He smokes the cigarette he’s been holding while pacing the steps of Union Square. He is uniquely aware of his lips, his hands, his body seems new to him, fit, sexual. Sitting on a bench he closes his eyes and briefly reviews the imagery and memory techniques of Cicero, Ramon Llull, and the origin of the concentric circles on his back—Giordano Bruno. Then he filters out everything. The outside city sounds become a white noise. His whole mind is now laid out as landscape, passages and buildings of artful Grecian architecture, workshops cluttered with hand-drawn maps and wooden globes, beakers and trigonometric instruments, chalkboards lined with mathematical scrawl, the reliquaries of books, hanging gardens, pools with bottoms of smooth white stones traversed by bulbous-headed fish, and a room with a view and a typewriter sitting by the window. Beyond this small village of civilization are the desert regions where desire and ambition rage as dervishes of weather and sand, and where half-buried pharaonic halls contain within them the stone statues of himself, their visages worn in the timeless heat, all bearing different versions of his face. Kierk summons forth a white space where his mental avatar appears to him, awaiting attributes like at the start of a video game, and he first wraps it in the clothes he had been wearing, then sets it walking out of the hookah bar, the rain is added in, Alex is set laughing on the steps, Atif is set standing looking up, Carmen is set smiling at him. From the surrounding white infinity a taxicab drives into the little domain of color and objects. As the avatar climbs into the cab the perspective shifts and it is Kierk climbing into the cab, Carmen scooting up her butt into his lap. Rain on his hands coming through the window. Her hands over his hands in the spray. Leon in the front seat, the outline of his head shifting about. The jerk of a stop. The form of Leon is exiting, leaving just Alex and Kierk and Carmen, and Alex goes to the front, and then the lurch of a start again, Carmen ending up in his lap, thrown over him, body unto body, hair mixing so close now, their faces inches from each other, the exotica of another’s breath, lips meeting, her tongue surprisingly cool, wet from rain, the incredible texture of an unknown mouth responding, everything spinning but her mouth, hands gripping at each other, trying to break free of the material world and into each other, and then there is a wall of obsidian black, perfectly smooth and texture-less and extending like a monolith up and up forever. Kierk opens his eyes to the passing lines of people, the burned-out cigarette in his hand. If any part of him remembers the further events that memory is wrapped up as tight as the higher dimensions of string theory, everywhere and nowhere in him all at once.