“I don’t know. Like I said, I’m trying to stay out of all this stuff. Always drama. All the time it’s drama.”

“Glia, it is extremely important you describe this man to me.”

“Well, let’s see. Big. Very big. And they call him ‘the Nazi.’ Everyone scaring themselves. The Nazi is coming, the Nazi is coming.”

“Why the Nazi?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause he sounds like a Nazi.”

“He has a German accent?”

“Yeah.”

Kierk rocks back on his heels. His thoughts are following an anxious beat, his mind racing down the corridors of the CNS, plowing over memories, overturning comments, trying to reconcile this. The dog laps at his hanging hand.

“Hey, you okay mister?”

“What? Oh yeah, yeah thanks. Anything else you can tell me?”

Glia shakes her head, pinching off the cigarette to save it for later.

“Alright. Hey, listen, stay here. I’ll be right back with something.”

Kierk walks while dialing Carmen. It goes to voicemail. Eventually he finds an ATM. Punching in his PIN to the account containing his stipend he looks at the remaining, still large, amount. He withdraws the maximum, five hundred dollars, then walks back to Glia.

“Hey,” he says, as her face wars toward amazement. “Take this.”

She’s hesitant, like the money comes with some unspoken consequences. But after dumping it into her lap Kierk just pats the dog on the head.

“Stay away from this park, okay?” he says, and then is jogging off through the arch.

She shouts, “THANK YOU” from behind him, scaring the pigeons to flight.

Night falls over Sunday. Kierk has been going back and forth within his apartment, a blur of energy. His impending eviction from the program is mixed with the discoveries of the day, and he’s been moving from depressed to frenetic within the same hour. He wonders if it’s better if Carmen never calls him back. He’s been trying to get through since the afternoon. Sitting in his apartment he broods, throws the tennis ball, stampedes over the books, takes a bath, sobs a few times, punches the wall, screams once or twice, reads, waits, indulges in suicidal ideation, washes his hands under water hot enough to purposefully scald himself. Finally, he grabs his electric shaver and in the bathroom slowly and surely buzzes away all his hair. Blood from where his hand punched the wall mixes with the hairs falling into the sink. When he’s done he looks extremely skinny again, his figures sharp, a totally new primate just arrived.

Exhausted by himself he lies on his bed, rubbing at this prickly new sensorial dome. He’s nowhere near sleep when his phone rings. It’s Carmen on the other end. He scrambles to pick up.

“Hello? I’m sorry.”

“That’s it? I mean . . . wait, okay, I shouldn’t have said—

” “—well no but I also—

” “—because it wasn’t right to suggest—”

“—and I’m sorry that—”