Soon, still nursing his hangover, Kierk is underground and everything is shaking about and screeching. Following a trail of text messages he’s meeting Carmen and Alex at the Bronx Zoo, but right now he is standing amid an incredibly crowded train, a hurtling hot metal box making its way beneath the earth. He’s pressed up against the glass windows of the door staring out at the stream of passing earth, metal, odd lights, brief glimpses of entire subterranean spaces. At one point a wall ends and for a second Kierk thinks he’s staring into a mirror but it’s just another packed train traveling alongside them, with people other than him staring back, strangers staccato blinking in the chthonic yellow light so that they look sickly, like dream people. Expressionless the two sides gaze at each other, neither one moving. Yet both move. If even motion is relative, what isn’t?

Interspersed into his stream of consciousness, like frames spliced into one movie reel from another, he thinks of Carmen. He feels this lust is entirely absurd, doesn’t make any sense for him. He had thought his life was all charted, that the ouroboros could be traced again and again, that he would die before thirty. In the lurching and heaving of the mechanical turns he thinks hot, dark thoughts of relativity, of sex and death.

Just one subway car behind Kierk, unknowingly thundering down the same tunnel, Carmen sits statuelike amidst the dense crowd. She is in the neutral spine position on the edge of her seat, one hand searching around in her purse beside her, discriminating objects by touch, moving past and over lip balm and a Nabokov short story collection to take out some gum, thoughts drifting. She watches herself in the moving black planes of glass opposite her. As they slow down for the next stop she sees, in a flash of illuminated yellow underground construction, a lit alcove, a concrete wall on which is spray-painted in red: DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. TORTURE FOR TORTURERS.

Pulling into the platform she’s craning her neck, even briefly fighting her way out to look down the tracks, but she gives up and slides back in as the doors are closing. This is midtown, well beyond NYU-student territory. Doesn’t make any sense. One thin pinky goes up to smooth an eyebrow as she sits back down, confused. It’s a further addition to the already merry-go-round nature of her thoughts.