Bright Shards of Someplace Else

Elegantly, in the Least Number of Steps

55 ElegantlY, in the Least Number of Steps Behind a windowed storefront full of live butterflies, Aaron sat at an old Formica table surrounded by numbers. It was night, and the only light in the whole declining strip mall (the sub shop next door was now a check-cashing outfit, the laundromat gutted and for rent) came from his desk lamp. In his mind, the numbers around him were hardly numbers. He had done a lot of thinking about numbers and what they meant, and he had come to the conclusion that no number was valid that did not correspond, exactly, to something in the world. One of his favorite stories about himself as a child, and one that he liked to tell to prove this point, was that up until early second grade he had been taught mathematics using objects such as beans or seeds or marbles. Once he hit second grade, his teacher had made him do a mathematical equation with simply a paper and pen. He had, in his teacher’s telling, thrown himself to the ground and demanded beans. Ultimately he had been forced to do the equation without the beans, which was of course easy for him. Still he had glued small beans all over his math homework as an act of protest. The numbers that surrounded him corresponded to nothing. There was a checkbook with checks torn out from the front, back, and middle, leaving only checks 2442, 2451, and 2485. There were receipts for unknown items. There was a torn box top with a large figure written on it followed by the letters I.O.U. The buttons on the solar calculator they set out for him were worn smooth and the numbers dis- Elegantly, in the Least Number of Steps 56 played only from their middles up. He held the calculator under the lamplight but still the numbers were no more than curves and lines, like the spine of an old hull revealed by shifting sand. He had brought his own calculator with him, as always, but he still hated when something didn’t work. A few times he accidentally tapped an equation into their calculator and smacked the edge of the table when he saw the unreadable result. This sent the butterflies aflutter. The light of his desk lamp was angled so the butterflies created huge flapping shadows like stingrays on the back wall whenever they moved. There were about fifty butterflies in the net-cage; their purpose was to bring in customers. As he leaned over to examine them his first day, the owner explained: “These are the ones that aren’t fit for flight. See the notch out of the viceroy’s wing? That’ll make it fly off sideways. See how that painted lady’s missing an antenna? That throws them out of whack, too. Castoffs always go in the cage.” Aaron had been working for Final Release for a few years now. The company sold butterfly releases, that is, releasing hundreds of butterflies at pivotal events such as weddings, ribbon-cuttings, funerals. Usually there was some kind of crisis Aaron had to deal with—this morning it had been a complaint about faulty release pods. He had seen one of these botched releases firsthand when the owner went to show him how well they worked. “I don’t get what all the complaints are about. These have been rigorously tested,” the owner said and pulled the ribbon. The little paper box flattened down and then opened, so the butterfly, a monarch, pinwheeled down to the warehouse floor in the wake of the scale crushed from its wings. Aaron had offered to redesign the pods, and for a few hours he was in his blissful element. He sat on the concrete floor with a monarch mount, a compass, a calculator, a piece of string, and four stacks of sturdy cardstock in various dimensions. He drew diagrams, he folded and unfolded paper, he slipped the dead monarch in his prototypes, he experimented with the opening mechanism, the amount of force Elegantly, in the Least Number of Steps 57 needed to pull the paper envelope apart without the string breaking or the paper ripping. Soon he had a new release-pod design, one that would be safe for the butterflies, cheap to produce, and able to be operated by the frailest hands of their clientele. The owner and...