“I’m not on any meds,” I said.
“No shame if you were,” he said, opening the box. He set the bag of cereal aside and, removing the shirt, he said, “What’s this, now?” and, as it unrolled, he said, “Well, look what we have here,” and held it up by the shoulders, both-handed, in front of him. “That’s really something, Belt,” he said. “What a thoughtful gift. It means a great deal to me. The memories seeing this shirt brings back.” With a flick of his wrists, he draped the shirt atop the helmet. “Thank you so much. Really. You know, I’m glad we’ve had the chance to see one another again, and catch up at last, once and for all. I’m happy to see you doing so well. I mean, really, you look like a million bucks.”
“Maybe more like a hundred thousand,” I said.
“Now, don’t go and underrate yourself,” he said. But he wasn’t riffing with me. He’d set his palms flat on the desk as he’d said that, leaned forward a little, softened his eyes. He’d spoken in earnest. Scolded me…warmly. Concerned older-brotherly.
“No, no,” I said. “I was—I was just kidding.”
“Ah,” he said. “Got it.”
But I didn’t believe him. “I said it like a joke,” I said, “as though you’d meant what you’d said, and I’d believed you’d meant it. If you’d meant what you’d said, that would be kind of funny.”
“Right,” he said. “Sure.”
“Funny in the sense that it would sound nice, but would actually be pretty shitty and backhanded, right?” I said. “It would sound like what you were saying was, ‘Belt, you look like you’re worth ten times what we both know you’re worth’—no. More than that, okay? Because of taxes. I don’t know exactly what taxes take cause I’ve never owed them, but I’m thinking probably twenty percent. That sounds correct-ish. So you’d be saying I look like I’m worth as many times more what I’m actually worth as whatever a million dollars divided by eighty thousand is. Is that…twelve and a half?”
“It’s twelve and a half,” he said, glancing at the doorway.
“So you, if you’d meant it,” I said, “when you said I looked like a million bucks—you’d have been saying I looked like twelve and a half times what I’m actually worth, and that would seem like a really nice thing for you to say until I realized that it also meant that you were saying I looked like—”
“It’s just a saying, Belt. Like a million bucks. You don’t have to get…analytical about it. It’s only a saying.”
“Hold on, though. Hold on. It is just a saying, in most cases—almost all cases, really—but not in this one. Not when you’re saying it. Not when I’m the one you’re saying it to. That’s what’s so interesting to me here, right? That’s what’s so funny. Because while you—if you were speaking literally—while you’d be saying this thing that would sound really nice at first—while you’d be saying that I looked like I was worth twelve-and-a-half times what I was really worth—you would, at the very same time, be saying that I looked like roughly twenty thousand times less than what you’re worth, which is, in fact, well over two hundred thousand times more than what I’m actually worth. Before the taxes. See what I’m saying? About the shitty backhandedness?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. That’s one of the main reasons I think it’s funny.”
“Have I offended you, Belt?”
“You serious?” I said. “Have I offended you, Jonboat?”
“How could you possibly offend me?” he said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know what half the words you use mean. I mean, you don’t even know that you don’t know these things. It’s almost kind of cute. ‘Twenty thousand times less.’ ‘Two hundred thousand times more.’ You might as well be saying, ‘Seven-point-five majigglion times as much.’ ‘Sixty-nine-point-nine kangarillion to the eleventeenth tomato power less.’
“You seem to think my net worth’s twenty billion dollars. I’m guessing you got that from the 2009 Forbes billionaire list. I’m worth twenty-five billion now. I’m worth five billion dollars more than you thought. Twenty-five percent more than I was four years ago. But those numbers—twenty billion and twenty-five billion—they’re equally incomprehensible to you. You don’t understand what either number means, so, even if you can name the difference between them—‘one is twenty-five percent more than the other; the other is eighty percent of the one’—you can’t understand what that difference means.
“How far down, I wonder, would I have to factor to even begin to express to you the meaning of the difference? One order of magnitude? Would you be able to conceive of the difference between two-point-five billion dollars and two billion dollars, which is to say the difference between two thousand five hundred million dollars and two thousand million dollars? No. No way. So how about two orders of magnitude? Two hundred fifty million and two hundred million? See the difference? You don’t. Still incomprehensible. Three orders of magnitude? Four? Six? Can you conceive of the difference between twenty-five thousand and twenty thousand dollars? I bet you could with a little work. We’re in mid-range Japanese car territory there, right? The difference between twenty-five k and twenty k is the difference between a pretty good Honda and an okay Honda, or maybe an upgraded okay Honda and a just-okay Honda—I don’t know, exactly. I’ve never bought a Honda. Only seen the commercials. But you don’t drive, and I wouldn’t want you to have to work to understand anyway.
“So suppose I go down one more order of magnitude. Suppose I go down to the difference between twenty-five hundred dollars and two thousand dollars. Well, that’s actually harder to conceive of than the difference between twenty-five k and twenty k, right? Because now we’re in monthly apartment-renting territory, and the grounds for comparison are murky, unstable. A twenty-five-hundred-dollar-per-month apartment in one neighborhood might be more cramped or noisy than a two-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in another neighborhood. Do we privilege location over size and quality of fixtures and appliances, or…what? Too many variables. Probably it’s better to picture just one apartment, with one fixed price—a fraction of the numbers we’re talking about now—and think of how much longer twenty-five hundred dollars allows you to stay in that apartment than two thousand dollars does. So let’s say the rent on this hypothetical apartment is five hundred bucks a month—a real steal in any major city—or maybe, more realistically, let’s say it’s a thousand dollars a month, but you’ve got a roommate. Either way: it costs you five hundred a month to stay in the apartment. So the difference we’re considering now is five months in an apartment with a roommate versus four months in an apartment with a roommate. But months—that’s the problem. Time on the scale of months is hard to contend with. I ask you to picture where you’ll be four months from now—how much work you’ll have gotten done, how much pleasure you’ll have achieved—then ask you to picture where you’ll be five months from now, and how different are those pictures? Are they different at all? I doubt they’re much different. So the difference between twenty-five k and twenty k is easier to conceive of than the difference between twenty-five hundred and two thousand, turns out. Which would seem to indicate that I’m overshooting our sweet spot of mutual analogous understanding, or whatever.