When Two and Two Make Five

“Crazy people can do the damnedest things.”

That’s what I remember overhearing Max say to mother in a voice just above a whisper before the cops arrived. He had had one too many glasses of Conundrum wine, and I had ripped up all the carpeting in his house.

Mother, born Maria Elena Grimaldi, had been seeing Max for fourteen months and twelve days, little under thirty-seven million seconds. I know because I remember her telling me she met Max when he started working with her at Caesars Palace and I have some obsession with figuring out and telling time in seconds. The residential counselor at the care facility I stay at says it’s because I might be on the spectrum. Previously, doctors just slapped a diagnosis of OCD on me. I suppose people in my family refer to me as “the nutcase,” to distinguish me from my two other siblings who are pretty neurotypical and doing well for themselves. But I don’t feel crazy. I guess sometimes I just make people feel scared.   

One thing I find strangely coincidental is how Maria and Max got together soon after I had told the woman who carried me in her belly for over twenty-three million seconds that I had started dating a girl who is a resident in the same care home where I spend most of my time. When I say “dating” I mean playing marathon sessions of Dungeons and Dragons, and sitting next to each other in the common areas at meal times. Never touching. Unless it’s mother and I’m really stressed out, I’m not comfortable with people putting their hands on me.  

Max is a nice enough person when he’s not “imbibing spirits.” That’s what Maria likes to call it. Max also pays me to do occasional home repair work for him when I visit mother during holidays. Even though my current care team is still mulling over whether I’m actually an a-tip or not, I’m not bad at fixing things around the house. Some of the care facility residents’ parents don’t like their kids visiting home because neurodiverse people can often make a mess of things, but although he might complain about the quality of the work I do and almost always gets involved himself when I’m getting “too sloppy,” Max likes giving me handy chores when I come to Vegas. He and Maria pick me up at the airport and take me to Morning Mania Diner to eat blueberry pancakes afterward, even if it’s close to bedtime when I arrive.  Vegas is the kind of town where waitresses don’t blink if you ask them for breakfast at 11 pm, or thirty-nine thousand six-hundred seconds past noon.

During Christmas break, Max paid me to change an old toilet for him. The new one he replaced it with is jet black ceramic and has the streamlined shape of a sports car. On President’s Day weekend he had me patch up a hole he had punched in the wall during a drunken fit. When Maria told me about his drinking habit, I sensed she tolerated it because, according to her, “Max is a romantic.” I know the more romantic episodes in some neuro-tips’ lives are inspired by whiskey and wine, so I uncomfortably understand Maria Elena’s tolerance of Max’s drunken moments.

When I visit home for Easter holiday, Max complains that the carpets in his house are ugly and that if he expects to sell the property for the best possible price, he should probably replace them. He never explicitly says he is going to pay me to pull up the carpeting, he never even once asks me to do the job. All he does is complain about how unsightly the burgundy-colored synthetic floor covering is and how he wants a look for the house that is less “eighties-extraordinaire,” a look that Maria Elena, who collects pricey ceramic vases and whose house has light grey faux-wood flooring and art deco rugs, would feel more comfortable in when she comes over for tulip-decorated table candle-lit dinners.

Now I don’t know how you, specifically, put two and two together, or what their sum is when you add them up, but I’m one of those people who sees two twos and combines them to make five. When I was five years young, I remember going to an antiques and collectibles shop in Sin City with my dad and betting on the black number five horse in a type of gambling machine you don’t see these days. My dad asked if the machine worked, and the antique dealer, thinking he could make a sale, plugged it in, saying there were jackpot funds in it, and allowed my dad to drop a quarter in the slot. To butter up my dad, the antique dealer said he only did this for “special customers.” He got green as guacamole when my horse crossed the finish line first. The bet won me ninety-four dollars and seventy-five cents that day, and since then I’ve felt an affinity for the number whose multiples end either in another five or a zero.

But back to putting two and two together to make more than their sum. What do I mean by that? By that I mean because of the condition I have, the OCD, and now, possibly the autism, I always see more in things than other people do. I’ll see a cloud on the horizon as I’m taking an Uber to go have my monthly lunch with dad, and I’ll take it as a sign that nuclear war is immanent. I’ll see a mound of dirt someone has used to cover up some doggy doo, and that mound of dirt becomes the grave of one of my care home friends who I believe is going to die in a war that hasn’t happened yet. 

My psychiatrist tells me putting two together to make five is just a symptom of my condition. “People who have what you have can often experience magical thinking,” the doctor says. Magical thinking is when you think like causes like, or when you think you can exert control over somebody if you do something to a resemblance of that person, like sticking pins in a voodoo doll’s head to give the school bully a migraine.

Maria Elena says that what happens when I put two and two together is just imaginary glitches in reality. “Always remember these things you see aren’t real, Gaff,” she says. 

Although my mother’s parents were Italian immigrants, my mother has been an Anglophile since Princess Diana died in 1997, six years (or 189 million seconds) after I was born. Maria Elena named me Geoffrey, but I couldn’t pronounce my own name properly when I was two, and called myself “Gaff.” The name stuck, and it’s how I introduce myself even today at the age of twenty. I think Gaff Grimaldi sounds better than Geoffrey Grimaldi because it alliterates, a word poets use to describe the repetition of consonant letters. My ears like it when consonants repeat. It’s kinda’ similar to how sums and multiples of the number nine repeat themselves when you add them together. For example, two times nine, or nine plus nine equals eighteen. What number do you get when you add the one and eight in eighteen together? Nine. I’ll use one more numerical example to make the rest of my point: 3 x 9 = 27.  2 + 7 = 9.  And so on and so on, beyond infinity. Nines always give you more nines.

About my magical thinking, Max, who liked what I had to say about the fractal nature of nines, says I just have to man up and face that some things are exactly what they appear to be. "Somethings is less, others is more," Max tells me, speaking the way his grandfather who was a peanut farmer in Georgia spoke, “but most things is what they are.” What I need to do, according to mother’s boyfriend, is act like a man despite what the things I see make me feel.

So, on my last day home from Spring break, I see Max’s toilet and although it’s black, it reminds me of his gold Lexus and I want to steal the keys and drive the Lexus into a tree, because if I do, I believe Max won’t drunkenly crash into that same tree and die. But since I’m busy putting two and two together and also believe that people can read each other’s thoughts, I see the poor patch job I did on Max’s wall and think he’s going to sock a hole into my head for wanting to crash his Lexus. So, to make up for the morbidity of my magical musings, I decide to rip up Max’s burgundy-colored carpeting for free, thinking that if I do, I can save Max some money and also prevent his blood from being spilled, because magic being what it is, no dark red carpets signify no spilt blood. And there you have it. How two and two make five.

Max and my mom pull up to Max’s house as I’m uprooting the carpet from the spare bedroom. “Gaff, what the hell you think you’re doin’?” Max asks, and when I don’t respond and just keep right on ripping carpet up, he puts me in a half-nelson. “Stop trying to sock me upside the head, you fool,” says Max as I try to make him release me, and my mom nearly screams out, “Gaff! Calm down! I’m calling for help! I’m calling 9-1-1!”

“Don’t call 9-1-1!” warns Max as I squirm in his WWF grip and smell the intermingled sweat and Drakkar Noir cologne he sprays in his armpits instead of roll-on deodorant, as well as the purple odor of wine every time he breathes out through his mouth. “They’ll just send over the police,” Max says, then adding, like he means it, “I can take care of this myself.” But as I continue to writhe, he starts to lose confidence. During my episodes, Maria Elena says I acquire super-human strength, and when she’s said that, visions of the Hulk have flashed in my mind, but I’m not like the Hulk. I’m not him because he always scares the bejesus out of me, and I don’t think I’m big, green, or mean enough to scare anyone. 

Max and I continue to struggle for what seems to be the length of a pro-wrestling match, and when mother sees Max’s strength begin to flag, she dials for an emergency response.

I finally break free of my mom’s boyfriend’s grip and although I don’t want him to be scared, the look on his face tells me he is. “You alright now, Gaff? You good? Help is coming. We don’t want them to take you away. Sit down on the bed there. Maria, get him some fizzy lemonade.”

When the woman who carried me in her belly for over twenty-three million seconds comes back upstairs, she sits next to me and caresses my back like she does after my episodes. That’s when I overhear Max utter in a whisper, words that makes my chest feel tighter than when he had me in his wrestler’s grip, “Crazy people can do the damnedest things.” Even though I know he only says it because he’s had too much Conundrum, I want to scream and hit my own head when I hear this, and I see mother give Max a look that says, “How could you?”—a look that might suck the soul out of him.

As I take the last sip of Limonata, the police arrive.

Max lets them in, they come upstairs to see me, and as Max is explaining to the cops what happened, my ears shut out the sound. I see the mouths of Max and one of the officers move, but no words come out. I see Max rub his neck with his right hand. If he knew that I was about to start putting two and two together again, he’d tell me to stop and explain that his neck is just sore from the wrestling match we just had. But no one can ever tell when my mind is making fives. Max is rubbing his neck and I remember when that police man on T.V. had his knee on that black man’s neck. I don’t want what happened to him to happen to Max. My mind is saying that Max is trying to tell me that the police are going to hurt him, that they’re not going to let him breathe. Max’s life matters. I can’t let the officers kill him. I have to hurt the police. Now.

Flash-fast, I try to give one of the officers a knock-to-the ground punch like I’ve seen Rocky Marciano do to other boxers on YouTube. My hand doesn’t fully connect with the cop’s face, but he loses balance and, even faster than the Flash, I push him to the ground. All Max says is, “Shit, no!” when the capsized cop’s partner sprays me in the face with pepper spray. To both cops, who now have me on my stomach and are hand-cuffing me, all Maria says in a gasp is, “Please don’t hurt him! He’s sick.” The cop who isn’t handcuffing me has his taser touching my back and says, “You try anything funny again and I promise you, you’ll regret it.”

The officers are understanding and take me to the hospital instead of jail. As I sit on the bed in the emergency room, Maria Elena rubs my back like she does when something’s gone wrong. The nurses clean my eyes of the pepper spray. Max is at the hospital, too, and I know he’s thinking I need to stop reacting to the way the things I see make me feel. Maria Elena tells me, “Gaff, it was just another glitch in your reality. They’re just glitches. They don’t last.

I wish they wouldn’t happen at all, but as I let her hug my neck, she promises to take me to Morning Mania Diner after we leave the hospital. Sometimes even people who do the damnedest things deserve to have blueberry pancakes.