She viewed them as the harshest strokes devised by the Romans: angled lines gashed into stone with a minimal number of blows, figures designed with all of the elegance offered by a mallet pounding on a chisel. The three strokes that formed the number cast before her commanded it to exist without subtlety, IV. On none of her medical charts, records or other documents had she seen the current stage of her cancer represented by the numeral 4.
      Stationed in the white-walled room, she wondered about the experts who had decided the crude markings of archaic tally sticks offered the most fitting symbol to denote the fourth level of such a brutal, ruining beast. They must have concluded that the slender Hindu-Arabic lines and curves gracing so much of modern western civilization weren't up to the task.
      Poisons dripped into her body while she sat in a padded chair. Words sharing Greek and Latin origins roiled through her mind and tattooed themselves onto her cells: Metastatic. Metastasis. What root should she use to define each term, to make sense of their demands for submission? To stand across? To move over? She decided upon "beyond rest."
      Supplementing the linguistic puzzle was the fact that so much of her treatment required an infusion from another representation of the Roman four, this one embracing the initial letters directly from the bloodthirsty Latin phrase intra venous. She recalled the tetraphobia of the Chinese. Wasn't four their most unlucky number, the very sound of its name a homophone for death? She saw Roman fours everywhere, and she was all too aware she would be offered no future access to a Stage V. She knew where that downward pointing caret led, and the solitude of the I missing before it remained as distinct as Martin Buber's.
      Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, hormonal therapy... therapeia by its definition promised curing and healing, but for her there was to be none. It added to her frustration that entire vocabularies, beyond their individual words, now failed to suffice.
      Trained to analyze idioms from multiple perspectives, she was experiencing the unforeseen result of a lifetime spent studying ancient languages and ethnologies. Assessing the symbols on the equipment in the treatment room, she reweighed the values of Aegean and Attic numerals and tossed them aside for their lost isopsephy. Her reckoning now forced to focus on numbers that moved beyond counting, she totaled her teachers and her students, and factored her husband and daughter into an equation that kept its unknown variable so well-protected no "golden ratio" could admit to a solution.