He picks up a neuroscience textbook marked by odd stains, realizing where it’s from—a neuroanatomical lab his first year of graduate school in Wisconsin, back when Kierk, ennui laying on him in a grime of nicotinic soot, had seen clearly his difference, his eventual end. One day he had gone to get the supplies for the neuroanatomy class: human brains. They were crowded in a white plastic bucket, suspended in formalin, bumping into one another like a school of marine life set to dead dreaming. They bobbed back and forth as Kierk had removed two, one after another. Each time his gloved hand had to cup the corralled reef of the cerebellum to keep it from detaching. He laid them delicately in a metal pan and took them glistening back to his lab partner. Then Kierk had stood posed with a scalpel in hand, staring. The classroom, the people, the voice of his partner reading aloud the lesson plan (step one: identify the central sulcus) entirely faded to the periphery, and instead all Kierk could do, sound and light and thought red-shifting in recession, was stare in deafness at the two brains, one bisected mediosagittally, the other still whole. In the buzzing deafness Kierk felt the problem was presented here so starkly, the problem he was most attuned to, his intellectual resonant frequency. How could such a gelatinous structure, suspended in fluid, sloshing to-and-fro under the force of acceleration, stabilized by the plush dura layer, the silky strands of the arachnoid layer, the skin of the pia matter, hold within its electrical storm the thin and definite and complex geometry of thought—of feeling, of blues and greens, of orgasms, of dying, of Jesus’ time on the cross, of every possible experience—the naked axe of phenomenological realism cut through materialism like a dream of shattering clocks. If such a graying and solid object, wrinkled with sulci and gyri, something you can hold in your hand, could be conscious by just the erotic swap of chemical packages, this is followed by the more terrifying awful amazing thought—then what isn’t conscious?

“Light is both a particle and a wave,” Kierk had whispered, and, his partner paused in perplexed expression, Kierk stripped himself of his nitrile gloves, muttering the mantra over and over, in his haste to leave nearly knocking over an empty beaker at another pair’s table. An aggressive question was thrown at his departing back. Thinking to himself—Both a particle and a wave. Both a particle and a wave. A particle and a wave. A particle and a wave. Some things have a dual nature. Subjective and objective. Subjective and objective. The brain is both subjective and objective. It’s a paradox. For how can a thing be both subjective and objective at the same time? But perhaps paradox is merely an opportunity for transcendence.