So instead that morning she had called her parents for a long conversation, mentioning nothing, reveling in the sameness of their complaints and concerns, their well-worn tracks. Then she had taken a walk around her neighborhood in the East Village, where even the trees had seemed mournful, the day overcast. She’d spent the rest of the day holed up in her apartment, filling the hours doing yoga naked on her yoga mat while listening to NPR, making coffee. Everything tasted very good and the yoga made her body feel useful and functional. Now she’s reading one of her favorite books, the correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, which ranged in topic from the mind-body problem to fluctuations of their health and fortunes to the punctilious dissection of Descartes’ theories of atomic vortexes. Carmen reads this the way some people Bible dip, finding random things of relevance, adumbrations of their daily lives, poetry. When she shifts her weight on the bed she leaves stamped outlines of her sweat on the sheets. Her fan is on full blast, and she could really use some frozen yogurt, but the thought of putting a bra on seems infinitely difficult so she’s meandering between Descartes’ belletristic linguistic bows and winking compliments and Elisabeth’s occasional playful teasing to thoughts about death and how quickly life can change, how precarious everything really is. Occasionally she perceives an aural hallucination refusing to fully manifest, an acknowledgement of the K-sounding specter that is haunting her thoughts, mondegreens of his name in the clicking—kah, kah—back-and-forth movements of the fan, but she is refusing to ruminate on him, she is relaxing, happy, a thing alone and content with herself, with her body, her body that is like a hot collection of parts discombobulated about her, hair sticking to her forehead, unconsciously a fingernail is picking lint out of her bellybutton, one of her legs is up and stretching itself using a bookshelf on the nearby wall for leverage. Next to the bookshelf, are postcards announcing various art exhibits from the local galleries, along with a black and white NYC calendar, fitting the theme of her whole apartment; even when the city was separated from her by only a brick wall she still had gifts from it, a mute boyfriend expressing its love via fliers for concerts, found playing cards, little knickknacks from the city. Some people Carmen knew who lived in New York City for awhile become ironically muddled in their relationship with the city, but not Carmen, she loved in a pure fashion. A few of the things that hung on her wall were the products of taking art classes early on at Columbia University, amateur but talented drawings of buildings, courtyards, and her favorite, which hung by her bed: a negative-space self-portrait of just her own form, posing, one leg slightly behind the other.