So when Josh broke up with her with no warning in her fourth year of grad school she left his apartment like a bat undone, without echolocation, flopping hysterically from surface to surface, in purposeless flight across the pinwheeling lights of the city at night all overloading her as she spun in a centrifuge, his words coming, speaking themselves to her again and again—“You are leaving and you don’t even know it yet. I’m doing this to protect myself. When we started you were this student who came to me for advice. I loved lecturing to you. I loved watching you learn. But now you’ve surpassed me in everything. You’re going to breeze through a postdoc and I’m going to end up some fucking research tech somewhere. When was the last time I won a debate with you? You contradict me about everything and you don’t even notice. But what’s fucked up is that you’re always right. You’re a better scientist than me. And that makes you a monster. Because, also, I mean, look at you. Sometimes I can barely stand it. So what do I have left? Nothing. Just my damn dignity. And I can’t take watching you fall out of love with me. You’re going to settle with me and you’re never going to forgive me and then one day you’ll leave me. I have to do this to protect myself . . .” All as Carmen tried to just remain upright, tried to comprehend what was happening, because her insides had clenched up into a spasming wall and she had waves of nausea coursing through her, while an abstract small voice, an academic part of her somehow divorced from her, was commenting—isn’t absolute mental anguish neurologically quite interesting? She had cried uncontrollably on the subway while people avoided looking at her. In her apartment the noises she made were barely human, so far from language it was as if she had become an animal wrestling with an injury.