When it came time for O to horrify her parents, she dated lassos, loops of rope who threw themselves around her opulent waist (how they knew where it was, even she had no idea), and pulled her tight, clenching her in the middle. But an O roped in the midriff becomes two smaller os—an 8. She knew that she wasn’t a number.
She was a realization, a shock, a unity.
Still, she loved being squeezed by the lassos because then at least she had some definition, a way to fit into someone …
“But you’re our little opal, complete in yourself!” the outraged senior Os objected. Objurgate her as they did, their daughter took every occasion to offend them, hugged in two so often by the lassos that she had little waist-dents in her sides. Each time she thought, Now someone can hold me, and we can sweetly osculate! But within a few hours she had plummed back into perfection.
“We’re earning a zero in parenting,” Daddy-O said to Mom.
Onward went their family operetta, the adult Os overreacting and the teen provoking, till late one night in the kitchen after Mom had retired to bed, Daddy-O said softly to his daughter, “When you came into this world, you were a lovely little ochre dot, you were the blink of an eye. You were just perfect …”
At that O was desolate.
Complete she might be, but she felt incomplete—for how could she ever conjoin? “I wish I were still a dot,” was all she said to Daddy-O, and then went up to bed.
There she fell into pessimism. Was anything worth doing?
For the rest of her senior year she lay, otiose, on an ottoman. Nightly the Os discussed the situation. For them, the state of an O was sublime. Os opened doors, created occasions and, best of all, offered opportunities! Why was their daughter so mopingly hopeless when the natural state of an O is optimism?
Young O fulfilled her obligations and graduated, rolling across the stage to get her diploma like everyone else, if not with aplomb, at least with a forward motion.
On she went to university. There she became a bio major, deciding to orbit solo for a while, achieving her orgasms as a unity unto herself.
One day after the lecture on ovipara (her favorite animals, the egg-layers), something brushed against her at the lab table. “I’m assigned to share this station, too,” whispered a lanky, elongated oval. “I just transferred in.”
She looked into his long, transparent center.
“What’s your name,” he asked her.
O frowned. She’d really been hoping to keep this lab table all to herself. “I’m O,” she said.
“A letter O,” he smiled as he began to set up his half of the station. “I do revere the capacities of letters.” He jiggled the oxygen source, “Hey, does this work?” She showed him how to unstick the lever. “Thanks. My name is Zero, since you didn’t ask.”
Something began to oscillate.
“A number,” she said. “In high school I tried to become a number.”
“What did you want to do that for?” 0 asked her. “O is the word of poets! O rapture, O divine.”
“O shit, O hell, O damn,” she reminded him.
During 0’s enthusiastic and O’s reluctant cooperation in the lab assignment, by chance he brushed against her again. It was the farthest thing from a lasso that she could imagine, but there was something … a valence exchange … like static from a balloon. He did give out a dreamy scent of stretched rubber.
“Zeros,” he said when they signed off their experiment, “consume a huge amount of energy. Want to go for an all-day breakfast?”
In the booth of the coffee shop, they had the first of many intense, overwhelming conversations.
“But the price of being a universe unto yourself is solitude,” O said, “isn’t it?”
“Even perfection needs company,” 0 said casually, tucking into the oatmeal he’d ordered as an appetizer before his omelet arrived.
She had met a positive thinker. Slowly she chewed her onion bagel.
“O is what everyone in every language says when they’re overwhelmed. You give them the syllable to say. You’re the world!” he said between bites.
She was amazed at his bottomless capacity.
“Me,” he continued, “I’m the perfect absence. I’m the last. And the first.” After he polished off the oatmeal and the omelet, he ordered the Old-Fashioned Pancakes, which he insisted she share.
A mandorla of optimism began to surround her.
“I’m dating a zero!” she texted Mom and Daddy-O. On the phone she told them, “He’s thrillingly airy inside and clear.”
“What joy!” they said. A zero was a zillion times better than a lasso.
0 had the lightest of touches, tender, every contact a whisper from his nothingness to her being. It was not a matter of fitting. It was a matter of melodious proximity. Like two balloons inflated to perfect shape, they float-bumped, kissing at every opportunity. And as they lightly collided under the covers in her dormitory room, they entered the oomph of omphalos—an uroborian circle where O came into her own.