Thinking about her now I feel a great nostalgia for her innocent almaniacal obsession with dates and numbers and coincidences, and I can see that it was nothing but the efflorescence of a good and hopeful nature. What she yearned for above all was a universal and perhaps even an inter-galactic certainty, and those little wonders of synchronicity she discerned were important to her because they were confirmations of coherence, and therefore causes for celebration. She was ready to crack a bottle of champagne every time something added up. After five years of marriage I suppose I must have been less responsive to this statistical optimism than I ought to have been, but I must confess that in the early days of our courtship I capitalized on it unscrupulously. I could get her to do anything for me provided that I justified it with a small sum. She would stay with me until whatever hour in the morning was equal to the addition of both her parents’ birthdays divided by how many veins I could count on her forearm. She would kiss me in as many places as I could multiply the seconds we’d known each other by the minutes we hadn’t. I always regretted that more of the means whereby men and women please one another were not referred to by numbers instead of names because I believed I could have totted her up into all of them. As it was I gave myself a sounder mathematical grounding in her company than most modern boys, with their reliance on pocket calculators, can ever hope to equal.

But on this occasion, with everything totalling 27 and Sharon looking full of amazement, I didn’t manage to be very graceful. ‘Read it to me then, if you really have to,’ is what I must have said, because read it to me she did; but I reckon I must have added some imprecations to my consent. I know I was most irritated with her.

This is what she read to me and if you wonder how I come to remember it so vividly I can at least tell you that it is not for want of trying to forget it.

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY, COSMIC MEMORY, OR REINCARNATION?