Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone Page A

terrifying not because of any specific torture, but because it is eternal.
     
       
    The square root of seven results in a decimal that repeats randomly into infinity. The exact figure cannot be known, only a close approximation. Rounding a number to the nearest significant figure is a tool designed for the purpose of making measurements. The practicality of rounding is something my mind can fully embrace. No measurement is ever exact, of course.
     
       
    Seven is the largest prime number between zero and ten. Out of all the numbers, the very largest primes are unknown. Still, every year, the largest known prime is larger. Euclid proved the number of primes to be infinite, but the infinity of primes is slightly smaller than the infinity of the rest of the numbers. It is here, exactly at this point, that my ability to comprehend begins to fail.
     

    Although all the numbers follow each other in a predictable line, many unknown quantities exist.
     
       
    I do not know how long I have been clenching my teeth when I notice that I am clenching my teeth. My mind, apparently, has not been with my body. I wonder why, when I most want to, I cannot seem to keep my mind from my body.
     
       
    I no longer know who I am, or if I am in charge of myself.
     
       
    Experts do not know why some pain resolves and other pain becomes chronic. One theory is that the body begins to react to its own reaction, trapping itself in a cycle of its own pain response. This can go on indefinitely, twisting like the figure eight of infinity.
     
       
    My father tells me that when he broke his collarbone it didn’t hurt. I would like to believe this, but I am suspicious of my father’s assessment of his own pain.
     
       
    The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father’s, and he cannot feel mine. This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain.
    Several recent studies have suggested that women feel pain differently than men. Further studies have suggested that pain medications act differently on women than they do on men. I am suspicious of these studies, so favored by Newsweek , and so heaped upon waiting-room tables. I dislike the idea that our flesh is so essentially unique that it does not even register pain as a man’s flesh does — a fact that renders our bodies, again, objects of supreme mystery.
     
       
    But I am comforted, oddly, by the possibility that you cannot compare my pain to yours. And, for that reason, cannot prove it insignificant.
     
       
    The medical definition of pain specifies the “presence or potential of tissue damage.” Pain that does not signal tissue damage is not, technically, pain.
     
       
    “This is a pathology,” the doctor assured me when he informed me that there was no definitive cause of my pain, no effective treatment for it, and very probably no end to it. “This is not in your head.”
     
       
    It would not have occured to me to think that I was imagining the pain. But the longer the pain persisted, and the harder it became for me to imagine what it was like not to be in pain, the more seriously I considered the disturbing possibility that I was not, in fact, in pain.
     
       
    Another theory of chronic pain is that it is a faulty message sent by malfunctioning nerves. “For example,” the Mayo Clinic suggests, “your pain could be similar to the phantom pain some amputees feel in their amputated limbs.”
     
       
    I walked out of a lecture on chronic pain after too many repetitions of the phrase, “We have reason to believe that you are in pain, even if there is no physical evidence of your pain.” I had not realized that the fact that I believed myself to be in pain was not reason enough.
     
       
    We have reason to believe in infinity, but everything we know ends.
     

     
       
    “I have a very high pain threshold,” my mother mentions casually. This is undoubtedly true.
     
       
    I stand by uselessly and cover my ears as my mother,