The two two hundred words
Fiction
A friend of mine told me, quite sharply at the time, that I was obsessed by the number two hundred. I didn’t believe him. I still don’t, because just look at it. In letters it looks kind of cool and all that, but in numbers it just ugly. 200. A two and two zeroes. See? Even that looks awesome when spelled out—perhaps even more so—the two times the “two” is used creates a symmetry that would be lost if mere numbers were used. I tried to explain this to him both once and twice, but he wouldn’t listen.
“Understand this,” he told me and pointed his finger at me, “that you always—no matter what, when or even how—you always uses two hundred. Always!” I shook my head.
“I do not do that. I know what I’m doing, you know? I’m not some automaton that needs to blurt out the same number two hundred times. I’m not a lottery machine.” I walked a silly walk, just to prove my point. I could see in his face that he didn’t buy it. He muttered something, rose from the now pale green sofa and left. The door slammed shut.
* * * *
I sat there alone in the room. The light made me depressed as it allowed me to see everything around me, the apartment felt empty and cold. I pushed the light button that was placed on the wall, just above my head. It didn’t work so I pushed it again and the room went black. I was alone, and much worse than that: I had nothing to do anymore. “I must do something,” I said to myself. I took out my old typewriter from the cupboard and began hammering; I had to strike hard for the keys to go down.
Suddenly I heard a knock on my door. Then another and another and one more, the one after the other was harder and louder then the one before. All together it must have been a couple of hundred of them in rapid order. I went to the door and opened it. Outside stood the man from down below. He didn’t look happy.
“If you use that typewriter in the middle of the night again, “he roared, “I’ll break your arms. Two hundred words a minute is a pain in the ass when you try to sleep. Knock that shit off.”
6 August 2002, 23:59, a Tuesday.
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