In the Lower East Side they stop to get dinner and soon they are tipsy, not just on the emotions of the day but also on the combination of sharp white wine and the textures of oysters, and now both enter again into a kind of merging, two streams conjoining in a conflux, a brief meeting point where there is a mixing of waters, each drinking, and then, sated and rejuvenated by the alien other, each brachiate off again. But once two waters have mixed there is no unmixing them, they are changed forever in their constituencies and courses.

MONDAY

Kierk wakes up to a slight touch, then something brushing his lips, a dream leaving him by his mouth. Carmen is kissing him awake.

“Hey,” she says, smiling.

“How bad is my breath?” he replies.

“Pretty bad.” She throws back the covers laughing.

“What time is it? Can’t we sleep?”

“No. I’ll stay with my mom outside the city and drive in. At least for the next few days.”

“I don’t blame you. Did you get some sleep?”

“Actually yes. And we’ve got to get up because we’ve got to attend the conference.”

“Conference?”

“There was an email. Saying we should go to it instead of Professional Development.”

“An email?” Kierk says, squinting over at her, propped up on one elbow.

“We have to attend the NYU neuroscience conference.”

“NYU neuroscience conference?”

“Stop echoing me!” Carmen says, giggling again, hitting him with her pillow. He wrestles the pillow away, throws it across the hotel room. He slumps back with an arm over his face groaning—“Noooo the fucking conference. The fucking conference . . .”

“Oh, does poor Kierk need to go to an adult place?”

Kierk is muttering under his breath—“Officious, meddling, interfering . . .”

“You’re half acting,” Carmen playfully calls back to him as she pads away. Kierk sits back up in the bed, surprised that she knows him that well.

“Half real though!” he calls back, hearing the bathroom door close.

Kierk folds up the conference schedule on Promega letterhead, which he had been reading in the dim light of the auditorium, trying to figure out what the hell the speaker’s been talking about. Earlier Carmen and he had gotten their complimentary breakfasts together. Since the incident with the mannequin she has seemed sensibly reluctant to be alone. But this morning it became obvious to Kierk that she knows he is aware of her reluctance and fear, and that today she’s putting on a brave face and pretending everything is fine, and so is off somewhere networking and doing everything she ordinarily would, determined to have an absolutely normal day.

Sitting in the back alone Kierk has reached a point of complete indifference after four straight hours of listening to undifferentiated drivel. He reads the tattooed writing on his left forearm. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?