The Perfect Two

When I was about ten, we had these multicoloured copybooks for different school subjects, all with the school insignia on the front. Science was orange, social studies was blue, Spanish was red, English, yellow, and maths was green. Of all these, it was usually my maths copybook which would be the most disorderly, numbers jotted down everywhere in all kinds of pens and pencils - I had a penchant for losing them all the time (and I've kept it ever since). The pages, originally pristine white with subtle light-blue lines, would fall like city snow, showing the murky grayish-brown marks left by a thousand erasers gone astray. My green copybook was, in short, a complete mess.

That is why it was so strange when the perfect two decided to visit me there.

One day, in between many dishevelled calculations (fractions, I think), the teacher was writing some exercises on the board when it happened. Her numbers were not particularly beautiful -in fact, not even memorable enough for me to remember precisely. They were, however, legible and well-crafted. And compared to my own, they were like the roof of the sixteenth chapel is to crass graffiti on a restaurant napkin. Her numbers were purely functional, no more and no less, written with that purpose in mind and living for it to the bitter, eraserbound end.

This one number, however, was different. I would later come to believe its origin was only halfway in the reality of perfect logic, while its other feet were half set in alternate dimensions of universal inspiration. And there was no prelude either, no fanfare, no sudden bout of artistic inspiration: it just happened, quickly and destitute of thought, much like every other answer in my maths exercises. As I squiggled along my increasingly incorrect fractions, the two came out of nowhere. Before I knew it, it posed itself in my grotesque green copybook, a single shining pearl within murky oceans of geometrical water.

Here stood the most perfect number two ever made by man. The main strokes were marked with calm precision, not too hard on the paper and not too soft, regular all throughout with no blemishes of tardiness or hurry. Its fancy plumage was the upper curve, arousing in its voluptuousness, yet affectionate in its sweet caresses to the paper below. The line beneath curved up, ever so slightly, in perfect balance with its sister above.

Quickly, I tried to copy it several times. "This," I thought to myself, "will be my newly adopted shape for number two." And every time I would fail. For weeks I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every time I pulled out my green copybook, I would turn the pages, holding my breath in expectant hesitation, just to admire its perfect figure one more time. Again, I would try to copy it, and every time my efforts would be foiled. Meanwhile, the perfect two just giggled back as I tried to steal away its glory, safe in the knowledge that it was the only and last perfect number to set foot on any of my notebooks, my hands too clumsy to recreate it and my mind too aware to picture it. The two was spawned from nothing, as in direct opposition to the physical laws, ex nihilo nihil est, and the very knowledge of its existence negated every possibility of its rebirth.

That green copybook stayed with me for years after its pages had run out and the fractions inside became a childish joke. Every so often it would resurface from the debris of my bedroom clutter, and when it did, I was quick to check that one page of unsurpassed dual beauty. And one day, as the copybook finally found its way to stationary heaven, the perfect two disappeared from human sight forever.

I never showed it to anyone, of course. This knowledge alone was my own possession. Beauty was only true because it was imaginary, like the mold carved faithfully in my dirty maths book. Even trying to share this would have been futile, with more than one blank stare to mar my enthusiasm.

I still think about the perfect two. And it has also tried to come back. Many times it will make a coy entrance in an unsuspected place: a receipt, a foreign bank note, a date on a chalky blackboard. But whenever it happens I realise that these are only copies, an aftershock of the original, like a cranky stone making slow ripples on a pond. All I do is compare it to the mold and I know this new version, not matter how alluring, is ultimately inferior. I glanced at perfection once, and now the real perfect two lives outside my grasp. It will live telling me that because of itself it may never be seen again, and I'll know that the blessing of its beauty was also the beauty of its curse.