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more of that, when it was genuine. She wondered whether with him it
was
genuine, or whether he was simply playacting. She watched him stride out, brisk and humming, his shoulders square. In a moment the front door slammed and he walked away down the sidewalk toward Ocean Boulevard, just as he did every morning, tapping along with a stick topped with an ivory sea serpent that curled back around onto itself.

TWO
     
    “—Mr. Shandy, my father. Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it;—he placed things in his own light;—he would weigh nothing in common scales.”
     
    Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy
     
    A NDREW STOOD IN what had become the bar. He very carefully poured cold coffee into a cup. Beams Pickett watched him. “So I fill it once,” said Andrew, “like this.” He finished, set the coffee down, and picked up the cup. “And I drink half of it, like this.” He drank half of it, then set the cup down. “Now I fill it up again, and, once again, drink it.” He poured the coffee down his throat, finishing it off entirely, then set the cup down once more, with a flourish, like a stage magician. “So this cup has been entirely full of coffee twice. Is that right?”
    Pickett squinted at him for a moment before nodding.
    “And now it’s empty, right?”
    “That’s right. Empty.”
    “And yet,” said Andrew, smiling, “though the cup has been full two whole times, I only drank a cup and a half of coffee, and the cup is
empty
.” He turned it upside down to illustrate. A single dark drop plunked down onto the countertop.
    “I think I see,” said Pickett, calculating. He touched the first two fingers of his left hand with the index finger of his right, as if working the problem through thoroughly. “My advice to you is to drop it entirely. There’s no profit in it at all. I swear it. Einstein was in ahead of you anyway.”
    “Einstein? He worked with cups of coffee, too?”
    “No, cups of tea I think it was. And it didn’t have anything to do with drinking the tea, either, like yours does. His had something to do with rivers—oxbows, I think. He figured them out.”
    “Did he? Einstein? From reading tea leaves?”
    Pickett shrugged. “That’s what I’ve read.”
    Andrew rather liked that. Science was a satisfactory business all the way around. One of Rose’s cousins had spent years whirling frog brains in a centrifuge, with the vague hope, apparently, of working the experiments into something telling. The papers he’d written were full of the most amazing illustrations. One man whirls frog brains, the other measures coffee in a cup, and one day—what? A man walks on the moon. Another steps into a black hole and disappears. Who could say what might come of it all, for good or ill? That was the wonder of it. “It’s rather like infinity at first, isn’t it, this vanishing coffee business? Like the notion of endless space. When I was a boy I always imagined that there was a chain-link fence out there somewhere, like on the edge of a schoolyard, where things just ended.”
    “Couldn’t you see through it? Chain-link, after all …”
    “I can’t remember. Coffee?” He held the rest of the cold coffee out toward Pickett and slid a clean cup down toward him. Pickett shook his head. “I love mathematical mysteries,” said Andrew, “especially when you bring them down to earth, to where they apply to cups of coffee and that sort of thing. Not an unprofitable consideration for a restaurant man.”
    Pickett nodded, but looked puzzled. “You know, I don’t think it
was
filled twice; I think …”
    “Of course,” said Andrew. “Of course. I figured that out myself—last night. It’s a matter of language, isn’t it? What do we mean when we use the word ‘filled’? Do we refer to the empty cup having been filled up twice, or do we mean that it’s merely been topped off? It’s rather like the word ‘window.’ Look that one up in your
Webster’s New