As the light turned green, Bill Wagner pushed the spongy accelerator into the floor. His 1973 Chevrolet Caprice moaned and grumbled to speed. Its suspension struggled against twenty-seven years of gravity as it moved under the watchful eye of a man, we'll call him Carl, and his binoculars.
With a practiced right hand, Carl cracked open his third beer of the morning. He took a sip and watched as Bill maneuvered his Caprice into the obscurity of the early morning fog. Carl swallowed his sip and removed the binoculars from his eyes. He squinted as the flash from the sun burned at his pupils. He placed the binoculars on top of the bundles of unread newspapers that lay in a pile on the table next to the window.
As he began to draw the blinds, he caught the scent of the fresh morning air streaming into his musty apartment. Carl quickly sealed the crack in the window with a piece of duck tape pulled from one of the strips that had been waiting, neatly applied along the edge of the table next to the window. Carl hadn't remembered how the window was cracked. Upon further examination he concluded that it must have come from the outside, the pressure must be increasing out there. Carl finished drawing the blinds and then drew another sip of the morning to his lips. As he titled his head back, he closed his eyes and let his ears focus.
Carl had always been naturally enthusiastic about science and mathematics. He excelled in the academy despite his, at times incapacitating, disability. It wasn't until later in life that his understanding began to overwhelm his enthusiasm. Carl realized that numbers are never without context. Until he removed them, even the numbers on the dials of his radios began to speak to him, as numbers do.