“Eigen Vector, this is John Sill.”

“Enchanté.” Sill bowed slightly, but dramatically, and seemed to click his heels without moving his feet.

I was surprised, if not shocked, that Eigen appeared taken with either his appearance or his manner, or both. Not that I was encouraging anything, but I felt compelled to offer some kind of explanation for his presence. “Mr. Sill is funding my research,” I said, a strange thing for a mathematician to say, as there is seldom any monetary reward.

“I see,” Eigen said.

“Mr. Sill is a billionaire,” I said, not impressed with the fact myself, but merely offering what I thought was a useful descriptor.

“It’s John,” he said. “Are you a mathematician, also?”

“I’m a differential topologist.”

“I’m certain I won’t understand a single word you’ll say to me, but I insist on listening to you speak. Just meeting you, I suspect that you, too, could prove useful to me.”

It was clear to me that Eigen was likewise understanding nothing that Sill was saying. It was a conversation that promised to be amusing, but of little or no interest to me. “I have to get home to Trigo,” I said.

“Oh, Trigo,” Eigen sighed.

“Trigo?” Sill asked.

“My dog. I’ll be going now.” I stopped. “Wait, John, did you want something?” I asked.

“It can wait.” He was paying attention to Eigen.

I wandered back through campus toward home, contemplating very briefly Zorn’s lemma, stopping because it was not only boring, depending as it did on the trivial ring having the multiplicative unit one, but also incomprehensible. I didn’t understand a word of it, a symbol of it, a function of it, especially a function of it. What was the damn thing for? That thinking sent me spiraling the way I always did, wondering what I was doing with my finite, but unknown, number of days of life, realizing that I was a fraud, that I could talk to my colleagues for hours about things I simply didn’t understand, that I could fill a board with a proof that might make them ooh and aah, but had no meaning, no truth, no purpose. And the more wrong the noodling was, the more impressed they were. I was a charlatan. I knew nothing. But given that was my chosen topic, I was a successful fraud, a real, fake expert, an expert fake, a fake with real expertise, an ostensive definition of my subject, an object lesson for myself, a pure construction, and so, because irony is the air I breathe, a real-world example of Zorn’s lemma applied.

I was well past the businesses on Hope Street and about to make my turn toward my house on Camp Street when someone called me. “Professor Kitu!” It was Sam. “May I talk to you?”

“You are,” I said.

“Yeah, right. I mean, sit down someplace and talk.”

“Okay. I’m just on my way to feed my dog.” Sam walked with me. “This is the way to my house.”