Nokia Gematria – Dylan Hussey

June 16, 2026

The day he decided to die was the happiest day of his life. All thirty-three years of it. A sense of profound vindication washed over him like warm white water as he teetered on the high-rise lip. This world, exactly as I said it was. What a glorious end. And as he watched the sheet fall and flutter in the wind, there were only two words left in his head. Very good.

In preparation for the plunge, he’d brooded. How to prepare for the great whatever-next: a Salve Regina, or just zen-legs? Drifting through his flat, he’d tried his best to ferret it out, since there surely had to be some settling thing. He lit a joss stick on the stove, cleansed the bathtub of groin fluff, dusted a triptych of blue nudes above his bed. The baobab was fed, pothos watered.

But in the end it was the spirit cached away in the back of a kitchen cupboard that crooned to him the loudest. Toothsomely, in fact. He ran a thumb across the punt. Three clean years undone with the snapping of a red cap. Ice cubes crackled beneath the weight of auburn water. And his belly was a balefire. Hello there, I’ve missed you.

The next morning hurt. He popped the pills out of their blisters but quickly reassessed. Maybe it’s brave to die with a migraine. He surveyed the damage; his flat was a wreck. Paper clumps littered the parquet, a single sheet lay on the desk. This must be my swansong, then. A murky recollection of thought forming, of sucking on a pen cap. His eyes flitted over the text. Deliberate, albeit childish, script. Well, at least it’s not a poem.

He read it once. He read it twice. And he read it again. It wasn’t until the fourth time through that it dawned on him. Dumbstruck. The note spoke. A few simple calculations, and its meaning was unveiled. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it is. His jowls quivered. He muttered pellucid repeatedly, and then his voice swelled. Brandishing the note above his glabrous head, he stomped. Cackled in exultation, roared weep — and did just that — read it!

***

His cipher was simple. Take the keypad of an old phone. Some Nokia model. A brick. There are three rows of numbers: 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and 7 to 9. Each number corresponds to a cluster of letters. 2: A to C; 3: D to F; 4: G to I; and so on. To generate a letter, a key must be pressed a certain number of times. Take the word body. That would be 2 twice, 6 three times, 3 once, and 9 three times.

From there the word is converted into a sequence. Body again. Having generated the letter B by pressing the number 2 twice, you arrive at 22. For O, 666; D, 3; and Y, 999. Then it’s simply a matter of calculating the root. In the case of body, that means: 2 + 2 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 3 + 9 + 9 + 9. A total of 52. And then, with a final reduction (5 + 2), the number 7 is generated. And so, body = 7.

Are you with me? He placed his book onto the glass-top table and smoothed its pages flat. He was nine years old when he wrote the first word. Back then, his journal was A5-sized and had rhinoceroses on the cover. And here’s the index, see? All arranged by number.

It was curiosity initially. He’d pass an adshel or graffiti patch and stop to calculate each word’s value. But soon enough his intrigue soured. When he felt the urge, he couldn’t skip over any word that called on him to calculate it.

And it was at this point that he first noticed the narrative. Particular terms equate to particular values, obviously, and once I began to categorise them, the words with equal values that is, well, then it all just sort of clicked. The words were speaking to him; there was a subterranean textual realm that he had begun to unearth.

Chapel, temple. Earth, heart. Freedom, signal. Reduced to their primal form, the logic of these couplings became undeniable. Don’t you think?

Resisting the conclusion that her only son was mad, his mother had begged him to stop, to promise her that he’d put all the number business behind him. And so he did. For a whole month he resisted the urge to calculate and reduce. It was at the end of the month she died. Called in for a scan on the Monday, by the Sunday he was stood by a gurney eavesdropping her last rites.

That was on the evening of the 2nd. And do you know what else is a 2? He slowly closed the book and tied a band around it. Human. Angel. His face was briny. Magic. Night. His shrink offered a tissue across the glass table and he sneezed into it.

***

Therapy puttered out; he’d balked at the verdict of an idée fixe. It was evident to him that no one would listen. And yet, as the narrative unravelled, as he slowly deciphered that arcane force uniting all human enterprise and experience, it baffled him the way in which his selfhood seemed to be rapidly unspooling as well.

He’d quit his job as a cleaner (the reduction of martlet — the winged thing at the centre of his uniform’s insignia — and evil to 3 appalled him), and then as a porter (put off by ward and Gehenna both being 8s).

And when he was eventually fired from the florist’s on account of his ramblings about the pennywort and how it pertained to a recent spate of car bombings in Derry, he’d concluded, crestfallen, that the job market was maybe not for him.

From then on he all but locked himself away in his flat. Only ever left to gather provisions. And whilst being out in the world stupefied him, by framing it in such a way that he could don the front of a man on a mission (be it a gleaner or a marine), he allowed himself some slight distance from that polysemous terror, lurking and so very scupper-set.

Returning from his sorties, he’d leave the foodstuff in the kitchen, and in the front room decant the rest. Bourbon was a 2, and so he’d place a pair of bottles in the centre of the table, with a tumbler poised in front. Ale was a 5 and a requisite number of cans would encircle the liquor.

Lastly, the scratchcards: a heptad for the week. These formed an integral part of his rite.

Match the WINNING NUMBER to any of YOUR NUMBERS to win PRIZE. It was really only the winning number he needed. That would determine which digit to be on the lookout for during the rest of the day.

And then, pulling the lever on his recliner and opening his book to the relevant page, he’d watch the TV’s static supersede his reflection.

***
He realised early on how best to receive the communiqués. The cosmos were constantly speaking, but it was crucial to tune out the noise. He tried sex, and he then tried shopping. Neither proved fruitful. Cartoons and game shows left him giddy. The news, on the other hand, was apposite. A torrent of chatter for him to decipher: directives, proposals, insights.

Take for instance the shock disqualification of a Korean Olympic water polo team. Feeding this story through his system, he discovered that the U-bend beneath his sink was on the verge of bursting. And then there were the reports detailing the surge in GDP of a country in the Caucasus. That helped him locate the exact fuse in his flat that kept tripping.

And so needless to say, he was gladdened but in no way shocked the day he lucked out. For the whole week the news had been about nothing else.

‘Billionaire playboy-turned-philanthropist Auriel Voss set to launch his first shuttle Friday.’

He watched the pint-sized man lead the news crew around the site. His name reduced to a 7. On the appropriate page there were the words gladness and wealth. Serene, gold-rush. The camera panned across the aluminium ship in all its priapic glory. ‘Nullstar’ was blazoned in boldface across one side. Again, a reduction, a flipping of pages. 8. Crystal. Oceanic. Paper.

For the days preceding the launch, in what most would have considered purely fortuitous, each of his WINNING NUMBERS had alternated between 7s and 8s. He speculated on his blessing. Blessing: a 9. Winner, success, moonbeam.

On the morning of the launch he scratched away the foil from his PRIZE. And there we have it. A blessing indeed. He turned on the TV. The newsreader was ashen-faced. While exiting Earth’s atmosphere, Nullstar had suffered a systems failure and all six astronauts on board had perished. 6s: Hades. Firestorm.

The reporters flooded the launch site, trying to get a comment on the catastrophe from Voss. Should’ve known, really, what with a name like that. 7s again: haughty, freak. Chuckling to himself, he dropped a handful of ice cubes into his glass.

***

The fissure occurred in January. He’d just turned thirty-one. He began receiving messages of a momentous tenor and their frequency and intensity were unmatched. Yet what struck him the strangest was how downright vague they were; a constant oscillation between forewarning and crypticity.

At the outset, there were many 3s. He took this to be an exposition of sorts, but could be in no way certain. Axis, omen, echo, etc. Code appeared often, as did prelude, and ripple. They were, however, completely untethered, dovetailing into no grander scheme.

Suddenly one morning there was a deluge of 7s. Tactics, onslaught, fuse. The rising action, evidently, yes, but rising why and to where? Focus occurred again and again. Discipline. Gather.

Then soon after the 6s started. Among them evacuation, ouster, crash. He envisioned a global crisis the likes of which the world had never seen. Millions in exodus. Bugs the size of bibles. A shadow usurping the sun.

And at this juncture he could say with conviction that only two things were true. Firstly, he was being balanced on a blade’s spine. A cataclysm loomed. Secondly, he was, without a shadow of a doubt, drinking himself crypt-ward. His organs throbbed and his skin was sallow; he woke most mornings having pissed the bed.

But he didn’t actually want to die. (Not just yet.) Not until, well, not until I’ve done something, not until I’ve warned someone, not until it’s clear, not until I’m told what to do, not until the final missive, not until the end, not until I know what the hell is going on, not until it’s all unscrambled and explained, not until I can finally make sense of, well, of anything.

So one morning, just like that, he set it into motion. Clockwise his libations went. So long. He gritted his teeth as the dregs gurgled down the sink.

***
‘Initial report… Witness described… Officials announce… Travel delays… Work continues… Updated figures… General progress… Shares rose…’

To the uninitiated, this was simply surface-level stuff to fill dead air. But he felt in his marrow the staggering factuality of it. The threat level was compounding, and so he prepared as best as he could. A bag was packed with the essentials: tinned pulses, a floss pot, knives. Calisthenics for when he could prise himself away from the screen: star jumps, push-ups, sprinting (blisteringly) on the spot.

But in spite of it all, he barely slept. He’d lay awake nightly, wild-eyed, as a succession of Public Information Films played back-to-back in his head. Geriatrics squatting in doorways; pupils cowering in the cubbies of kneehole desks.

For two long months then the messages were laden with 1s.

THE SIGNAL IS FIXED. A DIRECTIVE IS PRESENT.

For the next two, 3s.

YOU WILL NOTICE IT SOON. THE SIGNS ARE FORMING.

The following two, 5s.

IT IS NEARING RESOLUTION. YOU WILL NOT HAVE LONG TO DECIDE.

And then, 7s.

YOUR RESPONSE WILL FEEL AUTOMATIC. IT WILL FEEL OBVIOUS IN THE BODY.

Then 9s.

THIS WAS ALWAYS MOVING TOWARDS CLARITY. ALL PATHS ARE CONVERGING NOW.

The final two were a lattice of tocsins. Pure action stations, people.

He would march about his flat, knocking into the towers of notebooks that had come to monopolise the space. He was waiting for the word, for the green light to go. Any day now. Any day now.

Any day.

***

With that the year ended and another took its place. All the while he presumed every firecracker’s clap was it. The start. Here, finally; doomsday’s opening salvo. Yet the celebrations fizzled out and dawn came up with its usual wintry palette. The world was still there. And it was still there the following day. And the one after that.

Soon it became impossible to deny. He looked, and they were not there. To the dead air, motes clung. The cosmos had gone dark. There were no more messages.

It felt almost cruel, March. Sixty-odd days of nothing. He’d thought he knew where it was heading. The arc was apparent, and he was afloat. Each omen, every intercalation, all the digressions, had been written down and cross-referenced in his books. There was a denouement in the air, he could taste it. A final reckoning. The gist.

But now there was no longer a narrative he could grasp. Calculations, reductions; he’d continually draw a blank. A succession of floating digits with zero significance or story. The payoff, it seemed, had been utterly obliterated.

And after that it was a slow, slow slicing. Oblivion by paper cut. Impossible to nail it to any one thing. He was obviously crippled by the let-down. Reduced to a limp balloon of a man. And a keening desolation gnawed him. He realised that, without the buttress of language, the comfort of the liturgy, and no longer being word-bound, his life had been truly squandered.

So when the nights began to elongate and Christmas loomed once again, the solution took its final form with a dire flourish. He knew about the roof hatch; it seemed a feasible conclusion. Belly-flopping his woes away. Irrevocable to boot.

And so he prepared. Readied himself. Ordered his meagre affairs. Weighed up praying, deliberated deities, but drank himself rickety instead. And eventually, having almost drained the bottle and slumped down at his desk, it seemed apt to begin putting parting words to paper.

***

After a fifth read-through, he calmed marginally and nudged a small wooden chock into the doorframe. Through the gap: a sight-line across the hallway to the living room. He snickered. The edge of his notebook, left open on his desk, rippled slightly in the draught.

As he made his way up the stairs, he reduced each word to its primal form, unfurled its analogous terms, and placed them in a row, one in front of the other, in that warm space just behind his eyes. Persist. Confetti. Plough.

Flicking the first word into the second, he watched them topple in succession until there was only one left standing. He knew this word meant something like perennial.

As he climbed the penultimate flight, a floorboard creaked behind a neighbour’s door. He went right up to the peephole and smiled. Considered his body misshapen through the lens. All concave. Another sentence popped into his head, and after a reduction, he stacked up neatly a new row of words. Stomach. Effulgence. Jewel.

They clattered. The last word left was kindred to cherish.

Teetering with one foot on the bannister, he unbolted the hatch and pulled himself through. Up on the roof, the air felt ice-bright. Well, that’s nice. I’ve never done this before. Every day, do one thing that scares you. On the street below, hawking up small soot clouds, the traffic navigated junctions and bends; the silvery path of a railway meandered off towards the sticks.

It was blue all around him.

For the final time he took the note out of his pocket and held it up to the sky. The ending, admittedly, had been somewhat hackneyed. A 5: farewell (followed by an egregious exclamation mark). He checked the date on his watch. And there we have it.

More 5s: driftwood, aurum, gleam. Approaching the edge, he let go of the note. The Tippex shone in the sun. There was only one word left on the paper now. And there were two words left in his head.