An Excerpt from THE PRUMONT METHOD by Trevor J. Houser

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1

When did I predict my first mass shooting?

It was late winter.

Summerville, South Carolina.

Only I had the wrong church. It was Baptist, not Presbyterian. This was just after my divorce and right before I quit my job in healthcare marketing. I was knee-deep in the Method at this point.

My roommates were Archimedes, Gauss, and Poisson.

Is it weird to say a bunch of famous dead mathematicians are your roommates?

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It only took me five days. The Method, that is. Which is actually lightning fast to finish something of this magnitude. I mean, it’s only thirty or forty-odd pages, which really isn’t that much when you think about it.

The Abel-Ruffini theorem spans five-hundred pages.

Almgren’s regularity theorem is almost a thousand.

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For some reason, I drove there. To Summerville, that is. The very next day, in fact. It sounds silly, but the numbers came alive there, so to say. I felt I should pay my respects or bear witness in some way.

I guess in the excitement, I’d forgotten to bring a change of clothes. I just jumped in the car and drove south. Not that I was excited about all the death and tragedy, obviously. But I felt like my life suddenly had meaning in a way I’d never experienced before. Like when veterans say they never felt more alive than during a firefight. It’s bloody and horrible and at the same time it feels like windsailing the Drake Passage in the nude.

Or something like that.

When I got to the church, I walked up to the impromptu street memorial as if walking to a grave.

There were flowers and balloons and a big sign that read, “Don’t leave us, Jesus.”

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