The arrival of the letter from the director of the program had been a shock given how tenuous his connection to the world was. Kierk has been living in his car for almost six months. Car insurance, his next meal, and a place to park overnight have been the daily concerns. Every week he’s driven to the San Diego Public Library to grab a new pile of books and use the computers and revisit the bank to extract cash from his minimal savings, less and less each time, approaching the limit of being flat broke. The sunsets here have been like falling bundles of white wood, and standing amid the birch forests of light he had thought he might never return to civilization, that his brief life was over at twenty-seven. It’s been months of dry California nights sleeping in his car somewhere on the coastline with his legs hanging out the window, his toes feeling out the slow seas of air. In all this Kierk has known that he was slowly receding from the world, that his depression was rising like an internal tide. He had sifted through the dog-eared copies of his favorite novels until they did nothing for him. In the halving and letting sunsets he would patrol the beach to write on the windy, scattering bugs of pages. Of the several books he had started writing (a monograph on measuring consciousness using information theory, a poetry collection, and an autobiographical bildungsroman), all had failed to take form, and he had been left in a cyclical pattern of self-reference, delving deeper and deeper into his own paths and roads and words.

Only a few reminders from his old academic life remain. Occasionally he would drive up to Caltech to hang out with a PhD student and have long arguments about twentieth-century philosophy, always returning in the end to the same question: who was the greater philosopher, Russell or Wittgenstein? The master or the student? But mostly he’s spent a lot of time at a cafe on the outskirts of San Diego, until the older woman owner had started bringing him Tupperware filled with food, then inviting him over to her house if he needed a place to stay. It took a few visits to realize he was just one of a group of street people she let sleep in the basement. Kierk saw them as shaggy and smelly shamblemen nodding blearily, or drowsing like a dusking heap on the couch, making their awkward conversation and pauses, their tics. He knew that even if he wasn’t there yet he would be soon. No one would have guessed that less than a year ago he had stood in a beautiful mansion, clean-shaven, wearing a blazer and with a glass of Chardonnay in hand, participating in toast after toast with famous scientists, each toast getting more and more extravagant—“To science!”—“To the next generation!”—“To the beautiful mystery of consciousness!”