Kierk says that he’ll be there and hangs up before there can be any argument and he’s left alone with just his ears buzzing and the fizzing of his eye. Eventually, after wrapping his head with comically misshapen and bloody bandages, he’s able to call a local garage and offer to sell them his broken-down car for a few hundred bucks if they tow it. The rest of the day is a blur of activity and logistics. Later in the San Diego Public Library frantic emails between him and the scholarship program make everything official and get an emergency stipend transferred into his account. The only overnight flight with an available seat to the East Coast is to Boston, and that plane, that deep rumble when it finally reaches liftoff, is to Kierk like the sound of an angelic steed breaking atmosphere.

TUESDAY

Kierk wakes up from the first sleep he’s been able to catch in the odyssey of cross-continental travel. Roused by the shudder of the bus over a pothole, shaken from his sleeping slouch against the window, Kierk’s eyes blink open and the scene outside resolves into perception. Beyond the smudged glass is a busy sidewalk where people are fanning themselves with magazines, waiting for the walk signal, shielding their eyes as they exit the glare of glass doors, moving quickly carrying suitcases and purses and airs of motion. Dogs explore on leashes like searching filopodia as baseball caps are adjusted under lances of sun. There are vendors with coolers full of bottled water. People emerge from and disappear into the stark shadows the buildings cast like great sundials. The bus trundles along Manhattan’s capillary-like streets, heading for the city’s heart.

Kierk wipes at his mouth, sitting up straight. The woman next to him goes back to reading her magazine after eyeing the young man with the wild scraggly beard who had just woken from fitful, small-noised dreams. In his startled waking his arm had hit her thigh. There is another lurch and Kierk drops the notebook which had sat cupped in his lap, forcing him to grope around the rooted feet, the dark underbellies of smells. There is the tang of talcum powder and McDonald’s from the seat behind him. Flipping to the folded page of his notebook, Kierk exhales slowly and blearily crosses out a sentence, pauses, and then expunges an entire diagram he had drawn right before he had drifted off from the buzzing of the bus engines. The pages in the notebook are overflowing with his distinctive byzantine scrawl, along with spidery drawings of neural networks, vector fields, probability spaces, attractor dynamics, but also unfinished portraits, the delicate treelike branching of dendrites under a microscope, while all throughout, between the drawings and equations and along the margins, words run in thick torrents. All the content is from months ago. Nothing is recent.