My new coworker and his wife are obsessed with a personality-diagnosing system called the Enneagram, which originated in fourth-century Alexandria and gained popularity in America during the 1970s. They are both from Boulder, the Bennington of the West, so their affinity for a numerically based wizardry system makes sense. It also makes sense if you’ve never heard of the Enneagram. Studies show that only 15 percent of people already making their own nut milk have heard of it. It’s too complicated to be confined to a place where you might have noticed it, like the back page of a magazine. It makes astrology look as precise as a fortune cookie, numerology as helpful as a mood ring. It makes the Myers-Briggs test look like someone ripped it off a cereal box.
One night after work, I go over to their apartment so they can figure out my personality number. This is a fantastically indulgent exercise, like a four-handed massage or group therapy in which only one person’s problems are addressed. Over the course of several hours, they ask me all sorts of questions, some personal, some philosophical, some mined from their many books on the subject. Scenarios presented involve hypothetical reactions to crowded parties, animal attacks, solitary confinement, and statements that describe me best. Information that should take years to impart takes minutes. In the end, I will fall somewhere on a scale between one to ten. Though “scale” is not quite accurate. Every personality number is an equal to the next, numerically labeled for ease and not hierarchy. We eat homemade chocolate cake and ice cream from a tub and compare my test results with the Enneagram chart. This is an open circle overlaid with hexagonal shapes. It bears more than a little resemblance to a devil’s pentagram.
After much deliberation, the two of them come to the conclusion that I am a nine. They smile because they, too, are nines. Though she is a nine with four tendencies. They look at each other like this is a point of contention in their marriage that has calcified into a private joke. I feel in on the joke, too.
At work the following week, my coworker and I have our first fight over something minor. I interrupt him in a meeting or he interrupts me. He takes credit for my idea or I take credit for his. I undermine his authority or he tramples over mine. The fact that I can’t remember tells you just how minor it was. Either way, we are both royally pissed. We had ordered Chinese takeout for lunch but we don’t eat it together even though it was my idea to split an order of scallion pancakes and now the pancakes are in his office and I can smell them from here.
“Your behavior,” he types from his office next to mine, “makes me think maybe you’re not a nine at all.”
In our private hippie language, this is the single most cutting thing he could say.
“Then what would you suggest I am?” I type back, loud enough for him to hear me clacking.
“A six.”
At his house, we had speculated about the people we knew in common. Our boss was a three. His boss was a four. My coworker’s wife was raised by two sevens. It’s a miracle she’s not in a mental hospital. As far as I know, we don’t know any sixes. I have not begun to defend myself when another text bubble appears:
“Hitler was a six.”
I mutter an expletive at my screen. Stupid system. Stupid new friends. Who needs them? I take my food out of the bag, grabbing the fortune cookie first. My whole life, I have eaten the fortune cookie first. This is because they’re not real dessert and Hitler probably ate his fortune cookies first. I tear open the plastic wrapping just as my coworker knocks on my door frame. Startled, I drop the cookie into a mug of cold coffee, which splatters onto my shirt. We frown together at the drowning cookie. He has come to give me my half of the pancakes, a peace offering.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” he says, and returns to his desk.
By the time I rescue the cookie, the fortune is blurred and so are the lucky numbers below it. All that’s legible, in red ink on the left-hand side, are the words:
You
someday
Lucky
I pin it to the wall until it’s dry. Then I stick it in some underutilized crevice of my wallet, where it will remain until I quit my job, leave town to find myself, and lose the wallet in a foreign city. Why, it could be there still.
Such a nine thing to imagine.