“Just think of how hard it is for us to communicate with a worm or a fish,” Oz offered. “Or a houseplant.” I imagined him sitting in his desolate student apartment in Berkeley talking to some aloe vera. “The farthest we can reach in our communication with vegetation is when we, say, plant, water, or fertilize it. But it’s evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of ten points or more cannot be very meaningful.

“So what, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?” Robert asked, taking a sip of coffee.

As I listened, nodding, I considered how proximate the states of genius and insanity were. The conversation trailed off soon after Robert and Oz began eating, and I let myself get sucked back into Ana and Will’s orbit of banter. The three of us also ordered pancake stacks because what the hell, and waddled back to the car an hour later bloated and mired in regret. Ana took a photo of her “food baby,” posted it on Facebook with the caption Yours? and tagged every man she’d slept with in the past six months. As I drove into Vegas, I found myself stewing over my encounter in the diner. So much so that that night, while Ana was having a bath and Will was fucking me in our new motel, I imagined Robert on top of me, the bristles of his moustache on my neck, and realized there and then that I would never make love to a true genius and I would most certainly never be one myself.

“Ana, you know you’re going to hate it.”

“I want to go,” she rebutted from the passenger seat.

“Seriously?”

“Why do you find that —?”

“Because you’re always going on about, you know — fuckin’ Orientalism and privilege, and now you’re telling me you wanna hang around with tens of thousands of white hippies wearing bindis and doing peyote in the middle of the —”

“It’s not just white hip —”

“It’s going to be all the annoying stuff about Occupy without any of the good politics.”

“What are you talking about? Burning Man has — It’s an experiment in community and art, radical inclusion, self-reliance and self-expression, community cooperation, civic responsibility, decommodification —” she intoned, reading from the Wikipedia entry on her phone.

“No no no…” I mumbled overtop.

“Plus it can be deeply spiritual for some people.”

“I’m sure.”

“I hate — You can be so goddamn cynical sometimes.”

“It’s a big, week-long drug bash for —”

“Friends of mine have, Jordan, friends have mine have had profound experi—”

“— a bunch of tech-com employees from Silicon Valley, I mean maybe it started out as some radical pagan rite but —”

“It sounds like Mecca for agnostics,” Will chimed in from the back seat.

“And what’s wrong with that?”