“Come in,” Kierk finally says, waving her in, and Carmen enters his apartment for the first time. Initially what Carmen notices is the spartan nature of it. She surveys the white walls of the small living room area, a place unfurnished except a worn, standard-issue couch. On the floor there are books forming small towers, bibliocolonies spread out and constructed into parapets and castles, falling into spilled arrays, interspersed with a few tennis balls—she reads titles like Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory and An Introduction to Set Theoretic Paradoxes and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and Causation: a Mathematical Exploration and Introduction to Quantum Physics: Vol 2 and Connectionist Principles and Crime and Punishment and The Logical Structure of Reality and Conscious Experience and Short Biographies of Prominent Intellectuals and Timaeus and Information Theory Proofs and Infinite Jest and En glish Poetry: 16–19th Centuries and on and on. She notices in a corner there is one of those blocks of printer paper they sell at UPS stores that had been torn open and half emptied, which accounts for the scribbled-on sheets laid out everywhere, so many that she had, she now realizes, originally mistaken the floor for tiling but actually at its edges there’s a scruffy carpet. The floor-covering layer of paper forms almost a canvas and on it those harsh scribbles and diagrams, unreadable and hieroglyphic. Kierk is silent behind her leaning against the wall in the hallway as she takes it all in, then she slowly steps over to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door to find it bright and humming and empty but for a packet of butter, and in the freezer only a plastic ice-cube tray, and after she closes it she gives up on looking like she’s examining the apartment by happenstance and now openly catalogs the contents of his kitchen, rummaging through empty drawer after empty drawer, finding only a single salt shaker, one pan, a stack of paper plates in ripped plastic. Sitting drying on the counter is a single plastic fork that Carmen picks up and holds in her hands, looking at the small tines. On cradling it she feels a wave of inconsolable sadness sweep over her—an ache in her heart pulls at her eyes and mouth like there is a string between the pit in her chest and her face. At the same time she feels an anger toward this man who has been so studiously ignoring her, pretending nothing happened.

“Predators run for their supper. Prey run for their lives,” he says, then gestures one hand around like what he just said was an explanation for the state of the apartment.