“We were trying to develop a theory of consciousness so working with him was . . . intense. When Gertrude Stein met Alfred North Whitehead, she said a small bell went off in her head, informing her that this man was a genius. It only rang once more in her life, and that was when she met Pablo Picasso . . . When I met Antonio Moretti my own bell went off for the first time. It has not rung since.”

“But see, even a disproof is a contribution!” she says. Kierk’s face collapses. “No really,” she continues, “It’s an accomplishment.”

“I don’t think of it that way. It was against my research as well.”

“Then you’re not looking at it right. Listen, when I was in graduate school I did research I didn’t believe in. We didn’t lie or anything, but I’m a coauthor on at least one paper that’s unconvincing even to me. But it was a learning experience.”

“A learning experience? I wasted four years of my life. And the only thing I have to show for it is that I falsified one of the infinite numbers of false theories.”

“You don’t think it will help you if you’re actually looking to come up with something original?”

“Not yet . . . I must have generated and thrown away a dozen theories. I’ve got old notebooks filled with them. If I could . . . if I could find a solid surface on which to stand I could lift the earth from its axis. But I can’t.”

A waitress sets down a hot bottle of sake and Carmen pours it out into the little ceramic cups.

“So, where does that leave you, Archimedes? Back with us mortals?” She raises her cup.

“Me, I don’t know what I’m going to do. So fuck it, you know, I can find something else. I can be happy doing something else. I’ll be fine.” He grins widely as they touch the rims of their little trembling cups and drain the hot liquid, tilting their heads back. Kierk sets his cup down and stares out the window, and for a moment Carmen thinks his profile looks infinitely sad.

But she herself is happy to be sitting across from him, in this program, having discussions that stimulate her. It is moments like this that she wonders what the other Carmen would be doing, had her mother gotten her way. Who would be sitting across from her? It was the closest possible world to her, so close that occasionally she felt she could reach out and breach the barrier to the universe abutting this one, and that one day, on waking, she might slip streams into the other, into some different but similar bed somewhere nearby in the city, unaware that she was a point discontinuity in a continuous curve.