[In this story] I introduce [the characters] Dett and Sheedy. Sheedy is a businessman and thinks only in those terms. Dett is a young man who is consumed by his own way of calculating probabilities (he does this, in part, because he likes betting at the racetrack). In order to put words into Dett's mouth that make sense given his very peculiar obsessions, I had to re-acquaint myself with a language I hadn't thought about in some time: mathematics. I should emphasize that Dett's way of making calculations is not rigourous. A math student reading the story would see this right away. But the point is that he thinks not in a literate language (like Sheedy), but in a numerate one. And Dett's way of expressing himself, to a large extent, defines who he is, how well he communicates with Sheedy, and what kinds of problems he is able or unable to solve. As I wrote the story, I enjoyed trying to “think” through Dett in his numerate way, even though I had a hard time doing so at school. In the process, I came to think that of all the languages I had researched for characters over the years, mathematics is very special. I would even go so far as to say that it is a precious language. It's difficult to learn and, as a result, it is rare and valuable. But it is also very powerful, and perhaps this interests me more. As I wrote Dett's story— even though he applied his numeracy in an unconventional way—he had the tools to solve many, many problems that Sheedy did not. And that fact, boiled right down, was the essence of my story.