“Hi,” she says, smiling. From his gaze she knows she has interrupted something, and as he returns he pierces Carmen with those green eyes, a locust whine of green, sleeves of it in a thunderous forest bringing forth a memory long forgotten. Carmen has seen those eyes before . . . It had been dawn, and she, blushed with herself, in her yellow raincoat of youth and on her way to school hopping over puddles, all pink notebooks and ballpoint pens and report cards, had been confronted on the road by a fox not five feet in front of her, a fox with green eyes just like that. It had been frozen waiting for her to notice until she pulled up short and they stared at each other, speaking no language at all, Carmen’s central faith shaken by such a thing, her unspoken belief in only bodies and languages had been uprooted, all done away with by those eyes screaming that within me is something else, an entire simulated world, mental phenomena living and birthing and dying in ferocious, pullulate growth, a whole ecology but internal, like it’s climbing the walls of a space without walls, a presence looking out from behind the biological wet of those eyes. Kierk, in his motions and speech, points her toward this same basic question, somehow making it obvious that beyond her own enclosed world there was a whole other world, but this one was inside him. Biting her lip she considers—should a fox have such an effect on my ontology? Should a boy?

“Hi,” he says, finally returning her smile. But now they have been staring at each other too long and the moment becomes self-conscious, so they busy themselves until it dissolves.

After finishing the electrode placement, they use a kind of liquid concrete to create a skullcap on their little patient, just like those on the rhesus macaques, molded around the long wrapped snake of wires that now sprout up from the mouse’s head and connect it permanently to the recording equipment. The mouse is put back in its cage, a sleeping, healing husk. They wash their hands thoroughly, pushing each other a bit for space over the sink, which escalates into soapy water throwing. While hanging up their borrowed lab coats Carmen notices through his dress shirt the tattoos on his back and becomes insanely curious, but doesn’t mention it, storing it for later with a small pulse of satisfaction. Instead she gestures as he rolls up his sleeves.

In small dark print up the inside of his forearm it reads: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

She looks at him questioningly.

“The title of a Gauguin. It’s hanging in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I only saw it once in person, and I got this immediately after at a parlor in Cambridge.”

“It’s beautiful . . .”

“It’s the second question. It’s that second question that has captured me.”