Against his better judgment Kierk buys another pack of cigarettes at a bodega and, looking up and down the busy street, lights up in the braggart heat. Sigh of relief. The palindromic drone of cars. People talking on cell phones. Night is the old Indian woman discarding wilting flowers on the sidewalk in a heap, looking up at him from dumping the cut stems from an old white plastic bucket. He feels he is already forgetting California, that everything prior to this was a dream someone else had. Today he’s been toying with the idea all day that consciousnesses are tautologies tied in nature—he’s taken Schopenhauer’s “world knot” seriously in his wondering at exactly how one might tie such a knot: through reentrant cortical connections, or through some kind of meta-mappings of sensory maps, and so on, but it’s never enough, it’s never radical enough to produce phenomenology from mere wrappings and recursion. Just another thing to add to the scrapheap. His shoe pokes at the pile of cut stems. He’s reminded of the infinite theories of Adolf Lindenbaum’s work, who showed that Boolean operators could make a lattice out of the infinite set of all possible theories, all possible models, every thinkable thought of the world—the vast majority of which are wildly incorrect. Lindenbaum showed how to order (but not to search) this vast library, which holds all truths. Somewhere, lost in that tower of Babel, that library of Borges, was the theory of consciousness. The one and only correct theory an infinitesimal needle in an infinite haystack. To see a glimpse . . . It would fit in how many English words, how many sentences? Half a paragraph, for those with the right vocabulary? Would it use information geometry? Thermodynamical work? Autopoietic symbol construction? Algorithmic complexity? Computation? Symbolic recursion? Stacking of hierarchical receptive fields all the way up to grandmother neurons? Quantum physics? Would any such theory give the tools necessary to describe exactly the inner life of the same Adolf Lindenbaum on that beautiful summer day in Lithuania, 1941, as he was rounded up by Nazis along with hundreds of other Jewish intelligentsia, all marched under that cheerful summer sun to a place of deep ashy pits and tall trees and faraway bird calls. Stand around the pit. Line up. Don’t look behind you at the deformed faces amid the ashes. Pray. Know that the idea of God is a member of your ordered set of infinite theories, but hope now that He is a member of the by-definition true theories, the set of tautologies, the theories that must necessarily exist. Your heart is impossibly loud and the sky is impossibly blue. You are so afraid but cannot move. When it comes it’s sudden, loud noises accompanying a rough push back like being shoved hard but in many directions at once and your body isn’t really your body anymore. Then you’re lying there mortally wounded among the dead, and all the theories in all the world bleed from you and slip into the sea of ash. All the dark embers are set to flame, a cigarette sparking against concrete, a heel crushing it out.