“But what about The Belt Way, aka The Jonboat-trying-to-empathize-with-Belt’s-best-possible-understanding-of-the-difference-between-twenty-five-billion-and-twenty-billion-dollars Way?
“For that, let’s picture three rooms at once. Begin by going back to the picture you had of the first room I asked you to picture. Two hundred thousand cigarettes, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. That’s picture one.
“And now, instead of removing forty thousand cigarettes from the room, remove just four-fifths of a single cigarette. So now you’ve got 199,999.2 cigarettes in the room. That’s picture two.
“For picture three, remove the final fifth of that cigarette from the room in picture two. So now you’ve got 199,999 cigarettes in the room.
“So three rooms. Picture them side by side, okay?
“Room One: 200,000 cigarettes.
“Room Two: 199,999.2 cigarettes.
“Room Three: 199,999 cigarettes.
“With my present net worth of twenty-five billion dollars, I, if I lose, or pay, or give away a hundred thousand dollars—i.e. your present net worth—it’s like I’ve gone from having the contents of Room One to having the contents of Room Two. Whereas had I lost or paid or given away a hundred thousand dollars in 2009, when my net worth was just twenty billion dollars, giving you a hundred k would have been like going from having the contents of Room One to having the contents of Room Three.
“That’s the Belt Way of understanding the difference between having twenty-five billion dollars and having twenty billion dollars.
“So now what we want to do, to bring it all home, is create The Jonboat-Belt Way (or The Belt-Jonboat Way) of understanding the difference between having twenty-five billion dollars and having twenty billion dollars. We want to make our two points of view converge: we want to create a fuller, truer understanding of the difference: a mutual understanding. Problem is, I don’t see how we can do that. Despite all I’ve just said, I’m at a loss. I don’t know how to proceed. The convergence, after all, seems beyond me. I was hoping I could talk it out—talk us toward it, into it—but I can’t. Time was wasted, yours and mine. I was the one who wasted it. Sorry. I might as well have just said something like, ‘You’re an electron microscope aimed at Jupiter, and I’m the Hubble trying to make out a dust mote.’ But metaphors, right? They just beat around the bush.
“My original point, however, stands (maybe more firmly than before, given the fruitlessness of all the effort I just put in): when you say words to me like ‘two hundred thousand times more,’ especially in reference to my net worth, and regardless of whether you’re aware that my net worth is twenty-five percent greater today than Forbes said it was in 2009, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and I know you don’t know what you’re talking about, so I know I can’t know what you’re talking about, and therefore I can’t be offended by your joke, or, for that matter, your explanation of your joke. I can’t even laugh at your joke. I could have made some laugh sounds, but I’m bad at that—I don’t have a lot of practice. The sounds would have sounded entirely false. Your joke just wasn’t funny, so I didn’t laugh. Your joke was sad. It was sad that you thought you had to make a joke when I told you you looked like a million bucks, and sadder still that you thought the joke you had to make was a self-effacing joke about how little your net worth is. It is sad for me to contemplate how little your net worth is. It’s a cigarette to me. Not even a cigarette. A partially smoked cigarette. It’s pitiful, Belt. And after you’ve paid taxes and Social Security? A nearly half-smoked cigarette. Even more pitiful. And then for you to explain the joke? For you to smirk your uncomfortable smirk and explain? Why put a finer point on it, Belt?
“What you should have said, if you had to make a joke after I told you you looked like a million bucks, is, ‘And you, Jonboat, look like twenty-five billion.’ Or, maybe if you wanted to get some slightly more barbed self-effacement across while doing your calling-Jonboat-out-for-his-bullshit-tone thing, you might have said, ‘And you, Jonboat, look like two hundred fifty billion.’ Neither joke would have been very funny, I wouldn’t have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been so sad. I wouldn’t have felt the need to tell you not to underrate yourself in as comforting a tone as I was able to manage, which tone obviously struck you as patronizing and got you all bent out of shape.
“Probably I would’ve given you a polite smile. But then again maybe that would have just caused a different kind of sadness. And certainly some disappointment, right? Me politely smiling at a joke you made? Politely smiling instead of laughing? That would be disappointing. To both of us, I guess. Definitely to me. Not end-of-the-world disappointing, but a little disappointing. I mean, you made me laugh a lot when we were kids. That’s why we were friends. It wasn’t because I pitied you, which I did. I pitied you. You were pitiful. You’d been dealt a lousy hand. The death of your mother. Your mental illness. But it wasn’t because I pitied you that I was a friend to you.
“You understand that, right? Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you don’t think I understand that. Maybe you think I don’t remember. Is that what’s going on here? Is that why you made your limp joke and smirked when I told you you looked like a million bucks? Is that why, ever since you walked in here, you’ve been acting like there’s an elephant in the room? There’s no elephant, Belt. Were there an elephant in the room, I’d have to see it, right? I’d have to see it, you’d have to see it, and we’d both have to consciously avoid talking about it. I don’t know about you, but I’m avoiding fuck-all, I’ve been avoiding fuck-all. I’m not hiding shit. I remember we were friends. I remember being kids. I know all about us. I’ll tell you all about us.
“When we were kids, I was a friend to you because you made me laugh. And it happened that, because you’d been dealt such a lousy hand with the death of your mom and your mental illness—because you were a slumping, open wound on legs—it happened that being a friend to you meant preventing the kids we went to school with from making your life even worse. And so that’s what I did. And I don’t say so because I’m seeking any gratitude from you. It was easy for me. It was easy to treat you like a human being in front of others, to listen when you spoke to me, and laugh at your jokes, which I found funny anyway. That was all it took to keep the others off you. Easy.
“The only real effort I ever spent on you was on resisting the occasional urge I felt to kick the shit out of you. The urge to kick the shit out of you for being so needy and weak and available to harm. I didn’t quite understand where that urge came from, but I knew it was universal. Not just among the other kids at our school, and not just toward you—I’m not trying to be insulting—but toward every being like you in every kind of social circle in every last species of the animal kingdom. Herd, pack, murder, flock. Universal, this occasional urge. I’d see you sitting there, sometimes, in this or that corner, all by yourself, or walking through the hallway, or standing in line—didn’t matter where—I’d see you and, often as not, you’d have this puzzled look on your face, and you were always wearing those awful glasses with the tinted lenses that never fully clarified and never fully darkened, they just remained in that middle state of gray, which made you seem like you thought you were hiding your eyes, like you thought you were getting away with something, or like you thought you could get away with something, like you not only failed to realize how transparent you were, but you actually thought you were complex, mysterious—and you’d have this look on your face, this puzzled look like you couldn’t determine whether something you were thinking of was amusing or horrifying or what, I don’t know what you were thinking, might’ve just been your face at rest, I don’t know, but I’d see you with this contemptible, pitiful look on your face, this look of amusement or horrification, or horrified amusement, amused horrification, this fucking look on your face, Belt, in some corner, some lunch line, some wherever, and I’d have it, that urge, you know? to kick the shit out of you.