[Warning: This is a fever dream from my imagination at 5am. Reality not included.]
$1,729.63. That’s what the receipt said. I stared at it, mesmerized. The numbers seemed to rearrange themselves, forming impossible geometries, but after each blink they snapped back to $1,729.63.
Was it worth it? Let’s see.
The restaurant sat between the 27th and 28th floors of a building that shouldn’t exist. As we rode up in the elevator, gravity felt heavier, time slower. My watch ticked backwards, then forwards, then stopped altogether.
The menu twisted like a mobius strip. I ordered “Schrödinger’s Sushi” – somehow both raw and cooked. My friend got “Fibonacci Fettuccine” that kept multiplying on the plate.
We washed it down with “Klein Bottle Kombucha” that seemed to pour endlessly from a vessel with no discernible inside or outside.
The dessert was a “Mandelbrot Meringue” that fractaled across my tongue. As I swallowed the last bite, I felt my consciousness expand, touching the edges of the universe.
The bill came: $1,729.63.
Was it worth it? Hard to say. I left changed. Reality hasn’t looked the same since. Some nights, I still taste infinity on my tongue.
Note on the number: 1,729 is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number, the smallest number expressible as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways (1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³). In this story, I added 63 cents to make it more mundane.
S.J. Asher 
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