Kierk wakes up and immediately knows that this day will be a dance with the noonday demon. He had felt it building yesterday, in his discontentment and restlessness. This has all happened before. Like the first organism crawling onto mud and into air from the sea, he attempts to make it to the bathroom. On the way he gives up and lies splayed out in the center of the room, examining the grain of the carpet. When it hits Kierk like this it’s just something he wakes up, not an exogenous force but rather (and this is much worse) completely internal. He tells himself that is what happens when he turns his intelligence inward, like a microscope warping back around to examine itself, seeing without the gauze of delusion—and what a fucking pathetic mess he is. Some small metacognitive part of him knows that this will pass. But right now he cannot see how one can make only finite moves when bookended by infinities in both directions—Dante would not even let me into hell, I without fame or infamy, no, I would contribute only to the howling gale of the angels who remained undecided.

Forcing himself to stand, he takes a hot, steamy shower in the complete dark. With the glass shower door shut from the outside, it is shaped like a sarcophagus. He sits with his legs drawn up and begins to sob, his chest shuddering for air, a few burbling gasps, but no tears come. One hand comes up and with a vicious slap of impact rocks his head back against the slick wall. Around him in the dark, a crowd of ghosts stand. They were also the ones who slaved and obsessed, but for them there was never the chance encounter, the lucky break—the Kants never woken from their dogmatic slumber, the Wittgensteins without a Russell, the William Jameses without a brother to compete with, Darwins without John Henslow, Matisses without Stein, Wolfes without Perkins, Carvers without Lish, Eliots without Pound, all of the poor, poor dreaming patent clerks—the faceless ghosts stretch out into the steam, a nameless legion standing over Kierk, severe of countenance, dressed in all clothing and all manners from antiquity to the present, ready to embrace him like an army from Hades. Silent of judgment, they merely watch him sitting there with his legs drawn as he speaks a mantra with water running over his lips—“I am twenty-seven and I have done nothing with my life. I am twenty-seven and I have done nothing with my life.”