Carmen takes a deep breath, giving a quick glance to Kierk, sees him with hands clasped, face serious, looking like a psychologist bent forward in his chair in a way that feels natural, cultured, expectant.

She continues—“And I didn’t want to be representative of that kind of ontology. I didn’t want to be a body in a culture where everything was just body, just extension, even if those bodies were beautiful, but without a place for mind anywhere. To present only one face. At the time, my ex-boyfriend and I, we called the decision to give up modeling for science ‘the mind-body problem.’ Just a joking thing. But that night I realized I didn’t want to just have a mind-body problem, I wanted to solve the mind-body problem. It took me a while to articulate it to myself like that, but I think it was true in the moment and it’s still true. I don’t regret leaving.”

“And that’s why you study consciousness now?”

“And that’s why I study consciousness now.”

“Fascinating.”

“I don’t usually . . . tell anyone that.”

Leaning back in his chair, Kierk looks like he is appreciating a delectable wine, a psychic swallowing which is then gone.

“Don’t worry, people tell me things all the time.”

“Well, now you owe me a story,” Carmen says, laughing nervously also in relief, her fingers dancing on her coffee cup. “So what about you? How’d you get into this?”

Kierk smiles wryly, looks down, clears his throat in preparation. Outside, beyond him in the window, Carmen can see a single cloud splitting in two like it is undergoing mitosis.

In the summer after they graduated from college, Kierk Suren and Mike Hogan—friends, classmates, and intellectual competitors in many late-night dorm-room debates—had gotten into Mike’s messy black jeep, their science poster, “Neural correlates of bistable perception,” secure in a plastic tube rolling around in the back. Together they had road-tripped up from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Toronto, Canada, so that they could present their poster at the fourteenth annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, held by some clerical error on the exact same weekend and only blocks away from the main site of the G20 economic summit. As they drove, around them a legion of other cars bore protesters heading to the economic summit, protesters who were equipping themselves with an armament of balloons filled with paint, who had signs clanking around in their trunks instead of science posters, many of them listening to radical podcasts and communicating to one another via encrypted text messages. The occupants in the thousand cars around them were preparing for war.