Standing outside, rubbing at his hip and wincing, a smiling college-age girl hands him a glossy pamphlet protesting NYU’s aggressive buying up of real estate and its effect on the local community. Kierk thanks her, but once he’s a bit past her he limps over to a recycling barrel to throw it away. As he crumples it up he realizes that the pamphlets in the subway had all been brand new, shiny, like someone had been handing them out there and had dropped them. The man who disappeared into the underground? If that hadn’t just been a symptom of the heat? Maybe he had also been handing them out there late last night, and Atif had come up, said something, they got into an argument . . .

Kierk limps about for a long time as night comes down, all the way to the docks. By then it is dark out, and the city lights have switched on, and in the still-hot blackness he looks out on the lit figurine of the Statue of Liberty. His thoughts are like the bodies of black waters making their way down streets, alleys, across cobblestones and pavement and concrete, submerging street signs, a wash of mannequins and paper and garbage and trash barrels and eaten-away photographs and that creased pamphlet, all slipping softly in the night into the Atlantic, a dark sheet bending over the dock and into the sea. What is it like, to see that bright headlight thundering down, to be doomed by clockwork and automata? What is it like to be struck and be so violently done away with, to know that it was all leading up to this, that every choice you ever made had led you here, to this absurdity of fear? What is it like to be? Turning away from the water, he looks into the trees lining the dark, the streetlights, and beyond the city howling in steel and glass, the backlit stumps of gargoyles leer down, whole skyscrapers have become obelisks of light. Something swoops above him, dark forms, a whole cloud of them, a sentence of wings, the arcane and familial lives of bats. In their movements they are an unbreakable code.

SUNDAY

Kierk wakes up in the long troubled highways of dreaming’s end, and, rising, nearly sleepwalks to the bathroom and only comes to himself fully with his hands on the sink. Some time is spent admiring the deep blush of bruise, a spreading purple stain across his right hip.

It is upon checking his new NYU email that Kierk finds it, addressed to all the Crick Scholars as a group.

Subject line: To Whom It May Concern