The fifth stairwell cut into this hill also led to a tree. Poison Pie and I began to think that we were really onto something, a convoluted but intrinsic relationship between things arboreal and the vast expanse of nowhere. I began discussing the transitive property of equality--if a equals b and b equals c, then, as better mathematicians than us have proclaimed, a equals c.

Poison Pie winced. With a scowl, he insisted that trees, as magnificent as they come, were not nothing.