The Man Made Only Of Straight Lines: A Rectilinear Fable
Gamel Livingstone sighed and pushed the plate aside.
"Shrimp doesn’t seem to agree with me anymore," he said. "Tails go round and round."
"Did it get worse since . . .?" Lyssa asked. She cleaned the corners of her lips with precise painter’s strokes. The waiter revealed no emotion as he withdrew the mostly virgin creole shrimp and brought the bill to Gamel’s side of the table.
"Yeah, it did," he replied wearily. "A few more weeks and I’ll be all right angles."
*
During the last month the evening rotation of waiters at the Cajun Bait had served Mr. Livingstone every Friday night, as he wined and dined a new date. They naturally assumed that tonight was no different. They were wrong.
Gamel smirked and said, "My treat, I guess."
"Ooh, what a privilege! How long has it been since my little bro paid for one of my meals?"
"I got you Frutti de Bosco gelato."
"That was like twelve years ago. And it was my birthday."
"A real scorcher of a day, is what it was," he said.
"That’s all right Gamy," Lyssa said, "I’ll get ya back."
During the bustle out of the congested diner he felt Lyssa’s gaze burn into his nape; the way she measured with her eyes the distance he kept from others, the mechanical rhythm of his bent gait, was almost palpable.
In the cold night air Gamel recalled the incendiary heat of Granada on that ice cream day, and they laughed about it.
Lyssa said, "Want a ride home?"
Her visible breath formed tiny constellations. Clouds of mist--spirals.
"No, that’s fine," he answered. "The doctors said I need to start exercising my muscles more. As the walls of my cell membranes align, the tangential pressure on my muscle fibers is increasing. So it’s walk walk walk from here on out."
She winced at his choice of words.
"But I move faster now," he said, patting her on the shoulder. The pat had replaced the hug years ago, when their parents had died in a car accident. "Less friction."
*
Gamel watched Jette’s mouth and waited his turn to tell the Alhambra story. With the onset of his new geometry his hearing hadn’t gotten worse but his sense of balance had. His outer ear offered less surface area for the dispersal of sound waves, but the effect was negligible--the inner ear was the problem: the three semi-circular canals were becoming less circular each day, composed of longer segments of straight line. He tried to blame his queasiness on that. But no, it was the company. Food was becoming more insipid--the fault of his palate--and his choices in companionship more bland by the day.
So Gamel did the only reasonable thing: he entertained himself by choosing the best type of mathematical curve with which to describe the person to whom was attached the flapping mouth.
Proud chin. Hmmmm. If he were able to roll the parabolas of her breasts together and set them vertex to vertex, he could draw out a cissoid. Cissoid of Diocles?
". . . and that’s when I decided I should be dating someone younger," her mouth said. "How about you?"
She raised her glass, poised in wait for his response.
He smiled and said, "Personally, I’m looking for someone who offers me the right configuration. Know what I mean?" He licked his lips. "A Conchoid of de Sluze," he said, emphasizing the last word.
"Sounds nasty," she said.
"It’s all relative. I’d also be happy to find a trisectrix of Maclaurin."
"Trisectrix? You mean, like a ménage-a-troi?"
"Not exactly," Gamel said. "Have I told you about my trip to Alhambra?"
She slurped her wine and shook her head.
*
Lyssa propped him up against his stiff rectangular pillow. Gamel’s eyelids descended like vertical shutters, leaving no arc for emotion at the edges. The excess light caused him to seek lower illumination and blink more often. As his tear ducts elongated and narrowed, he found he could cry only with the greatest difficulty. But there was an upside; energy extraction in his cells had become so efficient (the near-perfect alignment of ATP molecules made them easier to process), and conductivity in his synapses so improved, that he hardly needed sleep anymore.
Yet he spent more and more of his time in bed, too embarrassed to be anywhere else.
Gamel shook his head. "Men lust for curvy women all the time," he said. "I could do with a woman made entirely of curves."
Lyssa eased her grimace into a smile and nodded, sweeping her brush with angled teeth across the bed. She originally used it to break out her dog’s hair, but as Gamel shed more and more skin she’d found a new application for it.
"Maybe you’ll still find her," she said. "After all, the universe created you." She remembered the time, years ago, when she’d stepped out onto the porch to throw out the trash and had been startled by movement in the shadows. A full moon shone above. Thinking it was a cat--or worse, rats--she stomped on the creaky porch planks, attempting to startle the creature. And a sixteen-year old Gamel fell off the recliner he’d moved against the edge of the porch, his girlfriend tumbling down on top of him. He was quick to zip up and walk the blonde home.
She said, "You know, with all the craziness when you were young, I’d always figured you’d be married by now. Responsible family-figure, father of three. Weekend picnics and all."
He laughed. His lung capacity had increased, but the change to his windpipe and glottis caused the pitch to be higher.
"I ended up sounding like a woman instead," he said.
"Is that so bad? Or are you gender-biased?" She smiled.
"Of course I am," he said. "I’ve got enough troubles as is, without trying to redefine my own gender."
"You know . . ."
A pause. "Yeah, thanks," he said sarcastically. "I really didn’t want to think about it."
"Will you still be able to--?"
"I don’t think so. I mean, how could I? There’s curving involved. I can’t get excited and have it be, you know, completely perpendicular. Jeez! Talking to you about this feels weird."
"Are you sister-phobic now too?"
He harrumphed and turned onto his side, away from her. When he didn’t say anything after a few minutes, she leaned over.
"Hey, I was just playing."
"No worries. I was too," he said. "But there’s something new. My legs. Something’s wrong. I can’t move."
*
Gamel lost the ability to speak a week later, though he could still communicate via sound, short bursts of wordless gurgling. He became completely paralyzed on the outside, though there must be sufficient peristaltic movement on the inside for him to continue to digest food. Lyssa discovered in a journal he had left open before the onset of his "freeze" that he was convinced his evolution into straight lines was the result of their trip to Alhambra. The perfect geometric patterns, the infinities couched in symbols; there had to be a connection. Somehow, the math hidden in those designs had reprogrammed him, working through his body over the last twelve years. This was the end-phase of something larger, he believed. Intrigued, and trying to dismiss the pathos of his understandably self-elevating notion, she researched Al-Khwarizmi, the eighth century mathematician of the Persian Empire. To while away the afternoons, she would read to Gamel from Al-Khwarizmi’s masterpiece on algebra, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.
A few days later, she made the connection herself.
Gamel was so thin and light by now that she had built a wall of pillows around him on either side so he wouldn’t float away.
Lyssa was the only one who remained at his side. She said, "You’re becoming an expression of purity. A manifestation of God. I never believed in God. I mean, I don’t really even believe now. But . . ."
There was a soft rustle, and she saw he had become blade-thin.
"Are you going to cut through the heart of the world now?" she asked, her eyes misty.
Another sound followed, this time more like a vacuum seal popping open. Gamel was so thin and so straight she could only tell he was there at all by the curious way in which the light and shadows in the room were split by a line.
"The square of infinity is infinity," she proclaimed, trying to sound solemn.
But there followed an undignified thud; instead of becoming infinitely long, his nano-width self bumped against the wall. Then there was a puff and he disappeared altogether.
"A perfect straight line may only exist in the absence of all reality," she said.
Understanding at last twinkled in her eyes.
She changed the sheets on the bed and discovered some coins and a twenty in Gamel’s wallet on the night-stand. With brisk steps she headed out into the sunny afternoon for gelato.
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's fiction has appeared in Farrago's Wainscot, Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine and Atomjack Magazine. His reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, The Fix and Fruitless Recursion. His blog is Waiting For My Aineko.