I wait for the moments when 1+1=1, the glorious inequalities preserved forever in the formaldehyde of my mind. While she sleeps, I peel them, layer by layer, until the duvet is covered in dust. Pulsating moments quiver, but once ripped apart, they reveal nothing more than shrivelled seconds, naked and twitching before my eyes. One by one, they stop twitching until they crumble away into nothing. I brush the dust off the covers, and a stray hair off her sleeping face. She has not stirred.

She pretends to understand my obsession with numbers, but when she’s asleep, she can’t hide. I prop open her eyelids with my fingers and worry at the apprehension I find. I tell my wife I love her twenty times a day – but the beauty of the constancy of twenty in relation to the constancy of our love fails to touch her. She replies to questions with answers; I, with more questions. There are times I doubt our compatibility, but our common factors take precedence over our irrational coupling.

Our baby is a miracle in Base Ten: ten fingers, ten toes, two ears, two eyes, a nose. I mutter feverishly in the early hours of the morning when reason deserts me. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two ears, two eyes, a nose. I learn quickly that babies can’t be solved: only temporarily simplified until new factors are added. I try to divide my love between my wife and my daughter, but come up with another impossible equation: 1÷2=2. I puzzle this as I watch their sleeping bodies. Ten fingers. I calculate the probability of them waking up and add factor after factor. Ten toes. I stand for hours over her crib and try to formulate a reason for my child’s existence, but come up with yet another equation I cannot explain: 1+1=3. Two ears, two eyes, a nose.

In a moment of darkness, I lock myself in the study and try and solve the impossibilities simultaneously. 1+1=1, 1÷2=2, and 1+1=3. I lose track of time as desperate minutes shift around me, the black room streaked with grey as slowly, I disintegrate. The numbers swarm from the page and pull me limb from limb, and the room is suffocated by my screams. I lie in fragments on the floor, but drag myself together again and try to find the seams with my probing fingers. My wife appears in the door, a vision of uncomplicated beauty, and I brush the dust and blood from my hands. She wonders where I’ve been. I don’t reply. The light from behind the doorway makes her look like an angel, but I never notice these things anymore. Instead, I calculate the probability of her leaving me.

The next morning, she packs while I shave. My eyes find my own in the mirror, but see a haunted stranger with flickering irises. My eyes were blue once, but now the numbers flicker so fast that they’re black. The razor clatters, forgotten, as watch the equation resolve itself into three, beautiful sums:
1 = 1, 1 = 1, 1 = 1.

With a trembling finger, I write these sums on the mirror-mist, before picking up the razor to do what my mind has already done: eliminate all factors besides myself.