“How are you supposed to control nothing?” Eigen asked.

“I don’t know. But I know nothing and this is not going to be easy. My fear is that anything can happen.”

“But nothing will, right?”

I looked at her and nodded.

“What’s the story with Gloria?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“She seems especially focused on you. She didn’t appear concerned with me at all. I’m not even sure she saw me.”

“I think she’s crazy. She keeps asking me if I want to have sex.”

“Oh.”

“I find it an odd question. It’s the have I don’t get. Does one have it? Or perform it? Do it? I’ve heard that. People don’t have tennis.”

“People have surgery,” she said.

“That’s true. One doesn’t have a test. One takes a test.”

“Do you think you should have sex with her?”

“Do you think that might benefit us?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

We sat quietly for a while. The plane hit another patch of turbulence.

“What should we do?” Eigen asked.

“Let’s think.”

And that’s what we did.

2

The most common of speakers of any language are capable of using nearly any word in a wide range of contexts and situations, employing varying meanings, with complete ownership, and can be understood. There is perhaps no confusion as profound as when one’s utterance means nothing to those who hear it. As when I say, “The world will never be the same because nothing is happening to it.” Nothing is changing. I say that now and it terrifies me. It was the fact that nothing never changed; but now that nothing has happened, nothing will never be the same. The distinction between negation and nothing is no small concern. What is the theater expression? There are no small concerns, only small concepts. Something like that. I had a colleague say to me of his ex-spouse, “I feel nothing for her.” To which I responded, “You should let her feel that for herself.” He thought I was brilliant, bragged me up and down as a genius regarding relationships. Later, he asked me how I had come to be so wise and I said, “Because nothing matters.” He thought I was being dismissive and walked away. Nothing matters.

The jet touched down early in the foggy morning. It seemed we were always landing in the morning. The landing strip here was private and adjacent to Sill’s Kentucky residence. I was fairly certain that there was no other home like it in Kentucky as we were driven toward it in a red Jeep. Gloria drove. I thought this person could drive anything. Cars, planes, submarines.

Eigen was frightened, but not more than I was. We held hands. That was new; however, it did feel strange or foreign.

The house was glass and steel, sprawling and yet somehow incorporated into the landscape. It didn’t look as if it had been built but instead had appeared, in spite of the materials and hard edges, to have grown there.