“I’m sure you’ve all heard of Momus’s indictment of Hephaestus; if not, you will hear it now. Momus was asked to judge a contest between Athena, Poseidon, and Hephaestus, on who could construct the best artifact to present to Zeus. Poseidon bred a bull. Athena erected a house. But Hephaestus built an entire mechanical man who could walk and talk. As the other gods clapped and congratulated him, Momus, the god of writers and tricksters, said—‘Why Hephaestus, it is clear that you are a master craftsman. But what is also clear is that this is the worst present in the competition. You have failed in representing the fundamental nature of the thing. Would not this mechanical man be vastly superior if upon his skull there was a window through which one could see his thoughts?’ ”

Alex does a little golf clap. Carmen from her stool gives an exaggerated look of unbelief, somewhere between astonishment and mock astonishment.

Kierk continues. “Installing a pane of glass that lets you look at the gears, that’s the neural correlates of consciousness. It won’t tell us anything, just as Momus slyly pointed out. Francis Crick was wrong.”

Mike’s scoff is quieted as his attempt at sneaking the fifteen past the guard of the four instead goes wide and the four meanders inexorably into the pocket.

“The house of neuroscience will collapse,” Kierk proclaims like a priest, walking around the pool table. “In the ruins nothing will grow.”

“Then it’ll crush you and your ego as well.” Mike’s hands are white on his pool cue.

“No,” Kierk says, lining up for the only remaining solid. “See, I don’t plan on being inside of it.”

A dream of chartreuse loses itself into the waiting netted mouth.

“You don’t have the authority to dismiss an entire field.”

Kierk smiles devilishly—“Truth is always in exile. Don’t think that if a theory of consciousness were offered tomorrow everything everyone at the CNS does wouldn’t disappear in a puff of smoke. Calling my shot: far right pocket.”

“So what’s next then?” Carmen stirs her drink. “If you’ve got it all figured out, Kierk, which apparently you think you do, oh please let us in on the secret.”

Kierk, eye level with the cue ball, takes a deep breath, and everything slows down. He can hear himself talking, and then calling his shot, a thing apart, but he is here, with this long field of baize and the dynamics of these reversible mechanics, in this dream of a physics that never happened. Words, his, are spoken—“Perhaps nothing will grow. Like the fields of Carthage after the salt. Carthago delenda est.”