With the plotter performing and all of my other messages dealt with, I wondered further, again without typing, about the sustainability of everything. Whatever process I had running on the computer sent information scrolling by while I stared past the pixels more baffled than ever.

The next weekend one of my sailing students, a woman about twenty years older than me, pulled me aside and asked what was wrong, saying that I seemed a little troubled. We'd known each other for many years, drank a lot on weekend evenings at The Club and if her husband wasn't such a thug... I said we'd talk later, after class.

At the bar with her, I glossed over my trip to Seattle but emphasized the randomness of the accident that befell the technician's wife. I told my student that I may have appeared distracted because I couldn't reconcile the ease of my life against the backdrop of a world gone mad.

As if she had been working on the problem all her life, she matter-of-factly said that there are only twenty people in the world and that the rest were just props, like extras in a movie. "Listen, honey, it's as if your life unfolds in a Hollywood studio." This wasn't landmark, original thinking as science fiction writers had already proposed this. What struck me was that this moderately inebriated, yacht club socialite said it. I nodded as she flitted off to the next conversation with some of her classmates. I looked around at all the props in the crowded bar and wondered what category she was in and how that was determined. I also wondered how she came up with twenty.