“What’s this? Is this the selection of Descartes’ correspondence you were talking about?” he says over the distant sound of running water. “I mean, I know the general story . . . The princess raises that objection of interaction to Descartes’ substance dualism . . . and the two of them—the princess and the philosopher—they fall in love but they never get together . . .”

Carmen spits out mouthwash, adjusts her hair in the mirror, looks at herself from several angles, flares her nostrils to make sure they’re clear, examines her pores, winks at herself, comes out of the bathroom smiling and a little bit wobbly.

Closing the collection of letters Kierk puts it back in its home nestled between Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kierk, charmed by the synchronicity between the two covers, is drunkenly struck by the repetitions and cycles of history, imagining how within individual lives the same choices are presented again and again like notes in some grand song . . . and that there must be a Hegelian synthesis between Eternal Return and Unbearable Lightness, that maybe there is a road not yet taken, that lives were lived again and again but sometimes a choice was made and this time around everything was different; that history was a giant chaotic system of attractors, different versions of the same identities living over and over like Buddha’s previous reincarnations in the Jātaka tales, each one building and cycling on the ones that came before it, sometimes identical but sometimes coming within a hair’s breadth of their previous incarnations until a single choice changes everything . . .

“Lost yourself?” Carmen says quietly, standing beside him.

“Oh, hey.” He collapses back, a rain of thought coalescing again into form.

“Hey.”

The lights flicker, then surge and go out. There are cheers from outside.

“Let me get some candles.” She paws through a cupboard, Kierk gives her his lighter, and soon the apartment is thrown into flickering relief. Out the windows they see, one by one again, candles being put in other windows. To which Carmen puts a candle on the sill over which they lean, watching more and more small points of light flicker into being.