At the entrance to the CNS Carmen and Kierk have a brief interaction but are heading separate ways. He had brought her no news, although she felt perhaps he wasn’t mentioning something. Afterward Carmen is drumming her fingers on the lid of her coffee, ruminating, for she had wanted to mention what had occurred last night but it seemed so ridiculous, smaller now, shrunken in the logics of day. She had been woken in the early hours by her phone ringing from an unlisted number. Groggy and dry-mouthed she had picked up and said hello. On the other end had been wet and heavy breathing like the phone was being held up to the mouth of a bull, and she, thinking she might be dreaming, had laid there confused for a number of seconds listening as the breathing intensified. Eventually it reached a crescendo and there came a guttural welling moan, like something coming into its own hands. In shock she had hung up and threw the phone away from her in the bed, fully awake now, looking at it lying sinisterly there like a giant bug. It rang again. Automatically her hand had gone to the light by her bed but then she consciously arrested its movement. Slinking out of bed, in the dark she pulled on her pajama bottoms, and then she snuck into the kitchen and with a quiet snick took down the butcher’s knife from where it hung on a magnetic strip above the sink. Knife in hand she had tiptoed to the door, checked the three locks, and then looked through the peephole into the empty hallway for a while. She slowly checked out the bathroom, using the knife to peel back the shower curtain, opened the sliding door to her closet, and then, very slowly and with her heart beating so fast she could hear it in the quiet, lifted up the covers of her bed and looked under. The street outside was also empty. Exhausted and defeated she had drifted off some time later on when the black sky had developed a tinge of verdigris. But in the bright light of today she just couldn’t bring it up to Kierk, it seemed such an overreaction on her part, an event so separate from the daytime world in which she and Kierk have a date on Friday.