- watching the display on my childhood alarm clocks - first the bright green one, and then the red one - intently, only taking my eyes off it to blink. I had to wait until the sum of the digits on the display was exactly divisible by the number of digits, or the house would burn down and take everyone with it. 9:03, and all was well, likewise 22:57 - but 14:49, and I'd have to wait until 14:52 until I could look away again. Being disturbed meant the certainty of being consumed by fire, that same night.
- think of a number - normally less than 30 - and fix my eyes upon an unused plug socket. Keeping my eyes fixed on the socket, turn my head the number of times I'd just thought of - else a plug would appear, put there by an evil spirit, and disseminate disaster through the length of the cable.
- checking my face in the mirror and feeling surprise that the same one I always see is staring blankly back at me.
- on similar lines, waggling my fingers and being shocked because a hand! and an arm! are present, as though I've never before observed such wonder.
- playing a video game with the intensity and speed of someone possessed, because
- repeatedly praying for the health of Bluefish, even though my most carefully-considered view is that such appeals are never heard by any interventionist deity, let alone acted upon.
Gods were invented as a way of explaining the cyclical, and the frightening - the apparent dip and ascension of the sun thanks to the solar god, the changing of the seasons because the god of winter puts on her summer clothes; the lord of the clouds causing the sky to split apart in thunderstorm, the one who was born of fire burning up the earthly terrain in a message of foreboding for those living on it.
In most places, polytheism gave way to monotheism over the course of time, but the principle never changed - to bring predictive power and understanding where before there was none.
As there was no explanation before, it stands to reason that any explanation for the events which regulate nature is desirable: the displeasure or good temper of a god being as simple and convenient as any. Ah, pre-scientific people - how badly the modern era judges you, mocking your sacrifices and rituals!
Yet I'm as bad, coalescing repetitive tasks into a narrow, specific narrative, the completion of which will levitate Bluefish out of her hospital bed for good. Forget the painstaking deliberation of talented surgeons performing complicated strokes of dexterity. Not even the reaction of Bluefish's own prone body dictates what happens next - it all rests on my abilty to win on a 1990s video game, or type a whole sentence, correctly, with my eyes closed.
When I fail to type the sentence, and Bluefish is released from hospital in as good a state as anyone could reasonably expect, what then? As the desirable Amparo, constrained in Eco's novel, declared: I don't believe it, but it's true.
