All at the same time there was Carmen . . . who is now popping into his head as much as anything about consciousness. Her influence on his thinking is growing. A distraction that had been present all weekend. Every time he goes to work on the issue, in his awareness she becomes more solid, like the development of a haunting, a carmine rose growing up out of equations. Sometimes beautiful thoughts, sometimes bawdy ones, sometimes about protecting her, all were blended together—he wants to fuck her in every position, he wants to lay his head between her breasts, wants to tease her and spank her and kiss her and hold her down and save her. Wants to stay up all night talking. Everything he eats tastes like her. For he himself has been dumbstruck these past few days by the happiness that suddenly seems so graspable. The two of them together made him feel a poet, a teenager. He knows he could circumnavigate the globe and find nothing like what he has found here.

He feels guilty about not responding to her calls and text over the weekend, when she had needed him. Yet in a sense he’s also wary of these feelings. There is developing a clear choice, a metaphysical choice, two roads. Because he cannot help but think—FURTHER. I must go further. Something calls to me, tugging at me. Carmen is an exit on the highway, a highway headed to . . . I don’t know, but I do know that this age needs me in some way and that I, like the storm petrel heralding a hurricane, must comply.

He has not told her everything. He wonders what she deduced from his journal. Had there been mention of his fatal melancholy? For he knows there is a fundamental flaw deep within him. He could leave, run from her, but if he does he will be forced to love her forever but from a distance, an infinite resignation. There must be some way he could spare her from his melancholy, his torment and ephemeral nature, from his monomania. Sometimes the Egyptians would grow corn out of the mummified bodies of their sacred dead . . . What will grow from me? Such a thanatological crop can only sprout from a gift wrapped with appropriate ceremony and set out upon a sacrificial altar, a body primed and stripped of everything . . .