The student’s eyes narrow but she continues. “When expanded and considered at length, it will point to a specific kind of datum related to human social experience. I would call this scaffold a ‘sophism,’ which is to say, a deliberately erroneous argument. This scaffold consists of events of looking and thinking and, eventually, walking. It is produced via the medium of a room. It is also produced through the medium of others. The scaffold, once unfolded, is a piece of persuasion. It suggests that information in human social life is mostly generated not through deception or confession but rather (and ironically) through the act of recognizing that other people do not know what you also do not know.”

Now everyone in the room is staring at the student. The writing teacher realizes that it is possible that she has never spoken in class before.

“But I can poke holes in this sophism. It’s not very hard to do. Most fucked-up and ersatz of all is the warden, who is in fact unable to assign any combination of dots other than the three white dots, if he values the notion of a fair game. In distributing three dots of the same color, the warden renders the puzzle equally challenging, which is to say, equally time consuming but artificially so, for all three contestants. Had he distributed the dots differently, for example at random handing out two black dots and one white dot, the wearer of the white dot would have been the instant winner. This is similarly true for a situation in which one black dot is present, for its wearer would be at an immediate temporal disadvantage in the reasoning process. Any scenario the three wearers of dots could contemplate other than the one that they in fact encounter is an impossibility, given the need for a game. This has nothing to do with real life. Simply put, a warden who behaves differently cannot exist within the game. Therefore, there was also, ironically, never a game, never a contest here, and never a warden with the will to choose. I knew the solution even before the dots were distributed, which is, by the way, the real test of logic.”

No one says anything.

The writing teacher looks down at his watch. He looks up again and lets everyone know that the class has ended.

All semester long the writing teacher waits to see the story to which he has, or so he believes, supplied the beginning. He reads other stories, but the student who said she did not know how to begin her story never hands anything in.

The semester ends.

The day before winter break, the writing teacher sees the student in the hallway of the building in which his class is held and decides that he will approach her.