“Guppa,” I said. “Remember what you were telling me about trade-in value?”
“Huh?” he said, stretching his back again. For some reason, Guppa seemed to be having a harder and harder time following the thread of my conversations with him. At the time, without thinking much about it, I put this down to age—his, not mine. It didn’t occur to me that perhaps my style was beginning to rival Miss Rheingold’s in discontinuity.
“Trade-in value,” I repeated.
“Trade-in value,” said Guppa, so I’d know he’d heard.
“What is it again that makes the trade-in value go down? What do you call that?”
“Depreciation,” said Guppa, with the pride all professionals take in the lingo of their guilds.
“It’s like diffusion, isn’t it?” I suggested. “Depreciation is like diffusion. Some of the value just drifts away.” I remember quite clearly that at this point I got a little flustered. I may have stammered, and I’m sure I blushed. I fell victim to an unavoidable association. Diffusion put me in mind of Miss Rheingold’s experiment with her perfume, and that in turn brought Miss Rheingold herself to mind, and with her came, of course, her legs.
“Well, I suppose in a way it is,” said Guppa.
“But—um—I mean—I forgot what I wanted to say—” This was a terribly embarrassing moment. Guppa stood there. Marvin stood there. “Oh, I know—where does it go? I mean, where does the old value go? You know, the old value of a car, when it depreciates.”
“You mean, is there someplace where all the old value goes?”
“Sure there is!” said Marvin. “There would have to be, wouldn’t there?” He turned to Guppa for the wisdom of age.
“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” said Guppa.
“What’s left of the car, the part that isn’t worth as much anymore, goes onto the used car lot,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Marvin. “But what about the rest of it? That must go somewhere else.”
“Some of it comes off on a rag when you wax it,” I said.
“Sure,” said Marvin, puzzling, “but there has to be more, a lot more. The rest of it—the rest of it—” His eyes lit up. “—the rest of it must just kind of slip into the Zwischenraum!”
“Yeah!” I said. “Into the Zwischenraum. The car winds up sort of spread out all over the place.”
“Wow!” said Marvin. “I never understood that before.” He turned his mother’s smile on Guppa.
“Zwischenraum,” said Guppa. “No kidding.”
The three of us stood there in silence for a bit, but it was clear to me that, despite this magnificent discovery, something unstated, a question unasked, still hung in the air.
“Well,” said Guppa, who must certainly have known that I had something I wanted to say to him.
“Well,” I said.
“Might as well get back to work,” said Guppa.
“Might as well,” I said.
“Where do we start?” asked Marvin. He stood there grinning. After a while, the blank look on my face made him repeat himself: “Where do we start?” He waited another moment, and then said, “Get it?”
“Huh?”
“Where do we . . . start?”
“Oh. Sure,” I said. “I get it. Sorry, Marvin. My mind was on something else. That happens to me. I—ah—I have a strange mind. You know, Marvin, I—I’ve been thinking about something. Do you ever watch ‘Fantastic Contraptions’?”
“I used to,” he said. “Before we started going to school all day.”
“Well,” I said, thinking that I might sneak up on the idea of collaboration, “I was thinking—”
[to be continued]
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