I heard about this story from this Math Fiction page. Published in December 2003 in the Fantasy and Science fiction Magazine, this story was too obscure to find a copy online. The descriptions I found gave me a basic idea of the short story, and I was very intrigued and I had to read it.
After attempting to purchase an online backissue from the magazine and being disappointed (they didn't sell digital back copies and I couldn't pay for international shipping), I decided to keep this artifact on the backburner for a while. A few months later, I brought it up to a friend of mine in America, and figured out that a physical copy was available on amazon.com (bezos mkl) and that he could bring it to me the next time he came home. I have been waiting for months to read this short story. I have spent over a year with this living in the back of my mind, and it has been carving itself a living space. There is no world where this story could live up to my anticipation, but I am glad that I will be able to read it. It has grown into a obsession over the last few months.
It has been a couple of weeks (months?) since I've read the story so my thoughts have had time to marinate and fade a little, but I find this story fascinating in many small ways.
The format of this story was something I wasn't used to. Published in a monthly sci-fi magazine among other stories, it had a very laid back tone. The narrator himself spends the story responding to his dream as if he knows that the story has no consequence beyond this month's publication. The story does not take itself seriously, and it first and foremost meant to be a comedic work. Here, I feel are the flaws of this approach. A lot of the jokes are very dates, with the narrator's bread and butter bit being "my wife is so hairy and boring". Although the story tries to make us believe that this comes from a place of affection for his wife, it comes of as a classic example of misogynistic boomer humour, an instance of the classic 'I hate my wife' archetype that usually fails to be funny to me.
The influences of mathematics to the story are light and surface level, truly, as if the world, like its narrator, was only married to a mathematician and not one itself. Whether or not intentional, it sells me the idea that the world the narrator finds himself temporarily trapped in is really just a figment of his mind, as the depth of the world's mathematical rigour cannot exceed that of his own understanding.
The story primarily is the exploration of a man's wine infused dream, as he reminisces about a wilder past, set in an even wilder, eldritch world. His wife, and the mathematics she represents, are just an anchor to the reality of his life, and the uncertainity of his safety in that world.
Beyond this, I don't have much to say. I am glad that I spent time in this quest, and this little artifact will remain with me, serving little purpose.