Then on to his little studio apartment he’d moved into just the month before, where the sink always dripped and the kitchen countertop was peeling off in rusted strips. Nothing on the walls, no posters or pictures, no furniture, just a nest of clothes spread out across the floor between tottering towers of books. At the center was a yoga mat with a comforter laid over it. Tiredness had hit him like a wave and he collapsed. In the closing of his eyes, there was the unhearable sound of a choice being made by someone young. Tomorrow he would confront Antonio about the irresolvable problems in his theory of consciousness, telling him the truth Kierk had kept hidden so long, and damn the consequences.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up and the world imposes objects and is in turn filled by them. The first thing he does is lie quietly and inspect himself, examining his mind. Right now it’s merely a dollhouse set in plastic, and while he knows the basement is flooded and heaving with crocodiles, they are confined for now. This is not depression but realism. Bouts of realism that can last anywhere between a day or a week. Once one stretched into a fully agonizing month. In the mirror he examines the bluish hue that is a half-moon arcing along his right zygomatic arch.

Of course he knows that he could be diagnosed, that there was some box in the DSM that, once checked, would allow him official approval to oscillate between periods of euthymia and dysthymia. He knows what the research on the statistical link between creativity and depression or bipolar disorder is. But Kierk thinks that drugs for mental illness are more like chemotherapy—the medicine was not actually targeting what was wrong and correcting it, but rather both the mind and the disease were poisoned and it was hoped that the mind could withstand more than the disease. Besides it all seemed rather non-neural and pretty psychologically obvious: Kierk’s capacity for self-hatred was as expansive and powerful as his ego. In fact, one necessitated the other.

It’s already late afternoon, so when he does finally get to work Karen has left for the weekend. Kierk just sits down in his chair, seeing only a few other souls in the office, and right after he sits the lights automatically wink off for the weekend and he is illuminated only by the blue light of his computer screen, his head now hanging in his hands. There are seven missed messages on his phone.

The strolling group is a slow aggregation of bodies, a disordered row, an isolation of some, a coupling of others. Eventually all the Crick Scholars are present. There are many lights and suddenly they are all very young. Mike walks with Jessica, both laughing easily. Alex lights up a joint and passes it around. Only Greg turns him down.