The chuckling breaks into laughter as the rat pivots, its little body heaving with exertion. Kierk looks around at the crowd, mouth agape, and thinks about what it must have been like to sit in the room while the physicists and engineers were taking bets on whether the first nuclear bomb would be a “boy” and set the atmosphere on fire or a “girl” and not. To control something without understanding it . . . He feels sick. But then the lights are on to applause and everyone heads out in groups to get lunch.

Sleep refuses to claim Kierk even as he lies still, all the rituals of going to bed completed. Instead he is lost in a cycle of mind, a tumbling over of the same problem. Getting up in the hot dark he flips on the light, yellowing everything, and starts to unpack the boxes that have taken up his bedroom floor. It becomes a slow browsing process that stretches on into the night—the unpacking is done as reverently as if lighting candles for Christmas mass. His hands touch spines, check inscriptions, flip to sections he knows. He lights a cigarette and takes a drag while looking down at the growing piles stacked around him, evincing an order only he can see. Slowly a bibliophilic recrudescence takes place, a real resurrection. My soul, he thinks, has been untethered by so unorganized a library.