Wisconsin in winter was a whole planet removed from the sun, a frozen globe of thought. Kierk was a riding phantom blowing past the dead Midwestern cornfields at 100 miles per hour in the night. Already drunk, he’d been swilling beer for the entire ride, the interior of his falling-apart car lit only by the dashboard, opening bottles between his knees, the grain silos blurring past. Kierk had felt irreducible, violently American, and young.

On Kierk’s arrival outside the huge house Antonio Moretti came out and greeted Kierk with a welcoming handshake, taking the bottle of wine Kierk bought and giving a small frown at the label. The modern house was made entirely of glass with walls that unfolded into the surrounding nature during summer. Impressive square footage. There was a garage with a hanging kayak in it, a projector screen for interviewing postdoctoral applicants for the lab, a CD collection that took up a wall, a fireplace, a sauna, a Jacuzzi, an outdoor brick oven, a small shooting range, a barn with the ass-end of an SUV protruding, a liquor cabinet that stretched across shelves, and a wall-to-wall glass atrium filled with trees and plants. Antonio Moretti himself was unnaturally tall, and bald, and always impeccably dressed. European and old-world cultured with an MD in psychiatry, he was like a benign Hannibal Lecter.

That night Antonio brought him upstairs alone, and they talked next to bookshelves which spanned the entire length of the study . . .

“And did you read his autobiography?”

“Yes, one of the best.”

“You are young. Did you read Schopenhauer—”

“No, I never did. Excerpts though. The world knot. After all that’s what we’re trying to do. Untangle the world knot.”

“You never read him?”

“This is a beautiful house, by the way, I can see—”

“Thank you. More cognac?”

“No, no, thanks, I’m good. I’m still working on this one. Oh hey, is that Will Durant?”

“Yes, I read all of it.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, all eleven volumes. Yourself?”

“I read, ah, the Egyptian one, I remember that. Ancient hieroglyphs, so interesting, a language no one could understand but it was all around them. Like something aliens would write in.”

“I called you away from the others to talk, man to man.”

“Oh, okay.”

“You read literature, Kierk? You write? Do you chase many girls?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Because you’re distracted easily. You would rather talk about problems than publish. The papers must be published. Carthage must be destroyed. It has not even been invaded.”

“It’s taking . . . It’s taking longer than I thought.”

“Carthago delenda est.”

“Every time I go to write all I see are the holes.”

“What holes?”

“I sent you that review, by William James, of Spencer’s notion of the conformation of inner relationships to outer relationships. James’s critique is pretty devastating.”

“It’s a hundred and fifty years old.”