The statistician of the title introduces himself by saying:
| (quoted from The Statistician)
You MUST KNOW ME: I’m the man who proved that
the percentage of rodent hair and excrement in the average candy bar is.00152. If you Ve never heard that one,
you've undoubtedly come across another of my little
firecrackers, that the average annual income of a San
Francisco prostitute is $74,189, and her age, 23,4; that
302.9 acres of forest are expended for one average Sunday issue of a major metropolitan newspaper; that
272,154 children are employed annually in pornography; that the national tonnage of cats and dogs killed
each year by the A.S.P.C.A is 39.8. Statistics should be
called the study of the morbid and bizarre.
|
Though seemingly jaded, he can still sometimes see the power and beauty of statistics and other parts of math. He says:
| (quoted from The Statistician)
At times I am strangely moved by numbered quantity and feel there is a mysterious fitness to it: 17 milligrams of shattered bone clinging to the blueberry bushes
beside D.B. Cooper's unopened knapsack of cash; the
fractal structure of coastlines, clouds and Gregorian
chants; the positive correlation between violent crime
and the full moon; the quantitative perfection of fish
bodies for movement in water, birds’ wings for air currents. Numbers bear witness and no more, and so doing
may occasionally lie in the silent, beautiful domain of
angels...
And I suppose we can’t forget the input of the
15th-century street gamblers, who needed a convoluted
Renaissance rationale for their cheap thrills. Who can blame them? If we didn’t have our means and correlations, we would be naked as cavemen, afraid to come out
into that chill, unsparing light we moderns have let fell
on us.
|
He longs for the abstract quantities that his company studies to become more concrete:
| (quoted from The Statistician)
I who produce
I have an inconsolable desire to see and touch
one of my products. How bizarre: I actually want to talk
to a mean.
Now, my Mean would be the average of various
attributes of men my age, 42, with exactly the proportions, personality, interests and financial health I am so
efficient at measuring. So why couldn’t I just pick him
out of a crowd? I know more about him than his wife
does. Isn't he, in a sense, my"better half’? Isn’t he
“truer” to life, the inhabitant of that blank surface I am
always reaching toward? Why wouldn't I, of all people,
take the greatest pleasure in capturing him?
A fantasy life is particularly dangerous for a man in
my profession.
|
The warning in that last sentence turns out to have been prophetic. After walking out of his office with the intention of truly meeting a Mean, the rest of it reads like a horror story in which the people he meets morph into bizarre, beautiful, and deadly monsters.
I'm not exactly sure how to interpret that. On the one hand, if we are to think that this is really what happens to him, then I would label this story as being in the "Horror" genre, akin to a scary episode of The Twilight Zone. On the other, if he is simply encountering ordinary people on a subway train and is hallucinating the fantastical aspects, then I should tag it with the "Mental Illness" motif. Most likely, the ambiguity is intentional. Just to be safe, I'll tag it with both. But, just to be clear, let me emphasize that this work clearly has higher literary ambitions than many works in the horror genre.
Originally published in Black Warrior Review (Spring/Summer 1991) and republished in The Man Who Took a Bite Out of His Wife and Other Stories. I learned about this story from the website MathFiction.net. |
