“Alright,” Carmen says as her hand plays over his shoulder, tracing with her fingers the geometrical designs there. “Buuuut first you have to tell me what these tattoos mean.”

“No.”

“Tell me!”

Kierk slowly props himself up. “They’re designs from Giordano Bruno.”

“Oh! He was the guy, the monk, who was burned at the stake for suggesting the universe was infinite? Right?”

“These are combinatoric wheels for his art of memory. They were supposed to combine to create a perfect language. It preceded the Turing machine by three centuries. Same idea, really.”

“Why’d you get them?”

“Besides being twenty-two? I had just gotten back from Toronto. I told you about that . . . I got it because, if you had a theory that would really describe consciousness, the how and why of it, its content, its level . . . that would truly be a perfect language.” He smiles. “And because I thought there was dignity and romanticism in impossible projects.”

“Do you still?”

Chuckling, but a sadness to it. Carmen shares a long kiss with him—“Alright, you get your latte now.”

She hops out of bed and looks over to see Kierk looking at her. Pulling on panties as she sticks her tongue out at him, then walking bare-breasted to the kitchen, she puts a large cup under the nozzle of her espresso machine that she starts up to a familiar mechanical hum, a tune she hums along with, kind of dancing. Her dance takes her to the refrigerator, where she pulls out a mason jar, unscrews the lid, pours in some 2 percent milk, then shakes it back and forth really hard, her butt stuck out and wiggling, and she hears Kierk laugh from the bedroom where he still has line of sight. When it’s done she unscrews the top of the thick now-foamy milk and sticks it in the microwave for thirty seconds as she takes out two big saucer cups from the cupboard and sets them out on the counter. The microwave dings. Taking a big spoon out she sticks it in her mouth concave side down, where it is cool and wide against her tongue, the handle projecting into her field of vision, and, still humming, she first pours the espresso that has accumulated in the original large cup into both saucer cups equally, then, taking the big spoon out of her mouth and using it to keep the milk foam at bay, pours a pattern of milk into each with zigzagging movements so it looks like a Christmas tree when she’s done.

She turns holding the two cups and sees Kierk, fully dressed and leaving the bedroom. Carmen is suddenly extremely aware that she is not wearing a top.

“You’re . . . clothed,” she says, as he takes one of the lattes from her.