Maggie wrote in her notebook, a tan, extralong spiral notebook. She used an expensive mechanical pencil.

“Stop taking notes,” I said. “Don’t take notes. That goes for all of you. No notes. Never notes.”

“Why not?” Maggie asked.

I smiled at her. “Go ahead, note away. Or not,” I said. “I like that you didn’t just follow my instruction blindly. Why not? is the correct response. Take notes or don’t take notes. Believe me or don’t believe me. Don’t listen to me, for everything I say is either true or false. A kind of liar’s paradox, I suppose, but not really. Let me put a more or less philosophical question to you. What is the function of identity?”

“Are you asking if identity is a function?” Maggie asked.

“Sure. Why not? Do you have an answer?”

“No.”

“That’s a little disappointing. I thought you might. What if I said the function of identity is recurrence in discourse? What we want is to find some kind of sameness of reference,” I said.

“I don’t get it,” Sam said.

“Neither do I,” I said. “Let’s focus on the fact that identification and identity have nothing to do with each other. The latter is not dependent on the former. You can identify nothing and have no knowledge of nothing.”

“You know you sound crazy,” Sam said. “It always comes back to nothing with you? Always nothing.”

“Yes, I do sound crazy,” I said. “Thank you, Sam. You may have identified the problem. My problem. You may have put a concrete finger on a particularly important abstraction and that’s not easy to do.”

Sam laughed.

“Thank you, Sam,” I said.

The lie is the arithmetical axiom that for any x in the world x equals x. It is only faith that allows this as irrefutable truth. Even if I define x as that thing that occupies a particular position in space at a particular position in time. I was fairly certain that man occupying a particular position in space outside my office building was John Sill and so I addressed him that way.

“Hello, Mr. Sill,” I said.

“Please, it’s John. We’re partners, so to speak.”

“I thought I was working for you.”

“Well, yes, technically.”

He was well dressed. In my memory of him in the coffee shop he was not quite disheveled, but he was not a natty dresser. Now here he was, tailored iron-gray suit, thin maroon tie, a maroon handkerchief peeking out from his breast pocket. His oxblood wing tips gleamed. He looked like a supervillain or, worse, an upper-crust English spy, an openly promiscuous and functionally alcoholic heterosexual with an on-and-off-again messiah complex. It was the shoes, the way they were tied.

“Why are you staring at my shoes?” Sill asked.

“Your laces. I am thinking of de Broglie’s waves. More specifically, Schrödinger’s equation.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“Everything is about motion and momentum.”

“Did someone mention momentum?” This from Eigen Vector. She seemed to appear from nowhere. Her shoes did not match.