Marc consults the Philips Agricultural Guide: 1968. The section titled “Cowsheds and Other Outbuildings” contains a description of how to put together a toilet for a washroom to go with the milking stalls. He turns the diagram around to see how to adapt this toilet to his hut. He can’t concentrate. His mind keeps being drawn back to a theory he’s pondered for a number of years now, one that fits into something bigger, broader, which he calls socio-physical theory. The sphere of action, the testing ground, would extend no further than 2 or 3 blocks around the roof terrace. The neighborhood contains everything he needs: comestibles, mundane conversations, and seasonal clothing made from polyester. The theory is intended to demonstrate in mathematical terms that solitude is a property, a state, natural in a better sort of human being and, to that end, is based in a physical proof well known among scientists: there exist in nature only 2 kinds of elementary particles, fermions [electrons and protons, for example] and bosons [photons, gluons, gravitinos, et cetera]. Fermions are characterized by the widely demonstrated fact that only 1 can occupy a particular state at any given time, or, what is the same, that 2 or more cannot occupy the same spatial distribution. Bosons have the opposite properties: not only can more than 1 be in the same state and share the same spatial distribution, they in fact try to mass together, they need to. Marc uses this classification as both his image and his model in postulating the existence of solitary people who, like fermions, cannot stand to be around others, and are the only kind of people deserving of any respect. Then there is the other kind, those who cluster together, boson-like, in the form of associations, groups, and other collectives—hoping to hide their genetic mediocrity in the crowd. Marc, no admirer of this latter type, unsurprisingly cares little about the march of world events, or about poverty or wealth, or the rise or fall of prices in fruit or fish, demonstrations, collectivities, political parties, religions, or NGOs. Of course, he takes as his authentic models for this kind of higher being, of the essentially fermionic life, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the Unabomber, Cioran, and above all Henry Darger, the man who barely left his Chicago room. Also, Marc, like all fermions, has long since stopped frequenting women and friends. His only stable connection with the world is the internet. Sunday, after 4:00 p.m., people are down at the beach; he hasn’t eaten all day. A chink in the asbestos section of the hut lets in a ray of sun that alights on the 0 button of the PC keyboard. He is playing the Sufjan Stevens album The Avalanche, with “The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies” on repeat, while putting the finishing touches to a proof he feels extremely pleased with. He goes out onto the roof terrace with a sheet of paper and hangs it on the reticulating wires at the point: x = 10, y = 15. Nothing better to check a theory, before propagating it, than to air it, he thinks.