So after a few hours he, exhausted, hot from the computers, had gone to take a walk in Washington Square Park, joining the congregation around the geyser of the fountain. Teenage girls take off their shoes and sit with their feet dangling over the rim of the fountain into the cool watery spray. There is a grand piano out over to one side of the fountain, and Kierk recognizes the strains of an Erik Satie étude floating over to him on the air. Near the piano, surrounded by a low crowd of children, a woman has a kind of string contraption that blows huge soap bubbles larger than some of the kids. The bubbles gleam their oily curvaceous nature, vary from perfect spheres to elongated spheroids, platonic entities from outside the world forced to take form within it, lose their way and their nature. It’s windy and so the bubbles take flight in swarms all moving in the same direction, chased by the clapping and outstretched hands of the children, some flying low into their arms but others escaping into the air, become floating orbs passing above the piano, some even making it through the far stone arch. There they cohere, change, decohere. Sometimes two bubbles travel together for a time, then split off. Or a single bubble yearns to be three, while other times two bubbles will seek to merge into one. Sometimes a bubble will completely contain another one, unified but still with their surface boundaries intact, and carry on until they wink out together. When a bubble perishes it becomes a wisp, a vanishing string, or splits into smaller, rounded marbles, all going off in different directions. For a long time Kierk sits on a bench by the fountain watching the bubbles and the children and listening to the music, waiting for revelation to strike. He never goes back to lab. But he does while away the rest of the evening writing in his notebook with Atif’s pen.