Sore naked muscles on smooth sheets, stretching out. Around the bed a fleet of cardboard boxes stuffed with his books, arriving now from California. Kierk’s taken out an old dog-eared copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which is currently splayed out on his thigh. Keeping him from reading, haunting about his memory like the machinations of a ghost, is the God Helmet, the low bother of an existential itch. Coerced belief. These are precisely the kinds of things that can work themselves underneath Kierk’s skin—even the idea of solipsism had nearly destroyed him, hadn’t it? His first introduction to it had been amid the woodchips and hours of recess, after some skinny child boasted to a group of other children—“Well, what if the world was created just a second ago, huh, what if it was created just in the last second and then all your memories were made, how could you tell, what if God created it just now?”—and the little boy had snapped his fingers and Kierk’s young eyes had gone wide and he’d had no answer.

That same wonderment returned later when he, as many children unknowingly did, rediscovered the inverted spectrum argument with one of his friends. A sleepover with two forms lying on their backs whispering—“But what if my whole life my red has actually been green. And I still say ‘red’ when you say ‘red’ even though I actually see red as green. How would anyone ever know?”

It was trivial . . . and yet . . . not trivial. Kierk could now use technical terminology to describe it as a certain lawlessness in any proposed correlation between neural events and conscious experiences, or “qualia.” Because really, why couldn’t one neural firing lead to green instead of red? Why would some neural activity correspond precisely and only to a particular experience? Merely because it’s going on in the area that gets statistically excited when the eye is presented with red stimuli? Or merely because the area is hooked up, somewhere, to saying the word “red”? Is it really red only because the signal from the area, through a near-infinitely long feedback and feedforward—that one-two step dance, that shivering oscillation—originates from precisely those neurons and jazzes over to Broca’s pub, puts quarters into the arcade games to activate the pinball levers of a tongue and the forge bellows of the lungs, and some great mechanical machine far beyond sight or knowledge moves its comically large mouth to say slowly and deeply and with the blazing eyes of the Wizard of Oz—“Red! Red! Red!”

Kierk dozes in imagery. A still-verbal homunculus, a split part of him, thinks—let us reframe the intuition. We have our subjective world, and the objective world. Can one ever fully envelop the other, or do they only have, displayed on their surfaces, the distorted reflection of the other?