volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

He re-enters his room and slams its door as closed as closed
can be.
bang
Leaving gawping Roy with a narrow range of options.
The way he sees it he can: (a) forge ahead with his initial
plan and temporarily inhabit the B THRO M, thereby eliminating
whatever waste materials the machine that is his body has
manufactured, or (b) beat a hasty retreat back to his own room to
lock the slab of painted wood that is his own door, and suffer the
exotic pain of consequential retention of aforementioned waste
materials that will be his own pain, unique and without reference
to others.
In his confusion as to which of these two options ought best
be applied to his life at this exact moment, it occurs to him that
there might be a third.
And this would be: (c) follow the man in the Cowboys and
Indians towels and investigate further.
That this last option is the one he elects is remarkable, given
his history of challenged decision-making.
He walks slowly along the hall in the towels’ wake to stand
beneath a bug-filled globe suspended from three dusty chains.
His sweating dome is weakly illuminated by the globe’s single,
low-wattage bulb.
He stares at the scratched, patinized brass numbers on the
door and notes that they all have their little nails.
And the door’s number is this: 28.
And is this not as it should be, in accordance with the rules of
numbering? For does not 27 precede it, and does not 29 follow?
And is not 28 a perfect number, an integer for which the sum of
its proper divisors is equal to the number itself?
Roy’s number—23—is not a perfect number. It is a prime
number, a number with only two divisors, 1 and itself.
But these mathematical facts elude Roy who has, in fact, no
mathematical facts at his disposal.
What grabs Roy and gives him a shake isn’t the two fullynailed
brass numbers, but what’s attached to the door beneath
them.
Directly beneath the numbers, secured with two screws, are
0 ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY