What do the physicists say about this?

Not much. Mostly they roll their eyes. They’re not Kantian sorts of guys. The problem with the unknowable absolute is that if you could actually say something about it it wouldnt be the unknowable absolute anymore. You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual. Bearing in mind that to claim reality for what is unknowable is already to speak in tongues. The trouble with the perfect and objective world—Kant’s or anybody’s—is that it is unknowable by definition. I love physics but I dont confuse it with absolute reality. It is our reality. Mathematical ideas have a considerable shelflife. Do they exist in the absolute? How is that possible? I said to myself. But then myself became another self. No more than right. It took the math with it. The idea. A long period of uncertainty. When I recohered I was someplace else. As if I had escaped my own light-cone. Into what used to be called the absolute elsewhere.

I dont understand.

I know. Me either. It’s just that my view was that you cant fetch something out of the absolute without fetching it out of the absolute. Without converting it into the phenomenological. By which it then becomes our property with our fingerprints all over it and the absolute is nowhere to be found. Now I’m not so sure.

Can we talk about the Kid?

Sure. What the fuck.

I’ve touched a nerve.

Not really. I just felt like being rude.

What does he look like?

He’s three feet two. He has an odd face. Odd look I guess you would say. No particular age. He has these flippers. He’s balding if not bald. He would weigh maybe fifty pounds. You’re smiling.

I was thinking about him stepping into Charon’s boat.

Yes. I’d thought about that. Dante doesnt think about it until he himself steps into the boat and feels it settle.

I didnt know that.

Yeah well. Sorry about the fuck.

We’ll live with it. How do you know that he’s three feet two?

I measured him.

He stood still for that?

No. I measured him the way Thales measured the Pyramids. I made a note of the length of his shadow on the carpet and compared it to the length of my own and the relative lengths of our shadows were equivalent to our respective heights.

Why did you want to know his exact height?

I think I just wanted to know if he had one.

What else?

He has no eyebrows. He looks a bit scarred. Maybe burnt. His skull is scarred. As if maybe he’d had an accident. Or a difficult birth. Whatever that might mean. He wears a sort of kimono. And he paces all the time. With his flippers behind his back. Sort of like an iceskater. He talks all the time and he uses idioms that I’m sure he doesnt understand. As if he’d found the language somewhere and wasnt all that sure what to do with it. In spite of that—or maybe because of it—he’ll sometimes say something quite striking. But he’s hardly a dream figure. He is coherent in every detail. He is perfect. He is a perfect person.