egyptian theme.”
     The Luxor sprawled about us in all directions, outward and upward, in all its vast, pyramidal glory...
     “I suppose I can see that. There is something of the exotic about it...if you don't look at it too closely.”
     “Yep.” My new acquaintance nodded, then waggled a finger at me. “So, I'm sorry – what did you say your name was again?”

     “Chris,” I said.
     “That's right. Chris. I'm Terry.”
     “I remember.” 
     “Anyway, thanks for the drink, Chris.” Terry and I clinked our glasses together, and we each took an inaugural sip. “It's a nice consolation prize, after I blew what was supposed to be my entire weekend wad in there. I swear, blackjack makes me its bitch every time I come to town! But I never learn. Although I never got beaten into the ground that fast before – that was brutal.”
     “I usually stick to Pai Gow Poker, myself. You can play for hours, and never win or lose much more than a few dollars.”
     “So why would you bother?”
     “Fair question.” I sipped from my drink again. “I suppose I figure that if I'm here in Las Vegas, I should gamble at least a little bit...but then I'm not very good at gambling. And also, until recently, I didn't exactly have bags of disposable cash to play around with, either.”
     “But you do now?”
     “A couple of bags, I suppose...”
     “Nice.” Terry crunched ice cubes, molars doing what they do best.
     “That's not why I wanted to play blackjack tonight, though,” I said.
     “It's not?”
     “No.”
     “Why, then?”
     “It has to do with numbers...”
     “You mean like, as in, odds?”
     “What? No–”
     “Wait...” Terry leaned toward me in conspiratorial fashion. “Do you mean you were trying to, like, count cards or something? Look...don't take this the wrong way, but...you sucked in there. Maybe as bad as I did. Seriously, if you were trying to cheat – well, I don't know what your day job is, but don't quit it.”
     “I wasn't trying to cheat. I didn't mean those kinds of numbers. Let me try again...” I paused, and I let my vision blur: a kaleidoscope of diffuse faces and starry points of light cascaded all around us. “You see all these people? Sitting at the bar; rushing around through the casino...?”
     “Yeah?”
     “Okay. Now, I know this will sound...well, far-fetched. But, here it is...” I took a deep breath, and then plowed straight in: “Above the heads of each and every person around us right now...I see numbers.”
     “Numbers?”
     “Yes.” Terry was going to need a trail of breadcrumbs here...
     “What...? Um...what kinds of numbers do you mean? Like...you see literal numbers? Just...floating there, like holograms or something?” Terry's eyes darted to the dual scars that cut their way from my left temple down to my left cheekbone, twin tracks etched in lurid, angry red. The permanent blood-spots in my left eye weren't going unnoticed, either.
     “That's almost exactly what I mean, yes. They're like glowing, digital readouts. Except, I know what you're thinking, and they're not just hallucinations. Not exactly. I've come to believe that there's actually a bit more to them than that.”
     “Let me get this straight... You're telling me that above the head of every single person in this casino...you see actual, literal numbers, just...floating there.”
     “Yes.”
     “Just the live people, or the ones on the TV's, too?”
     “Just the live ones.”
     “But you're saying it's not just here in this casino? If we went outside, you'd still see numbers over everybody's heads out there, too – yeah?”
     “Yes. I'd still see them. I didn't mean to give the impression that it was just in here. But in the interests of being fully transparent here...” I rubbed the scars lightly with my fingertips. “It wasn't always this way. I didn't always see the numbers...”
#
     Several months earlier, I'd been in an auto accident.
     I was in a full-blown coma for about a week after the crash, and then I was in something of a semi-conscious “walking haze” for the better part of a month after that. The doctors told me I'd sustained some head trauma; I also broke my collarbone, fractured several ribs, and suffered some internal bleeding.
     I wasn't driving – that seems to be everybody's first question – but I should have been. I was out on a date the night of the crash.
     C.J. – it was my ninth date with C.J.
     We'd gone out to dinner in my car, but the second glass of wine hit me much harder than I'd anticipated. I'd always been a bit of a light-weight where alcohol was concerned, but still, a measly second glass shouldn't have been incapacitating. When I stood up from the table, though, it was more like I was on the deck of a schooner at sea than on a cobbled plaza somewhere in Santa Monica. C.J. seemed to find this easy tipsiness rather charming, though, and offered to drive us home. I accepted, because why wouldn't I...?
     Witnesses – a baker's dozen, all told – agreed with sterling unanimity that it was the other driver who'd been at fault.
     He was this wealthy producer-type person with a super-fast car and not-especially-fast reflexes. He apparently realized – while cruising the innermost lane – that he was about to miss his exit, and so he tried for it. In his super-fast car, he tried for it, cutting laterally, and he sideswiped us while he was still accelerating, and took us down the ramp with him. Our two cars apparently flipped and tumbled like dice on a craps table...
     And when all the kinetic energy had finally played itself out, this high-rolling producer had crawled from his fine Italian wreckage with hardly a scratch on him...while meanwhile, I was already firmly ensconced in my nice, warm coma.
     And C.J. was dead.
#
     “Oh, my God!”
     “People do say that when I tell them the story.” I worked at my drink, little liquid nibbles.
     “I'm so sorry – that's so fucking tragic!”
     “Thank you.”
     “So what happened with the guy? The one who caused the accident?”
     “Settlement. I was still laid up in the hospital... More drugs than food in me... He made an offer; it seemed reasonable at the time...”
     “Oh – that's why you said you suddenly have cash now.”
     “Exactly. I sometimes wonder if I was too quick to accept the offer, but...I don't know, would a big legal battle really have helped anyone? Even if I won such a thing, C.J. would still be just as dead. And I'd still have been facing all that physical rehab, and all that – well, the hospital psychiatrist kept referring to it as 'catastrophic bereavement.'”
     “What's that mean?” All the ice had melted in Terry's drink.
     “As near as I can tell, it's what happens when someone you're halfway in love with is suddenly killed at an indecently young age, and you're left to wander around in a fog of survivor's guilt.”
     “Jeezus. And you said you suffered head trauma...?”
     “You're wondering if that's a synonym for 'brain damage,' aren't you?”
     “Aw, come on, I didn't say that.”
     “You didn't really need to say it, Terry. But don't worry, I'm not offended. It's another fair question, especially when I'm asking you to believe that I see little glowing numbers floating above everybody's heads.”
     “So the numbers...”
     “They weren't there when I first woke up. It was more like...well, a few weeks after I surfaced from the coma, I started finally getting out of bed and hobbling around the hospital hallways. And whenever I did, I started to notice that everybody seemed to have these indistinct glowing patches above their heads, just sort of shimmering there. There were no numbers yet – just this vague kind of luminescence.”
     “And everybody had it?”
     “Yes. But I was ready to write it off as after-effects of the head-trauma, combined with that unholy fluorescent lighting that they like to use in hospitals. But then later on, when I first lurched my way over to a window and looked out into the natural light, I saw that everyone down on the sidewalks and in the parking lots had the same kind of glow over their heads, too. I didn't tell the neurologist or the psychiatrist, though, because to be honest, it didn't seem like that big a deal, and I really just wanted to go home. I was feeling better otherwise, and I didn't really want to be around other people at that point.”
     “You wanted to wallow.”
     “Possibly.”
     “Hey, I'm not judging. I can be a total wallower myself, I get it. So what, then? You eventually got sprung...”
     “I did. The settlement was large enough that I just quit my job. I never really liked it anyway, and I didn't see the point of slogging my way there and back every day if it wasn't really a necessity any longer.”
     “I heard that. I'd quit my fucking job in a heartbeat if I could... What did you do?”
     “I was a writer.”
     “Really? That's so cool!”
     “It wasn't creative writing. I was the communications officer for a regional branch of your basic giant, faceless corporate entity... I wrote press releases, company handbook updates, internal memos. There was nothing glamorous about it – it was basically the obnoxious parts of a writing job, and none of the rewarding parts.”
     “So you quit...and then the glowing patches over everybody's heads started turning into numbers?”
     My own drink was turning watery now, too... “More or less...”
#
     Once I was out of the hospital, and trying to get assimilated back into life in general, the glowing patches I'd been seeing over people's heads began to coalesce into...something. I was positive that I wasn't having problems with my vision itself, because aside from the odd phantom glowing patches, my eyes were functioning as they always had – even back before the “freeway dust-up,” as one of the doctors had phrased it.
     But I could tell that the glowing patches were beginning to tighten up...to resolve themselves into something.
     About a week and a half after my release from the hospital, I woke up one morning to find that the patches had transformed into numbers.
     I didn't get to see the metamorphosis as it occurred. One night I went to bed after a full day of seeing those indistinct glowing swatches over everyone's heads...and the next day, they had been completely replaced by very deliberate-looking digits.
     Numbers.
     I was utterly fascinated by this new development, even though a very large part of my consciousness was also entertaining the possibility that my brain might very well have been literally broken in that freeway cataclysm. I held any such conclusions at bay for the moment, though, figuring I could always check myself into a psych ward or some neurosurgeon's private game preserve if necessary, once the novelty of the numbers thing had worn off. For a while, though, I was too intrigued by this new phenomenon...
     The numbers were green. Actually, the indistinct glow had also been green, right from the start – the kind of color and quality often found with LCD technology, like on the faces of clock radios, or the readouts on microwave ovens – and the numbers that replaced those indistinct glowing patches over everybody's heads retained that same electric emerald hue.
     The numbers were comprised of varying amounts of digits. It differed from person to person, but the most common were four- and five-digit numbers. Sometimes I'd also see three-digit numbers, and once in a while I'd spot a two-digit number. Single-digit occurrences were extremely rare – I'd catch one every once in a very great while, usually in some crowd of considerable volume, or maybe tied to someone who went whizzing by me in traffic, there and then gone.
     One digit seemed to be the floor: I never saw anyone who simply had no number at all. Similarly, five digits seemed to be the ceiling, in that I never saw anyone with six digits or greater.
     The numbers even came complete with commas. If they had more than three digits, a helpful comma would appear, so I could easily sort them into thousands, or tens of thousands, at a glance. There were no decimal points, though, and apparently no fractions figured into whatever it was that the numbers represented. It was whole numbers all the way.
     And I soon recognized yet another prevailing trend: for the most part, the numbers seemed to be largest in the cases of children and adolescents, and they generally seemed to decrease as their bearers' ages increased.
     Infants, toddlers, and pre-pubescent types were the groups most likely to sport the five-digit numbers, and this by a landslide.     Teenagers and 20-somethings might still boast figures that large, but on the whole, their numbers might be just as likely to start dipping toward four-digit “readouts.”  In a small subset of cases here, the digits could even be as few as three. Instances of less digits than that for people in those age groups wasn't completely out of the question, but examples of them were only slightly more abundant than, say, sasquatches or hobbits.
     The numbers started to dwindle noticeably as their bearers' ages climbed on into the 30's and 40's, and they really started to nosedive once even late middle-age was fading in the rearview mirror.
     Older people generally carried two digits, and that age bracket also housed virtually every one of the single-digit readouts I'd managed to spot.
     But as intriguing as all these observations were to me...I still had yet to grasp what the numbers might actually mean...
#
     “So but what do the numbers actually mean?”
     I pointed an index finger at Terry as if to say Yes, that is exactly the right question, then paused before answering so I could signal the bartender to bring another round. After receiving a thumbs-up, I turned back to Terry.
     “It took me a while to figure that out. And it wasn't easy, either – and but for a bit of blind chance, I might still be banging my head against that question.”
     “What kind of blind chance?”
     “Well, I had this flash of understanding one afternoon when I was at the gym.”
     “Oh, yeah. They say that if you distract your conscious mind enough with the strain of working out, then your subconscious can finally pipe up with some answers. Or something like that.”
     “Um, true... Except in my case, it was something I happened to see at the gym that gave me the clue I needed – it wasn't any help from my subconscious.”
     “Oh.” Terry frowned, then reached for the new cocktail just arriving even before the bartender had the chance to let go of it.
     “I was back at my public gym at this point – I was still doing rehab at the hospital, but I wanted to return to my regular gym, as well. I suppose I wanted to feel less like somebody's broken toy, or what have you. I wasn't exactly killing myself with exertion, but it made me feel more normal to be sweating it out among the general public.”
     “Sure, I could see that.”
     “I was on this crunch-machine. You know, for your abdominals. You sit on it just like you're sitting in a regular chair, only it has this padded crossbar here across your chest...”
     “Like doing sit-ups, but sitting down instead of lying on your back.”
     “Exactly.”
     “Okay.” Terry crunched up a few more ice cubes. I'd forgotten to get my own drink straight up this time, so as to avoid the creeping dilution effect of melting ice.
     “So, you need to understand the layout of this particular gym. The machine I was sitting on faces a large glass wall that separates that section of the gym from an open-air courtyard outside.”
     “Gotcha.”
     “Excellent. And in the center of the courtyard, they have a large hot tub. Along the far wall, they have these little steam rooms that can accommodate maybe two or three people apiece. Each steam room has a glass door.”
     “Alright...” Terry concentrated visibly.
     “So as I was finishing a set on the abdominals machine, this gentleman came out into the courtyard from the men's locker room. He was about 30 years old, and he looked like a lifeguard in a movie made by people who never actually go to the beach: he had this sort of frosted-looking blond hair, he had a fair amount of muscle mass with very little body fat, his skin looked orange from those fake tan products that people use, and he seemed to be completely shaved below the eyebrows.”
     “I think that guy goes to my gym, too. More than one of him, actually...”
     “Well, he sort of posed there for a minute – preening, basically. And then once he realized he didn't have an audience out there, he went into the steam room that was directly across the courtyard from where I was sitting. Then the glass door fogged up behind him, and I forgot about him.”
     “I'm with you...” Terry wasn't exactly with me.
     “And the gentleman's number, by the way, was a nice, round seventeen thousand, three hundred. Very easy to remember.”
     Terry sketched 17,300 on the countertop in front of us with a swizzle stick. “Got it.”
     “So I did another set of my abdominals exercise, and then a woman walked out into the courtyard, wearing a one-piece bathing suit. She was a bit frumpy, maybe around 50 or 55 – what I believe most people would describe as plain-looking. Not a stereotypical bombshell, anyway, and even if she had been a young bikini-model type, if I'd had to guess, I would have figured that the lifeguard gentleman was...ah...other-directed.”
     “He probably wouldn't be into...”
     “Exactly. But either way, the woman climbed up into the hot tub... And my eyes were suddenly drawn to the steam room door by these quick gestures that were happening on the other side of it. I realized that the lifeguard person was using his hand to quickly and repeatedly wipe away part of the glass, so that he could see more clearly out into the courtyard.”
     “The guy was checking out the 50-year old woman in the hot tub?”
     “That seemed to be the case. But while I was assuming he'd take one look at this sort of not-visibly-extraordinary, middle-aged woman, and then retreat back into the steam, he actually stayed there at the glass, like he was glued to it. Meanwhile, the woman was sunk up to her neck in the hot tub now, leaning back with her eyes closed.”
     Terry surrendered: “I have no idea where you're going with this.”
     “That's alright – I'm almost there.”
     “Oh. Okay, great.”
     “So anyway, as the woman sat there, soaking and oblivious, the lifeguard held his position at the glass. He kept on staring at her in this very fixated sort of way. Every few seconds, he wiped the steam from the glass again, so that his field of vision would stay clear... And then after this had gone on for a few minutes, I realized that the wiping gestures weren't the only movements that I was seeing from the steam room.”
     “What do you mean?”
     “About a foot or two below the patch of glass that the lifeguard gentleman kept wiping clean, there was this other...ah...motion...that was catching my eye, even through the steam.”
     “I'm not sure I...”
     “It was the gentleman's other hand – the one he wasn't using to clear away the glass. It was moving in what I'll characterize as a sort of...jerking motion...?”
     Eureka. “No! You mean...the guy was...”
     “Yes. He was engaging in an act of self-pleasure. Right there in public, with only a thin layer of steam to conceal his efforts.”
     “Oh, lordy!”
     “Yes.”
     “Wow!”
     “Yes.”
     “I'm...I'm still...” Terry was processing.
     “I understand. But now here's the important part...” I took a pull from my tall, cool drink. “I was almost done with my abdominals work at that point, and I decided that I didn't need to see the results of his exertions possibly manifesting there on the steam room door, if you take my meaning...”
     “Ick! No joke!”
     “So I was untangling myself from the machine, when the lifeguard gentleman suddenly burst out of the steam room, and blazed his way straight back into the locker room. He didn't even spare a glance at the woman in the hot tub.”
     “So he'd...completed his mission.”
     “Yes. It seems like that has to be what happened, doesn't it?”
     “From what you just described, that's what I'd have to guess, yeah.”
     “And here's the most critical part of all this: before he disappeared back inside the building, I got another good look at the number floating above his head.”
     “Oh, right – the numbers! So...?”
     “His number had changed. It was now seventeen thousand, two hundred, ninety-nine.”
     Terry sat back and regarded me gravely. “It changed? So...it dropped by one?”
     “Yes. And that's when it hit me. I suddenly knew what the numbers meant.”
     “What?”
     “The numbers are a running counter – they show how many instances of sexual climax a person has left in this lifetime.”
     Terry's mouth hung open.
     I worked my drink in silence as the casino pulsed and throbbed all around us...
#
     Even though most of me knew that this really was what the numbers signified, my conscious mind insisted on proof of some kind.
     But how could I go about proving something like that?
     My first idea was to hire a prostitute to masturbate herself to climax in front of me.
     But then it occurred to me that if I did engage the services of a lady of the evening, there was a chance she might try to simply pocket my cash and then fake the orgasm. These women do work hard, after all, and they probably need as much of their energy as they can conserve during any given shift. And sadly enough, my detection skills in this particular area were almost surely not refined enough to be proof against any such subterfuge...
     Next, I briefly entertained the idea of dialing up a male escort for the same purpose instead, as there are certain aspects to sexual release that men simply can't fake (i.e., what we might call “output,” or “byproduct,” if you will...). But on the heels of that notion, I was struck with a much cheaper alternative: I could just go to an adult bookstore, and loiter near the video rooms that I'd heard such establishments maintain. I was betting I could log a healthy dose of research just idling nearby.
     And how deeply correct my suppositions turned out to be...
     I took myself off to a likely spot bearing the subtle name of “The Rump-Us Room.” I set myself up in front of a rack of magazines called Cavalcade of Flesh, as this particular rack was adjacent to the doorway of the shop's “theater.”
     I then proceeded to pass a riveting two hours, watching the furtive clientele slipping in and out of the curtained aperture, while the numbers above their heads ticked down and down and down, sluicing off quantity by ones and twos, and sometimes even threes. It was rare that a patron went into the viewing area and didn't come out with a reduced “readout.”
     My biggest challenge was in keeping track of which gentleman had gone in bearing what number. I cursed myself for not having had the forethought to bring along a notepad and pen with which to record my findings, but I was still able to amass what felt like a metric ton of data.
     When I tottered out of the place after midnight, my head was spinning...but I'd managed to convince myself beyond any shadow of any doubt that I was right about the numbers...
#
     “Nobody cared that you were just hanging around outside the video rooms and staring at everyone?”
     “I think they were fairly tunnel-visioned on their objectives.”
     “Oh. Yeah, that's probably right...”
     I swirled my drink around softly in a counter-clockwise direction, watching the lights glint off of its pale meniscus. “And once I understood what the numbers were actually telling me...the flood of knowledge was just incredible. It was like having a bizarre sort of super-power all of a sudden.”
     “What do you mean?” Terry was staring at my drink now, too, as if half-mesmerized.
     “Well, I was suddenly privy to this vast info-stream about human sexuality that I'd never really been aware of before. I mean, characters in fiction often seem to pick up all sorts of input about other people's sexual feelings and activities around them, don't they? And I've even known a couple of people in real life who could actually do that...but I'd always been absolutely clueless about sexual dynamics, myself. I couldn't tell you who was attracted to whom, who was having sex versus who wasn't...I was basically what you'd call insensate to all of that, like a block of wood. But suddenly, being able to read changes in the numbers, I could see all kinds of amazing things.”
     “Like what?”
     “Like what...” My cool drink swirled and swirled...
#
     After my release from the hospital, I'd embarked on a phase of taking overnight trips out of town to no place in particular, and even to booking hotel rooms right in Los Angeles, just so I wouldn't have to stay at home by myself.
     Staying in these LA hotels, or especially in the big Vegas casinos along The Strip, made me feel like I was participating in civilization in this sort of vague but still semi-valid way, and all without my having to put any real energy into it. I was in a sociable sort of mode, but without the headaches inherent in actually socializing.
     During one of these forays, I booked myself into a hotel in Barstow, right on the very edge of the desert. A small collection of gas stations, fast food restaurants, and a tumble of outlet stores clustered in one direction, with the highway beyond them cutting across the Mojave like Orion's belt.
     In the other direction, there was nothing but sand and rocks and a sort of colorless and scrubby undergrowth, clusters of which seemed destined to eventually come unmoored, break loose, and deaden into tumbleweeds.  I imagined them somersaulting slowly forever across the plains in the endless, baking heat...
     The room I was assigned shared a door with the next room over, presumably to allow families booking both rooms to open this door and create a sort of suite of interconnected chambers. While I was first arriving and letting myself into my new lodgings, a young couple emerged into the hallway from that room next door, looking especially happy and affectionate. They nodded a greeting at me, and then wandered off, most likely in search of food, as it was dinnertime just then.
     I had fine opportunity to take in the numbers glowing gently above their heads before they departed, and I noted that the man had the easily recallable total of 8,383 nestled atop his skull, while the woman's gorgeous mane of chestnut brown hair was adorned with the sum of 10,109.
     I'd begun turning some of the numbers into equations as a mnemonic device so I could better remember them over time if I had opportunity to see the same person more than once, so in this instance, I immediately and somewhat automatically transmogrified the woman's number into “10 = 1 + 0 + 9.”  The man's “eighty-three, eighty-three” was easy enough to remember on its own...
     I went into my room, transferred my few token articles of clothing into the dresser drawers, then changed into my bathing suit and went down to the outdoor swimming pool.
     Swimming was great exercise for me at this point, low-impact as it was, and friendly toward my still tender injuries. The water in the pool was surprisingly chilly, given the intense heat swirling around it and into it all day long, but it still felt good to me. As I swam slow laps, I could almost sense my blood being oxygenated, turning a vibrant red in my imagination.
     When I'd pause at one wall or the other to catch my breath, I could hear ravens croaking nearby, but I wasn't able to locate any of them by sight. I had to assume they were lost in the sunset shadows of the few trees, or perched atop the hotel itself, beyond where the edges of the roof lopped off my sight-lines.
     After 45 minutes or so of these aquatic exertions, I treated myself to a dip in the hot tub, then went back to my room. After a long shower, I flopped on the bed, bracing myself for a flood of unbidden grief and self-directed recriminations about C.J. and our accident...when the noises from that next room over began to come clamoring through the dividing wall and the connecting door.
     The young couple I'd seen in the hallway earlier had clearly returned before me, and were enjoying each other in thoroughly carnal fashion. They sounded like cave-people, although I didn't begrudge them anything. Instead, I turned on the TV, and I let some film or other that I didn't care about wash over me like the water in the swimming pool, and I drifted in the torrent of imagery until sleep overtook me...
     And as it so happened, when I went down to the lobby the next morning to help myself to the continental breakfast toward which part of the room fee was allocated, that same young couple was just finishing up their own morning meal. The man was rising from their table as I arrived, blocking my view of the woman for a moment. His new tally seemed to leap out at me of its own accord: 8,381. Two less than his total of the night before... He nodded at me, and then went to make himself another waffle.
     As I poured myself a cup of coffee, I happened to glance over at his companion, who was at that moment staring wistfully through the windows at that empty wasteland of desert outside, already shimmering with heat-haze.
     Her number remained exactly as it had been when I'd first encountered the couple in the hallway the evening prior.
     10 = 1 + 0 + 9.
     10,109.
     She'd been making enough noise after my swim to leave her throat raw this morning, but her number hadn't changed at all.
     She went on staring out at the Mojave...
     #
     “She faked it?”
     “She faked it. Maybe twice, if she'd been trying to make her partner believe she was matching him.”
     “Well, you know, some women do have trouble...uh...achieving climax. They say some never do.”
     “They do say that. But if she's having trouble now, she'll clearly figure things out – she does have more than ten thousand instances of them stacked up and waiting for her.”
     “That's assuming that your take on these numbers you're seeing is actually on the money.”
     “True.”
     “But you're convinced it is.”
     “I am.”
     Terry fretted and scowled. “Well, okay...so you think you caught some youngster faking an orgasm. What other things did you think you were seeing? I mean, now that you had this theory about what the numbers were telling you.”
     I raised an eyebrow at Terry...
#
     I was at a party.
     My friends had been great about trying to be supportive of me. After what they must have agreed was a respectful waiting period, several of them began inviting me out to various events all at once. I cherry-picked a couple of these affairs to attend, although more to avoid giving an impression of ingratitude than because I actually felt like going out and being among people.
     This particular gathering had to do with an album release by the band that a friend of an acquaintance of a friend was in...or something like that. The details eluded me, and I was okay with that.
     I spent my first hour there fielding small talk, and looking idly at the numbers dancing quietly above everyone's heads. I could tell that people were pointedly not looking at my fresh angry scars, and that they were all trying not to show how aware they were of my recent tragedy.
     The second hour was more about me counting down minutes until I could feel okay about leaving. I had about 22 more to go when I noticed something interesting by the snack table...
     The friend of the acquaintance of the friend, whose band had just released the album, had brought his wife to the party. I'd noticed her because she seemed too elegant for her loud and loudly-dressed husband.
     I watched her now, watching him, a glass of champagne going flat in her left hand, wedding ring glinting in the light from the ceiling fixture.
     Nearby, the husband, sweat starting to slick his dark hair a bit as it fell across his forehead, downed his beer, discarded the bottle next to a giant plate of chocolate chip cookies that looked like a pile of melting Dali clocks, and headed down the hallway toward one of the bathrooms.
     In the five-count or so that followed, I had time to note his number – 8,378 – and to recall that the bedroom where everyone had been stowing their coats was also down that same hallway...and then the girlfriend of one of the other band members broke off her own conversation by saying a trifle too loudly that she needed to use the restroom, and then she, too, went swaying down that same hallway (10,626 glowing serenely above her auburn hair as she went)...
     And about 15 minutes later, they returned, aware enough to stagger their approach, but only by about half a minute.
     Him, now at 8,377...and then 30 seconds later, her at 10,625.
     The auburn-haired woman took up a position by her boyfriend, who seemed oblivious to what had just happened down the hall, possibly right on top of his denim jacket...but the elegant wife looked over at her own too loud, too loudly-dressed husband in a way that told me she didn't need to see any glowing green numbers over anyone's heads to know what had just transpired in the makeshift coatroom...
#
     “Wow! Ice-cold.”
     “I thought so, as well. It struck me as almost a bit...sacrilegious, even.”
     “How do you mean?”
     “Well, even before this all began with the numbers, I'd often thought that each instance of sexual climax is – in some sense – like a miniature version of the Big Bang itself.”
     “Say what!”
     “Symbolically. Yes, absolutely. Don't laugh! In a very real sense, these are all explosions of pure energy, aren't they? Energy erupting into being from out of nothingness... There should be something sacred in that.” I shook my head. “But just casually fornicating on a pile of somebody else's cold-weather jackets, while the two significant others are a room and a half away...? I don't know, that's all just so...tawdry? Sleazy? Graceless?”
     “Jeez! If you want people to treat their orgasms like little religious experiences, you're in for one colossal fucking string of disappointments in your life.” Terry chuckled, then downed more alcohol. “You have more of these stories?”
     “Dozens. I was actively collecting them for several months, and recording them in a journal.”
     “So? Let's hear a few more! You got anything with, like, clergy, or...?”
     “I believe it might be more productive for me to tell you about what came next.”
     “Oh. Okay.” Terry blinked at me. “What came next?”
     I took a deep breath, and then held it as casino sounds jangled... Then I exhaled, and I answered: “I came across someone whose number was zero...”
#
     The old man was Italian. I heard him before I saw him.
     I was heading for the little bookstore in my neighborhood where I sometimes like to stand and browse, when I was obliged to vacate the sidewalk proper so that a local man and his dog could pass. The dog was a bull mastiff, large enough to need turn signals and brake lights, and the local man (7,621) was using a full-fledged rope for a leash, the kind you could use for mooring a boat to a dock. I dodged into the doorway of a handy coffee shop, and as the dog lumbered by, I heard the stream of Italian issue forth from deeper in the shop behind me.
     I half-turned, and my first quick thought was that the old man inside the coffee place looked just like Marvel Comics impresario Stan Lee: swept-back hair, glasses, and a blazer that might have been fashioned somehow from a television test pattern.
     My second thought, as the old man and his coffee partner edged past me and began ambling slowly down the street, was that the old man's number...was zero.
     0.
     His friend wasn't quite as old as he was, and the friend, too, had a number, but aside from it not being 0, I didn't really retain anything else about it (or about the friend, for that matter).
     I only had eyes for the old man, as it were – very anxious eyes. I'd never really had the opportunity before to study someone whose number was 0.
     It occurred to me that I was afraid for his life. I was instantly petrified that at any moment, a bank safe would fall from the upper stories of an adjacent building and crush him into paste, or a meteor would come hurtling out of the sky, making a deadly, cosmic beeline right for him.
     He and his friend continued onward, one slow, oblivious step after another, while perspiration began to gush from my every pore. I wanted to protect the old man, but I had no clue where the lethal threat might be coming from, or what form it might take. Every traffic sound made me flinch; every gust of wind made me whimper. I was white-knuckling, but without anything there to even grab onto...
     I followed the old man home. Like some demented stalker – a self-appointed, would-be savior/stalker – I dogged his slow, torturous steps.
     I loitered across the street when he pulled up at a bank of mailboxes outside one of the local apartment buildings. He said goodbye to his friend, who hobbled onward, and I stayed fixed on the old man. I watched him as he retrieved his mail with the ginger, arthritic care of the aged, and I watched him close and re-lock the mailbox...
     Careful! I screamed at him in silent anguish, as if one wrong turn of the key might somehow detonate the mailbox like a block of plastic explosives.
     He shuffled on inside the building, and I collapsed onto somebody's front doorstep, wiping sweat from my face with both hands.
     It dawned on me that I was assuming that simply because the old man's “counter” read 0, I had jumped to the unreasonable conclusion that this must mean he'd be dealt some sudden and merciless death-blow at any second. But that wasn't necessarily true, I decided, pushing myself up, and orienting myself back toward the bookstore, forcing myself to walk away, even though my body was incredibly reluctant to comply.
     People can exist for very long periods of time without experiencing sexual climax, I reminded myself. For all I knew, certain people might have their last release, and – especially if they'd reached a certain venerable age – they might then endure for months or even years without enjoying any more of them, before finally expiring. Just because they'd had what would turn out, in the final analysis, to have been their very last sexual climax in this lifetime, that didn't mean that the instant its last spasms had subsided, their hearts would explode.
     And yet deep in my bones, my primordial, instinctive self was nevertheless convinced that something along exactly such lines was in store for the old man I'd just encountered...
     I started following him. It began that very day: I never made it all the way back to the bookstore. I tried, but I lacked the requisite willpower.
     Instead, I darted into the same coffee place where I'd first seen the old man, I got myself the largest, most caffeinated drink they offered, and I returned to that same front porch across the street from his building. I had no idea what I was waiting for, or what I could possibly do if something actually did happen: I had no emergency training, medical or otherwise, my car was parked blocks away, and I wasn't even sure my cell-phone was properly charged in case I needed to call 911. Still, I lingered.
     A couple of people arrived, and went into the building whose steps I was sitting on. They looked at me, just barely, and none of them asked me what I was doing there. At one point, a young man came out wearing a bicycle helmet but not at all in possession of a bicycle. He didn't even spare me a glance – he just walked to the end of the block and then disappeared around the corner, still on foot, and still wearing his helmet (9,846 floating just above it).
     A helmet, I thought. The old man should wear a helmet!
     After it got dark, I decided that like most of the elderly people I'd known in my time, the old man was most likely of the early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise tribe. I stood up, stretched, rubbed at some tenacious aches in my collarbone and ribcage, and then made my way home.
     I slept fitfully, poorly, got up before dawn like the fisherfolk do, and I was back at my post across the street from the old man's building with a fully charged phone and a thermos of black, extra-strength coffee, while the birds were still struggling to rise.
     It took about an hour before the old man emerged, and my heart fairly leaped when I saw him. The world had likewise begun awakening by then, so I was no longer the only one out on the streets. The old man didn't seem like a hardened, veteran criminal type or a retired espionage professional, so, new to the surveillance game though I was, I still felt pretty sure that he didn't spot me, drifting along there in his slipstream like some deranged box-kite.
     He went into the same coffee place where I'd first seen him, got himself a cappuccino, and then sat at one of the tables outside, sipping it for a while until his same friend from the day before appeared and joined him. They passed a few hours there, and then they ambled two blocks over to the Italian deli where I sometimes bought wine and cheese for myself when I wanted to feel cosmopolitan. They ate mortadella on thick slabs of bread for lunch, they each had a glass of Valpolicella, and then they adjourned back to the coffee place for another cappuccino. I hovered in a distant but definite orbit, watching and fretting...
     Over the next few days, I established that this was the old man's pattern. It varied slightly from one day to the next: sometimes a different friend would join them...sometimes they had cappicola instead of mortadella...sometimes they had a second glass of wine.
     Nothing dire befell the old man. There were no falling pianos, no ravenous tigers freshly escaped from the zoo, no speeding getaway cars trailing police cruisers and hailstorms of stray bullets...
     And finally, after ten days or so of this routine, the dread I was feeling on behalf of the old man began to subside. I began to desensitize at last, and to admit to myself that a tally of 0 floating above someone's head was not the same thing as the Grim Reaper's scythe actually starting into its remorseless killing stroke.
     I then took a better look at a newcomer to the old man's posse, a dapper and dark-complected gentleman with a fancy handkerchief folded into the breast pocket of his silk shirt: his number was 52.
     I decided that while a 0 might not necessarily require a cuing of the closing credits for its owner right that very instant, on the other hand, any number greater than 0 must surely be testifying that its possessor would definitely live to enjoy another day...or in the dapper gentleman's case, maybe, say, as many as 52 such days, if not more (depending on how he parceled out his moments of pleasure).
     This realization cheered me tremendously. Suddenly, the numbers felt less like ominous portents foretelling somebody's impending doom, and more like proof of blazing life-force ready to burst into joyous effervescence all around me.
     I stood up, went home, and got my first good night's sleep in over a week.
#
     “So what happened to the old man?”
     “I don't know.”
     “You don't know?”
     “No.”
     Terry chewed at this, and found it unpalatable. “After all that – how in fuck do you not know?”
     “I stopped trailing him all over the neighborhood on a daily basis. I saw him around a few more times after that, but like I said, I'd started to relax about him...and then I became completely distracted by something else.”
     “Wait a minute.” Terry tapped at one temple with a fingertip. “I don't think I like where this is going.” I sensed a rewinding of mental footage, and then its playback... “You said before that you wanted to play blackjack tonight because of something to do with the numbers. You meant my number, didn't you. What is it, Chris?” Terry's face turned grave. “What's my number?”
     “You know, I interfered once before, Terry. I don't mean with the old man – that was just me watching him, really. I didn't actually do anything where he was concerned, and I never really tried to, either.”
     “Chris...”
     “But this other time...I actually did interfere. It was with somebody else whose number was 0 – only this time, it was somebody who wasn't old at all...”
#
     The slender young man sported several striking affectations that seemed at least partially designed to render him less frail-looking.  A few vivid red streaks coursed through his otherwise coal-black hair...a necklace made from the teeth of some animal hung nestled against his throat on a leather cord...his lower lip had been run through by a piercing the size of a hood ornament...
     I only noticed these details after a few minutes of concentrated study, though.
     What caught and held my attention first and foremost was the deceptively serene-looking “0” that glowed gently above his crimson-streaked head like a vertical green halo.
     He couldn't have been more than 21 or 22, I estimated, so the 0 alarmed me in a way that even surpassed what I'd felt with the old Italian man in my neighborhood. The old man, at least, had already lived a relatively long life by all appearances, and even if he had no more instances of sexual gratification lining his path up ahead, it was no leap to presume that he might have enjoyed literally thousands of them by the time I'd stumbled across him.
     This young man, though – this boy, really – was decades younger than the old man. He appeared to be in fine health, and by all rights he should have had a number clocking in at four digits, or perhaps even five.
     I could think of only one reason why that might not be the case: he was fated to die before he could get around to having another climax. Given his youth and apparent good health, I couldn't help but take this to mean that his time was bearing down on him like a freight train...
     I started following him. It wasn't even a conscious decision on my part – it was more like I was a hapless bit of flotsam, dragged along in his wake.
     I felt spellbound by him: I had to know more. That same panic-attack feeling I'd had in connection with the old man returned with a vengeance, and I felt all hot and sticky, anxious, and abraded by the very air around me.
     It wasn't long until he noticed me. My time spent trailing the old man had hardly qualified me as a legitimate stealth operative, and I must have stood out now like I was underlined, bolded, and italicized. I was weaving through the crowd with rather ill-disguised purpose, all flushed and sweaty, and lurching a bit to and fro as my still-healing collarbone and ribcage began to ache and protest.
     He picked up his pace, and my doing the same so as to keep up with him didn't help matters any. At every intersection where we were forced to pause by uncooperative crossing lights, I must have looked like a drooling urban cannibal closing in for the kill, or an enterprising slave-trader with one eye on that next commission.
     Finally, at one such junction, he apparently couldn't take my breathless scrutiny any longer. Before the lights had the opportunity to finish their timed sequence and change as per usual, he gave me one last frightened glance, then darted out into the crosswalk...
     And at exactly the same moment, a cab tried to come squealing around that same corner so as to beat that imminent change in lights...
     Several people fainted on the spot as the grim incident unfolded, and a few more vomited into the street. I felt like doing a bit of both, myself – not so much from the horrific sensory stimuli emanating forth from the collision, but because I understood that it was my own interference in the grand scheme of things that had caused the young man's untimely demise.
#
     “Have you ever heard of the observer effect, Terry? It says that the very act of observing something...changes the thing that's being observed. Do you understand? I killed him. It was my observation of him that chased him out into that traffic. If not for me...he might still be alive.”
     “Hey, it was broad daylight, with about a million people around. If he really thought you were some dangerous weirdo, he could have just asked somebody for help. No one told him to run out into traffic.”
     “No, you didn't see him: he was like a baby fawn. I should have just left him alone. I could see how disturbed I was making him, but I couldn't just leave him alone...”
     “But so what if you had left him alone? You said his number was 0 – so even if you had totally backed off, he still would have gotten himself dead in pretty short order one way or another, right?”
     “We'll never know now, will we?”
     “No. We won't.” Terry's eyes squeezed shut, then reopened with an almost audible click. “So...what about me?”
     “What about you.”
     “Quit stalling. Just tell me: what's my number? It's another 0, isn't it...”
     I looked at Terry. I shook my head. “No.”
     “No?”
     “No.” I took a deep breath... “It's 1.”
     “1?”
     “That's right.”
     Terry grappled with this revelation. “It's 1.”
     “Yes. You have one...you know...”
     “...left.”
     “Yes.”
     About a thousand different responses flitted across Terry's face. “1...”
     “Yes.” I fell into a ludicrous parody of damage control. “But maybe you could try to use this knowledge to your advantage, and, and...extend your lifespan somehow.”
     “What? What the hell are you talking about?”
     “Well, what if you were to remain celibate? And if you forego even self-gratification...”
     Terry sneered. “Sure, I might last longer, but could you even call that living?”
     I nodded. “I admit, it might be a somewhat...bland existence.”
     Terry was shell-shocked. “1...” 
     “I'm sorry.”
     “Wait!” Eyes wide with sudden grasping hope... “So people's numbers go down, right? Like, all the time. People have sex, or whatever, and they hit climax, and then their numbers drop, right?”
     “Yes.”
     “But have you ever seen anyone's number go up?”
     “What do you mean?”
     Terry groped at the air. “What if someone...I don't know... What if someone, like, did a good deed or something? Like, something noble. Couldn't The Powers That Be reward them with more...you know...'Happy Moments'...?”
     “'Happy Moments?' Um...”
     “Or! Or what if someone was suppressing their true self, but then they make a really big change, like on a lifestyle kind of scale – like, they suddenly come out of the closet as gay, or they stop fighting their gender issues and finally go the transsexual route. Couldn't that maybe open up all kinds of new possibilities for Happy Moments up ahead that weren't there before?”
     I tried to play along. “These are certainly some very innovative ideas...”
     “But...?”
     I sighed. “But I've never seen anyone's number increase. Not anywhere, ever. True, I haven't exactly been looking for it, but...”
     “But you probably would've noticed something like that by now.”
     “I would think so...” And oh, the crestfallen expression that followed that pronouncement... I tried to bright-side: “But are you someone who could express some truer sexual self? Are you a closeted homosexual or a repressed transgendered person?”
     Terry remained crestfallen. “No.”
     “Oh.” 
     Terry stared at me for a very long time. The bartender came over, looked at us, mixed us up a pair of fresh drinks, and then went away, all without speaking. The Luxor hummed and buzzed, a neon dream of ancient Egypt... Finally, Terry spoke again: “And what about you?”
     “What about me?”
     “What's your number?”
     “Mine?”
     “Yeah. How many Happy Moments do you still get to have?”
     I frowned at my fresh drink. “I have no idea.”
     “Um...you're saying what now?”
     “I have no idea.”
     “What do you mean?”
     “I mean that if I look up, above myself...there's no number. There's nothing there. And if I look in a mirror at my reflection, there's nothing there, either. If I look at other people in a mirror, their reflections always have backwards numbers over their heads... But over my own head? Over my own reflection's head?  There's just nothing... From my point of view, of the seven billion or so human beings currently walking the Earth, I seem to be the only one who doesn't have a number. And I have no idea what that means. And I have no clue how many 'Happy Moments' I have left in this life.”
     “Huh.” Terry chewed on that disclosure. “So you might have 10,000 of them still ahead of you, or you might already be riding out the clock at 0, yourself.”
     “That's right.”
     “So in a way, you're in the same exact place as me.”
     “How do you figure?”
     “I figure that either way, we both have to try like hell to make the next one really, really count.”
     I picked up that fresh, newly delivered drink, and I swirled it a bit, considering...and then I nodded.
     I raised my glass toward Terry. “Drink to that with me?”
     Terry picked up the other glass and inclined it toward me. “To every little Big Bang with our names on them.” 
     We clinked our glasses together, and we drank...
 
###