“Wala, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, I know. So am I.”

A distinction between names and other words

1

Eigen and I managed to get out of the hotel without seeing Gloria and I assumed without being seen by her. I was reminded that what we see is really all we know; everything else is induction, deduction, or simple guesswork. You drive by cattle in a pasture and you think brown cows and then you think further that at the very least they are brown on one side. But just a few strides west put us in view of several Sikh-appearing men. I turned us around and we walked toward a bridge. There was a steady stream of pedestrians and cars and so, dressed as we were, I thought we were fairly well camouflaged. The air was cool and I realized that in our haste we had forgotten a wrap for Eigen. I took off my suit coat and put it around her, a gesture that felt both necessary and correct and strangely intimate. At an ATM just blocks from the hotel I removed a sizable amount of cash from my account. Being close to the hotel didn’t give away much. Soon we were at the Foggy Bottom Metro station. We got on a blue line train and sat. We hadn’t spoken since we left the hotel.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m so stupid,” Eigen said.

“I don’t think anyone would say that,” I said. “How many people actually understand the Collatz conjecture?”

“That doesn’t mean anything. That’s just a game. I don’t know anything about”—she paused—“life.”

“Neither of us.”

“You came back for me,” she said.

“You’re my friend.”

“I don’t remember much of anything.”

“I think you were drugged.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’m going to try to get you back to Providence.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t know.” I remembered that I was still carrying the new phone that Sill had given me in the diner. I slipped it into the open tote bag off a woman who was exiting the train at the Smithsonian stop. “I don’t know,” I said, again. “Sill wants me for nothing, though I don’t know what that comes to. The government wants me because they’re afraid of Sill. I believe they are all dangerous.”

Trigo poked his head out of the bag. I gently stuffed him back inside. “I know, boy. You’re hungry.”

“This is crazy,” Eigen said, looking around.

“It’s no use looking around. If they see us, they see us. We’ll never recognize any of them. The government might want to shoot me on sight. At least that’s the way Sill made it sound.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to make America nothing again.” I looked up at the Metro system map. “We’ll get off here at L’Enfant Plaza and take the yellow line up to the red line to Union Station.”

“You’re very capable,” Eigen said.

“Don’t fool yourself. We’re just alike. We can calculate the cube roots of seven-digit numbers in our heads, but we can’t balance a checkbook. I’m even worse, I can understand that paradoxes are necessary for language to actually work in the world, but I can’t see a lie that is staring me in the face.”