Eske tried to find Nancy Santos and failed. Her office number was disconnected or out-of-service at all hours, day and night. He couldn''t be sure which it was. He finally found a directory that listed an address for her outside his area. He called there, but no one answered except someone who said she had not been in business long enough to have any clients yet, and that he should seek another colleague.


    Eske insisted he wanted to open the deal with Miss Santos and only her. The person on the phone refused him this right and gave him instead some other real state officer name as being more suitable than hers. Eske could feel his blood boil and insisted it had to be with Nancy Santos, or he would go to another agency, hoping the threat worked. It didn''t. So then Eske got angry, and his temper went through the roof. He yelled at them so loud that they feared he might get violent, and they hung up on him.


    ''Shit, I should have asked the address before going, berserker. Fuck''; he vented aloud while lightening a cigarette. ''I''ll try again.'' And he did, several times over the next few days until, by sheer persistence, he succeeded in getting through to a woman with a timid tone:


    ''Hi, I wanted to speak with Nancy Santos.''; Eske demanded, already feeling his bad temper wanting to run wild on his tongue.''


    ''Hi, I…''


    ''I don''t want anyone else. I need Nancy. N-A-N-C-Y, Nancy. Get me, Nancy. Please.''


    ''So, I was saying...''


    Eske interrupted again: ''I don''t care how amazing you are or who you will advise me with. I have no idea why nobody gives a fucking chance to that woman doing business with me, but get me fucking Nancy!''


    ''It''s me. I''m Nancy, Mr Schrodinger. I''m Nancy Santos.''


    The voice sounded familiar to Eske, though he ought to figure out where from. She also spoke too softly and hesitatingly for a real estate agent. ''Why didn''t you say so?''


    ''Oh, well, I didn''t want to interrupt you.''


    ''Oh, sorry, I have been trying for days, and your colleagues were doing everything in their power not to.''


    ''I''m still a temp. Nobody likes to give the commission to a temp. So this is my first time.''


    ''How old are you?''


    ''18,''; came the hesitant reply.


    ''Oh, okay. That would explain a lot, hum. I was recommended by a, huh,a friend to sell the apartment I have. Can you help with it?''


    ''Yes, certainly I can. I already have a buyer. I just need to fill it, and I will send you the contract to be signed,'' she replied.


    ''What? But how? I didn''t give any details or location or..., how can there be already a buyer?''


    There was silence after that question. Then the girl began to stammer: ''Well, um, I know because, uh, I don''t know if I''m supposed to tell you the company''s name.''


    ''What company?''


    ''They are called WTL Pi, and they sent me their offer a month ago. I kept it secret from anyone else. They were very peculiar. Well, frankly, they were odd and sort of fishy.''


    ''Fishy! What kind of way do you mean?''


    ''Like, they made the most absurd demands about what they needed, and I thought they were crazy, but since they paid the full price and more without haggling, I agreed to make all the arrangements, even though I knew they were weird.''


    ''What did they demand you?''


    ''A blood sample.''


    ''A blood sample?''; Eske looked for the folder Vihann gave him and went through all the files present. He looked for Nancy Santos, which he found in a couple of seconds. Her T-DNA was 0.3%. He searched for Vihann''s file, T-DNA, 0.2%, Robert, 0.1%, and Penny, 0.8%. ''Did they say anything else?''If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ''They offered me a new job in a new location that sounded really nice.''


    ''New location? Where?''


    ''Um, somewhere far away.''


    ''Where?''


    She hesitated once more, then whispered: ''Home.''


    She hung up on him without telling him when did he need to vacate the place.


    Eske scratched the first line of the list and started with the second one. He ought to understand the undertone of the second task. The house wasn''t that messy or unclean. It could have been better, not Nona perfect. She would clean, disinfect the place, and arrange each detail in the house as it was aligned to an imaginary pattern he never understood.


    But truth be told, her ways made any space she touched cleaner, warmer and bigger. And the way she performed the cleaning task, the order and the how was extremely relaxing. Eske couldn''t justify why he had stopped to do it Nona''s way, and then he remembered why. Because he moved out and had to follow other rules that never made sense to him, he would only come back to escape.


    His apartment stopped at a home to become a safety bunker, and that is what he was cleaning. A shelter from all his past mistakes. But now there are no more mistakes. And if there are, then it needs to be cleaned all over again, and so on.


    It made a lot of sense.


    Eske sniffed the apartment: ''Does it really smells like smoke? Could get one of those lemon candles, perhaps.''


    So far, Eske has scratched two tasks, and the third requested him to read the line and simply quick smoking. The word peppermint made him anxious, made him think about her, and he was trying so hard not to. Well, nobody told him he had to follow the numerical order of the instructions. Although if it was he to write this list, there are numbers for a reason.


    But by the logic, if it was him, and he still needed to work on the map, wouldn''t it make more sense to smoke the last cigarette as a sign of victory? No? He really liked to smoke. Damn it. Would she like it? He never smoked near her. He has no idea what she would think about it. She could taste anything from a timeline. For sure, she could taste smoke, shit. Would it be bad? Of course, it would. Everyone hates it.


    Eske looked at the bud, wholly consumed and dropped it in the ashtray. ''Well, seems that one was the last one''; Eske scratched the third line on the list but was never able to recall if he had indeed thrown out the pack of cigarettes.


    It was almost noon, and Eske''s stomach was demanding lunch, but he couldn''t take his eyes off the wall. There it was, Pi, 3.14159265358, just as though they, the numbers, had been talking about him all this time! Numbers from all the places, locations, all the hours, days, months, years, everything all together with no coherence. He shivered to think as kind of a mathematical ghost haunting the wall and needed to be turned into a map.


    A map that anyone could use to travel, to go home, to seek refuge. Turning time into something as fundamental as gravity instead of this abstract concept. Eske just needed to understand how these numbers would dance to their own tune.


    It was still hard for Eske to hear the numbers. Almost a year now, they had turned into intangible whispers. He kept staring at the wall, soothing his wrist where his name and Nona''s were written. He looked at a strange drawing she had made once that looked like a simple ladder.


    ''It''s a spiral. When I jump in pairs, I jump several curves. We are at the extremity of a fractal and need to go up. And at this point, we are jumping down. I can''t go up if I don''t jump the curves.''; Nona explained with her most soothing voice. ''I can draw it for you if you want to.''; She told him back then.


    Eske nodded to himself, trying to concentrate only on what he could see. Her drawings were two sticks and vertical lines between them. But she said it was a spiral. It doesn''t look like a spiral. How could she jump two curves? Doesn''t make sense. Eske stood out of the chair and paced forth and back in front of the wall. Nona also told him they were at the bottom of a fractal and she needed to jump up. That is why her knees hurt, but to hurt as they did, meant she was landing on extra weight, her own weight.


    The more time she put in, the further she got. If she was below time, she would be exhausted. It couldn''t be just a spiral as a two-dimensional plane. It would explain the fractal but not the jumps. If it was a cone, she could just run the line, and to get higher, only a curve would be necessary, but she was very specific about the two curves. And even more. What could be a spiral in a ladder?


    Eske was rubbing his wrist. He was feeling a hitch. He looked at his and saw the ramification of his blue veins along his arm. ''Fuck.''; who was the one who said everything happens for a reason, which is a fancy word to explain that even chaos has a pattern. Everything is made of numbers, even humans.


    What Nona wanted to draw was a pair of strands that were held tightly together. Two long strands coil around each other in the shape of a double helix. The nucleotide contains both a segment of the molecule''s backbone, which holds the chain together. And a nucleobase which interacts with the other DNA strand in the helix. A biopolymer comprising multiple linked nucleotides.


    Time was made as anything else in the whole universe, with DNA, its own. There it was. Now all he needed to do was to start naming the unnamed lines. He could start by when he was, but how could he know? That was Nona''s part. And she wasn''t here. He felt utterly lost without her.