It hadn’t always been like this. Indeed, Kierk still misses the intellectual stimulation of working with Antonio in the early years. Sometimes the pair would have four-, five-, six-hour-long discussions. Hours and hours working on the details of the theory. Most people, outside of obsessives, have never experienced the true intellectual exhaustion that comes from thinking about a single complex problem for hours on end—the buzzing, drowsy feeling from your cortex burning piles of calories just to keep up. When there were others in their conversations Antonio and Kierk would outlast them all, a young marathoner and an older experienced one, still talking after everyone else had rushed out in tears of frustration or lapsed into a drained silence. Once a conversation about consciousness had begun at two in the afternoon and only when the night janitors came in to clean Antonio’s office had they realized how late it was. At near midnight the two had walked out together to their cars, the only ones left in the vast empty lot on the outskirts of Madison, a park set aside for research by the university, so the natural night world was all around them as they kept talking under the vastness of the Midwestern stars—the Milky Way a bridge of light above them, the dark grasses on all sides a sleeve running itself off in secrets, and after the headlights of Antonio’s car pulled out Kierk had been left alone, just him, the low-hanging moon, and an owl landing like a horned messenger in the trees. Kierk had followed its tufted shadow as it had winged from tree to tree, followed it as it followed the moon, and he himself then became a whipping form, a thing left running, a poet of the secrets kept by the grasses and the trees and the owl, real things casting shadows which were words which were thoughts, the living park a great mystery speaking to itself in the dark, a hued eye cracking, an old Egyptian myth reincarnated again, an irreducible animus, all of it alive, part of some larger structure, and everything had seemed possible to his running form as he sprinted across a field and into the soft bulk of night yelling at the moon, which yelled back in its stone language. He was right where he should be. All was phenomenon.