Going Nowhere Nothing happens in this story. Any resemblance to actual events, past or present, is purely coincidental.

Any semblance of plot is purely illusory. Persons familiar with shorter stories in which things happen might be confused by the fact that, in this story, nothing happens for such a long time. They might do well to remember this: everything that happens, happens for a short time; nothing happens for a long time. Chapter One Happily, ever after Sofa Morales was born, she did nothing right for as long as she lived. Oh, I know everybody says that about themselves. Everybody wants to be right and nobody wants to be wrong, so of course nobody will admit that they sometimes do nothing wrong instead of doing nothing right. You probably think you do nothing right, and maybe you even have an older brother or sister to back you up on it. Well, let me tell you something, kid: family recommendations dont mean nothing in the big leagues. Look: every nobody out there who ever tripped on the stairs or used the wrong kind of soap in the dishwasher or accidentally burned their house down thinks that makes them some kind of Babe Ruth of incompetence. I hate to be the one t o tell you, but if youre anything like almost everyone, you probably do nothing right at least a quarter of the time. Maybe, maybe, if youre really exceptional, you do nothing wrong as often as a third of the time, but even Babe himself didnt have a batting average much better than that. His batting average, a whopping .342, is often mistakenly interpreted as a measure of his competence. If that were true, then he would have been incompetent an absolutely unbelievable 65.8% of the time. But if you think his batting average was a measure of his competence, you will be delighted to hear that youre wrong. Babe Ruths batting average was a measure of his incompetence. You probably think youre pretty incompetent if you so much as crash your whole body into a screen door once every few months or so. Well, day after day, Babe Ruth managed to crash a stick only a few inches wide into a ball maybe a fraction of an inch wider than that, with a collision so hard that it sent the ball flying and everyone around him into chaos. If it was a really great shot, it might have even hit one of his fans in the face. Ever lost something so badly that nobody else could find it? Well, Babe did that 714 times . You can call them home runs and you can say that he meant to do it, or that he had to practice to get that good, but theres no getting around it: thats real, pure, natural incompetence, a nd you cant train anybody to be like that. Sure, you might not want Babe in your living room, unless you want him to throw a home run through your windows. And its not going to put food on anyones table or get anyones tax returns filed, but under controlled conditions, so as to limit the worst of the damage, incompetence can be a magnificent thing to behold. And we think Babe was absolutely spectacular for being incompetent only 34% of the time. Well, 34.2%--but 34, 34.2, whos counting when Sofa Morales was wrong 100% percent of the time? With Sofa, we dont have to count. It wasnt 99.8% of the time or even 99.9% of the time; it was absolutely one hundred percent of the time. Sorry, kid. I dont know who you are, but youre no Sofa Morales. You could still be up there with the minor greats of incompetent. Plato, for instance, while not so admired for the frequency of his incompetence, nevertheless deserves to be remembered for the sheer magnificence of its scale. For instance, he believed that because planets travel in perfect circles instead of meandering through space, they must actually be smart enough to know what theyre doing. (What this says about Plato, who occasionally walked from place to place without going in circles, is unclear.) Then there was Thomas Edison, who is remembered for getting the incandescent lightbulb wrong a thousand times in a row before unfortunately breaking his streak on the thousand-and-first try. And Shakespeare, who managed to write thousands and thousands of words without ever describing a single thing that had actually happened, and who could have been the wrongest person of all time except that scholars have since managed to wring out a little bit of truth between the lines. And George Washington Carver might seem impressive since, after being born in slavery and facing discrimination, he tended 17 acres of land that he plowed himself; went on to study art and piano and then botany; became a successful teacher; founded his own industrial research laboratory; discovered techniques to restore nitrogen into depleted soils; published recipes to improve nutrition in the South; found 105 uses for the peanut and hundreds more for other crops; wrote bulletins on diverse topics such as sweet potatoes, cotton, corn, cowpeas, alfalfa, poultry, hogs, meat preservation, nature study in school, dairy, the use of acorns as feed for farm animals, wild plum, tomato, and ornamental plants; had three patents issued to him; was a celebrity in life and a historical figure in death; and still believed it was a cardinal virtue to win without bragging. However,

despite all this, he was neither George Washington nor particularly accomplished as a carver. Moreover, he once said of the peanut, I doubt if there is another foodstuff that can be so universally eaten, in some form, by every individual. This was a reasonable thing to say at the time, but since peanut allergies have become the most common kind of allergies in the years after his death, he can now be posthumously given a place among the wrongest of all time. Those were the good old days. Carver, Shakespeare, Edison, Plato and Babe belong to what is often called the Golden Age of Wrongness, when people believed that the earth was flat and when all the sidewalks went uphill both ways. Everyone had to work very hard hunting and farming just to get food to survive, and nobody could get anywhere without walking there on foot. Nowadays, we have all sorts of scientific progress to make our lives nicer, such as childproof packaging, flash-frozen vegetables, fast food, disposable silverware, and fake flowers. With the time saved by such innovations, we now have ample leisure time which we may use for such pursuits as hunting, gardening, and jogging. This is quite distinct from humanitys earlier hobbies of hunting, farming, and walking, which were done in order to accomplish some end. As hobbies, they are all quite pointless, which is what makes them all so pleasant. To this end, perhaps the greatest invention of modern life has been the treadmill. In the earliest days, humanity was forced to walk in order to get somewhere; then, when the car was invented, humanity was able to get somewhere without the inconvenience of walking; finally, when the treadmill was invented, humanity was able to walk without the inconvenience of getting somewhere. Thanks to the treadmill, we have finally been able to expend enormous amounts of energy and time and end up going nowhere at all, and we have not even had to learn how to walk in circles. At least, that is one historical perspective. The other commonly held view is that we are living in the Golden Age of Wrongness right now. According to this view, sometime around the time your parents became adults, children suddenly started to disrespect their elders at unprecedented rates. New technology became much more difficult to understand, music became worse, and morality everywhere began to unravel. Since these perspectives are opposite, you might think that the dating of the Golden Age of Wrongness is fiercely debated within wrongness theory. Again, you would be wrong. Actually, most wrongness scholars seem to endorse both viewpoints. The fact that so many scholars hold such blatantly contradictory viewpoints can be explained by little except the fact that wrongness scholars typically only study wrongness because they love wrongness, which means that typically they want to be greats in the field themselves. For this reason, wrongness scholarship has always been muddled. Although most everyone agrees that society is getting either much better or much worse, not many people agree on which one it is. But none of it really seems to matter now anyway; wrongness theory is more or less a dead field. Because Sofa Morales was born. And Sofa never, ever, ever did anything right. She had all the credentials you probably do, of course. When she didnt want to play with her cat, he scratched her because he wanted attention; and when she did want to play with her cat, he scratched her because he wanted to be left alone. Whenever she didnt wear shoes, she was told to PUT SOME SHOES ON and when she did, she was told to STOP TRACKING MUD IN THE HOUSE. Whenever she did anything, it was wrong; and whats more, she never did anything enough. But thats no big deal. Anybody can achieve such a basic level of wrongness as that . But there are some ways in which you or I will be right no matter how incompetent we are. Its always true, for instance, that the sky is blue or that 2+2=4. Not so for Sofa Morales. When she tried to say the sky is blue shed look outside to catch it being blue, and instead it would have turned white with clouds, or black with night, or there would have been a particularly magnificent sunset, just to spite her. And just when she felt comfortable enough to say decisively that two plus two was four, shed get the problem wrong anyway, because she was supposed to have said that two miles plus two miles was four miles. Even when she tried to say something she knew had to be right, like I AM WRONG, she would find that as soon as she was right she was wrong after all. It was, she felt, like a dog trying to chase the tail of another dog that was much faster than the first dog. (Why a dog would chase another dog she didnt know. Werent they both dogs, and wouldnt it be better for both of them if they agreed to stop chasing each other? But it was a dog-eat-dog world out there, for everyone, if Sofa knew anything, and she didnt.) At least the weather had the decency to admit its own capriciousness. Mathematics, on the other hand, liked to pretend that it was perfectly logical. There was all this business about number sense, as if that werent a blatant contradiction in ter ms. To tell the truth about it, Sofa always suspected that the problem with the dogs was the same as the problem with two plus two. Two plus two was four, plus three was seven, plus six was thirteen, plus one was fourteen; only two plus two wasnt

fourteen, because two plus two was four; plus three was seven; and even though the chase never ended, you never seemed to get anywhere. Really, the idea that two plus two was the same as four was one of the silliest ideas shed ever heard. As if being able to leap two steps and then two steps again was the same as being able to leap over four at once! And grownups will try to tell you that having two half-sheet scraps of construction paper is every bit as good as having a whole sheet; or that having two halves of a person is the same as having one whole person, even if they are both left halves; or that owing five dollars to Sam while Elizabeth owes you another five is the same as being free and clear. If that were really true, her teachers ought to try to convince Sam of it and not her. And of course they refuse to explain why it is worth jumping through so many hoops to get to your answer, if it really is true that all you do is end up back where you started. Well, that is just like grown-ups. They are always shuffling around imaginary green slips of paper inside computers; and making believe that JAM would be good with peanut butter, when all it really looks like is a scene of a fishhook next to a shark fin rippling the water behind it into a wave; and telling themselves that the whole world is colored like a patchwork quilt stitched together with imaginary lines, and other such nonsense, when there are, in the real world, puddles that need to be jumped in and trees that need to be climbed. You mustnt blame them, though; they simply have very overactive imaginations, and I find it is best to go along with them, for if you dont th ey are liable to throw tantrums. Sofa, like all of us, had trouble going along with them when she could barely work out what they were trying to say in the first place. Perhaps she had a bit more trouble than you or me, perhaps a lot more trouble, but either way, that wasnt what made her the most incompetent of all time. Up until this point, she could have just been a prodigy with an unusually long losing streak. What made Sofa the most incompetent, what has made her forever remembered in the annals of wrongness, was the incident with the soap bubbles. Sofa did not understand soap bubbles. Now, there is nothing particularly deep about a soap bubble. You might have heard somebody use the expression beauty is only skin deep. Well, nobody bothers saying that about soap bubbles, because everybody knows that a soap bubble is only skin deep. There is nothing to a soap bubble except the skin. Even the shallow end of a swimming pool, while it might not be the best place for cannonballs, is at least deep enough that your cannonballs will probably hurt you more than theyll hurt the swimming pool. If you try to let your pinky-finger cannonball into a soap bubble, youll burst the soap bubble without even bruising your pinky. Thats how shallow they are. There arent any hidden depths inside a soap bubble, either. There are no depths inside a soap bubble, because there is nothing inside a soap bubble. Its just a big ball of nothing, and the nothing is covered in clear wrapping paper, because soap bubbles are not trying to surprise anybody. Theyre not trying to pretend to be anything except what they are, which is nothing. They cant travel very far, and they dont last very long, meaning you never have to wonder what kinds of places theyve seen or what their futures will hold. There is nothing more to a soap bubble except what you see right in front of you, and all thats in front of you is a few little drops of water curling themselves up as small as possible so they can hold on tight to each other in this windy world. Whats more, for anything else in the world except soap bubbles, there are little variations in shape, just for variety; not so for soap bubbles. All soap bubbles seem perfectly content with being exactly the same shape as all other soap bubbles that is, round. Theres really nothing more to a soap bubble than that. Its just a sphere, and a sphere is just a circle, no matter how you slice it. (At least, thats the theory. Nobody has yet managed to slice a soap bubble under laboratory conditions. But nobodys really been trying, either, because it doesnt take a lot to guess what they look like on the inside. ) Theres no reason to assume that soap bubbles are hiding any secrets of any interest whatsoever. Sofa found them endlessly puzzling. It was the simplicity of soap bubbles that appealed to her at first. Being always wrong at everything else, she figured that she could at least understand soap bubbles. After all, if she was the one who blew them into existence, she ought to be able to figure them out. Soap bubbles, she thought, were simple enough that she ought to be able to just nail down what it was she was looking at. Unfortunately, she discovered quickly that it is very difficult to nail down a soap bubble, for the same reason that nobody has yet been able to slice one. You cant put a soap bubble under the microscope. You cant even get to the bottom of a soap bubble, or know one through and through or inside and out, because, with a soap bubble, its not possible to delve beneath the surface. You cant even get it or get a hold on it or even grasp the subject without the subject breaking in your hands. The whole subject is so slippery that its hard to see how it even holds water, but of course, it is precisely because it is slippery that the soap bubble holds water.

Soap bubbles confused Sofa because they were so difficult to study. But soap bubbles also confused Sofa because, theoretically, soap bubbles should not be difficult to study. A soap bubble is just a sphere, and a sphere is just a circle, whichever way you look at it. That is just another way of saying that a soap bubble is a circle. A circle, by definition, is that which has no end. A soap bubble is a circle; a circle is that which has no end; therefore, a soap bubble is that which has no end. But soap bubbles seem to have an end very quickly, within a few seconds of their birth. Therefore, this apparent end must only be an illusion, although it is certainly a convincing one; and since they disappear but are not gone forever, they must be going somewhere. And this was why soap bubbles continued to fascinate Sofa. She desperately wanted to know what happened to soap bubbles when they seem to disappear. The soap bubble was so small just like her; and so simple, just like her; and just like she always seemed to slip, the soap bubble was slippery; it seemed like neither of them was ever very much at ease in the world. It seemed to Sofa that if she could understand where the soap bubble slipped off to, then maybe she could understand where all the right answers slipped off to and why she had such a hard time holding onto them too. She thought that if she understood that, then she might be able to understand her own wrongness. Of course, she was wrong. The question why am I always wrong? is never asked by people with any chance of answering it, so we will probably never know the answer. Its a shame, but there you have it. In July, Sofa blew shimmering soap bubbles in the shimmering heat, and they seemed to vanish into the ripples of warmth as if they were diving somewhere under the surface of the air. When autumn came, it seemed to her that the soap bubbles stayed a little longer, but still it was difficult to study what happened when they were gone. For as long as the soap bubbles were there to be studied, they were not gone; and once they were gone, they were not there to be studied. Still, she thought that it would help if she could just manage to catch one, although they all seemed to dart away so quickly with the lightest touch of her finger. When winter came, she thought maybe she finally had a chance at catching one. In winter, the surface of the water freezes shut so that the fish are trapped underneath and the ducks are trapped up above it; and the surface of the ground is so hard that plants cannot bring sun down to the roots and sprouts cannot get through to reach up to the sun. Sofa thought maybe in winter the air would freeze, too; maybe not enough for people to notice, but just enough so that the soap bubbles couldnt slip through the air anymore. And so, on the coldest day of the year, Sofa was outside, blowing soap bubbles in the snow. The soap bubbles popped one after another, just like before. Sofa tried to catch them one after another, just like before, and failed, just like before, except that now it was winter. Her already cold hands and feet tickled with new rivulets of cold, the way a block of solid ice still has fine hairs of ice standing on end inside it, and needle-thin hollows, as if the ice is boiling through the hollows and out into the little air bubbles which you sometimes see on their ends. Sofa felt like that was happening inside her. And then the ice inside her seemed to melt, until her hand was clear as cool water, and it seemed to her that it could have passed straight through her body. She watched her last soap bubbles fall dizzily through the air, and she decided she would go home now, and as she thought that, she said softly, this is never going to work. Now, for you or me or even Plato, that would be the end of it. Youd say this is never going to work! and youd be right. Y ou may be wrong almost all of the time, but at least you know that youll be right when youre affirming your own incompetence. But that wasnt what happened with Sofa. When she said this is never going to work, she had to be wrong. And in order for her to be wrong, it had to work. The last soap bubble fell through the air slowly and gently, as if it knew it had only a few seconds left and it wanted to keep Sofa wrong for as long as possible. What else could a soap bubble do with the few seconds it has on this earth, besides hold on to them? What could she have seen in a little soap bubbles time on this earth? Some people say that before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. Maybe thats how it works: you live for a while, and then you see it all flash before your eyes, and then you see the moment of your life flashing before your eyes flashing before your eyes, and then you see the moment of your life flashing before your eyes flashing before your eyes flashing before your eyes, and so on. You could live forever, that way. If thats true for people, maybe its true for soap bubbles, too; and since a soap bubbles whole life lasts only as long as a flash, maybe the life of a soap bubble is just one long flash of flashing before its eyes flashing before its eyes flashing before its eyes, which is why a soap bubble seems to reflect everything even though it is invisible, like a room full of mirrors that have nothing to reflect but each other. On the other hand, if a soap bubbles life seems to us to go by in a flash, maybe, to an earth that has existed for 45 million human lifetimes, one little human life seems to all go by in a flash before its little life dies out. Maybe when people say that before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, what they mean is this: before you die, you live, but only for a little while. Only for a flash.

But so much happens in a persons lifetime, even if the earth doesnt notice; and so much happens in the little flash of a soap bubbles life, even if nobody ever notices. In the space of a flash, a camera can record the moment in more detail than anyone living in that moment could ever possibly have noticed. As for the bubble, there was no camera to record it, but its soapy film was developed by that little flash of time. Little spirals of ice appeared, first at the points where the coldest eddies of wind had touched the soap bubble; and then, as the bubble spun and floated through the air, the spirals began to merge, until finally the surface had been written over completely with crystals of ice. The surface of the film told the story of how it had frozen: each crystal showed the way that place in the film had frozen. If you could see the film, maybe you would know the story of the soap bubbles life. I wish that you could watch the film so you could know the story. But it is not easy to turn soap-bubble film into the kind of film that you can watch. Camera film works like this: the camera takes a lot of pictures in a row very fast, and then the pictures are printed all in order on a film strip. The film strip is pulled through a machine so that you see each picture one right after the other. Even though all of the pictures are still and none of them are connected to each other, when the filmstrip moves by at the right speed and in the right sequence, they seem to be telling one continuous story. What you are really seeing is a million slices of space put into a million different slices of time. The slices are what makes the film seem like a story. If there were no slices, the film strip would just be a single snapshot. You need moments of nothing so that the story can keep going. But soap bubbles, as you know, are impossible to slice. If your soap bubble were made of clay instead of soap, you could make a cut, and then smooth it into a flat surface and push the ends together until you had a long, thin clay rectangle. Or, if your soap bubble were made of the rind of an orange, you could make a hole in the top, and then spiral your way down until you had one long strip of orange rind going all the way to the bottom. Then you could feed the strip you got through the machine to see the film. But if your soap bubble is made out of a soapy film, you can never make the cuts you need without bursting your soap bubble. Every part of a soap bubble must touch some other part of the soap bubble. The soap bubble is too continuous to be a movie; it cannot be anything but a still. Perhaps soap bubbles are limited because they cannot tell stories the same way that film can. But perhaps film is limited because it cannot tell stories the same way that soap bubbles can. Perhaps stories are limited because they cannot do everything soap bubbles can. Imagine a film of snapshots centered at every possible point of the surface of the bubble. A filmstrip shows one snapshot, and then a sudden jump to another snapshot, and then a jump to another snapshot, with nothing in between. But between any two snapshots centered at two different points, there is another snapshot centered at a point in between them. No matter how long your filmstrip is, it can never be long enough. But the tiny soap bubble contains all the snapshots of itself. Imagine a film that traced every possible path you could take on the soap bubbles surface. If y ou choose any place on the soap bubble, there are an infinite number of paths you can take across its surface to get back to that same place. If you tried to stretch them all out onto a single filmstrip, the film would be infinitely long. A story on film can never really go back to the same place; it is always moving forward. But a soap bubble can go back to the same place an infinite number of times. The surface of a soap bubble is nothing more or less than an exact record of all the paths that could possibly be traveled along its surface. The tiny soap bubble contains all its own paths. Imagine a story that describes every scene of what it depicts in as much detail as it happened. Imagine a story that describes every possible way of moving between its scenes. Imagine a story that contains itself. Along with every letter, there would be a description explaining the fact that that letter was included in the story, and all those letters would come with their own descriptions, and so on, forever. But this story describes every scene in as much detail as it happened, because nothing in this story really happened except in the story. And this story describes every possible way of moving between its scenes, not with words, but by the fact that you can turn the pages to a different scene in any way you please. And this story contains itself, not because the word contains is followed by the sentence There was a c, and an o, and an n, and a t but because c by itself tells a story of pins striking an ink-coated ribbon in the swerving figure of a c. The soap film contained its own story this way: not the way a film tells a story, with snapshots of actors faces standing in for other people or snapshots of sets standing in for other places; nor the way a story might be told in a book, with illustrations meant to look like faraway lands, or unrelated pictures of shark fishing; nor with any kind of symbols at all. In a book such as this one, the writing is a kind of code you have to decipher, and it is interesting only for what is on the other side of the code. It means nothing by itself; it is meaningful only because of what it can tell you about other things. The story etched in the

soap film, though, meant nothing but itself. Each spiral told the story of that spiral. It contained its own story the way wrinkles contain the history of a face. It would have been futile to look for meaning in the soap bubble. Soap bubbles are not trying to hide anything. They do not speak in code. They do not speak at all. Words have meanings that refer to other words, and other things, but the soap bubble referred only to itself. It was its own self-contained world. But Sofa could not help but wonder what it all meant. She gazed into the soap bubble to see what would happen to it, as if it were a crystal ball that could show its own future. She saw nothing, and then, a few seconds later, still nothing. This might have led her to guess that it was predicting its own future, and quite well, but instead, she kept staring, waiting for something. To a stargazer, all the planets in our solar system appear as small as soap bubbles in the night sky. Astronomers who want to study them have had to build telescopes and space stations to get a little nearer, just so they appear a little closer to their true size. But Sofa could get no closer to her soap bubble planet: she had already crash-landed on the surface; or rather, it had crash-landed onto her, right into her open hands. All she could do was lean in closer and look at smaller and smaller parts of the soap bubble in more and more detail. But as the area she could see became smaller, the soap bubble as a whole became larger and larger, until it was even larger than she was; and then, as quickly as a soap bubble merges with a smaller soap bubble, she found that she had become a tiny part of the soap bubbles surface, which had become as big as a planet, with all its tiny irregularities blown up into trees and animals and whole cities full of people, and all they lived happily or not, and Im afraid I cant say which. Chapter Two As you may have guessed already, I myself am something of a scholar of wrongness. As a scholar, I have devoted my life to searching for truth, and so you can believe me when I assure you that everything in this story is true. Some characters may have been combined; some events may have been condensed. Names have been changed, several times, particularly when I couldnt decide what to call someone. I cannot guarantee I did the naming exactly as you would have. Someone who looks to me like a Sofa might look to you more like a Chloe or an Isabel. What looks to me like a soap bubble, you might instead call a dragonfly or a soap sud or Abraham Lincolns left eyebrow. If you want all the names to be completely accurate, I suppose it is not strictly true to say that Sofa blew soap bubbles in July. But it is probably true that, say, Edward ate ice cream in Vancouver; and if that is not true, well, something else is. Look at this story. Do you see how the story wraps around the paper like a wire wrapped around a spool? Imagine unwinding it, so that all the sentences run end to end in one long filament. You can shape it along with the rhythm and the syntax of the storyeverything that would be kept the same if all the names in the story were changed. If you place this wire in a basin of soapy water and lift it up, there will be a wall of soap film hanging down from the wire, its colors changing at every angle in the light; you can imagine this as the specific words that are used in the story. There are infinitely many such stories, all of them with the same shape, and each of which might mean something completely different depending on your perspective. You can see it even now, without unwinding the story, just by looking at the page and imagining different words as bubbles on the surface of the page, popping in and out of existence, replacing each other as you change your perspective, so that the story shimmers with infinitely many possible meanings. I can promise you this: every last one of these stories is true. In each of them, nothing essential is changed: only the names and faces. I can promise you something else, too: even if you tell the story with a different rhythm, all of these stories are true. As I said, some characters have been combined; some events have been condensed; but still, nothing essential has changed. It may not, strictly speaking, be true to say that Sofa blew soap bubbles in July; but there is certainly such a thing as soap bubbles, and there is such a thing as July, and there are such things as girls who are named Sofa; and if you are using Sofa to mean a person who is always wrong, perhaps there has never been some person who is always wrong, but there has always been some person who is wrong; and so I promise you that every last part of this story is true, even if some of the parts might be in the wrong order. Chapter Three Perhaps you have learned in school why the sky is blue. If we ever meet, maybe you can explain it to me; I am a scholar of wrongness, not of optics, and the science is difficult for me to understand. I feel certain that you would be able to explain it to me very well, although perhaps I would not be able to understand it very well.

Yes, you could tell me why the sky is blue. But could you tell me why the sky isnt blue? Sunlight shines through the air just as light shines through an opal. Crushed opals are white, but the stone has a bluish tint; as light travels through the inner structure of the stone, it is scattered so that more blue light gets through. When you turn the opal in the light, or when the light changes, the light takes a different path so that the stone has the warm glow of a sunset. Just as a person might turn an opal over in their hands, the sky turns over in circles as the earth rotates, and as the sky turns it catches the light at different angles. And all of this is the same air that you cant see when its right in front of your face. Some people think that, if you were to go very, very high up, you would reach the blue part of the sky. Imagine that you were a fish: you might think that, if you were to swim very, very far, you would reach the part of the lake that is blue. Imagine that you were a person journeying through a desert between two mountain ranges: you might think that, if you were to walk very, very far, you would reach the blue mountains. But when you finally reach them, the mountains are gray and brown, and when you swim to it, water in a lake is muddy or clear; so there is no blue lake and there are no blue mountains, just as there is no end of the rainbow, because the colors change in the light, and the light changes every time you change your perspective. As it turns out, colors shine brightest when there is really nothing there at all. This is true of rainbows, beetles, butterfly wings, fish scales, birds-of-paradise, parrots, peacocks, kingfishers, hummingbirds, mother-of-pearl, and even soap bubbles; all of which would lose their color entirely if crushed like the opal; yet they gleam by letting light pass through their tunnels and secret passageways just as it travels through stones and the sky. You might think it is just a trick of the light, but I think it is something more. The brightest things seem brightest because their colors change. Soap bubbles are iridescent; they shimmer in the light, taking on different shades from every angle. They can appear to have every color at once precisely because they have no color at all. A true, deep color that does not change so easily in light must seem by comparison a little less vibrant, a little less true. Let me tell you a story about another stone that shines like the sky. A long time ago, there was a man named Johannes who lived in the Netherlands. Now when I say he lived in the Netherlands, you might confuse that with some kind of fantastic place, like Neverland or the netherworld, and you might make the mistake of either thinking that nobody there ever ages or that everybody there is dead. If I were out to trick you, I might let you believe that, so as to embellish my story; but as true blue is an honest color, so I am an honest man, and I am talking about the kind of Netherlands in which some people are children and some people are dying and most people are somewhere in between. It is a little country, so little that the people there have to build walls to keep out the ocean; for the land is not only small in width, but also does not have its height, and without these walls, much of the country would be underwater. It is a humble place, and Johannes was a humble man. After he died, he left his wife and children in debt, for he never had very much except his wife and children, and when they died, he was forgotten. All that remained of him were a few small paintings of modest things: a little street, a milkmaid, a woman reading a letter with words we cannot even see. He had but one extravagance in his life and death, and that was the color blue. If you were a painter living in the Netherlands at the same time Johannes lived, you might have colored the sky with indigo. (Indigo was so common that most jeans were dyed with indigo when jeans were first invented, which is why they are still blue today.) You might have used minerals or smalt or any number of cheap dyes. But Johannes colored his skies with paint made of crushed semi-precious stones. His blues came from lapis lazuli, which at one time was worth more than gold. As a stone, it even glows with flecks of gold, like stars, that make it shine like the sky at night. But unlike the opal, lapis lazuli is a true, deep blue. It is still blue when crushed into a powder, so it can be used as a pigment. Johannes would have called this pigment ultramarijn, or, in English, ultramarine, which means beyond the sea; because it was so rare that it could only be acquired by mining it in faraway countries and then shipping it to the Netherlands, through the very seas that threatened to engulf him. That is why they say it is called ultramarine. But, if you have ever seen the color, you could be forgiven for believing it is called ultramarine because it is bluer than the sea; and you could even be forgiven for believing it is cal led ultramarine because it is bluer than blue. If you were a painter living in the Netherlands at the same time Johannes lived, you might have used ultramarine for the robes of the Virgin Mary. Johannes used it for the skirt of a milkmaid; sunlight hitting some leaves on the corner of a little street; even gray-white walls, mixed lightly with ultramarine we cannot even see, so as to capture the elusive luminous character of daylight. It is a great cost to take such a color and hide it away in the walls, but he did, and he used it in almost every one of his paintings. He may not have had much, but he was willing to give it all for such a color of blue.

A little less than three hundred years later and three hundred miles away not far at all, to the earth, but far enough that you could not get from one place to the other without passing through foreign countries or facing the cold, empty gulf of the North Seathere lived a man named Yves. If you were a painter living anywhere in the world at the time Yves lived, you could have used indigo or smalt, I suppose, but I dont know why youd want to. In the three hundred years between the lifetimes of the two men, people had found a way to get a new and even brighter ultramarine pigment for much less money. The pigment was so cheap that Yves could afford enough to experiment with it, and when he did, he discovered a new way to turn the pigment into paint without watering down its brilliance. His paint was the brightest blue the world had ever seen. And unlike Johannes, he had such an abundance of blue that he had no need to hide it away in walls. Instead, in his exhibit, he covered up all the walls with paintings of nothing but blue. Only a few hundred years ago, standing in that room would have been a luxury even for a king. But people, by then, had spent all their lives with ultramarine. Many people asked whats the big deal? Theres nothing here but blue! But many other people loved Yvess exhibit. These were the people who came again the next year in great numbers when he gave an exhibit with no paintings at all. They bought thin air from him and watched him spend the money on gold leaf that he scattered away into the Seine. He even signed the sky and claimed it as his greatest work. It is a great work, the sky, whether it belongs to any artist or not. As time passes, the change in the way it looks is the difference between night and day; yet it is always the same thing, just seen in a different light. It shines like an opal, changing through every day and night, with no real color at all, and we say simply that it is blue. If it shone instead with the true, deep light of the lapis lazuli, I suppose we would say that it was nothing. Even if it were worth more than gold, people could still learn to see it as nothing if they saw it often enough. Perhaps no matter how blue the air is, youd never be able to see it, precisely because the air is always right in front of your face. Fish live in the water, worms live in the earth, but we are creatures of the sky. And since we know the sky so well, we wonder about it more than the water or the earth. Whenever we think about imaginary worlds, we say we have our heads in the cloudsalthough when we really have our heads in the clouds, we call it fog and we think of it as mundane, nothing like the fiction we have of clouds that we imagine to be more real. We fantasize about seeing the part of the sky with the brightest blue, but in fact the brightest part of the sky is the part of the sky we live in every day, the lowest part, before our atmosphere has begun to fade into space. We never notice it, but perhaps the eagles think about it when they daydream about the depths of the sky. Perhaps, as we imagine that the sky has limitless heights, they imagine that the sky has limitless depths, because they can feel the air becoming thinner the higher they fly. Our sky, which we think of limitless, is really just a bubble around our little world. Do you wonder what lies above it? Whatever it is, it is something beyond the sky, and so instead of being called ultramarine I suppose it would be called ultracelestial, which, as a color, would be a blu e even deeper than a blue that is bluer than blue, so deep that you could not tell it from black, which has the depth and intensity of all the colors and none of them at the same time; like the blue paintings of Yves, which are either paintings of everything or paintings of nothing at all. Perhaps to Yves, who loved blue as much as Johannes did, his paintings were paintings of everything. He said once, I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely, are the bars. If Yves had had his way, perhaps he would have torn apart the walls around the boundaries of the Netherlands, letting in the sea. Then Johannes everyday world would be made mysterious by having sunken to the bottom of an ocean; and, as seen through the light of the depths, all of his milkmaids and little streets and letters would be covered with an even more brilliant blue. None of this means anything at all. It is just that a soap bubble is made of sky and water, and if you want to know what sorts of visions a person might see in the surface of a soap bubble is, it is easier to start by thinking about what you might see in the sky and what you might see in the water. Now, then, what color is a soap bubble? It is iridescent, but sometimes the iridescence seems to vanish and it appears quite clear. Bubbles in the ocean, like the rest of the ocean, are blue. If we stirred many, many soap bubbles together into a blue ocean of soap bubbles, and then we scooped out a glass from that ocean, we would have a glass of soapy water, which would look clear; perhaps cloudy and swirled, but clear nonetheless. Of course, nothing can be clear and cloudy at the same time; but when you look at a clear glass of clear water, rarely do you really see the colors behind it that are distorted through

the glass to give it color. You can probably picture a glass of water with nothing behind it; if I asked you to paint one, though, your first instinct might be to reach for clear paint. It is as if we cannot see anything without imagining it with a color, even if that color is as meaningless as clear. Something could be both clear and cloudy, then, if by cloudy we mean it is not cle ar and by clear we mean the imaginary color we want to believe in when we say that something is clear. We think of ice as clear, yet if you tried to look through it you would see that its inside is the color of sea foam, which is ice that has melted into the ocean and become a sheen of bubbles on the surface. When I say "the color of sea foam," I do not mean sea foam green, because sea foam is not green, although the sea can be green when it is not blue; in fact, sea foam is the same color as powdered water, which we call snow, and which is as white as crushed opals. I told you about Johannes and Yves; now I will tell you about myself. You see, I am something of a painter too, or I was when I was younger. When I was a little girlI know I said earlier that I was a man, but it is only an expression, an honest manI asked my parents and teachers why lakes and rivers are blue when a glass of water is clear. The water is not blue, they told me. It only looks blue. As an artist, I wanted to paint things the way they really were, not merely how they appear. So the next time I painted a lake, I colored it with a dull gray. Not even I liked the painting. It was as if everything in the lake had died, and the lake along with it. I still do not know whether or not water is blue, but I know you could just as easily say of grass that it is not really green; it is really black, and it only looks green, because of the way the light hits it. The fact that light always hits it in the same way makes it no less of an illusion. You would even have a stronger case than with water. Water is always blue, but if light does not hit grass enough, the grass will turn brown. I said earlier that colors seem to shine brightest when there is really nothing there at all. Perhaps I was unfair; perhaps, when it seems that there is nothing there, that is when colors shine brightest. We live only in the world of our perception; whenever we think we have discovered truths in the depths, they are only appearances hidden beneath other appearances. While we wonder what lies in the depths of a lake, perhaps fish look up to their heavens and wonder what lies on the surface; for, in fact, the surface is no less real than the depths. I told you before that everything in this story is true. But you already knew that: you are holding it in your hands, and you can see it with your own eyes. Whatever Sofa thought she saw in the kaleidoscopic surface of her soap bubble, it was exactly as real as she was. Chapter Four At first, she didnt see anything at all. She did not, for instance, see a flock of Canada geese waddling about nearbyand a good thing, too. As you know if youve ever been in the car when Canada geese are around, they always seem to be in the way no matter which way youre going ; and since Sofa was perfectly happy going any which way, the geese would have descended on her from all sides and never let her escape. (Some scientists believe that Canada geese do not literally take forever when blocking traffic, only some finite amount of time that is greater than the amount of time the universe has existed. But Sofa wasnt known for her luck.) If that had happened, it would have been a bad state of affairs, because Sofa was trying to find someone who could tell her where soap bubbles go. And she certainly couldnt have asked the geese, because Canada geese do not talk, they HONK, even though they are the ones who are not obeying traffic laws. But as it was, there was nothing there, which left her free to go anywhere she wanted if there had been anywhere to go. She walked in circles at first, then triangles, then squares and trapezoids. At home, she had always gotten lost, so she was trying to be as neat and careful as possible, except that she never seemed to get anywhere. She tried to think of shapes she could walk in that didn't just take her right back to where she'd started, but she had never been great in geometry. Why did people make such a big deal out of circles having no end if all the shapes have no end? And if a circle had no end, why was it that walking in circles didnt get you anywhere? On the other hand, was it even possible to get to a destination if you never stopped walking? What was the it in its not the destination, its the journey? Was it the meaning of it all, or some sort of goal? Was that what she was supposed to be going towards? These were questions, all right. And then, on the second leg of a particularly long, thin dodecagon, she saw it. From far away, it looked like another small bubble that had merged with the surface of the larger one. But as she came closer, she saw that it was not a bubble at all but a castle of ice. She could make out its turrets and windows and the rows of

battlements in a toothy grin around the inside, protecting it like a mother crocodile holding her hatchling in her jaw. Together, the walls still gave the impression of a dome, but a dome in pieces, like a stepped pyramid with empty space between the steps. Underneath the dome, there was nothing, and the walls cut through the underside of the dome so that there could be no room for anything beneath it. Sofa stepped onto the low outermost wall and took a few steps to find her balance. The next wall was also low enough for her to climb, and the next, and the next; then, when the walls were too high for her, she tried to leap from one to the other, and instead fell down between them, where she was found and captured by the guards. Upon seeing that an intruder had been trying to get inside the castle, they immediately grabbed hold of her and took her into the castle, so that they could keep her prisoner. (Its an odd system, I know, but walls that keep people out are just as good at keeping peo ple in. In fact, if ever you wish to live in a castle with the king and queen, the best way to accomplish this is to find a castle where a king and queen live, and then wander around somewhere outside it pretending you are a king or a queen, and making all your own laws and enforcing them, and if you enforce enough laws with enough power, you will probably be taken into the castle to live. In the dungeons, of coursebut hey, you cant start at the top.)