It was in the Year of the Virus, after a take-out feast of Szechuan crispy pork with brown rice and wonton soup, when I discovered my lucky numbers were seven, twenty-three, forty-nine, and Infinity-plus-one.
Fragments of brittle cookie lay scattered across the table surrounding a small, oblong paper fortune that fell out when the cookie was cracked open. I picked the paper up and read its short, pithy prognostication: You will have a pleasant surprise, it proclaimed. Well, that was good if not especially specific news. What could the pleasant surprise be and when would it surprise me? More to the point, would my surprise be big enough and so agreeably pleasant that I'd immediately recognize it as the pleasant surprise foretold by the cookie, and not just some easily overlooked, random, everyday lucky event?
Alas, fortune cookies don't contain a second slip of paper answering such Frequent Asked Questions, and there are no customer service contact details either. Typically inscrutable Chinese soothsaying was at work, obviously. Oh well, I turned the paper over and made a mental note of the lucky numbers printed on its reverse. Maybe simple, unambiguous mathematics would provide a little more practical information.
The number seven wasn't particularly exciting. After all, seven is considered to be an all-purpose lucky number for everybody, so I'd been pretty much cheated out of an exclusive slice of serendipity with that allocation. Numbers twenty-three and forty-nine were also somewhat disappointing, as $23.49 was the total of my take-out order. What the Hell did that mean, then? That I'd be 'pleasantly surprised' to not get indigestion from all the MSG in my dinner this time? I guess so because my stomach did feel unexpectedly non-dyspeptic. So only the dubious Infinity-plus-one remained as a functional integer of good omen, if such an abstract notion could be considered an integer.
Having been dealt this poor hand of lucky numbers, I decided Infinity-plus-one was the ultimate trump card as it must contain every other number. Therefore I could make my own luck by bestowing fortunate properties on whatever combination of numbers I came across. Four, nine, thirteen, Pi, the square root of forty-nine, anything divisible by sixty-three. In my mind, all numbers were indicators of glad tidings now, even 2020, which would be a pleasant surprise considering how the year has begun.
In which regard, let me just say glory be to yesterday, today and tomorrow, as it was in the beginning, and now, and ever shall be, world without end, plus one.
