The brutal fact was that she was not next door, at the moment, and although he was in an allegedly safe setting, his mind seemed hell-bent on making him feel even more threatened than ever by a primitive terror of his surroundings. Added to the incomprehensibility of motion that had afflicted him in the car, now that he was at rest, he was being persecuted by the incomprehensibility of space. When an object, like the steel table in front of him, occupied a space, did the space get annihilated by the solidity of the mass? Or was it just denser space? Or was it a dented space, in the way that all massive objects dent the fabric of space-time. The more massive they are the deeper the hole they make, ultimately a black hole, sucking everything into itself. But the mass was itself mainly made up of space, everybody knew that. On the scale where the nucleus of the atom was the size of a marble, the electron was the width of a human hair two miles away from the marble, but matter must be irreducibly dense, at least in the nucleus itself, and so what happened to space in that place? If matter deleted space by moving into it, did the space get reborn when matter moved out again? Was space popping in and out of existence, as matter occupied it and then set it free? He tapped Saul’s name on the screen of his phone, but the call went straight to voicemail.