Kierk, having gone home to change into one of his new shirts and wash up and shave and load up on deodorant, heads to the martini bar near St. Marks Place where Carmen suggested they meet. He arrives early. The general theme of the bar is prominently displayed on the walls filled with old crumbling historical maps. Kierk picks a seat at the bar under a large map that he likes, with beautiful arabesques scalloping around its edges and in the blank frayed territory where the Indian Ocean should be is a large-snouted sea serpent entangled in a banner on which is writ in stylish lettering: HERE BE DRAGONS. He spends a while playing around with a few ideas in his notebook before Carmen taps him on the shoulder. She is wearing a blue cocktail dress and looks radiant. Kierk instinctively pulls out a stool for her. They order two martinis and watch as the drinks get made in front of them. They spend a little while catching each other up on things. Carmen tells Kierk about the blog incident when Karen was away at the conference (Kierk is conspicuously silent as she speculates over who the writer of the post was), which leads to them discussing Carmen’s grand dream: to show that the entire cortex participates in each conscious experience, like a large spider’s web where every part vibrates in response to the smallest perturbation of any part. That the apparent modularity that ruled current thinking was just an illusion brought about by the coarse-graining effects of neuroimaging and lesions. But she can only do one or two experiments at a time and so Carmen feels frustration at the limits of it, like she’s always cleaning a smudged glass with a rag that is itself dirty. There are so many variables beyond the experimenter’s control, so many background assumptions have been made, and consciousness is always squirming away, impossible to isolate as an experimental variable. When Kierk keeps asking about experimental designs—“Yes, but what does it really tell us?”—she can feel her own skepticism rising. His questioning in this is like some monomaniacal alembic, distilling things down to their essences. Carmen freely admits that her experiments and methodologies aren’t going to offer up a theory of consciousness, but maintains that they might tell us something if the string of assumptions that the field has constructed holds up. Yet it all suddenly seems so tenuous. Alex has spoken to Carmen about this before: Kierk imparts this sense that all you have been doing in neuroscience is useless and pointless and it’s like this contagious mood of depressive realism that can’t be shaken off. At the same time Carmen greatly enjoys these types of conversations because there is the sense of movement to them, like eventually everything, the departments, the grants, all could be torn down and the two of them could stand looking at the naked brain, erased of all assumptions, and consciousness would be suddenly as obvious as if the brain’s folds were lit by the light of a clear summer day.