Now those early experiences under Antonio Moretti seem like another life. He can’t believe it’s only been weeks since he moved to New York. The city is already familiar to him: its frenetic pace, the clockwork and machina of it, the curbs littered with garbage, the food trucks, the skateboarders, the beautiful women in their summer dresses, the yellow cabs glinting like beetles in the sun, the lances of buildings, the feeling of possibility. Lately every day has seemed voluminous in its contents. Comparatively, the last few months in California had been a trickle, a blur. He can pick out individual events but not days. Kierk knows that this is a common psychological effect. A week of vacation is clear and extended, lingering and rich, while a week of normal routine flies by. An exemplar case: Kierk as a skinny kid, his hair everywhere, his limbs thin around knobby red knees and elbows, up in a tree, his hands sticky with sap. Not sticky enough. The branch in one hand had broken and he had slipped off, a long fall where he somehow had the time to maneuver his body so that he rolled down into pine needles when he hit. Thought he was dying before his breath came back. Time during that fall had been like a big bubble. The current neuroscientific explanation for the effect is that memories are laid down in greater detail and in greater number during novel experiences, so it really just seems as if subjective time slows. But to Kierk this can’t be the entire explanation; rather, it has to be that each conscious moment is actually deeper, richer—there is a greater volume of consciousness. Or in a more Jamesian phrasing, time is the depth of the river of consciousness. And normal language doesn’t have that distinction at hand, so people say time slowed down, when really they should have said—“There was more me. I existed more.” In which case the amount of time experienced is a function of the richness of the experience. Maybe a bug’s life, with its consciousness of tiny volume, rushes by in a subjective blink. Maybe a dog’s days are like water, the stream of their entire life rushing by intrinsically at the same speed at which a year passes for humans. In the reduced consciousness of dreams the events are compressed, happening over and over in an impossible time frame. What about for a cerebral organ-oid? Kierk’s deformed clone, its life one contextless dream, its fluttering experience a thin fast-flowing liquid. And for a hypothetical being with an infinitely rich consciousness time would never pass—frozen, it would live forever in its own subjective moment even as the rest of the universe spun the way toward heat death.

Kierk, shuffling out papers with equations scrawled on them, chewing on a pencil, spirals once again, moth to flame.

THURSDAY