An Abundance of Katherines: Chapters 15-19

She and Colin remained friendly, but it was all so superficial, and Colin felt like they ought to be talking about the big issues of mattering and love and capital-t Truth and Alpo, but they only talked about the mundane business of taking oral histories.

She and Colin remained friendly, but it was all so superficial, and Colin felt like they ought to be talking about the big issues of mattering and love and capital-t Truth and Alpo, but they only talked about the mundane business of taking oral histories.

The day before his inaugural Feral Hog Hunt, Colin Singleton prepared the only way Colin Singleton would: by reading.

He scanned through ten volumes of Foxfire books for information about the habits and habitat of the feral hog.

He shows remarkable understanding of human speech, especially profane speech, and even an uncanny gift of reading men’s thoughts, whenever those thoughts are directed against the peace and dignity of pigship.

He shows remarkable understanding of human speech, especially profane speech, and even an uncanny gift of reading men’s thoughts, whenever those thoughts are directed against the peace and dignity of pigship.

They drove a couple of miles past the store and then turned off onto a gravel road that wound up a small hill through thick foliage.

“Well, boy, I reckon I'm nervous sending you out alone with a bunch of yahoos.”

He pointed to a patch of dirt that had been dug out haphazardly.

“This is no time for lollygaggin' or dillydallyin'.”

He would call when he completed the Theorem, which led him back to it and the seemingly intractable III Anomaly.

Admittedly, he'd only known her for twelve days, but the whole idea of the Theorem was that you didn't have to know someone intimately in order for it to work.

His favorite: “Remark eighteen, snub rest.”

She had dirty blond hair that was a little curly and she bit her nails and her favorite song when she was ten was 'Stuck with You' by Huey Lewis and the News and her mother was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and when she grew up she wanted to be a veterinarian.

Betrayed by his vaunted memory!

But there is an important difference, and that important difference was manifested in Colin's throbbing pain.

“I think I have to tell her,” he said, a trace of the philosophical in his tone.

“They burn like the fire of ten thousand suns,” Colin said, deadpan.

He'd become a wracking, all-over vacuum of pain.

When he opened his eyes again, he realized his glasses were gone, and between the dizziness and his astigmatism, the letters before him started dancing.

The night before, Paramedic (in Training) Lindsey Lee Wells had diagnosed him with moderate contusions...

Hass managed a wan smile.

“I really don't want to talk about it,” Lindsey said, preemptively.

“Ms. Mabel,” the nurse said singsongily, condescendingly.

Hassan was ensconced in the green leather couch.

"Fair,” Lindsey said curtly.

"...Katherines dump Colins like Hassans eat Monster Thickburgers: voraciously, passionately, and often.”

Hassan called driving and Lindsey called shotgun, so even though it was his car, Colin was relegated to the backseat, where he curled up against the window and read J. D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction.

A certifiable genius (who was definitely never a prodigy), Einstein had figured out that light can act, in a seeming paradox, both as a discrete particle and as a wave.

A few straggling strings were still blowing up from the box...

"Yeah, I’m getting there. Although—if I’m going to be an all-out, full-on doer,” Hassan noted, faux morose, "I should probably register for three classes. It's a hard life, kafir.”

Katherine IV, aka Katherine the Red, was a mousy redhead with red plastic-rimmed glasses whom I met in Suzuki violin lessons and she played beautifully and I played hardly at all because I could never be bothered to practice and so after four days she dumped me for a piano prodigy named Robert Vaughan who ended up playing a solo concert at Carnegie Hall when he was eleven, so I guess she made the right call there.

"In fifth grade, I went out with K-5, widely reputed to be the nastiest girl in school because she always seemed to be the one who started lice outbreaks, and she kissed me on the lips out of nowhere during recess one day while I was trying to read Huck Finn in the sandbox, and that was my first kiss, and later that day she dumped me because boys were gross."

Then after a six-month dry spell, I met Katherine VI during my third year at smart-kid summer camp, and we went together for a record seventeen days and she was excellent at both pottery and pull-ups, two fields of endeavor at which I have never excelled...

The Eighth wasn't quite so sweet, and maybe I should have known it since her name, Katherine Barker, anagrams into Heart Breaker, Ink, like she's a veritable CEO of Dumping...

And then after a horrendous dry spell, I met Katherine XVI on the roof deck of a hotel in Newark, New Jersey, during an Academic Decathlon tournament in October of my junior year, and we had about as wild and torrid an affair as you can possibly have over the course of fourteen hours at an Academic Decathlon tournament...

And the second moral of the story, if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees—breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; it's something that happens with you.

Hassan said, “Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.”

The future will erase everything—there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion.

An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward—ever smaller but everlasting.