Hamilton and Bernadette

“Before you can understand anything, you have to know whether or not you exist,” Hamilton said in a ringingly penetrating voice, a voice that knew how to make itself heard over the hum of the air conditioner and the background murmur of a small realty office. As he spoke, his long wormlike fingers were in continuous swimming motion, like wriggling clumps of tentacles, across a keyboard that was jammed akimbo into the open pencil drawer of his tiny sales desk. His face was obscured from the view of the others in the room by the large monitor that occupied most of the working surface of his desk, but nobody had difficulty hearing him. “You cannot know anything at all about anything until you are able to prove that you yourself do, in fact, exist,” Hamilton reiterated more emphatically, as if he thought his imaginary opponent could be won over by simple repetition, like hammering a nail into a wooden board, though nobody was arguing with him. He was typing with what appeared to be serious thoughtful engagement with a difficult philosophical problem, possibly directly related to the question of knowledge and existence that he was referring to with his intrusively resonating voice, but in fact he was chatting in an anonymous online forum in which he was identified to the other correspondents by the nickname “hotbuns.”

Hamilton's repetitive assertions were addressed to Bernadette, who sat ignoring him at the desk perpendicular to his own in the small storefront office, and busily copying customer information from a pile of newly filled-out forms into a notebook lying open in front of her. She was very short in stature, almost vanishing behind the notebooks and folders piled on top of her equally diminutive desk, but apart from that, there was something strikingly childlike about her, though her hair was graying at the temples and her light cotton outfit was formal and business-worthy, with a few bright colors poking out at the edges. Only on a closer inspection of her facial features did one take note of a certain pixie-like element, as if she might have stopped growing prematurely at some point in her childhood, due perhaps to some disease or nutritional deficiency, but most people didn't notice this charming aspect on their first visit. To the contrary, she often seemed almost invisible to new customers arriving through the door, who tended to gravitate more readily toward Hamilton's authoritative presence and welcoming display of brilliant white teeth, even though she would usually be the one they ended up working with to locate an available apartment.

Finally, after Hamilton's third and even more piercing iteration of his declaration about knowledge and existence, to be followed no doubt by some lengthy disquisition on the genius of Descartes or whatever it was he had in mind today, she looked up from her work to regard him with controlled annoyance. “The question of whether or not I exist doesn't concern me so much,” she began, “as the question of why it is that some people around here cannot seem to bring themselves to believe that other people also exist.”