“Can I help you?” An old man is looking at Kierk, who has stopped with one hand out and is leaning on an iron grate outside an unfamiliar park, his lips moving, his gaze on the ground.

“What?” Kierk startles, then sighs. “No. No, you can’t help me.”

“The movie,” the old man says, “is that way.”

“Oh, okay. Thank you.”

A small sign outside the park reads BEER AND WINE LEGAL DURING MOVIE SHOWINGS. The park is covered in colored blankets, and Kierk traces his way through the crowd without stepping on anyone’s blankets like it’s a path-optimization problem. Eventually he gets close to the exact geometric center and finds a small square of unclaimed grass in which he can sit cross-legged like the Buddha, facing the waiting giant screen. A breeze is rippling across the blankets and keeping everyone cool. The setting sun is pure red, a spill against the whole western sky, sporting around it the amorphous, lazy thoughts of clouds. The zenith is crossed by the strokes of two contrails forming a perfect giant X. The shadows of the horde around him are elongated, the whole world becoming a piece of art, impossibly real with talk, an extended thing. In the middle of it all he closes his eyes and lets the conversations wash over him—listening to the two white women with a picnic basket and an uncorked bottle of wine, toeing off their sandal wedges; the boisterous group in bright South African colors speaking English so fast and so accented it sounds like another language; the mother and father of a nearby family arguing about politics; some college kids all wearing Ray-Bans and playing cards; the cackling laughter, everything overlapping in a rising and falling surf, even the tinny digital sounds of a smart phone—that mix of conversations making a pastiche, an imbrication being constructed for no one, a dialog merging and breaking. A question is asked from somewhere and then, a few seconds later, Kierk hears it answered from somewhere else entirely. The crowd is having a conversation unknown by its parts. And in that darkening scarlet, in that ocean of sound, there comes through it, in one of the troughs of sound, a very specific voice, Carmen’s voice, speaking only for a single sentence that is clear and untouched—“I want to believe there is more to this world than we know.”