Research articles, covered in marks made with Atif’s pen, are scattered around Kierk’s bed. Books are splayed out on the floor, the ones Atif had mentioned in his notes. Reading neuroscience textbooks had always given Kierk that creepy feeling of being a machine reading its own blueprints. Now though he’s just lying on his bed, a thing coming apart, pulled at a frayed edge and unraveling into spools of string. He has been thinking about consciousness, or rather thinking about Atif’s thinking about consciousness, which he finds surprisingly sophisticated. Atif had been bothered by the same issues, found some of the same dead ends. And within the notes, Kierk had found the occasional cartoon drawing of a great eye with spindly human legs.

The softness of the bed is rising around him like dough. He bakes in the pleasurable heat, is swallowed, drifts off into a sea. Images come and go, some of them are of her, he’s not dreaming yet, he’s in the lands between, an indefinable time erased every night by retrograde amnesia, but it is here that he sees a series of doors, doors slamming shut, again and again, echoing in their closing, cutting off a sound from the other side, the babbling of an idiot, a scream, and then slam, and then silence, until even this image cannot maintain coherence and Kierk dissolves into mere associations, a million things at once, the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle thrown against the wall. Sleep is a series of doors slamming shut.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up like a fish twisting on the line, struggling against the force reeling him into the world. There is already someone standing on shore, a form in the light with a hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun, hair whipping behind her. Throwing off his sheet, Kierk knows what has woken him just ahead of his alarm—expectation of her.

Among the heterogeneous pedestrians that crowd the streets of New York, Kierk doesn’t look that out of place, but the moment he steps into the refrigerator air of the CNS he feels ridiculous. When he walks into the lab Carmen, turning in her seat, becomes locked in humor. A hand tries to cover her reaction as she, who is quite normally dressed, rushes up to him.

“Oh come on, you’re not even wearing yours,” he says, looking her over.

“I am not insane, so I didn’t wear to work my costume-slash-disguise-slash whatever that is. I brought a change of clothes.”

“Oh . . . right. In California this would actually be pretty normal.”

“Well, it’s . . . magnificent.”

“Thanks.”

“Here, look at this little pamphlet I got of theirs.”