Later in bed, and with barely a coherent mind left, Kierk recognizes something fundamental about his investigations into consciousness, but it also applies to the mystery of Atif’s death. He has been using the same strategy as Bobby Fischer—complexifying the chessboard to an insane, absurd degree, building forks and pins into gigantic towers of counterfactuals, and then trusting in his innate ability to see a way through when his opponent couldn’t. But Kierk has cluttered the board too much, he knows—everything contradicts everything else . . . which is his last thought before going the way of a shoal breaking into fishes swimming off on their own as he drowses off, not even anxious about the questions that have been haunting him. Rather he has quickly become a sleeping form dissolving into mere ruins. As it happens the pandemonium of demons falls silent and without the tyrant of the self the throne sits empty and Kierk again becomes automata, fully clockwork and puppetry once more. Now the great Cartesian theater is deconstructed, the wands of props and the full houses of sets are hustled into the dark corners of storage, the boom mics unrigged in dark wirings and the stage lights cooled down with a vibrating hum. Backstage the actors are tiredly wiping away makeup with wet washcloths in front of mirrors and removing the pageantry of feathers and elaborate costumes, not prepared to dream themselves because they are the miniature demons of thoughts and thus themselves dreamless; beyond them, past the dressing room of melting and scaling lights the deep-red curtains are winging close, the stage is swept dry by a lone janitor, and then the lights are shut off, leaving only a pregnant darkness, and then not even that . . .

SATURDAY

Kierk wakes up and immediately has the acute awareness that Moretti will be giving a talk later today at the CNS. As he lays on his back looking up, soon the textured ceiling is occupied by the empty screen of his morning mind and a memory plays out of the last day of his PhD . . .