It’s time. Outside it is gray and hot, the clouds are low, trapping the heat in, a lid to the city. During the walk to the CNS she texts Kierk again, this time just a bunch of question marks. He still hasn’t answered. It’s been two days now since they’ve communicated. Thirty missed calls. A gazil-lion text messages. Would Kierk have walked back from her apartment to his own? Undoubtedly. Or maybe he had taken the subway . . . And there was something terrible on the news that she had missed. No. Impossible. But after this many missed phone calls it seemed completely possible. His body, that thing that was now so full of life to her, could right now be a mangled doll somewhere under the city in the dark, lost. Or the person that had left that dummy outside her window had found him, gotten him, and with an ice pick stirred apart that delicate brain of his. She is gripped with worry for him. But maybe that’s not what’s going on at all, maybe he’s totally fine, maybe he’s consciously not answering her calls, and he’s decided something she didn’t see coming, some part of him was an emotional cipher and had taken over and he was making decisions using some formal system unknown to her. Or what if he had missed the first few phone calls and messages and then found them all, and decided she was too unstable or crazy or obsessive and now wasn’t responding at all, didn’t know how to nor did he want to deal with a girl who called him dozens of times. What if she’d ruined everything? Carmen is confronted with the fact that in the grand scheme of things she doesn’t know that much about Kierk. He had talked about his mother, but what about his father? He’d never even mentioned one . . . She knew that he had left his PhD prior to its completion, some kind of fight with his mentor, but whose fault had it been? And what of his past relationships? He’d never mentioned any, despite all the discussions they’ve had. Had he ever been in love? She’s just realizing now that she doesn’t know any of this. Had he just wanted to fuck her? Maybe he’d gotten everything he wanted from her already. She’d been so stupid not to see it! She’d misinterpreted everything. All his interest in her had just been him wanting to check off some sort of conquest box. Who the fuck was Kierk at all? Maybe he was just like everybody else . . . And then the cycle started again at her worry about his safety, and she’s back to certainty that some outside malevolent force is at work.