“But Quincy?” Eigen asked.

“Nothing,” Sill said.

“Is Quincy gone?”

“Is what gone? There is nothing there. There was always nothing there. That’s the real beauty of this weapon. The resultant destruction is always already there.”

Farnsworth K. Farnsworth slapped Hotswath Bajaj a high five and said, “Damn it, I don’t understand it, but I love it. Don’t you love it, Hotswath?”

“I love it.”

“Let’s go to my house and have a drink,” Shilling said.

Sill signaled to his men. “Take his dog. He won’t try to disappear if we have his mutt tucked away.”

The larger of my attackers from the canal reached for Trigo in the bag I had set down next to Eigen’s feet. I raced for it, but he got there first. He waved a finger in my face and smiled evilly.

“Gentlemen,” Sill said.

I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head and the world went black.

Humpty Dumpty’s extreme practice

1

It was certainly not the case that Descartes or Berkeley or Husserl would have actually considered an empirical adaptation of the relationship with the physical world or with scientific truth or the quality of an emotion as the premise of a syllogism. Berkeley would always step out of the way of the oncoming carriage. Philosophical conviction seldom leads to real-world modification. I could tell myself that the pain was merely reportage from my body that some trauma had occurred and therefore I could talk myself out of the sensation, but that was all bullshit. My head hurt like hell, even though I knew I was dreaming and not awake. I was lost in the dream without my guide. Where was my Trigo? I entered the dream with the knowledge that the house I was inside possessed the floor plan of that very house. The house was a drawing of itself, with furniture placed where the furniture would be placed in the real house, with doors that opened and closed just like the real doors of the real house. But I was in the floor plan of that house and so I assumed I was safe. I wandered through it, wondering where one might hide a dog. Many versions of reality occur at once, I was told by a quantum physicist. I just stared at him and said, “Could you repeat that? I wasn’t listening.”

I was wandering the floor plan of the vice president’s residence at One Observatory Circle. As I passed from the pantry kitchen to the dining room, I recalled that nothing had happened to Quincy, Massachusetts. I was both relieved and horrified. Because though nothing had happened there, nothing had happened there and what was left was nothing. More than ninety thousand people were up to nothing, had gone to nothing, had been affected by nothing and were left with nothing and there was nothing to do or say. And it was not a matter of perspective. Any perspectival rendering, by logic, whim, or design, required a vector of sorts, even if static.