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.I loved seeing his lettering, so neat, practiced from thousands upon thousands of hours of problem sets no doubt, both in school and after school and in his spare time and in his work and in his after-work brainstorming, and now with me, his son, his student, his would-be research assistant.Lettering so uniform, letters so straight and consistent in size and well lined they looked like words in comic book dialogue bubbles.I loved how my father set down the letters, mindful of the spacing, not fitting one to each box, which would have looked too structured, too planned, too spread out, not aesthetically pleasing, those letters would have looked like prisoners, each in solitary confinement, but rather, using the horizontal lines as a guideline, the words, the letters, crossing through and over and on top of the lines, no explanation, no protective underlining or boxing or any other kind of markings indicating a setting-off or a differentiation between text and curve, between space and commentary on the space.The words were right in there, close to the curve, close to the y-axis, just floating in the plane along with the graph, this space the Platonic realm, where curves and equations and axes and ideas coexisted, ontological equals, a democracy of conceptual inhabitants, no one class privileged over any other, no mixing or subdividing of abstractions and concrete objects, no mixing whatsoever.The words an actual part of it, the whole space inside the borders, the whole space useful and usable and possible, the whole, unbroken space a place where anything could be written, anything could be thought, or solved, or puzzled over, anything could be connected, plotted, analyzed, fixed, converted, where anything could be equalized, divided, isolated, understood.My personal clock shows that I’ve been in here, more or less, for almost ten years.Nine years, nine months, and twenty-nine days, according to the subdermal biochronometric chip inserted just under the skin on my left wrist.That’s how much time has passed for me, for my body, in my head.A rough measure of how many breaths I have taken, how many times I’ve closed and opened my eyes, how many lunches I have had in here, how many memories I have formed.I guess that makes me thirty.Thirty-one-ish.Probably goes without saying, but time machine repair guys don’t get a lot of action.Had a one-night stand with something cute a couple of years ago.Not human exactly.Humanish.Close enough that she looked awesome with her shirt off.We hung out a few times, tried messing around but in the end I couldn’t quite figure out her anatomy, or perhaps it was the other way around.There were some awkward moments.I think she had a good time anyway.I did.She was a good kisser.I just hope that was her mouth.Or at least her mouth-analogue.In the end, it wasn’t going to work.I don’t think she had the brain chemistry for love.Or maybe that was me.I don’t even get much sexbot these days.When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex.And that sex would cost a dollar.And the only obstacle to getting sex would be making sure you had four quarters.Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world.A world with coin-operated sexbots.And it’s not really as great as you thought it would be.Partly because it doesn’t make you any less lonely in the perpetual dark of total vacuum and partly because, well, it’s gross.Your friends, your neighbors, your own family, they know what you are doing in the kiosk.They know because they do it themselves.Partly because sexbot technology hasn’t really improved much since the first-generation consoles.No one cares enough.For a dollar, it’s pretty hard to complain.Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week.The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle.Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box a set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list.Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like undersea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.It’s not comfortable in here.But it’s not not comfortable, either.It’s neutral, it’s the null point on the comfort–discomfort axis, the exact fulcrum, the precise coordinate located between the half infinity of positive comfort values to the right and the half infinity of negative values on the left.To live in here is to live at the origin, at zero, neither present nor absent, a denial of self- and creature-hood to an arbitrarily small epsilon–delta limit
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