“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, you basically did. Jessica, where did you find this guy?” Jessica kind of looks helplessly around. Both Chelsea and Jen are gathering up their things to leave. Kierk rolls his eyes, acting exasperated.

“Real nice sociopath friend here, Jess,” Chelsea says.

“That term hasn’t been used since the seventies. It’s technically a psychopath.”

“Fuck you!” Jen says.

“You would have,” he says, smiling. “But I’d have died of boredom from your cadaverous taste in literature before we got that far.”

Chelsea and Jen both give him the middle finger, to which Kierk shrugs. After hugging Jessica goodbye they pass Carmen and the guy she’s brought with her.

“This is ah . . . Rob.” Carmen lays out the drinks, mentally cursing.

Rob sticks out a hand. Kierk reaches past the proffered hand and picks up one of the gin and tonics and drains the entire thing, his Adam’s apple bobbing. The empty ice-filled glass is still vibrating on the table as he wipes his mouth and says loudly—“Thanks, Ken!”—and then disappears into the crowd toward the bar. Carmen calls his name once before he vanishes.

Rob turns to Carmen. “Who the fuck was that?”

Carmen ignores him, debating internally, watching the crowd for sign.

The night is full of eyes, inhuman, a peacock’s tail. Momus would have laughed. Everything left, even the city. Carmen comes out of the bar wearing Rob’s hat. Alex pirouettes down the steps like an acrobat. Kierk is across the street already, had been for some time, sitting on the curb with his head in his hands. Distant voices call his name, looking for nothing at all. Kierk is thinking that materialism is a clock wound up by a macrocephalic god. The group is soon standing around him, including Rob the investment banker who has been hitting on Carmen all night with remarkable persistence and, so far, considerable charm. He hands out cigarettes to everyone. A lighter is passed around. Kierk shrugs off a hand on his shoulder.

“What’s his story?”

Looking up from his hands—“This has all just been a terrible misunderstanding. Thank Galileo for that, that old fuck, for establishing some goddamn assumptions that are going to fuck us over in the end. He took the observer out of science . . .”

Kierk’s head lolls about like a puppet with its strings cut. He shrugs off another offer to stand. Talk goes over and around him. A wall of legs, jeans, slacks, a dress. Some shoes are nicer than others.

“Materialism is a chrome clock wound up by the palsied hands of a macrocephalic god!” Kierk says loudly.

There is a drunken silence.

“Is this guy for fucking real?”

Carmen shoves Rob the investment banker into the street. A taxi honks as it swerves around him.