Amsterdam: Chapter 1, Last Part

I longed to know what he was thinking about even though it was probably nothing. Eddie was a person who didn’t like to be bothered with extraneous thought unless it was undeniably necessary. The only problem with this theory is that I could never really know, never fully dive within his mind to witness firsthand whether or not he was thinking with the same complexity that I was now. That’s the problem with being me, I thought, is that I can never be anyone else. I’d always thought of myself as overly perceptive, catching idiosyncrasies of peoples’ characteristics that they themselves were not even aware of, processing ideas and jokes and ideologies faster and more thoroughly than most people knew; I thought I was a great thinker. At least compared to Eddie. And most of my friends. And Jessica. And Napoleon too, probably. Actually, probably not Napoleon. Dude was smart. But I would never know for certain because I couldn’t slip into Eddie’s brain to see if he thought the same way, that he was more complex than everyone else, and that he picked up on things he thought no one else did. I wondered if he thought the same way about me the way I felt about him. I wondered how I would be described in his work of semiautobiographical fiction, if he were writing one. Which he probably wasn’t. Eddie didn’t like writing at all, and hated arithmetic even more.

“What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that I will never be able to fully know what it is that you think about.”
“Fuck man,” but that was all he could get out before the three guys we had been waiting for barreled upstairs and saw Eddie and I in the corner, him still smoking his cigarette, me still slurping up my vanilla milkshake.