Instead you asked me about the road trip. I thought about explaining what it felt like to watch the burn on the playa. About feeling myself not only lost in the sea of people but also lost as to what we were all really doing there. But for some reason I found myself telling you about my chance encounter with Robert at the diner. I launched into a somewhat breathless explanation of his theory on sentience as you cut your pizza into little manageable squares. I even took out a pen from your purse at one point and mimicked his writing of the equation on a napkin.

When I finished you forked a piece of sun-dried tomato off your plate, popped it in your mouth, chewed it and said: “Well, that seems rather flimsy, don’t you think?”

I immediately felt defensive of Robert. And perhaps of my own enthusiasm. I told you I had googled him and could verify he was a scientist of some renown.

You took a sip of wine, unimpressed. “All he’s describing is a measure of the efficiency of an individual brain, not its relative intelligence or sentience. It doesn’t describe how the subjective experience of being alive arises out of the very objective stuff of our brain tissue.” You took another sip of wine and shook your head, the glass still suspended in your hand. “I’m so goddamn tired of these scientists — all of them men, you can be sure — who want to equate human consciousness, sentience, intelligence with computational processing power. It’s just so — flimsy. And fascist, actually.”

Needless to say you were not inspired. Compared to the human soul you considered even the most lyrical aspects of science to be cold, analytic vulgarities.

We were in such a full-blown argument about it by the time you paid the bill that Kieran didn’t even bother performing the formalities of the warm send-off. As we crossed the parking lot you were working yourself into a rage, channelling a lifetime’s worth of professional setbacks into your exasperation with Robert’s theory and every half-baked, machismo theory that landed men tenures at Berkeley.

“I bet I know about a hundred times more about computers than Robert does — or power to the hundred times more,” you said.

A few paces from our car, lost in conversation, we looked up to notice a red sedan speeding directly towards us. The driver was looking at his phone and wasn’t slowing down. We leapt out of the way, and as we did your heel snapped and you careened face-first into a parked car, your head bucking back as it hit the bumper. Your nose was bleeding as I helped you back onto your feet.

You swivelled and shouted to no one in particular, perhaps to me, “That fucking car almost hit us!”