Two marbles are put next to each other. They touch only at an infinitesimal point.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up pleasantly tangled in sheets. Legs over fabric, sliding to the smooth, cooler parts. Groaning, everything hurts, but it feels like things inside him are being knit back together and there is a very old joy in that. On his way to the bathroom he nearly trips over A Confederacy of Dunces lying on the floor by the bed.

At a cafe on Broadway the barista starts making him an iced coffee and Kierk has to explain he wants it hot. The barista lifts an eyebrow—“You know we’re in the middle of a record heat wave, right?”

Carrying his coffee Kierk finds a convenience store. In the cool aisles he grabs a pack of pens and then he browses through the notebook selection, which is minimal. The only ones left are bright pink Hello Kitty notebooks. After a dour moment he chuckles, slapping it on his knee, remembering early on in his California period when he would buy thick packets of printing paper and tear them open and fill the loose-leaf sheets with pages and pages of prose, diagrams, ideas, equations . . . And he feels something he hasn’t felt for a long time: words stirring like small birds in his chest waking from a westward dream.

Kierk sets his tray of sushi down as Carmen looks up from securing a lid on her iced chai tea, a tray already in front of her.

“Do you know what I saw on the way here?” she says. “That Double Trouble graffiti. ‘Torture for torturers.’ Reminds me of what Norman Bennett said about how that researcher got chased by someone in a monster costume. And then whatever it is you saw! That creeped me out. And I think I got spooked from it all, because yesterday after lab, I left late, so it was dark, but I thought I was being followed. Like when someone walks behind you for too long, you know? This guy in a costume. Like a mask with horns or whatever. He was behind me the whole way home. But he must have been going to a costume party because he like, turned off right before my building.”

Kierk looks over at her sushi stuffed with avocado—“ Wouldn’t they leave you alone since you’re a vegetarian?”

“I still do animal research though. Sometimes. Besides, aren’t a lot of people vegetarians in the field?”

“I’m a complexitarian. Only eat things below a certain neural complexity.”

“You would be. So clearly shrimp don’t make the cut.” She points at his rolls with her chopsticks.

“Delicious and dumb. Just the way I like them.”

“What would be an example of something that would make the cut?”

Kierk gestures to the bar. “Among the things here? Octopus. But of course being a complexitarian is just a stand-in. Ideally, we’d all be unconscioustarians.”

“Nonconscious creatures only?”