La Asíntota

A neighborhood gathers upon the arrival of an impossible piece of playground equipment and its mysterious instruction manual.

Today’s short story was written by Dustin Michael. Dustin lives in Georgia with his family, where he teaches writing and literature. He and his wife share blogging duties at http://phinphans.blogspot.com, where they write about their son, Phin, who was recently diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

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The playground had been shut for months, an old shell kind of empty, the clam long rotted out.

To celebrate this communal space’s reopening, and to shake our collective fist at the pandemic that had closed it in the first place, the neighborhood collected some money to buy a new piece of playground equipment — a slide. 

The slide arrived by moving truck one breezy spring Saturday in a series of crates that seemed to go on forever, each one wheeled by dolly inside the playground fence by an anxious-looking driver who did not bother trying to find anyone to sign for the delivery and who left without saying a word to anyone.

A crowd gathered to witness the new slide’s construction, watching it uncoil itself from its packaging crates like a nest of drowsy snakes. Children darted gleefully between a labyrinth of crates all marked with the words “Borges Inc.” in black spray paint. Slinking forward reluctantly to help erect the new slide came a handful of forlorn adults, each of us casting the same thousand-yard stare common to all veterans of DIY playground equipment projects, each of us resigned to laying untold hours of our weekend upon the altar of community improvement. 

Gary, the paunchy recent divorcee from two cul de sacs over, stepped forward and drove a crowbar beneath the lid of the nearest crate. I was surprised to see him, as he was seldom seen outside of his shadowy bungalow and it was commonly assumed that he was working through a midlife crisis or something. 

“Y’all ready to get at her?” Gary said as he passed. Gary’s pronoun usage made it difficult to ever truly know who or what he was referring to. As a general rule, though, “y’all” served him indiscriminately as a catch-all second-person pronoun and he assigned feminine pronouns to all objects. 

Together, Gary and the rest of us opened and emptied the crates until we stood like a team of amateur fossil hunters over the scattered bones of a prehistoric leviathan. As luck would have it, the final crate contained a manual.

That isn’t quite right, though.

The booklet that emerged from the packing kernels of the final crate resembled a museum artifact more closely than anything written by a modern technical writer. Its unevenly bound pages were yellowed and brittle at the edges. From my travels to psychological conferences in South America, I recognized its cover to be Argentine leather. Emblazoned on the cover by firebrand was a horizontal line intersected by a vertical line next to a sloping curve under the word Direcciones.  

“The hell is this thing?” Gary sniffed, turning the booklet over and dangling it upside down between his thumb and forefinger before tossing it to the ground. “Shit ain’t even English. They don’t know this here’s America?”

“We could go get Bev from Harmony Lane,” someone suggested. “She knows Spanish. Her dad owns the Cuban restaurant.” 

“I love that place,” someone else affirmed. A low murmur ensued in which it was agreed that the Cuban restaurant owned by Bev’s father was objectively delightful. 

“Instructions is for pussies, y’all,” Gary declared. “Gimme that wrench.” 

Someone gave Gary that wrench. I picked up the booklet and opened the Argentine leather cover. 

On the first page, in bold, handwritten letters, the following words appeared:

Ten cuidado. Este es una asíntota.

I glanced up at Gary and my other neighbors as they shuffled back and forth carrying sheet metal sections like a team of ants maneuvering the shimmering wings of a dead dragonfly. Then I turned to the next page of the booklet and saw a mathematical function.

More lists of numbers and figures followed. From what I could tell, the booklet offered not so much as a single diagram for putting together a playground slide. I skipped forward a few pages. 

Near the fence, a throng of eager children whined and demanded to know if the new slide was ready, though my colleagues in impromptu playground design had only barely connected two long black girders to form a pair of right angles that would serve as the horizontal base and the vertical connection point for the curving metal slope and the ladder. 

“Anything useful in that manual?” a neighbor called to me.

“Nothing so far,” I said, furrowing my brow and raising the booklet back to eye level to indicate that unraveling its mysteries would be my sole occupation for the remainder of the heavy lifting. 

It was then that I noticed that most of the pages — from the section just after the mathematical equations to the end — were empty except for a “0” in the middle of each facing page that appeared so faintly that it seemed like a trace image from the page beneath. But when I turned the page, there was only the same faint “0” on the following page. Any individual page lifted to the light was revealed to be completely blank. 

“How…?” I said to no one. 

I turned a dozen sequential pages, examining each side front and back for the “0”. Nothing. And yet, laid flat, the “0” once again emerged from below. I flipped to the middle of the manual. Again, the same “0” materialized just beyond whatever page was facing. 

In a kind of panic, I flipped toward the end of the booklet. The “0” remained in place just beyond whatever page I turned, always appearing slightly fainter than the last with each subsequent blank page turned but never disappearing entirely.

At last, I arrived at the last page. Again, the same “0” image peeked up from below, but the page itself was blank like the rest. Beyond it was only the worn Argentine leather cover. 

A chorus of cheers rose from the children at the edge of the playground. The structure was almost completely built. 

“‘Bout got her ready,” Gary bellowed triumphantly. He was crouched turning a wrench atop a tower of metal that looked like an upside-down “T” with stairs opposite a deep, sloping ramp, the lip of which hovered above the bottom girder without actually making contact.

Flipping back through the manual booklet to the beginning, I arrived once again at the first page and its inscription: 

Ten cuidado. Este es una asíntota.

I wished that Bev — Spanish-speaking denizen of Harmony Lane and daughter of the owner of an acclaimed Cuban restaurant — had been there.  

Out of curiosity, I pulled out my phone and searched for an English translation of the inscription. It brought up the words, “Beware. This is an asymptote.” 

Out of even more curiosity, I searched the term “asymptote.” It brought up an image of a cartesian plane perfectly recreated by the looming metal structure before me, complete with a swooping talon of a curve stretching endlessly toward the x axis. 

“OK kids,” Gary yelled, “which of y’all wants to get down her first?”

“Wait!” I said. “I…I don’t think this slide is safe.” 

“The hell y’all say, boy!” Gary shouted down at me, as if I were more than one person and as if he and I weren’t approximately the same age. “I turned every goddamn screw myself. Y’all sayin’ I didn’t make it safe?”

“No,” I said, “I just think it might be dangerous to —”

“Dangerous!” Gary screamed. “Y’all ain’t even helped!” Y’all been kickin’ back over there readin’ yer goddamn immigrant book whiles I been over here doin’ all the real goddamn work! Tell y’all what, boy, how 'bout I come down there right now and show y’all dangerous!” 

What happened next is a matter of some debate. 

In truth, it has become an obsession of mine, although in my profession this is called “the subject of ongoing scholarship.” While I continue to await the approval of my IRB forms to formalize the psychological research to be gathered from the accounts of those present at the playground the moment that Gary mounted the slope of the asymptote, I can report what I saw, as well as what has entered the public record from the depositions collected from my neighbors by law enforcement. 

I watched Gary pivot and fling himself down the curving surface with the confidence of a man who was assured of the structural integrity of his handiwork and the outrage of a man who had yet again found his blaring hypermasculinity challenged by someone he suspected (correctly) of being a smartypants cupcake of a person.

Gary hung in midair above the asymptote for an impossible moment. Then his body descended,  intersected the surface of the curve, and became an irrational value receding infinitely toward a zero denominator. 

The moment this happened reveals something about the individual human perspective and the human mind’s ability to process the sublime terror of eternal reduction.

For instance, I saw Gary’s body disintegrate into a school of tiny fish darting away forever in unison. This image is burned into my retinas, and it reappears in my vision anytime I shift my gaze from light into darkness — a flash of fish that withdraws and diminishes but never fully disappears. 

Everyone who saw Gary go down the asymptote experiences a retinal afterimage like this, even now, after numerous eye examinations and, in one neighbor’s case, surgery. We are all slowly learning to accept that it will never be totally gone. Perhaps the same can be said of Gary himself? Who knows.

One child onlooker saw Gary become a dazzling explosion of fireworks. The elderly gentleman who lives behind me witnessed Gary's entrance into infinity as a scattering and reassembling of the mosaic tiles in a cathedral. A woman whose house is four down from mine said that Gary assumed the properties of a vibrating string. 

No two accounts of the incident match identically, but everyone agrees that Gary's abstract or fractalized form vanished from sight halfway down the curve and that nothing material about Gary arrived at the bottom. In the moments after it happened, everyone rubbed their eyes for the first of many times to come, looked around, and stood there in the playground not knowing what to do next.

A week later, a pair of tired-looking FBI agents arrived to question some of us about Gary’s whereabouts and jot down our responses on their clipboards. None of us could be certain how their investigation was going. I suspected that, if they’d handed us a graphing calculator, we could have plotted where it was going. In any case, they never found Gary. 

Nothing remains of the asymptote. We carefully dismantled the impossible structure and shipped it back with its impossible instruction booklet after the investigators concluded their impossible work. We demanded a refund. 

It has yet to arrive.

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