“It’s not working. We’re aggravating him.” Kierk backs up. But Mars Bars growls. Kierk stops. They are both careful to avoid its gaze.

Still, Alex asks—“Kierk, are you looking in his eyes?”

“No!”

Kierk takes a step back but Mars Bars gives another growl and shakes his chair, his head bumping into the hanging recording chamber and its partial ring of still-dripping skull.

“Whoa!” Alex says, as Mars Bars continues to eye Kierk angrily.

“Monkey,” Kierk says soothingly, “if you keep shaking your head, you are going to lobotomize yourself. Please, don’t shake your head.”

Mars Bars is looking at Kierk with a fierce intensity, still giving off a harsh hiss from thin lips. Kierk is struck by its frantic grin, its vivid maniacal expression. He feels like he has seen this before. Its lips look like they are whispering, and it seems it is trying to communicate something through its manic graze, like the macaque has just been being seized by something, possessed by a secret it wants to tell, filled with a preacher’s mania, a theological energy, a cosmological terror and ecstasy. Mars Bars, with his face stuck in a rictus of this expression, and his eyes locked on Kierk, begins to shake uncontrollably.

To shake and shake and shake.

Alone and outside the CNS, Carmen lights up a cigarette she had taken from Kierk’s desk. Her hands give off only the slightest tremor. The night outside is a thick cloud being relieved of heat by the breeze. Groups mingle as they head to local bars. She feels estranged from their laughter over simple things. They are not confronted, pushed against, by things beyond our current conceptions of the world. Normally she didn’t envy them, but right now she’d envy anyone who hadn’t seen that.

A deep drag. A flash of an image. It’s burned onto her visual cortex: the shaking and grinning form of Mars Bars, viewed through the portal window of the door. The short clip of memory has been running in her mind like an internet GIF played over and over—the top of him unhinging, dissolving into a cloud, a whiplash of pieces, a whirlwind of matter. And throughout it all, that grin.

The veterinarian, after arriving in profound shock, was apparently going to list the cause of death as “aggressive self-lobotomization.”

Kierk and Alex were still inside getting some kind of emergency immunizations, given their experiences in the room. Quarantine from which Carmen had been spared. Kierk hadn’t said much afterward, like he was avoiding her.