Kierk’s eyes snap open. But looking around he doesn’t see the speaker, not even when he stands and shields his eyes from the setting sun and scans the crowd for her. Then everyone stops talking, the entire park falling off in its noise, leaving Kierk standing alone, paused, looking at all the silent faces, until the sound of a lion roaring brings him around to the giant MGM logo on the outdoor screen. Sitting back down, a perplexed expression on his face slowly transforms into a grin; he opens his notebook in the waning colors. There’s still light enough to write by.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up, a thing previously untethered made fast, a boat moored to a dock. A dock somehow exactly the same as the one off the Union Terrace, and the lake blazing with summer sunset was Lake Mendota, for the dream was of his past, Madison coming and going, buildings rising and leaving as if through a fog, and there had been old faces he once knew, among them his younger self, four years ago at twenty-three, the two looking at each other in sadness. An old life is woken from.

Standing, he stretches in the harsh morning light coming through the window, blinking in it like an owl.

On the way to work the air is crystalline clear, a prism, and the city glints off itself. There are wild calls—everyone seems energetic in the sunlight. Kierk gets coffee from a food cart, then walks by the drifting snatches of a conversation in French, and then another right after in Spanish. Kierk finds himself at that spot on Broadway where one can see One World Trade Center to the south and the Empire State Building to the north.