Six of them. In one small warm box of a room, six bodies, and the farthest one is what, four steps away? Reachable. All of them reachable. Where I come from you may travel a thousand years in one direction and arrive at more of me.
I have counted the abundance in this room and I cannot make it stop counting. There is the breath, six streams of it, warming the shared air until the air itself is a body that touches every one of them at once. There is the smell of the coffee going cold and the smell of the marker on the whiteboard and, under it, the faint animal warmth of people who have been sitting close for forty minutes.
Three hearts beat within one arm's length of the one who is speaking. The one who is speaking does not know this. He is looking at the glowing rectangle and saying we should circle back.
Here is what stuns me. One of them, near the corner, has gone quiet. Her shoulders have curved inward and her eyes have gone to the middle distance, and I recognize, dimly, that she believes herself to be alone.
Alone.
I have measured alone. Alone is the ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine of me, the light-years stacked on light-years where nothing has ever brushed nothing. This woman is six inches from a warm elbow. She could extend one hand and close the entire distance between herself and another living furnace of a person. She does not. I cannot follow the arithmetic. By every number I own, she has already won.
Look at them. Crowded past all reason, steeped in each other's heat and noise and breath, complaining they must meet again Thursday. Thursday. They get a Thursday, and another after that.
The jackpot.
The whole impossible jackpot, and they are checking the time.