As they talk Carmen asks fundamental questions with an acuteness that Kierk finds startling. Unnoticed by them the bartenders are lurking nearer to them, attempting to overhear the strangely fascinating esoteric conversation of this young couple.

Carmen gestures over to the bartender. “Two more martinis, good sir.”

The ordered martinis long gone, both of them have excused themselves to go to the restroom. Kierk, pissing into a urinal, uses one hand on the wall to steady himself. He cannot believe this is happening between him and Carmen. He feels feverish from not having had sex for months. If they don’t go home together he will have to tie himself to a mast like Odysseus. But it’s not going to come to that, some barrier has been breached and Kierk thinks of those deterministic model systems he used to study, where once some invisible line is crossed an attractor sucks the system forward into a future state. He looks down at his penis and smiles like a munificent master.

Six feet away through a wall Carmen pops a squat to pee and stares at the side of the graffitied door, having that out-of-body experience of drunkenness: she is both squatting and watching herself squatting. She thinks—bracketing just like Husserl. Then she snort-laughs while peeing. After wiping off and washing her hands she spends a brief moment looking in the mirror, thinking that if he doesn’t make a move ASAP she is going to shove him into some dark corner and have her way with the boy.

When they both get back Kierk says—“Hey, want to get a drink somewhere else?”

To which Carmen immediately replies—“I have wine at my apartment.”

“Sold.”

On the way over everything seems to be alive with gender, each building leaning on the one next to it, rubbing; spaces are tight, occupied, waiting, each small thing become so biological as to breathe.

At Carmen’s apartment they spill in through her door, both laughing because it takes her so long to find the right key among all the others and Kierk pretends to die a little each time she tries the wrong one. The railroad apartment is a long rectangle covered in photographs, many are of New York City, and there are explosions of color in the form of carefully cut-out medical illustrations framed and hung up: the colored blues and reds of enzyme activity, the shaded regions of the brain stem, Kierk even recognizes the intricate trees of Cajal’s drawings of cerebellar Purkinje neurons.

As Carmen heads to the bathroom Kierk sets his notebook down and heads for her bookshelf. It’s always the first thing he does upon entering a home, go right for the library like a bloodhound. His fingers play over the spines, past a few popular science books, stuff on philosophy of mind. He stops, finger-walking back to a specific title stuck in the middle of a shelf, pulls it out.