In the breakup the same enigmatic indexical knowledge appeared: Carmen had known that it was possible to cry for two days straight, but she hadn’t known it. She received copious deliveries puffy-faced and in pajamas. She spent her time ignoring calls and emails and instead sat in the bathtub and watched dumb TV shows with her laptop resting on a fold-out chair beside the tub. In the hot water she had cried and cried and cried until she became delirious from dehydration. A few times it was Josh’s number on her phone. Each ring tore her apart until only pride remained. She bellowed and splashed around in the bathtub as if she were cauterizing a wound. Alternating in affect between vengeful and overwrought with loss, she shouted aloud one-sided conversations over the echoing tiles, cycling through invective tantrums where she accused him of just wanting to fuck other women, to stick his dick in someone else, always followed by reconciliatory begging sessions. She replayed that final night a hundred times over in the proceeding weeks, looking for a hint, a sign, a place where if she would have acted differently it would have changed everything. Finding it, and finding that everything he said had been true—this had been what really let her begin to recover, a long scarring process ending with a tender gratefulness for the existence of one self over another.

Kierk gets back to his apartment after the zoo, his mind full of lions and chimpanzees and the bat exhibit and the bar where he and Alex and Carmen had drunk pitcher after pitcher of beer. He fumbles with his key and then the door is open and where the hell is the light switch and the only visibility is from the city coming in like a machinery of light through the window and then in the bathroom he turns the faucet on full blast and rapidly cups water into his hands to drink, again, again, the roar of the sink and the hot, hot, hot water, the water burning up his throat and he’s just standing there leaning over the sink and wildly drinking hot water for a good minute before he violently and drunkenly hits the sink off and strips off his shirt over his head on the way to the bedroom and then slams into the pillow and sleeps.