They all shake hands. Soon Kierk, standing at the whiteboard, is sketching out a concept tree, and it all becomes a game of intellectual tennis as the ball of the idea is bounced, served, returned, and the board fills up with diagrams of experimental designs, little monkey faces with lines looping between them, some math that Kierk came up with on the spot on measuring neural bandwidth. Quickly the whole expanse has been filled and Carmen takes a picture of it with her phone, then Kierk erases it furiously and they start on another.

After leaving the shower Kierk picks up his notebook, flipping through the pages, looking at the dense blocks of paragraphs. It’s more than he wrote in the last four months of California. Some spigot is open again, and with the notebook in hand he laughs for joy in the empty apartment. Shaking out his wrists and grabbing a pen, he flops down on the bed, his eyes burning, feeling like he is etching his thoughts directly onto the page he is writing so fast.