morning, which is when I generally come in to report what happened the day before. So here I am. I came in to give you a report on the meeting I had yesterday with the student. Yesterday afternoon. This”—I pointed out the window at the darkness—“is morning.”
Pak waved away the idea of the report. “No, you don’t mean morning. Morning is shorthand. What you really mean is that the sun is at a certain spot at or below the horizon, the sky a certain shade, the early breeze bringing the smell of earth, someone groaning after not enough sleep. It’s the same with happiness, or sorrow, or boredom, isn’t it? All layers, everything layers. Layers and intersections.”
I could never fathom what set Pak off like this, climbing to these philosophical heights. Whenever it happened, the only thing to do was to follow along and try not to fall too far behind. “Intersections,” I said and nodded, but he wasn’t waiting for my reaction. He was already on the ledge above me.
“If you start to strip things down too much, get at their ‘essence,’ what do you suppose happens?”
This time I didn’t bother to nod. It wasn’t a real question. Pak pointed a finger at me. “I’ll tell you what happens. If we aren’t careful, things that matter disappear because we reduce them to bits and pieces, smaller and smaller, to the point where they become nothingness. Abstractions take over. Pretty soon, we start thinking that the only difference between day and night is the amount of light. ‘Essence is everything,’ people start thinking. So they keep searching for essence, some sort of first principle, but essence isn’t anything. Sometimes, it’s nothing.”
This was fast getting to be unprecedented. A change, not yet defined, was coming over Pak. First he had been unusually confrontational with the special section, and now he was soaring into philosophy, far beyond the boundaries where he usually stopped. In another minute, we might need oxygen bottles, we’d be so high in existential clouds.
If Pak was suffering from the altitude, he didn’t show it. “We can say exactly the same about sight,” he said, and he smiled expansively. I looked around the office. Was there nothing I could use to slow his ascent? Some sort of cord to keep him from drifting completely beyond the boundaries of space?
“You think you see something, O. No, what you really perceive is movement and change; what you perceive is the changing light, light off one object in relation to something else. If there’s no change, if things are totally static, there’s nothing to see. That is a fact. Provable fact.” That must have been the apogee, because he stopped and leaned back in his chair.
I took a breath. “Then I’m surprised anyone can see around here. Nothing ever changes.”
Pak pretended he hadn’t heard. He stared out the window into the darkness and the empty courtyard. “It’s exactly the same with sound, you know. Constant complaining—almost impossible to hear after a certain point.” He swiveled back to his desk and took a piece of paper out of a folder. He studied it a moment. “A woman was murdered last month. We’re supposed to find out why.” He glanced up to see my reaction. I started to speak, but he cut me off. Pak rarely cuts anyone off; he always defers to another speaker, even when someone interrupts him. “Not ‘why,’ actually. Not ‘why’ in the traditional sense. We’re just supposed to gather information about her, background, family, friends, political reliability, education. Gather them up, all the things that might have a bearing on the ‘why.’”
“Sex life?” Right away I was on guard. Cutting me off was another example of aberrant behavior. He was worried about something. If he wasn’t going to share with me what it was, then I’d better worry, too.
Pak observed me with a kind of smoke in his eyes, a hazy, far-off look meant to avoid giving anything away. “If it’s relevant, yes.”
“You don’t think it’s relevant?” I never liked it when he gave me that hazy look.
“It might be. But there is a complication.”
“A complication. Let me guess. She had odd appetites.”
“No, she was murdered overseas.”
I gave it some thought. “That’s a few hundred kilometers out of my district, isn’t it?”
“We have less than a week. They want a nice thick dossier prepared. We hand it over, then it’s not our business anymore. It goes to the Ministry, but I have a feeling”—he paused for the downbeat—“I have