It is in this manner that he writes furious and unusable sentences on the steps, too pure and unrefined to be sensible, all keenings of language, bellows of description, words like birch logs falling from the sky as white as the cataracts of dreams, decimating the park around him, and he builds rickety ladders as high as siege engines, things of an unknown purpose, absurd, words dedicated to the people around him, the stone they walked upon, even the mundane, hell, even the fucking squirrels that come and peer and jeer and run about in primal mischief, all in an effort to manifest an intentionality which would allow him to transcend himself, become a true artist, an immanent being of perfect empathy, and only as the sun sets and the quiet death of day descends does he come crashing down, human once more, nearly broken, sunburned on his arms and the back of his neck, the pages of his notebook flapping in the wind, crushed cigarettes discarded in a circle around him.

Nothing he wrote that day is very good, he thinks. Soon the day has gone to the dogs, run off with itself, and Kierk is left still and alone at an outdoor cafe, lighting his umpteenth cigarette, exhaling the evening. The haunting of the day by Atif’s ghost has made the world a beautiful sensorium. Brief studies and prolegomena on thanatology are scratched out, rewritten, played with vaguely. He picks at his fries, throws one to a brave albino pigeon. He thinks about Atif’s mother, the coffin, the prodigal son returning to his homeland in pine . . .

Is there anything worse than for a parent to lose a child? And then with a sharp intake of sadness as if cold water had doused his chest—where does she think I am? She must think she has lost me.

At a secluded section of a nearby street he paces up and down before working up enough courage to dial an old number from memory.

“Hello?”

Her voice, the first voice, hits him so hard and so fast he immediately begins to blink away tears, a sudden buildup of glottal pressure in the back of his throat, and in an instant he’s crying, turning away from the street to face the brick of the building.

“Oh, Mom, it’s me, I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I should have called six months ago. I shouldn’t have cut you out like that.”

“Where were you? Where were you? Honey, where were you?”

“I . . . I was . . .”

“What happened to you?”

“I got . . . I got lost somehow. I just . . .”

“Oh, honey, you’re okay, you’re okay. You’re okay, right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’m in New York . . . and I have a job now.”

“A job? And you’re okay? You had me, I was so, I couldn’t—”