He handed me the barn cat that had seven toes per paw. The cat hunkered against my chest. “I want to tell you about how there’s no such thing as the definite self. Take our old tractor,” he said. “Every bit of the engine has gradually been replaced. Is the engine still itself? Or when was the point that the engine-self gave over to its new inhabitant?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Each person seems to have separate memories that make them think they have continuous separate selves. But what if you lost your memory? Would it still be you? What if someone else could have all your memories? Would it be you? Would it matter?”

He paused. The cat kneaded my chest with its paws, extending and retracting its surplus of claws. I tried to think, but my mind was astonishingly blank. I didn’t like to imagine being separate from my memories; without them life would be as continually baffling and new as it must be to a newborn lamb. I said, “I don’t know.”

“Where does that feeling of self-ness come from?” Dice said, his tone somewhere between gentle and accusatory. “Does it well up from all the bits and pieces of memory and experience that make us up like the tractor’s parts? Does it arise or emerge?”

I didn’t know what to say. The cat writhed out of my arms, and it seemed that half of me went with it. Dice grabbed it by its scruff and it hung limply. “You know, people fear death because they’re afraid of losing self-ness, all those experiences and memories. But their experiences and memories will last in the people they were adjacent to. It is so easy to share a memory, to rewrite a memory, to think that someone else’s memory is your own.” I thought about that sensation of falling into the quarry the first night, when he’d told me the story. It had felt so real. I thought about Queen saying my mother had abandoned me. I thought about my memories of my father, and how I couldn’t tell if they were my memories or what my mother had told me. “So what is lost? There’s no real evidence for individual separate selves, there’s no real evidence for it.” He leaned close to me. I could smell his breath, a deep mossy smell. For a moment, his mouth seemed like the opening to a vast underground cave.

I said, at last, “But I’m separate from you.” I didn’t know what I meant by this. He was so good at destroying the doubting part of me and replacing it with a desperation to understand.

“You might feel that way,” he said, “but the borders are fuzzy. What can’t be divided, Harmony? Everything is pieces. When is the whole more than the pieces?”