After a long pause, during which no one spoke, and because they hadn’t yet paid their cable bill the TV was off—a pause during which only half of them, those with unlimited data plans, looked at their phones, Marc, who was sitting next to Andrew, one of the guys on their phones, on a love seat, a curb-pick-up, said, looking up into the dirty-webby corner of the ceiling, “there are only two types of people in this world, if you think about it.” He followed a crack from the corner down the plaster wall to the trim of sealant separating the wall from the floor, nodding as he followed. “Those who expand and those who reduce.”

“Expanders and reducers,” said Jonathan, feeling the lofty gist of the statement. He was blonde, buzzcutted, tall and lanky, sitting in a lazy boy, his legs and arms seemingly all over yet covering none of the brown leather, and stoned. He repeated: “expanders and reducers. Those who expand. Those who reduce.”

“I’m not 100% on this thought,” said Lucas, stretched supine on the couch, his head propped up by the couch’s armrest, playing Candy Crush on his phone. “This thought isn’t clear to me.”

“Expanders,” Marc said.  “Reducers. You know?”

“Did you get high?” Jonathan said.

“It doesn’t affect me,” Lucas said. “This is like the fifth time, and I’ve never felt it.”

“You’re not letting it happen,” Andrew said, who alone had received, tacitly, sometime during the four boys’ time as roommates, the permission to speak to Lucas like this. “You’re being too rational about it. You can’t think about feeling the feeling of being high. Because then you’re not feeling it. You’re feeling your mind’s thinking about feeling. You’re not letting it do what it does.” Andrew was not high.

“Right,” Lucas said, not bothering to follow this line of thinking, regarding it as mostly tautology or irony or the transitive property or whatever.

Another pause.

“Dude,” Jonathan said. He sat up, held out his hands as if to declaim something, preach something. “Dude. God is the ultimate reducer. Not the other way around, which is what they want you to think.” He moved his hands in a vague encapsulating gesture, what amounted to an incomplete circle. “He built the world in seven days? That’s reduction.”