I looked at her Nike sneakers. “Two of them,” I said.

“Hello, Trigo,” she said.

Trigo spoke.

Eigen attempted a bark herself.

“Beautiful day,” I said, noticing as I spoke that the sky was overcast and everything was gray.

“I suppose it is,” she said. “Why are you so happy? I ask because you seem happy. I’d like to experience happiness.”

“I don’t think I’m ever happy, to tell the truth,” I said. “Not really sad ever, but not happy.”

“Well, you seem happy.”

“Who knows, maybe I am,” I said. “I wouldn’t know what it feels like. Trigo, now he’s happy.”

Trigo spoke.

Eigen Vector stroked his fat, flat face with the back of her hand. “Soft. So very soft. Fat face.”

“He’s happy because he still has one leg left.”

“I would like my life to be symmetric,” Eigen said. “Symmetrical? But I can’t seem to make it equal its own transpose.”

“Was that an attempt at humor, Professor Vector?”

“What do you think?”

“Nice.”

“Kind of you to say so. But you do seem pleased about something.”

I nodded. “There is a distinction to be made there, you’re right, between being pleased and being happy. One is existential, though I don’t know which one.” We were silent briefly. “I just received a grant that I hope leads to nothing.”

“Grants are good.”

I nodded in agreement.

“It’s raining, you know,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you ever eat lunch?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Me, too. Almost every day. About the same time every day.” Eigen scratched Trigo’s face again. “So soft. Fat.”

I mentioned earlier, at least I believe I mentioned it, the primordial elements, the seeds of everything; however, this is all, again, question begging. Question begging is a rhetorical concept that has lost purchase in the culture. Poorly educated newscasters, sportscasters, and politicians, pardon my triple redundancy, have come to use the phrase “to beg the question” to mean “to raise a question.” To replace the age-old title of the concept with the descriptive “to assume a conclusion” is to at once diminish the value of the rhetorical device and to give in to a general and profound attenuation of cultural intelligence. You will pardon my indulgent aside. It, in fact, comes from nowhere, from nothing. Back to begging the cosmological question. The notion is that the Biggest Bang resulted from quantum fluctuations as the universe came into what we call existence, from a nothing we know nothing about. As beautiful as a mathematical model is, as enchanting as a logical proof might prove to be, these are mere ideas, ether, vapor. My understanding of nothing requires that it first be acknowledged that the acceptance of nothing is more than a philosophical and mathematical adoption of that very useful number zero. The Heisenberg principle is concerned not so much with the location of electrons but with the whereabouts of nothing, those gaps where the electrons are not. And the idea of that empty space as metastable vacuum, Hawking and Kaku always wanted things both ways, which isn’t even question begging but a failure of terminal regress. I do not want things both ways; nothing is not something, is not the absence of something, but is nothing. Zero might serve occasionally as a numerical placeholder, but nothing does not. Though nothing might be, tautologically, not anything, it is also not “not anything.” It is supposed that nothing comes from nothing, which is to say that nothing yields nothing, which yields nothing, which yields not anything but nothing, blah, blah, yak. Infinity might be boring, but it is profoundly inescapable and, surprisingly, rude. I will spare you and myself any lengthy discussion of zero, as in the face of nothing zero is actually nothing, though neither is it anything to sneeze at.