Kierk stands nude, quickly making a tangled nest of hair in the sink. There is still the yellow bruise on the side of his mouth, matching the fist that had recently caused it. Shaving away the last of the hair around the discoloration, Kierk is struck by this younger face in the mirror, a face with eyes expansive and a clear deep green, his nose more hawkish, his mouth wider, his cheekbones higher than he remembers. The top of his hair has begun thinning. But still, this is a face he had thought left behind, resembling for the first time in a long time his driver’s license. Standing back and looking at his naked body he can tell he’s lost a lot of muscle mass but still has those long legs and broad shoulders. His eyes are again acute and discerning, young and viridian, and Kierk can feel himself returning, catching fire just like he used to, ready to fall in love with something.

He wants this to work, wants this more than he’s wanted anything in a long time. In this new apartment, among these new streets and new sounds he wants to create something, and knows he is so lucky, unbelievably lucky, to be given a second chance. He will not make the same mistakes as before, he will not go chasing what is impossible to catch. Instead he will focus on his career, become one of those ordained academics who get tenure young and line their shelves with their own books published by Harvard University Press. He thinks—I will become fully what it is my destiny to become, and everything prior to this will have been just events, spatiotemporal instances, and they are vanishing because the universe is merely one state transitioning to another with no memory of the past, whereas my destiny, to be an intellectual, a great scientist, is teleology pulling me toward it from the future.

He says to the mirror—“I choose this.” Then wet and sopping over the tiles he gets down and does as many push-ups as he can. He takes a minute wheezing on the tiles, and then does another rep to exhaustion. And then again.

Later he lies on the bare mattress lolling about. Dim recollection causes him to root around for a long unworn watch and set an alarm. The city is a strange surf crashing in the distance, and slowly, but then all at once, Kierk dissolves . . .