Mathematical murder

         I've counted the bricks one-thousand times. Three-thousand, five-hundred and three on the southern wall. Two-thousand, one-hundred and forty-two on the east. There are thirty-six windows on the east side of the building, and on the south, there are thirty-four. I have estimated that, based on the size and mathematical proportions of the building, there are exactly two-thousand, one hundred and fifty-seven bricks on the east face. I can't estimate the north, because that's where the door ought to be, and I've never seen the door, so I can't say how big it is.

         I like to imagine the door as a seven-by-four foot rectangle. It is made of oak, because a building like that would need a heavy door, I think. It has two panes of glass on each side, each one sixteen inches on the top side, and three feet tall. The windows are bordered with balsa-wood trim. The glass is one-half-inch thick.

         If my imaginary door is true-to-scale, then there would be exactly three-thousand, four-hundred and twenty-three bricks on the north face of the building, assuming the number of windows and the size of the windows are the same as the southern face, which usually, they are.

         I studied architecture in college, but I majored in mathematics. I studied phonetics, too, but it was never my passion.

         In this cell, they have allowed me three books on advanced mathematics and one on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. I asked them to take the page numbers off so I could count the pages, but they denied my request. I have never opened them.

         I am wearing an orange uniform, just like everyone else in this building. The tag says that the thread count of the uniform is one-hundred and sixty. That means that there are that many threads woven into a square inch of fabric. The thread count on the tag is wrong. The thread count is actually one-hundred, or less, depending on the uniform. I suspect that this is a conspiracy to save money. I will write an exposé when I get out, I think.

         The interior of the cell is white. There are no bricks to count; it is solid, smooth concrete. I did, however, manage to calculate that the eastern wall of my cell leans inward at the top by three-fifths of a degree. I suspect this is within code, but it bothers me anyway.

         I have meals delivered to me three times a day through a slot in the door. The paint on the slot is beginning to peel very slightly at the corner. I have notified the guard of the dangers of this situation. Should the paint chip off and fall into my food, I could be at risk of several diseases. He assures me that the warden will be notified, but I am not certain I believe him. If the problem is not fixed, I will most certainly write him into my exposé.

         For obvious reasons, I have been denied access to the technical specifications of the prison. I have been able, however, to form several hypotheses.

         First, this facility is approximately one-hundred-and-sixty years old. I can tell, because the bricks in the outside yard are labelled with their date of manufacture. This gives me a lower parameter, however, I can tell by the relatively new grout between the bricks that it had been replaced at least once. The state mandate for the replacement of grout is thirty years, or, in areas of heavy foot traffic, whenever it happens to decay to the point of needing replacement. Assuming the officials in the prison left it for as long as possible to save money, they would have replaced it five times since the bricks were manufactured, assuming that the prison was constructed the same year the bricks were made. I am taking several liberties here, of course. The possibility remains that the bricks in the square are recycled. Even so.

         I am able to tell, by the style and level of decay of the buildings, that my assumptions in the yard are most likely true, granted that the architect was not a Romanesque in denial and the architectural style of the buildings are true to the era. The archway over the entry gate is especially damning evidence that this building was in fact constructed over one-hundred years ago, and almost certainly more
         Moving past the age of the building, I can go on to deduce that the outer walls are almost exactly six feet thick. They are reinforced with steel, which was cheap in the late eighteen-hundreds when the building was constructed. They are patrolled constantly with a shift change every three hours, to assure that the guards are as keen and awake as possible, but also not spending too much time in the break room.

         The guard towers are equipped with a one-thousand-watt spotlight, each of which rotates completely every twenty-point-eight seconds. The guards in the towers are rotated at twelve and six a.m. The guard who usually takes the pre-midnight shift is the least attentive.

         The laundry system is inefficient, perhaps even nonexistent. I have received dirty uniforms exactly five-hundred and sixty-one times since my incarceration three years ago, and each time I received a clean one, it was very likely owned by a man who had recently died. I blame this deficiency in work done by prisoners or immigrants, which I find puzzling, since the prisoners have to wear them and would therefore want them clean.

         I have a television in my room that has only been powered on once. The display is low definition, nineteen-hundred pixels by three-hundred. I could have told this from the label on the back, but I had to count them, because they encase the things in steel so that the prisoners can't get at the parts and build any contraptions.

         I've dissected televisions before. The basic components of one of this age could be used to build five different rudimentary aids to assist escape, and a separate thirty-three to murder a cell mate easily. Of these, I suspect only prisoners versed in the inner workings and practical applications of the components could manufacture escape aids at all, although twenty-six of the murder weapons could be devised easily by even the simplest of prisoners.

         I have shown you all of this now. I have drawn up one-hundred and twelve unique escape plans, twelve of which could prove to be entirely viable, given time and resources. However, I have no reason to get out. I have everything I need here. I am provided three meals a day, every day. I have a television screen, I have a building outside to speculate about. I have a guard and constant companion to ask about whatever I may need to know, although they never answer me.

         However, the single, most painful factor that causes me to stay here, cold and alone, is her absence in the world.

         She was a mathematical wonder. Not mentally, of course, in that area she was dull. Her proportions, on the other hand, were extraordinary. That is to say, her hips were exactly as wide as her shoulders. Her backside protruded exactly as far as her bust. Her chin was a nearly perfect seventy-five degree angle when she faced exactly forward. Her nose was perfectly centered on her face, and the corners of her mouth lined up exactly with her pupils. By all rules of attraction, she was, technically, perfect.

         I saw her from a distance in Paris, where I was staying for a conference on advanced mathematical theory, when I observed all of this approximately. I approached her with intent to study her further, but apparently, she took offense to my ogling her, and she slapped me. This was when I informed her on the anomalous nature of her figure. She seemed flattered. I'm not sure why; it was just math.

         I took her for coffee the next day out of politeness, because I am a gentleman at heart. My coffee cup was filled to only four-fifths of its capacity that day. I am, or rather, was keeping a chart on this matter to ascertain how to best save my money based on the price of coffee and how much I actually received dollar-for-dollar at each shop. I plotted the point that afternoon. I concluded, from the primary results, that it would be vastly more economical to drink coffee at home rather than go out and buy it one-thimbleful at a time.

         The thimble, of course, is not literal. The capacity of a normal thimble is approximately one ounce of fluid when the meniscus of the fluid touches the top edge. There were actually twenty-six thimbles worth of coffee in my cup that day.

         She decided, later that day that we ought to take a walk in the park since it was such a nice day. It was a nice day, by most standards, although "nice" is a very vague and subjective adjective. It was a temperate day, I suppose, or a very mild one. It was sixty-three degrees that day, with a twelve mile-per-hour wind from the east. It is sixty-one degrees in my cell now.

         I pointed out to her seventy-six pigeons on a telephone wire. I pointed out to her a lilac bush with a total of six-hundred and ninety-five flowers on it in total on sixteen heads. I counted twelve lost pennies on the sidewalk and one stray dime. In the dog park, there were three strays, although she couldn't tell which. She never checked any of this, but I suppose it was because she was paying attention to other things like the trees, or the wind, or to my face.

         My face, which, by the way, is slightly off from the standards of perfect attractiveness, but still close enough to matter to her, I think.

         We returned to my hotel room at exactly eight-oh-one p.m. She ordered a bottle of Cabernet which I informed her, by a quick glance at the label, had aged seven years, nine months, and twenty one days since its manufacture. She pretended to be interested in this.

         Did you know that, just like people fake a smile with clear signs, people fake fascination just as poorly and for the same reasons? When a person fakes a smile, the muscular impulses are not the same as a genuine smile. This makes the corners of the eyes remain downturned, where, with a genuine smile, they will turn upwards involuntarily. The same is true for fascination. The key, you see, is to genuinely puzzle a person and then use that as a standard for further reasoning. I did this earlier that day, as I do with most people, by asking them the most efficient way to count the flowers on a stem of lilac without individually counting them. She was perplexed. She furrowed her brow and put her finger at the side of her mouth reflexively. This reflex was then my standard. She was interested in the pigeons and the change, but not by the dogs, to which, I learned later, she was allergic. She was not interested in the age of the wine; she just wanted to drink it.

         We did, although I only consumed about half of what it takes to get a person drunk to the point of impairment. She consumed the rest- three times that amount.

         That night, she passed out drunk in my bed. I found out quite a lot about her after that point. She had, for example, 135,700 hairs on her head, slightly above the average. She had many freckles and moles of various shapes and sizes, which I also took inventory of. She had sixty-seven freckles in total. Of moles, she had seven. I suspect one of them may have been premature melanoma.

         I measured her proportions exactly, then. She was, as I had suspected, suspiciously perfect. Her backside, and bust, when bare, were exactly equal in distance, to the tenth-of-an-inch, from her body's center of balance.

         Naturally, at this point, I became curious as to whether the rest of her was so perfect. You know, her teeth, eyes, fingernails.
Her teeth were slightly flawed, and it upset me slightly to discover. I believe that she was in an accident as a child which may have caused her top-left incisor and immediately adjacent teeth to become knocked out of place. The offending incisor was artificial, and its neighbors were very, very slightly askew when compared to their brother on the right side. Her tongue, though, I was pleased to find, was symmetrical and centered in her mouth.

         She suffered from a mild deficiency of calcium, likely as a symptom of a recent change in diet. This produced white specks on her fingernails, which were otherwise perfect, for the most part.

         Her eyes focused in an above-average amount of time when exposed to light, and refocused in approximately the same manor. The corneas were blue and grey primarily, with small streaks of green and brown intermixed. This is a rare genetic anomaly in which both recessive traits come forward and compete with the dominant. She was perfect, and unique.

         I could not find any scarring on her body, which indicates that she was sheltered as a child, probably as a result of the incident which cost her those teeth.

         Anyway, I digress. She was the prime human in most respects. I could not bring myself past the simple fact that I would never have the fortune of luck to find someone else so pure, while, at the same time, being so natural.

         So I killed her.

         I could never be happy with her. I could never be happy that close to a perfect being. I could never be happy knowing that someone who fit, with complete accuracy, all of those standards existed in the world.

         So I plotted. You see, she had a boyfriend. I knew this by the contents of her purse, and so I intended to frame him for the deed.

The plan was to proceed as such:
         She arrives home at 3:30 p.m. under the guise that she stayed out late at a party and slept at a friend's house.
         I watch from the sidewalk until approximately four-fifty p.m., when the boyfriend would have to leave to make it to his six-o-clock shift at the local grocery.
         I enter the building and ask for her by her last name to make it appear as though I were there on business. This is subtle, but it works wonders in interrogation rooms if you have a witness to attest to your professional status.
         I wait until seven-thirty, or until she falls asleep from the hangover cures she would have inevitably taken at this point, and administer a sedative.
         I position her in the kitchen, stabbed from behind, unquestionably an act of murder.
         At this point, the boyfriend has an alibis, but I will have been prepared for that.
         I am now a distraught visitor of a recently passed elderly woman who I observed in the obituaries that morning.
         I hear the boyfriend discover my darling, dead. I rush in at the commotion to find the scene as I left it.
         I proceed to testify that I heard the struggle occur and therefor incriminate the boyfriend as a suspect and eventual convicted killer.

         This, as far as I am concerned, has few possible places during which it could go wrong. I was very careful to attend a party for a very brief time before the plan was carried out, and I signed the guestbook for good measure. I was seen by at least thirty to forty people, and I made sure that as few as possible noticed my exit.

         Once my alibi was in place, I made my way to the apartment complex. I watched as the boyfriend hailed a cab and left for work in-uniform. I entered, waited, but then things began to diverge from my original plan.

         The first flaw was in an unexpected third roommate, who, although I could have framed nearly as easily with only a little more effort, complicated things.

         The second flaw was that, although an old woman had just died in the complex, there was a clearly labeled sign in the lobby directing mourners, and another one outside of each elevator, so my presence in the upper floor would be extremely suspicious.

         The third and final flaw was the fact that the apartment kitchen was equipped with a tile backsplash. The tile was in regular pattern- five-hundred-sixty-two tiles- arranged into a pattern resembling ocean waves in the abstract. The issue lay in the one misplaced tile in the pattern, the crest of a wave. It made me furious. It made me itch. It made me violent.

         I suppose my violence must have carried over when I did the deed, because I became covered in blood afterward. The roommate had been asleep, but must have awoken for some bodily reason or another, and discovered me, quite literally, red handed.

         And so here I am.

         I am not a criminal mastermind. I am not a mastermind of any variety. I will not brag to you about my mathematical prowess. I will not gloat about my reasoning skills, because they are severely flawed and hindered by the blight of veiled emotion. I cannot bear to speak about my brief time with her. I loved her, you know, and I hated her beyond hate.

         I will, however, tell you that there are 3,503 bricks in the south wall. There are 2,142 on the east.