The Red Hembre

I.

The hill stood at the edge of an alpaca farm he’d discovered by speeding his car off the edge of a hairpin curve he hadn’t noticed in time. A sharp drop edged the road, and his car crashed into a fence enclosing the llamas’ grazing pasture. His car was totaled. He owed the rancher for repairs. The tow truck took six hours to arrive and cost a small fortune. But the farm’s tranquility did not escaped his notice, nor the hill, a geologic oddity, unique in his experience. An ancient and solitary elm grew at the summit’s center, and it was beneath this tree that Tim began spending his weekends with his compass, his notebook, and his maths.

He once tied a rope around it and paced the hill. The tree was precisely 2π meters around. The hill’s base was another exact circle with a circumference of 300π. And he’d changed the radius and measured at several other heights and confirmed every time the feature’s geometric perfection. He found it profoundly inspiring.

The alpacas mostly clustered near the small pond a hundred or so meters north. The hill was a steep climb, and the animals apparently did not consider it worthwhile, grass being plentiful in the meadow. But a red hembre, thick and poofy, would often come to graze when Tim was there. She’d approach quietly and softly nibble his ear as he sat leaning against the elm, then lower her head and munch outward from the tree, sometimes with the sun and sometimes against it, tracing spiradoodle patterns in the grass. Tim would follow her and graph her course in his book, and go looking for God inside of π.

II.

“π is infinite,” he once lectured a class.

“π is a non-repeating decimal, calculated to more than 13 trillion digits. The limits of our technology alone prevent further computation.

“π contains within it every possible number combination, every possible string of digits. A numeric data code for everything that ever was or is or will be. Solid and liquid and gas. Animal and vegetable and mineral. Rock and paper and scissor.

“π is a god.

“π may very well be God.”

The trick was in squaring the circle; he was sure of it, Lindemann be damned—spheres and circles being, after all, the preferred geometries of the universe, the shape of attraction. Was it so inconceivable to think π important to more than geometry? To electro-magnetism and time and the quantum foam? The unification of the forces? 

His students were nonplussed, quizzical. His faculty advisers dubious and unnerved. It was one thing to speculate idly, outside of curricular bounds; wholly another to assert in a doctoral dissertation in Mathematics so speculative and metaphysical a thesis.

His work was rejected before its formal submission, and he was cut loose from the university. This allotted him a truly unexpected and unprecedented amount of free time. “To work on an acceptable dissertation,” they’d instructed. But his mind remained fixed upon π, and six months passed without progress, and his loans came due, and what work was there outside academia for a failed mathematician obsessed with the ratio of diameter to circumference? 

III.

There came a day. The hill was all yellow grass and the gold of autumn elm, and the earthy, mammalian smell of the llamas carried on the breeze. Tim’s failures littered the ground and mixed in with the leaves as he tore sheet after sheet from his journals. The drudge job he’d taken to get by would leave little time in future for math or farms. Worse, his red hombre had ceased eating in spirals and taken to grazing in random patches. The autumn rains had eroded the western quadrant of the hill, ruining its wonderful symmetry. And the inspiration that he’d found there in the summer had evaporated. 

The hembre rustled towards him as usual, but he pushed her away, and when she pressed back he shouted at her and threw grass and leaves, and finally kicked her in the rump and drove her down the hill. He knelt and cried, and finally called her back, but she wouldn’t come. 

In the stillness that followed, he heard a car speeding down the road. The engine ripped through the trees like a wet fart, RPMs easily topping in the red. Someone from the city, he reasoned, with more money than sense driving a ridiculous machine to its limits for the first time, unfamiliar with the local geography. He quickly estimated the speed of the vehicle, the width between its tires, the momentum it was building. He formulated in his mind’s eye the arcs it was capable of producing, realized it had no chance of making the hairpin, and thought the driver, almost certainly, was going to die. Tim hoped no passengers, accomplice fools, accompanied him. 

He could calculate the rest, like a formula. The car would come around the bend a couple miles north and give a burst of speed down the drag strip leading up to the farm. It would spy the curve easily enough, but the trees would obscure its sharpness and it would realize too late to keep itself on the road, sliding off the edge where awaited the not-so-tall but quite precipitous drop. The car would be airborne for little more than a second, then tip down and roll for thirty meters before stopping, a battered wreck of iron and fiber-plastic and bone and blood.

What his predictions would not account for—could not—were the llamas toward which his hembre moved dejectedly, clustered near the fence and drinking water within the field of the possible wreck, and how they would lie bleeding and bleating and broken. And in the space of time he awaited this vision’s collapse into reality, he abandoned any remaining illusions about God.

—Thanks to Geoff Schmidt for Car crash, Llama, and π.

Image by Holiday Feartree, Twitter/Instagram: @holidayfeartree