Kierk wakes up to his phone ringing. Answering it, all he can muster is a bleary, “Yes?” before a salesperson launches into a robotic spiel. The phone spirals away across the room to a disconcerting crash.

He sits up on the bed with his feet on the floor. He’s confused by a strange sensation for a second. Looking down, his bare feet are resting on sheets of white paper filled with his drawings and writings and equations.

Sighing, he stands up naked amid them. They extend outward, an entire carpet, spiraling until his whole bedroom floor is covered with the overlapping sheets. They are slick under his feet as he walks but some adhere and stick. A path is traced through them.

Brushing his teeth in the bathroom he rubs at his bloodshot eyes. He opens up the window and is hunting around for clothes as he smokes inside. The screen on his phone is cracked but it still works.

Outside he crosses Union Square, still bleary and blinking against the light, moving amid a giant crowd of other morning-goers, a brusque human flow. In the thick of the moving mass, Kierk, about to step, glances down and sees lying there on the sidewalk the body of an albino pigeon, its feathers ruffled and claws curled up in death, thick with itself. Shoes step around it. Having stopped so suddenly in the moving crowd he is jostled from behind, hears a muttered exclamation. But Kierk is entranced. Its eyes are clenched shut, its head bowed into its fluffed chest. It is a bright white and surprisingly compact and solid in its physiology. He glances up at the building that towers over the sidewalk, a great glass plane extending up and up. Had the pigeon, only minutes ago, thwacked into the building and plummeted to the crowd? Kierk wonders—Did you become sun-blind from the glare? Or did you think as you sped forward that the other pigeon would swerve away at the last second, only to find it was your reflection all along? Or did you see the glass as a transparent barrier, a thing you could breach if you tried hard enough, but in your velocity you fundamentally mistook its substance and the impact snapped your poor neck . . .

Kierk maneuvers through the crowd and grabs from a nearby crate two newspapers. Returning he again guards the albino pigeon with his feet, people giving him strange stares as they pass. In a forest of legs he crouches down. From on high he is a still, bent dot amid a moving arterial stream of pedestrians.