“I guess. If you say so,” I said. “Sometimes it’s exhausting.”

“Tell me, please, what good thing isn’t exhausting? Surfaces are where it’s at, as the kids say.”

“What kids?”

“You know, the proverbial ones, the television ones, that’s what they say. It’s cool, dope, stupid. You know. Anyway, think surfaces. Rational surfaces, Hirzebruch surfaces, hyperelliptic surfaces, nodal Picard modular, Campedelli, and algebraic surfaces. Remember, a surface by definition has no depth, only planar existence.”

“You’re making that up.”

“You bet your sweet non-Euclidean ass I’m making it up. I’m a dog. I can’t read. Unlike the world at large, my imagination is surface all the way to the very bottom. You can try to place a ruled surface on my projective line all you want, but that will get you nowhere. Heraclitus, there a clitus, everywhere a clitus.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Unlike rivers, one can in fact step in the same shit twice.” Trigo barked out a laugh. “We have about one day, three hours, and sixteen minutes before you need to know how to handle this situation. You have to stop Sill from accessing that complex projective plane orbiter. Impressed that I remember that?”

“Not particularly, but you’re right, of course. I have to be ready for everything, but especially ready for nothing. If I can be there and affirm nothing and so negate it, then Sill will have nothing, rather he will not have nothing, or, at least, less than he started with or more than he wants.”

“And Bingo was his name-o,” the dog sang. “Imagine that entity than which none less can be conceived. It is better to be nothing than to not exist. Therefore, accordingly, ergo, even hence, nothing is God and God is nothing.”

“You left out thus and consequently.”

“My bad.”

“Trigo, why I am I bothering to try to stop him?”

“It’s a pickle,” he said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s a pickle.” Trigo held a gherkin between the toes of his one paw. “It’s a pickle,” he said and ate it.

“Where did you get a pickle?”

“This is a dream, Wala.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Pickles are more square because pickles have no hair. You can eat them in the closet, you can eat them anywhere.”

We let that hang dreamily in the air for a bit.

“What if Sill is actually able to direct nothing at New York,” I said. “What if he negates the nation’s largest city?”

“More room for you and more room for me, a chicken in every pot, pigeons in the sea. Sorry, there’s nothing funny about that.”

“What are the odds?” I asked. “That’s a long way for nothing to travel. I mean, what if nothing gets in its way? And what if nothing doesn’t arrive?”

“Well, then nothing will happen.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

“Then it appears to me that you are prepared. You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

5

Morning came, as mornings come. If there was a lull in the squeaking and moaning and bartering, I slept right through it. Eigen and Trigo were still sleeping peacefully as I walked over to the window and looked down at the parking lot. Men walked swiftly, heads down, to their cars. A police cruiser drove through without stopping. I entertained for a second that they were looking for us. The feeling underscored my paranoia, as if my paranoia needed underscoring. Anyway, my feeling was not paranoia, as I was clearly not exhibiting any sort of attribution bias. There were in fact people following me and looking for me and desiring my company for nefarious or other reasons. Paranoia would have me think that Eigen had been allowed to escape with me so that they would know where I was. But of course that was certainly, patently, assuredly untrue. I turned to see her sleeping there with Trigo’s heavy head resting on her belly.