‘Hi, Saul, I know it’s late, but I’m worried about some things I need you to clear up for me. Like, you know the way we think the house is the walls and the roof,’ said Hunter, ‘but we live in the space contained by the walls and roof – I have a Rachel Whiteread: she solidifies the empty space and deletes the containers, she plays with all that – and in this Tˉohaku, in front of me in the den, the branch is like the nearby wall of a house and those cloudy mountaintops in the distance are the broken parapets that mark the outer edge, and in between them is the empty space that is the true subject of the painting. But, without getting into art, just staying with the physics, and without getting into the quantum vacuum that’s fizzing with potential, or the mind-fuck of non-locality, or not being certain where the particle is located, or leptons and the whole subatomic thing, or neutrinos shooting through the Earth, totally unimpressed by the fields or charges or density, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, forgetting all of that, and sticking with this,’ said Hunter, leaning forward and holding the phone next to his fist as he thumped the steel table, ‘can you tell me exactly what the relationship is between matter and space? Is this a fucking solid object, Saul? Call me back! Give me a clear answer, because if physics doesn’t have clarity about the most basic concepts that it deploys, maybe I should … I mean, okay, so under ordinary conditions we can treat a tightly bound lattice of atoms as solid, as having extension and impenetrability: steel can crash into space, but not the other way around, right? So, what I want to know, what I need to know, is this: when they put this steel table into this room, what happened to the space that used to be in the space that the steel table is now in. I mean …’ Hunter broke off abruptly.

‘Saul? Saul? My muscles are cramping. This is something that sometimes happens. Saul? Fuck. Saul?’