Do you remember the time the three of us got into a fight over Zeno’s dichotomy paradox?
Jack hadn’t known what it was, so you explained.
“It’s about infinities and motion,” you said. “I’m sure you’ve heard this. It’s about how if you try to get to somewhere by halves, or any fraction, really, you will never actually get there, because ultimately there will be an infinitely small distance between you and your destination.”
“The most common example is a wall,” I chimed in. “That if I go halfway to the wall, then halfway of the halfway, then halfway of that, on and on, always halfway, I will never actually touch the wall.”
“Isn’t that sad?” you said. “I mean, isn’t that really disturbing?”
“But why?” Jack said. “I don’t get it.”
“Because you’ll never actually get there. You will spend your whole life making progress, but you’ll never actually get there.”
“Infinity is against us,” I told him. “There’s no way for us ever to count it or control it or understand it.”
“Are you stoned?” Jack asked.
You didn’t appreciate that.
“No,” you said. “We’re thinking. We’re taking what we learn and we’re applying it.”
“But that makes no sense,” Jack said.
“It makes perfect sense,” you argued. “What about it doesn’t make sense?”
“Well, duh, isn’t the answer to never walk in half steps? I mean, putting aside the fact that it’s physically impossible to walk forward, say, a thousandth of an inch, in order to be trapped in this paradox, you’d have to agree to its terms. And we don’t have to do that. If you want to walk to the wall, you walk to the wall.”
“But those are human terms,” you said dismissively.
“Yeah, but aren’t we human? Last time I checked, we were human.”
You leaned into him then. Leaned in halfway. Then another halfway. Then another halfway. And kept slowly doing this until your lips were hovering over his, only a sliver of air away. You held there—until he pushed in and kissed you. You pulled away immediately, angry.
“Go to hell, Jack,” you said. “Maybe there’s more to the Truth truth than being human.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You might be human, Jack, but Ariel’s mathematics. She’s all mathematics.”
There are so many things I wish I hadn’t said.