Love is a Number

For as long as he could remember, Joe Borowski had been fascinated by numbers and dead people and, specifically, numbers of dead people. He started reading about serial killers like Jack the Ripper when he was eight years old, disasters like the Titanic and the Hindenburg when he was nine, and psychopathic warmongers like Genghis Kahn and Adolph Hitler when he was ten. 

Whereas his friends talked about batting averages and three-point-shooting percentages, he talked about the percentage of soldiers in the Army of the Northern Potomac who’d died at Gettysburg and the average number of Union soldiers killed per day in the three-day Battle of the Wilderness. In high school, he astounded his AP U.S. History teacher by reciting the number of soldiers killed in each battle of the Revolutionary War, and in AP Biology he wrote a paper comparing worldwide death rates due to smallpox in the twenty years before and the twenty years after the invention of the smallpox vaccine. In college, his honors thesis in statistics was a comparison of gun-related deaths between U.S. states in the 1980s, with a focus on how state gun laws affected the totals. 

After he graduated, he worked as a statistician for the Department of Agriculture, tracking crop yields and livestock losses. He was engaged, briefly, to a woman named Mimi, a server at a diner he frequented. When discussing a possible honeymoon in Europe, he horrified her, or perhaps only bored her, with his deep knowledge of the various plagues that had beset the continent since the early 1300s. Soon thereafter, she flew off to Europe by herself.

After twenty-five years in government, he retired, moved out of D.C. to a college town in the Shenandoah Valley, and opened a consulting service, which attracted clients as wide-ranging as a county school board, a hospital, and a regional pizza chain. He had other interests besides statistics—volcanoes, exotic fish, and the original Star Trek—and on dates, conceived and arranged via an optimistically named app called Love Everytime, he played these up. But, thus far, none had resulted in a second date.

He had a crush on the woman who cut his hair. Her name was Amber Herald, and she was seven years younger than his 52 years. In the time he’d known her, she’d had a revolving door of boyfriends, all of whom failed to live up to her prohibition against certain drugs (marijuana: “fine”; meth: “no fucking way”) and mooching. She’d been married twice, once in her teens, and once, she said, when she “should have known better.” Her forearms were inked with the Zodiac signs of her two children. She threw a mean curveball in a co-ed fastpitch softball league and had ziplined in six states. Despite her profession, she didn’t do anything fancy with her hair; she’d even allowed gray to mingle with its oakbark brown. She was happy to discuss anything with him, including the fatality rates of U.S. commercial airline flights over the past half century.

What he found especially attractive about Amber was the serious and tender way she treated his hair. He’d been going bald, he liked to say, since he was a baby and had been left with hair here and there but far from everywhere. She could have completed his haircut in five minutes, but she lingered over it with combs and scissors, electric clippers and straight razors. He always requested a shampoo. Outside of sex, he couldn’t remember a better feeling than her fingertips caressing his head. 

In addition to her other talents, she played rhythm guitar and sang lead in an eighties cover band called Amber Waves. At the Get Back, in his usual spot at a standing table to the left of the stage, an iced tea in his hand, he allowed her voice and power chords to wash over him. A group of college boys, pretending to be groupies, frequently crowded the space in front of the stage whenever Amber’s band played, waving their arms and shouting, “I love you!” Joe always wondered, jealously, if she’d taken one or more of them home on certain lonely occasions.

Although he attended all of her shows and always stayed afterwards to congratulate her on her great performance—“Aw, thanks,” she always said, always with genuine appreciation—he never asked her on a date. He wasn’t sure it would be unwelcome. He met her minimum criteria: He didn’t have a drug problem, and he could comfortably support both of them. But if she turned him down, an outcome he calculated had a fifty-two percent likelihood, he’d never find trips to her hair-dresser’s chair anything but awkward. 

He had six friends: a couple of Trekkies like himself who lived in Florida and with whom he always had dinner at the annual Southeastern Star Trek convention; three members of the fantasy football league he participated in; and his neighbor, Fred. He swapped visits with his brother, who lived on the opposite coast, twice a year. He spoke with his parents every Sunday. 

Joe read the New York Times online every morning, but although he noted the country’s first death from the coronavirus, in Washington state in late February, he became especially attuned to the subject when the virus had killed 1,000 Americans, which was about 180 more than the number of soldiers who’d died, on both sides, in the First Battle of Bull Run. Every day, he tracked the numbers like a financial advisor would the share price of a mutual fund. He examined mortality rates and infection rates, breaking them down into categories based on geographic location and age. 

In late April, the local university hired him to provide an estimate of the number of its students who would be reenrolling in the fall. He looked at several factors, including the economic impact of the virus on whoever was paying students’ tuition and the potential reluctance of students to continue their studies if classes were held only online. He suspected the university wouldn’t be encouraged by his report.

He was afraid of death, although probably in no greater proportion than the average person. He feared serious illness just as much. When he lived in D.C., he’d had a severe case of pneumonia and had been hospitalized for four days. At the onset, he was so feverish, he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He would have preferred death to the agony he felt. 

He did everything he was supposed to do to prevent himself from contracting the virus. He wore a mask. He washed his hands regularly and always for at least twenty seconds. He didn’t touch his face. He didn’t socialize with anyone. He visited the supermarket only every five days and always early in the morning, when crowds were light. On his daily walk around the neighborhood, which had always been a part of his routine, he wore a mask, lifting it only occasionally to pull in a deep breath of the spring air. One day, he walked as far as Amber’s salon, which was on a side street downtown. Standing in front of the salon’s large window, he saw familiar objects: her hair-cutting tools arrayed on a cart next to her barber’s chair; a framed photograph of her two children on the far wall; her waiting area, comprised of three chairs around a small table with magazines piled on top of it. He removed his cell phone and snapped a picture. As soon as he did so he felt devious and even a little dirty, as if he were photographing Amber in a private, vulnerable moment. 

On a Monday morning in May, the governor issued guidelines for reopening the state. A minute after the announcement, Joe texted Amber to set up an appointment. In its few places on his head, his hair had grown like silky brown tentacles, giving him the look of a middle-aged octopus. Amber usually texted him back immediately, but he didn’t hear from her until late afternoon. She’d been booking clients all day, she explained. There had been a pleasant rush of them. Could he come Friday at 5? Yes, he could. 

He finished up his work for the university on Wednesday. If the university returned to on-site classes, he calculated an overall attrition rate of 9.26 percent. If the university employed a hybrid model, with some in-person and some on-line classes, it would be 13.45 percent. If it stuck strictly to online classes, the rate would be close to twenty percent. He gave breakdowns per department. English and Philosophy would be hit hardest, followed by visual and dramatic arts. He wondered about Amber’s young groupies at the Get Back. He hoped they wouldn’t be back. 

Friday arrived. He wore a mask decorated with colorful numbers; a red 7, over his lips, was the largest. He’d declared it his lucky mask, although it had brought him neither fortune nor failure. He stepped into Amber’s empty salon and found a seat in the waiting area. He didn’t touch any of the magazines, afraid whoever had preceded him had rifled through them with virus-laden hands. 

Moments later, from the back of the salon, Amber appeared. Without a mask, her face looked naked. She wore a red blouse and a pair of blue-jean shorts, and she’d cut her gray-brown hair to look something like Lady Diana’s once did. “You don’t have to wear a mask,” she said. Her voice wasn’t its usual low purr but a mild rasp. 

He said, “I’m doing it for your protection.” He felt simultaneously like a father strapping a complaining toddler into an unwelcome car seat and a lover insisting on safe sex. 

“I called the state health department,” she said. “I was told I don’t have to wear a mask.”

He hadn’t looked online to see what regulations now governed barbershops and beauty salons. He’d assumed that both parties in the transaction, cutter and client, would be required to wear masks. He wanted to believe her, and to believe the implications behind what she claimed—There’s no danger here—but more than half of him, maybe even 78.2 percent of him, thought she was either lying or misinformed.

“I’ve had a couple of clients turn around and walk out,” she said. “That’s their choice. But it’s my choice to call bullshit on this whole thing.”

From muscle memory, he’d taken a couple of steps toward the shampooing chair. “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he said, hoping to undercut his incredulity with a smile. But of course she couldn’t see his smile, hidden behind his mask.

“There are people who are going to make a killing, a goddamn mass murder of money, off this little flu,” she said. “They’re scaring people shitless so when they roll out their vaccine, everyone will line up to pay whatever it costs.” She paused to catch her breath. “Do you know why they call it ‘corona’?”

It had to do with the virus’s shape, but he kept silent. “It means crown in Spanish,” she said. “And you bet it’s going to make kings of people who are already princes.”

“How it going to do that?”

“They’re going to sell us a vaccine for 50 bucks a pop that will be the injectable version of a sugar pill.”

He’d reached the shampooing chair even as he knew the safer path was out the door. He sat down. His heart beat fast, half from the excitement of being back in her presence and half from fear. She wasn’t exposing him only to herself but to all the clients whose hair she’d cut from Monday on. He asked tentatively, “So you think it’s a hoax?”

“It’s real,” she said. This reassured him. “But it’s only one percent as bad as the media make it out to be. They’re in league with the drug companies who are in league with the Wall Street people who are in league with the politicians.” She drew in a breath and blew it across his eyes. “And,” she concluded, “they’re all in league with the devil.” 

She turned on the water in the sink.

“I know a 91-year-old woman and her 60-year-old daughter who had it. The 60-year-old had a fever and aches and all that but the 91-year-old didn’t have anything more than a cough.” As if to emphasize what she was saying, Amber coughed. “Teal, my younger son, is sitting at home all day. It’s forty-five minutes of virtual instruction from his lame school, then nothing. He’s becoming weaker in mind and body. He should be outside, playing with other kids, building up his immune system.”

“Some kids have been hurt by the virus,” Joe said. 

“I bet they’re indoor kids, like indoor pets. If you stay inside all day playing video games, you become obese and your immune system crashes.” She coughed again. “I know I sound like a conspiracy nut. The whole deal is so frustrating.”

“It is,” Joe acknowledged.

“I’m so glad you’re back.” 

He wasn’t sure he’d heard her, although his dancing heart thought it had. She pushed his head gently into the sink, and water soon rushed pleasantly over his skull. Moments later, she lifted him, rubbed shampoo into his sparse hair, and eased his head back again. Warm water suffused his scalp; her warm fingers massaged his stiff temples and neck. It took extraordinary self-control not to moan. He’d gone weeks, he realized, without being the recipient of a single human touch. He felt so grateful to her he wanted, like the boys at her shows, to yell “I love you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said as she lifted his head out of the sink. “I got your mask wet.”

“The hell with it,” he said, pulling it off his face like he might pull off a T-shirt before running into the ocean or diving into a lover’s bed.

“You needed this,” she said.

“Yes,” he exclaimed with a grateful exhalation, “I did.”

“A haircut, I mean.”

“A haircut,” he said, his tone now businesslike instead of orgasmic. “I needed a haircut.”

After drying him off, she sat him in her dresser’s chair. Gazing into the mirror in front of him, he watched her work with clippers and scissors of various sizes, the smallest of which she used to trim his eyebrows and cut the hair in his ears. She’d ceased talking and was devoting her complete attention to her work, her brown eyes narrow in concentration. Her hands darted and dipped around his head with the precision of a master pianist moving across the keys. There were no false notes.

After she’d finished, she brushed fallen hair off his gown, front and back. The bristles from her brush gave him a mini-massage. She stared at his reflection in the mirror. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said. “I’m sorry if I sound like a lunatic.”

He fumbled for what to say in response. Every phrase that streamed across the ticker in his brain was a version of “I love you.” 

The time was right, he decided, to ask her on a date. But he wondered where he should propose going. Were coffee shops open yet? Restaurants might be, but only if they had outdoor seating. The Pizza Palace, in the Wharf District, had seating both on its roof and in its backyard patio. He would invite her to the Pizza Palace. When should they go? Tomorrow night or next Saturday night? Next Saturday, he concluded. If she said yes—a big assumption—he’d have a week to look forward to their date.

He’d opened his mouth to speak when a woman in her sixties, her white roots about to become the majority stakeholder in her dyed black hair, appeared at the glass front door. 

“My next client,” Amber said. “I bet she asks me to wear a mask. And I’ll say, ‘What communist nation do you think we’re living in? Bulgaria?’” She sighed. “Sorry, Joe. It’s hard to know who to trust.”

“It is.” He wanted to add something more in solidarity, but during the pandemic, his word associations with “trust” were “scientists,” “healthcare professionals” and “New Zealand.” To cite even one of them, he thought, would be to obliterate the warm feeling between the two of them.

Joe left her barber’s chair and was halfway to the door when he realized he hadn’t paid her. He turned around, plucked his wallet from his pocket, and removed three twenties. He extended them to her. As she reached for them, their fingers touched. For a moment, their connection held. She waited, and when he loosened his hold, she eased the bills from his fingers. 

She stared down at what he’d given her. “Oh, Joe,” she said. “Joe, you’re too generous. You know I don’t deserve this.”

His eighth-grade self swelled within him, and with dead seriousness and unfiltered romanticism, he said, “You deserve the world.” 

She blushed and turned her head, as if to deflect whatever other words of praise he might bombard her with. It's now or never, he told himself, and before he could add, Or the next time I have my hair cut, he said, “I was wondering if, maybe, you’d like to grab a bite to eat sometime.”

When she didn’t reply immediately, he felt his upper body collapse, a landslide initiated by his heart, now sloshing in the acidic depths of his stomach. But a second later, she said, “Sounds good, Joe.” 

He hesitated to say more, wondering if she was only humoring him. Should he propose a precise date and location or declare victory for the time being, go home, and text her in a day or two with a definitive plan? He knew he would be no more courageous in the next forty-eight hours than he was now. He took a half step toward her, as if, in halving the distance between them, he might double his odds of success. With his new proximity, he registered the smell of her breath, which had been disguised before in the salon’s olfactory medley of hair products. Beneath the predominant smell of mint mouthwash, there was a hint of cigarette smoke. Smelling her breath was a new intimacy. He breathed in twice before he said, “I was thinking we could, maybe, go next Saturday to the Pizza Palace.” He added, “5:30?” As soon as he spoke, the time seemed to him ridiculously early, like the first dinner shift at a retirement home. 

She smiled, perhaps amused by his ineptness. “Sounds good,” she said. Before Joe’s heart could whirl in celebration around his lungs, she added, “But maybe a couple of weeks from now? Let me check my schedule.”

“Of course,” he said. He waited for her to retrieve the black planner in which she wrote down her appointments. But instead of plucking it from the shelf in the waiting area, she nodded toward the front door and the woman outside. “I’m still filling up my calendar with clients,” she said. “I’ll get back to you in a few days, okay?”

“Great,” he said. “Great,” he repeated. “Great,” he said for the third time. He wasn’t great at finding synonyms for great. “Goodbye,” he said.

With this, he turned back to the glass door. Imagining a smile on her unmasked face, though not wanting to test his hypothesis by turning around, he strode toward it, opened it, and stepped outside. He nearly crashed into the woman with the expansive gray roots. She’d put on her mask. It matched the midnight ends of her hair. He’d left his number-filled mask, with its blazing lucky 7, in Amber’s salon.

Three days later, at 7:42 p.m., Amber sent him a text: 

Hey, wanted you to know I’ve got a little fever. I’m sure it’s nothing. Just FYI.  Hope you’re good. 

She ended her text with a smiley face. What he wouldn’t have given for a heart. There was no mention of their upcoming date. 

Concerned that Amber had given him more than a haircut, he’d checked his temperature every day since he’d visited her salon. It was always 98.6. Periodically during the day, he’d done other self-inspections such as breathing deeply to see whether he could detect any congestion in his lungs and paying extra special attention to his taste buds to discern if they were functioning correctly. He hoped her little fever was due to nothing more than an old-fashioned cold.

He began to text back:

All is good here. I hope you feel better soon! See you soon!

He read over his text. He didn’t like the repetition of “soon” at the end of the second and third sentences, although the latter was intended as a subtle reference to their date at the Pizza Palace. He revised:

All is good here. I hope you feel better soon! See you around!

What did he mean by “around”? He’d sacrificed the allusion to their date in favor of something baffling. There were only two places he ever saw her: at her salon and at the Get Back. Neither qualified as “around.” Would she think he was planning an encounter away from the usual places—planning, perhaps, to follow her one evening as she left her salon and, minutes later, pretending to accidentally run into her on the street? He couldn’t say he hadn’t imagined this exact scenario before. He revised:

I’m fine. Thank you for your good wishes. Feel better soon!

He thought the “thank you” sounded too formal, but “thanks” struck him as too casual and even flippant, as if he might mean it sarcastically, as in “thanks for your pathetic words when you probably breathed a fatal virus all over me” and thereby rendering the imperative that followed equally sarcastic, as in “You’ll probably recover from your minor symptoms in no time while I’ll probably end up dead.” There was also the problem of “good wishes,” which sounded like a phrase from a different century.

He had an inspiration. He wrote: Sorry you aren’t feeling well. Looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. If you need anything in the meantime, let me know! He pushed send before he had time to reconsider.

Her text back made his heart leap: Thanks so much!!

Two exclamation points, twin lightning bolts to light his life.

Joe knew she’d given him the virus when, two evenings later, he started to cough. His cough, although troublingly frequent, was manageable and didn’t diminish his pride in sharing her germs. It was like she’d given him a hickey.

For dinner, he ate as much as he could, having read that people who are infected lose their appetites. He didn’t—he couldn’t—taste much of his spaghetti with meat sauce or his salad or his sourdough bread. Likewise, his sense of smell had vanished. At nine, his usual bedtime, he filled two mason jars with ice water and placed them on the nightstand next to his bed. He brought in reading material, including Current History and Smithsonian magazines. He plugged in his cell phone to an outlet a few feet from the bed. After he climbed under his covers, preparing for a siege, he wondered how many people in town were infected. How many in the county. How many in the state. He wondered what the odds were of him dying. Certainly someone, somewhere, knew exactly how many 52-year-old men in relatively good health had died of the virus. He felt his fever rise. How many 52-year-old men in relatively good health who’d caught the virus from their hairdressers had died? 

He fell into a fitful sleep and woke up coughing and breathing with effort. His bones ached. He’d forgotten to bring a thermometer to his bedside but didn’t feel like stumbling into his bathroom in search of it, his body raging in complaint. He sipped from one of the mason jars and fell back onto his pillow. Sleep captured him briefly before he coughed and coughed and coughed.

When he woke up at midmorning, his body ached, but his fever, he was sure, was down. He even felt well enough to use the bathroom and find, hiding behind a bottle of Tylenol in his medicine cabinet, his thermometer, which registered a temperature of 101.7. He tried to deceive himself into thinking he’d caught the minor bug Amber thought she had. He walked to his kitchen and boiled six eggs. He ate one and stored the rest in his refrigerator for later. He spent a long time sitting on his back porch, letting the sun pour over him until he became too hot and moved his chair under the overhang of the roof. He returned to his kitchen and ate another egg and some bread. He couldn’t taste them or smell them. He watched TV. The number of dead Americans was more than 80,000. The figure exceeded the number of American deaths in the Vietnam War. 

He returned to his bedroom and picked up his phone to see if Amber had texted him. She hadn’t. He wondered if he should text her to let her know he wouldn’t be able to be of service to her because he, too, was sick. But his bones burned, and he didn’t want to labor over a text message he would revise at least three times. He slipped into bed and fell asleep.

He woke up gasping. It felt like carbon dioxide had been pumped into his room. Was he sick enough to go to the hospital? He reminded himself that he had no history of asthma, no history of any illness that might work in dark concert with the virus to kill him. He’d read about celebrities enduring the virus in their homes. Prince Charles—he must be at least seventy years old!—had survived. He fell asleep, woke up, drank, fell asleep again, drank and coughed and coughed and coughed.

Morning came, and he checked his cell phone. No text from Amber. He thought to write: I hope you’re doing better now. But she might ask about him, and he wouldn’t want to worry her. Would she be worried? Would she care? Yes, of course she would care. Would she feel guilty she’d given him the virus? He wanted to tell her he wasn’t angry at her, that his feelings for her were as strong as ever, that when they were both feeling better they would eat pepperoni pizza and laugh about how in cutting his hair she’d almost cut his life short. He should text her something, he thought, but his head was cloudy. He went into his living room and watched TV. It was the same news as the day before, except with more stupid words from the president and more deaths. The weather was gray and threatened rain, and he didn’t feel like sitting on his back porch anyway. Afternoon came and his fever rose. He hadn’t eaten anything. He didn’t feel like pealing an egg. In his kitchen, he stuffed bread into his mouth and drank straight from the milk carton. 

It was early evening when he made his way to his bed. But as soon as he lay down, it was like he was underwater and his oxygen tank was depleted. He knew he would die if he stayed in his bed. He grabbed his cell phone and punched in 911. The operator asked what his emergency was. He told her he was dying. “Coronavirus,” he said, and gave his address. 

He was curled up on his front stoop when the ambulance arrived. The pair of EMTs, cloaked in protective equipment, looked like astronauts. This was a different planet now. They said little to him and he to them. They’d done this before. What number was he? It was a small town but an opportunistic virus. Might he be the twenty-fifth person or only the unlucky thirteenth? Would there be a bed for him in the hospital? He wondered if Amber had preceded him. 

On the curb outside his house, they placed him on a gurney and slid him to the back of the ambulance. He wondered if his neighbors were watching. Was this their first time seeing someone they knew driven off in an ambulance? It probably wasn’t Fred Armstrong’s first time. Fred lived with his wife in the house across the street from his.  Fred had been a marine in the Vietnam War. He’d probably seen a dozen men carted off.

Joe thought again of Amber. He was a number in her life: the number of clients whose hair she’d ever cut, the number of people she’d ever performed in front of, the number of men—and women—who’d secretly loved her. He was a number now in the list of people she’d infected with the virus. 

He heard a chime from the cell phone in his pocket. It was as if in thinking of Amber he’d conjured her text. He smiled as he imagined what it might say. He was too weak to check.

He heard the ambulance’s sirens. He felt the ambulance’s speed, but he feared it was too late. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. He couldn’t breathe. Darkness poured into his head as he coughed and gasped and wheezed. He wondered how many people during this gruesome pandemic had died for love.