“It’s good to get out of the city,” I said. “I forget all this is out here sometimes.”

“No shit,” Kurt said, and pegged an old square of carpet moldering a few feet away. “Not that there’s any big difference between the forest and the city, really. You know what I mean? It’s all one huge thing now. Trees in the city, garbage in the forest. What’s the difference? You know?”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

I aimed for a glinting tuna fish can, and dinged it.

We smoked another bowl and talked for a while about art and politics and some of the old people we used to know, and eventually, as the beers stacked up, we got into more theoretical territory. I told Kurt about some pots I’d been throwing. Kurt told me about some of the night classes he had been taking down in Ashland, where he had worked on the campus grounds crew.

“It was all right,” he said. He was starting to slur, though he had not yet reached the wet incoherence of his final, clownish stages before passing out. “Some physics classes. But here’s the thing, man. I knew more than they did. All this quark and superstring shit. I know all about that. It makes sense, don’t get me wrong—I understand it. But that’s not the final answer.”

“You think you understand it?” I said.

“Basically,” he said. “It’s like this. Look. Sometimes things look like they don’t have any order. Just a bunch of stuff jumbled together. But then, from a different level, you realize it does have an order. It’s like climbing a mountain. See? You look around and just see a bunch of trees, bushes, rocks, pressing all around you, but then, you get up above the tree line and you see everything you just went through, and it all comes together. It has some kind of shape after all. Sometimes it takes a long time to get high enough to see it, but it’s there. It’s all about space and time, and how their rules change sometimes. It makes perfect sense to me.”

He had another example, about two mirrors traveling through space and a single atom moving back and forth between them, but he lost the point and couldn’t quite make sense of it in the end.

“So, anyway, I get it,” he said. “I get it on a fundamental level. The thing is, I have my own theory.” He held the BB gun in his lap, forgetting to pass it. Both of us were staring into the breathing coals of the fire.