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“Let us now return to our main problem. This is to locate the ‘awareness’ neurons and to discover what it is that makes their firing symbolize what we see. This is like trying to solve a murder mystery. We know something about the victim (the nature of awareness) and we know various miscellaneous facts that may be related to the crime.”

—Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis

“Silly fish learn nothing in a thousand years.”

—James Joyce, Ulysses

MONDAY

Kierk wakes up in the back seat of his car, brought into being by a knocking on the window so loud and forceful the whole car shakes. Silhouetted by the dawn light coming through the back seat window the knocker is opaque and strangely shaped. Kierk’s movement in the sleeping bag stirs books aside as he struggles to extricate himself, then, expecting another policeman come to hassle him about sleeping in his parked car, he unlocks the door. Quickly it swings open and then more than one set of arms pull him out, his shirt riding up, his form dragged and his palms skinned against the pavement until he’s up, standing, pushing away, and then everyone retreats for a moment to look at one another and consider the scene. Beyond there is the expanse of a high school parking lot made wide and empty by morning. There are three of them. One has a nose ring, the other a shaved head, and the third is heavyset and shaggy. All are acned, teenagers or recent high school graduates. The shaggy one is lounging against the car and smoking a cigarette. The shaved head is now digging through Kierk’s back seat, tumbling books out, angrily kicking aside the sleeping bag with a boot. He hands a plastic bag from the back seat to the one with the nose ring and he empties it, pages spilling.

“Your phone. Give us your phone.”

“Cash, man. Where’s your cash?”

Kierk fingers the small wad of cash inside his pocket. This money is supposed to be for gas, coffee, some trail mix to munch on, and, most importantly, a new notebook. Today Kierk had planned on using those supplies to—not for the first time—give his writing one last try. He’s supposed to be out here in California devoting himself solely to his work, living on what little he had stashed away. Back as a graduate student in the wintery folds of Madison, Wisconsin, when he had found time to write in the stolen midnight hours after leaving the lab, there had been a rich river of prose waiting for him. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, everything. But with the hours of the day now empty, that torrential river had instead become a stream, then a creek, then dried up altogether, running itself out in ink. His previous attempts, all that writing, all those words failing to take hold, are now being scattered on the ground . . .