—All right, Duchess.
Handing Billy the spoon, I excused myself and headed for Dennis’s office.
Having said that I didn’t think Emmett would be here by two, I’d thought for sure that he’d be here by six. After quietly closing the door, I dialed Ma Belle. It took her twenty rings to answer, but after giving me an earful about the etiquette of calling someone while they’re in the middle of their bath, she brought me up to speed.
—Uh oh, I said as I hung up the phone.
Having done one accounting with Billy, I found myself doing another on my own: With Emmett already a little peeved about the Studebaker, I had hoped to make it up to him by giving him the night with Charity; but clearly that hadn’t gone as planned. How was I supposed to know that Woolly’s medicine was so strong? Then to top it all off, I’d forgotten to leave an address. Yep, I thought to myself, there is a distinct possibility that when Emmett arrives, he’ll be in a bad mood. Assuming, that is, that he can find us . . .
Returning to the kitchen, I discovered Woolly staring at the spice rack and no one tending the sauce. That’s when things began to accelerate.
First, Woolly went off on reconnaissance.
Then the telephone rang and Billy reappeared.
Then Woolly returned with word of a wrong number, Billy announced it was nearly eight, and the doorbell rang.
Please, oh please, oh please, I said to myself as I dashed down the hall. With my heart in my mouth and Billy hot on my heels, I swung the door open—and there was Emmett in a clean set of clothes, looking only a little worse for wear.
Before anyone had a chance to speak, the clock in the living room began to chime the hour of eight.
Turning to Billy, I stuck out my arms and said: —What’d I tell you, kid?
Emmett
At the start of Emmett’s junior year, the new math teacher, Mr. Nickerson, had presented Zeno’s paradox. In ancient Greece, he’d said, a philosopher named Zeno argued that to get from point A to point B, one had to go halfway there first. But to get from the halfway mark to point B, one would have to cross half of that distance, then halfway again, and so on. And when you piled up all the halves of halves that would have to be crossed to get from one point to another, the only conclusion to be drawn was that it couldn’t be done.
Mr. Nickerson had said this was a perfect example of paradoxical reasoning. Emmett had thought it a perfect example of why going to school could be a waste of time.
Just imagine, thought Emmett, all the mental energy that had been expended not only to formulate this paradox, but to pass it down through the ages, translating it from language to language so that it could be scratched on a chalkboard in the United States of America in 1952—five years after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier over the Mojave Desert.
Mr. Nickerson must have noticed Emmett’s expression at the back of the classroom, because when the bell rang, he asked Emmett to stay.
—I just want to make sure you followed the argument this morning.
—I followed it, said Emmett.
—And what did you think?
Emmett looked out the window for a moment, unsure of whether he should share his point of view.
—Go ahead, encouraged Mr. Nickerson. I want to hear your take.
All right then, thought Emmett.
—It seemed to me a long and complicated way of proving something that my six-year-old brother could disprove in a matter of seconds with his own two feet.
But as Emmett said this, Mr. Nickerson didn’t seem the least put out. Rather, he nodded his head with enthusiasm, as if Emmett was on the verge of making a discovery as important as Zeno’s.
—What you’re saying, Emmett, if I understand you, is that Zeno appears to have pursued his proof for argument’s sake rather than for its practical value. And you’re not alone in making that observation. In fact, we have a word for the practice, which is almost as old as Zeno: Sophistry. From the Greek sophistes—those teachers of philosophy and rhetoric who gave their students the skills to make arguments that could be clever or persuasive but which weren’t necessarily grounded in reality.
Mr. Nickerson even wrote the word out on the chalkboard right below his diagram of the infinitely bisected journey from A to B.
Isn’t that just perfect, thought Emmett. In addition to handing down the lessons of Zeno, scholars have handed down a specialized word, the sole purpose of which is to identify the practice of teaching nonsense as sense.
At least that’s what Emmett had thought while standing in Mr. Nickerson’s classroom. What he was thinking as he walked along a winding, tree-lined street in the town of Hastings-on-Hudson was maybe Zeno hadn’t been so crazy after all.