A cigarette is lit as he looks around the apartment, which is itself a failure, an incompletion. If only that infinite-sided die would have landed on just a slightly different number. He can still feel the younger version of himself for whom the future was all promise. Zoom in on Kierk’s brain and there it all is, the portrait of an artist as a young neural network, containing a whole world kept in miniature: there’s his hometown street, a long wooded cul-de-sac composed of ill-kept lawns that went back into the New Hampshire woods, and it was in those woods, the miles of forested reservation land, where Kierk as a child had tramped about in a paracosmic word of immense complexity, a physical world melded at its joints to an imaginary one, and at the points of contact raccoon prints could morph into human footprints, or brooks swell into impassable rivers, a bouldered hill could become a castle, the decaying skeleton of a fox a necromancer’s ritual. It had been a dangerous, wild place, where sharpened denticulated sticks soared through pine glens with a speed and precision lent by a carefully constructed atlatl, Kierk skinny and dirty, sprinting close behind his throws like a hunter, until one day he had speared a crow and struck it dead. He had cried over its body for a long time in that glen, dirty lips trembling, and he had promised and prayed and cried more and then had spent the rest of the day in an elaborate burial ritual, become a shaman laying it solemnly to rest, because back then all things had had an animus, a consciousness, from the trees to the crow to the creek, even the cervine saucer of grass where a doe had made her bed, or the perfect coins of snake holes, the tiny death’s-heads of ticks, turtles red amid the pebbles, all had been imbued with alien minds, like there was some great portentous spirit in the woods that whispered to him of his destiny to uncover their secrets—all of this, these landscapes and feelings, still there in that reddish mass of his brain, strung out in the finest bloody filigree, still located somewhere, though perhaps not even Laplace’s demon could chart such a map.

Everything is finished. He wonders what to possibly do with himself. He feels hungover, but not from any drug. With movements cycling between angry and sluggish he stuffs things into his old ratty backpack, first his new writing and journals, then a few changes of clothing. There’s so little of anything else besides the scattered books. How much would he get for the collection at a used bookstore? And with that thought Kierk knows he needs to leave this sad stripped apartment.