He sits down in the tall beach grass and watches from afar as the morning fills up with sky and the car hemorrhages his meager belongings into the windy lot. In the dry scrubs Kierk takes stock of his wounds. He notices with interest that when there’s a lot of blood in your mouth it doesn’t hurt, but rather it’s like your mouth is overflowing with water, your tongue moving about in a pool. He thinks—my cup runneth over. Something keeps leaking into his vision, and he wipes at the arch of his eyebrow, which a stray sneaker had cut a significant gash into. His lungs are still ragged from the mad sprint and as some sort of aftereffect of the violence his mind is so crystalline bright it aches.
After about half an hour Kierk stalks his way back to his car, spinning when he hears a noise to see the three of them just a couple hundred feet away, running toward him now, and Kierk sprints the rest of the way, starts his car, and in his haste throws it in drive instead of reverse and goes straight into the lamppost in front of him, the hood giving a small cave and Kierk bouncing forward in his seat. Then Kierk reverses and burns out of the lot.
After a couple miles, smoke starts billowing up in gulping gouts from the hood, each plume swallowing the last, and Kierk pulls over to the side of the road and starts yelling—“FUCK FUCK FUCK you little shits you’re going to die in a gutter little goddamn FUCK YOU and fuck ME stupid stupid fuck me what the FUCK am I doing here”—and beats violently his steering wheel and then in a frantic search finds an old bottled water under a seat and pours it over his head to calm down and wash the blood from the cut over his eye, leaving a damp spot on his jeans. By the side of the road he uses a dirty T-shirt to beat at the smoking parts under the hood until they subside. Panting and praying it hadn’t been lost, he digs around the back seat for a letter that had arrived in his PO box last week. Finding it smudged and folded he lets out a small half sob, double-checking that it contains the number to call.
Dear Kierk Suren,
We are extremely pleased to accept you to the Francis Crick Scholarship program at New York University . . .
With the letter folded in his back pocket he quickly stuffs what little is worth salvaging from the back seat into an old backpack of his, from journals to unwashed clothing to loose change to books with their bindings long broken. Leaving the rest behind, he starts hitching. No one picks him up. Cars blow past, children pressing their faces against the glass.
The arrival of the letter from the director of the program had been a shock given how tenuous his connection to the world was. Kierk has been living in his car for almost six months. Car insurance, his next meal, and a place to park overnight have been the daily concerns. Every week he’s driven to the San Diego Public Library to grab a new pile of books and use the computers and revisit the bank to extract cash from his minimal savings, less and less each time, approaching the limit of being flat broke. The sunsets here have been like falling bundles of white wood, and standing amid the birch forests of light he had thought he might never return to civilization, that his brief life was over at twenty-seven. It’s been months of dry California nights sleeping in his car somewhere on the coastline with his legs hanging out the window, his toes feeling out the slow seas of air. In all this Kierk has known that he was slowly receding from the world, that his depression was rising like an internal tide. He had sifted through the dog-eared copies of his favorite novels until they did nothing for him. In the halving and letting sunsets he would patrol the beach to write on the windy, scattering bugs of pages. Of the several books he had started writing (a monograph on measuring consciousness using information theory, a poetry collection, and an autobiographical bildungsroman), all had failed to take form, and he had been left in a cyclical pattern of self-reference, delving deeper and deeper into his own paths and roads and words.
Only a few reminders from his old academic life remain. Occasionally he would drive up to Caltech to hang out with a PhD student and have long arguments about twentieth-century philosophy, always returning in the end to the same question: who was the greater philosopher, Russell or Wittgenstein? The master or the student? But mostly he’s spent a lot of time at a cafe on the outskirts of San Diego, until the older woman owner had started bringing him Tupperware filled with food, then inviting him over to her house if he needed a place to stay. It took a few visits to realize he was just one of a group of street people she let sleep in the basement. Kierk saw them as shaggy and smelly shamblemen nodding blearily, or drowsing like a dusking heap on the couch, making their awkward conversation and pauses, their tics. He knew that even if he wasn’t there yet he would be soon. No
