She shrugs it off. “That’s normal for you. I’ve found you in here fast asleep after drinking the entire pot.”

Santi shakes his head, half-laughing. “Are you just going to keep throwing rational explanations at me?”

Her brow furrows. “I don’t understand. What else should I be doing? What alternative am I arguing against?”

Santi opens his mouth and closes it. He looks down at his coffee, still there and still inexplicable.

Dr. Lišková understands. She laughs, and that’s unusual enough to make Santi stare. “Oh, I get it. You think this was a miracle! All hail the holy coffee cup!” She leans toward it, making exaggerated motions of veneration.

Santi doesn’t want to let her see that she’s got to him. “So you think I should accept one of your explanations instead?”

Dr. Lišková’s eyes widen. “Yes,” she says. “Obviously, yes.”

“And what if my perception and my memory tell me that those explanations are wrong?”

His forced calm is working. He can see the frustration coming off her in sparks. “Then you should conclude that your perception or your memory is wrong. You know the science, Santi. Witnesses can’t even describe a car crash accurately five minutes after it happened. We’re flawed, lumbering machines, crudely accidented into existence because a few cells randomly started copying themselves. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t accept that, instead of—of jumping to the conclusion that a big man in the sky likes you enough to stand you a coffee.”

Santi glares at her, overcome by an intensity of feeling he can’t explain. She glares back, as if his faith repels her as much as her cynicism does him. He sees her see him seeing her in a set of infinite mirrors and reels with a yawing sickness.

A knock on the door of the lounge snaps him out of it. “Do you mind not arguing so loudly?” says a sleepy-looking graduate student. “I’m trying to get some work done next door.”

“Oh,” says Santi. “Sure. Sorry.”

The student closes the door behind her.

“Christ,” scoffs Dr. Lišková. “We’re turning into my parents.” A personal detail, offered like a flash of a fish’s tail before diving back into the depths. Santi imagines a sullen seven-year-old covering her ears. The sharpness of the image makes him shiver. “I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” he says, lowering his voice. “My mind is open, that’s all. What about yours? Why are you so desperate not to believe?”

Dr. Lišková runs her hands through her white-streaked hair in frustration. “If God could work miracles, why would he refill your coffee cup instead of—I don’t know, curing all the world’s diseases? Or—or revealing the secrets of the universe?”

“Because he wanted to leave you something to do.”

“Be serious.”