Max Cohen does not “wake up” in the profane human sense; his eyes open the way an equation reappears on a blackboard you forgot to erase, the chalk‑dust still present in the air, the cough still caught in the throat of the room. Morning does not arrive; iteration does. He is not greeted by sunlight, or Devi’s off‑screen kindness, or the comic stupidity of a radio jingle, but by a monologue he has already rehearsed into a creed: 

“Three things I know: mathematics is the language of nature; everything can be understood through numbers; if you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge.”--He imagines.

He does not “say” this; he incants it, a secularised Gayatrī quarried out of Euclidean marble and recast as neurosis. Each clause is less a proposition than a round fired point‑blank into the soft tissue of his own cortex. It is not a prayer for revelation; it is a consent form for crucifixion. I wake up—if this torsion of consciousness between nightmare and coffee can be granted so optimistic a verb—and say, with less grandeur and more phlegm, “I am running out of breath.” This is not pulmonary reportage. It is the lungs’ first attempt at metaphysics. I, too, recite, just without the dignity of integers: I am running out of breath means I am running out of volition to keep dragging this sack of atoms through another day of so‑called meaning. If this masterpiece was not in black and white I would have never watched this. I hate color. Max wakes and says, in his own dialect of the same despair, “I am running out of randomness.” My lack is metem-oxygen;[^1] his lack is noise. I was complaning this in my Who Will Bury the Dead God or The Outsider and both of us are confessing, in different costumes, that the world has become too legible, too tightly coiled, too eager to reveal itself as trap.

The apartment he inhabits is not “set design.” It is an exoskeleton of a cracked mind. To call it a room would be to pretend it has domesticity, softness, the possibility of rest. In truth it is a skull that forgot it was bone and decided to impersonate hardware. The walls throb with the low, animal hum of Euclid, his home‑built Leviathan, that metallic Shiva‑liṅga vibrating in the corner, not as symbol but as the literal axis mundi around which his days are organised. Cables crawl along the floor like intestinal vines, not merely carrying electricity but redistributing the man’s nervous system across plastic and copper. There is no plant because chlorophyll cannot be graphed. No photograph because memory implies texture. No curtains because curtains are a concession to the body’s wish not to be observed. Here there are only monitors and printouts and fluorescent migraine light, bleaching everything into the anaemic monochrome of an already‑ruined world. If it cannot be computed, it is amputated: sleep, as ineffable discontinuity; conversation, as semantic entropy; Devi’s pastries, as unnecessary sugar in an already hyperglycaemic cosmos. Even his own brain is treated not as an organ but as a provisional storage medium, destined sooner or later to become an external drive—meat converted to data, cortex to CSVs.

He think, perhaps. “Sol died a little when he stopped research on Pi, it wasn’t just the stroke. he just stopped caring.”

Nietzsche shouted about this man long before the cameras rolled, though he called him another name. Through Zarathustra’s split tongue he demanded: what happens to the creature who bows before an abstraction and calls it “truth”? “All joy wants eternity,” he wrote, but he also knew that obsession wants something even more obscene: exclusivity. Joy cries, “Repeat me,” yes, but allows interruptions. Obsession commands, “Repeat only me,” and brooks no rival. When Max stares at his spirals pinned like insects to the walls, when he traces the cold dance of prime numbers around the drain of infinity, when Euclid hisses out a 216‑digit string like an automated priest spewing a litany in a dead language, he is not merely “doing math.” He is officiating, alone in a basement chapel, a liturgy of Eternal Recurrence misread as solvable puzzle. The pattern cannot simply be glimpsed and respected; it must become the underpinning of everything, devouring contingency, abolishing the accidental, outlawing improvisation. He wants the universe to stop jazzing and play a single, fixed theme.

In the cheap backstage of his cosmology, the Greek gods lean on props and smoke. They have seen this production a thousand times, each with different costumes. Once upon an epoch, the over‑serious ape chased Delphic riddles and misprised hexameters, clinging to oracles the way Max clings to output. Once Apollo whispered metres and symmetries into the ears of tragedians; now he whispers “closed‑form solution” into the feverish inner monologue of a paranoid New Yorker. Dionysus, antlered and sticky with metaphysical blood, does not roar or cavort here; he sits in the corner of the frame, an unseen clinician in a ward of one. Max imagines himself an Apollonian acolyte—clarity, proportion, control. He does not see that he is already strapped to the table of the Dionysian clinic: his headaches are not incidental side‑effects but deliberate openings; his hallucinations of ants boiling out of the monitor are not “bugs” in the system but a commentary on his equations written in the only language he still understands: multiplication gone feral. My headache was not a headache it was a burial ground for God. 

And then—because theatrically this requires an escalation of pantheon—there is Kali. She is not named in the script because the script, like the West that wrote it, is terrified of saying her name without protective irony. But she is there, coiled in the gesture of the drill. The image of Max, sweating and broken, pressing steel to his own skull, is not an avant‑garde shock tactic; it is a late, diluted echo of a goddess who has always known what to do with heads. One sees her standing, as she has always stood, on the reclined chest of Śiva, tongue bright and obscene, garlanded with decapitated crania. That necklace is not jewellery; it is a phenomenological archive of thoughts that tried to freeze themselves into finality. Systems that refused to die, dogmas that insisted on being last word, philosophies that solidified like old blood. She wears them as both trophy and pedagogy: “This is what happens when you try to stabilise flux; this is how you look when you insist on not rotting.”

Max, being of a timid, modern caste, offers his own head pre‑emptively, before the goddess can reach down and pluck it off with mythic efficiency. His sacrifice is clumsy, DIY, a suburban yajña with no priest and no mantra, just a man, a tool, and a surplus of meaning. Yet the intention is recognisably ancient. He has glimpsed, through the pinhole of a 216‑digit sequence, a raw, unfiltered, unanthropomorphic pattern beneath his little obsessions: call it Shem ha‑meforash, call it market code, call it cosmic joke—the nomenclature is irrelevant. What matters is the voltage. He realises, far too late, that the architecture of his skull is not certified for this load. Spinoza, in a cleaner century, believed that to know Deus sive Natura would dilate the mind into blessedness, that adequate ideas would make of us small, luminous appendages of divine self‑contemplation. Max discovers that when God elects to speak in decimals to a primate, the mind does not bloom; it behaves like a cheap circuit board hit with industrial current. There is not enlightenment but smell: burning plastic, fried insulation, something acrid you cannot wash out of your clothes or your dreams.

But we should not flatter ourselves by pretending Max began as an exception. He began like those of us who have ever allowed a book, a theorem, a text to reorganise our viscera: he began with a hole. That is the common ancestor. Wilson’s Outsider felt a hole that did not merely sit but gazed. A perforation with an eye. Nietzsche experienced, somewhere between Basel and Turin, a rupture that split his nineteenth‑century sanity. Arjuna, on the field of Kurukṣetra, felt his bow hand liquefy under the weight of a cosmic rationale he did not request. The hole is indifferent to content. I had encounterd one in my Le Grey Bastion period too. It selects a language according to temperament, accident, and shelf. Max’s hole is numeric, mercilessly orthogonal. Mine is lexical, infested with nouns. Someone else’s might be erotic, theological, pharmacological. The structure, however, is invariant: an absence that insists. You do not go shopping for it; it colonises you, then teaches you to call this colonisation “vocation.”

Max believes the number will fill the hole. That is his inaugural error, and in this he is perfectly modern. We imagine that enough input—pages, data, prayers—will grout the gap. Nietzsche’s demon of recurrence, when he appears in that ugly little parable in The Gay Science, comes not with filler but with a chisel. “Imagine,” the demon hisses, “that you must live this same life again and again, down to every migraine, every ignored knock from Devi, every claustrophobic subway carriage where faces turn toward you like accusations, every Double that carries the de-existential forces, Can you bear this? Can you love this?” The demon does not offer closure; he offers expansion: the hole widened until it is indistinguishable from horizon. Max never reaches this question; he is too busy trying to escape the spiral by standing above it. He wants the pattern in order to weaponise it: to print money, to decode Torah, to prove to himself and his species that the cosmos is nothing more than a gigantic equation awaiting the arrival of a clever, courageously sleep‑deprived primate.

In Greek, hubris is not “confidence” but the grotesque attempt to step outside the chorus allotted to mortals and hijack the script. In Hindu myth, it is the ascetic who performs such ferocious tapas that the gods begin to sweat, afraid that the heat of his practice will destabilise the worlds. God sends Apsaras to de-lived their will. Max is ascetic in that sense, a tapasvin of data. His austerity is comprehensive: no friends, no dyed shirts, no festivals, no sex, no real food. No Apsaras. Pills instead of prasad, Go stones instead of Rudraksha beads, equations instead of mantras. His apartment is a grotesque, lopsided altar where he conducts a private sacrifice: feeding every living tissue of his life into Euclid’s composite throat in the hope that, like smoke from a properly tended fire, something like Truth will ascend and settle on his head.

The gods, who have an old sense of humour, oblige—but not in the way press releases understand “answered prayer.” They take him literally. The 216‑digit number arrives not as a gentle confirmation but as a mantra too long for the human tongue to wrap itself around without tearing. The Hasidim convene, pe’ot curling like parentheses, and declare: Shem ha‑meforash, at last. The corporates, all muted earth tones and hard lines, declare: predictive key, at last. Both are, in their way, correct, because what is godlike if not the capacity to make reality behave according to your desire? They circle Max like rival cults around a delirious oracle, not noticing that the first sacrifice is already on the floor, nose leaking, hands trembling, pupils blown wide in an attempt to accommodate a pattern his neurons cannot metabolise.

Nietzsche accused his priests of a particular cruelty: taking strength, naming it sin, and alchemising vitality into guilt. Here, in this neon temple, stands a new clergy. Not cassocked this time, but hoodie‑draped, spreadsheet‑fluent, ocular muscles honed by screens: quants, coders, pattern fetishists, BookTok alchemists of taste, Substack prophets of “Reality of Bestselling Books.” Their church smells not of incense but of ozone and overheated resistors. Their heresy is not fornication but remainder denial: the conviction that if you have enough data nothing will be left out, that consciousness is merely a poor interface over a cleaner, more real economy of algorithms. Max is the emblem on their stained‑glass: patron saint and cautionary tale. With his own skull he demonstrates the principle that a bounded consciousness attempting to chug an unbounded recursion will do what any glutted body does: purge. It will vomit understanding.

This is the intersection where Kali’s dance and Nietzsche’s laughter become indistinguishable. Both, in their unregistered way, say the same thing: “You wished to go beyond good and evil, beyond illusion, beyond story; beyond The Outsider, you forgot that beyond also means beyond you.” The cosmos is under no moral or aesthetic obligation to resize itself for our psychological comfort. The Upanishads murmur “Tat tvam asi”—that thou art—and we, raised on posters of serene sages, swoon at the non‑duality, the tenderness of atman folding into brahman like milk poured into milk. But the inverse of that equation is not a Hallmark card; it is ruthless: if you are That, then That is also every migraine that has ever turned your vision to static, vision to Double, every phalanx of ants boiling from a screen, every subway car turning as one head to glare at you, every shuddering Euclid, every moment in which the ability to spit out 255 × 183 evaporates from your tongue like a fever dream, and for the first time in decades that lapse does not register as failure but as something obscene and new: relief.

Spinoza, that geometrical saint, was not incorrect in his wager that understanding changes the vector of the soul. It can. There are indeed thresholds where clarity calms, where adequate ideas widen the channel through which reality can flow without smashing the banks. But there is another threshold, less tidy, where more understanding does not mean more serenity but structural compromise. The ancients, when they were not babbling or murdering each other, understood this with a caution moderns call “mystification.” Greek tragedy called it too much seeing—Oedipus, having mapped the pattern of his own life, no longer able to bear the sight of any light that might reflect that pattern back, tearing his eyes out not as punishment but as prophylactic. Hindu practice called it darśan: the act of beholding the deity’s form, knowing that unmediated exposure is hazardous work—hence veils, curtains, circumambulations, the elaborate choreography of partial revelation. You do not stare at Kālī’s face unprepared unless you wish to liquefy. Nietzsche’s version is shorter and less ceremonial: “The abyss looks back.” Max’s is cruelly literal: 216 digits printed on cheap paper.

In the end, he performs a gesture that, if one were still sentimental, might be called obscene purity. He chooses not to know. Not with the lazy shrug of “whatever,” but with the fanaticism of a man sawing off the limb that, left attached, will drag him back into the same war. He walks away from the Apollonian fantasy of perfect transparency because he has tasted it and found, in the afterburn on his palate, that the substance was never Apollonian at all but liquefied Dionysus: undiluted, acrid, too potent for a configuration of carbon that still secretly wants to be touched, fed, loved. He drills a small, imperfect circle into his own cranium—call it a Kali‑yantra improvised with bad tools—and lets the blood, warm and stubborn, overwash his theology, staining all his clean ideas rust.

When Devi’s niece (or whatever relation we assign to that small emissary of the ordinary) later asks him, “What’s 255 times 183?” the scene reads, on the surface, as gentle comedy: the once‑brilliant recluse, reduced, a savant turned simpleton, a brain rinsed clean. He smiles and says, “I don’t know,” and the audience exhales; we are meant to read “freedom.” But the ambiguity is the only honest thing left: Max has not been raptured into a higher clarity. He has merely stepped out of the court. The invisible tribunal that once indicted him with every pattern—“Look, a spiral, confess; look, a coincidence, explain; look, a flicker in the stock graph, predict, look, two sun, try to avoid it”—has adjourned without verdict. The universe has stopped howling at him in digits. It now hums, almost shyly, in pastry crumbs, in leaves, in the flabby stupidity of not knowing something a mediocre calculator app could answer in a heartbeat. He has not “escaped myth”; he has fallen back into it like a man slipping, finally, into an unspectacular river. The world reverts to its pre‑Euclid mode: opaque, inconsistent, sometimes boring, occasionally kind. And for a creature that almost overdosed on meaning, that opacity is the only digestible food.

Perhaps this is where Nietzsche, Kālī, and the faceless programmer‑gods of our century—those who build recommendation engines, bestseller lists, BookTok trend loops, Big Five funnels that “choke off the rest of our literature”—converge in a briefly lit triangle. The arrogance is not longing to know; that is the only decent impulse we have. The arrogance is insisting on knowing in such a way that exempts us from participation, as if “understanding” were a platform from which we could supervise the play without ever entering the stage. Max wanted to stand over the pattern and manipulate it like a puppeteer. The pattern, with the politeness of a guillotine, reminded him that he was always already one of the puppets. The circular absence in his skull is not an exit hatch to some clean, transcendental viewing room. It is an entrance—a tiny, bleeding vestibule through which the world can pour in without being filtered through a grid first.

We each have our Euclids. Some whir and blink. Some are simply piles of books insisting from the shelf. Some are habits, substances, faces we keep returning to, convinced that just one more iteration will finally explain the hole. Some are five conglomerates deciding which narratives get oxygen. Some are self‑help algorithms, some are Substack feeds, some are theoretical frameworks so airtight they suffocate anything breathing. The temptation is monotonously the same: if I just continue—reading, calculating, scrolling, conjuring, drilling—I will at last reach the sentence, the proof, the verse that sutures the gap and justifies the ache.

Pi mutters, in its grainy, headache‑inducing monochrome, a more indecent option: the hole is not a bug but the aperture of Being. It is not there to be filled but to ventilate. Close it with a number, and you do not become godlike; you become décor in Kālī’s necklace. You become a head on a string, swinging gently while the goddess dances, while Dionysus laughs, while Nietzsche shrugs, while some future, feverish reader, half‑blind from his own Euclid, sees your story flicker past and, for one second before pressing “Next,” feels an inexplicable, boring, human hesitation:

What if I let the pattern go, and just breathe? What if I let the Double go, and just close my eyes!