Eventually his dusty and sweating form reels into the parking lot of a CVS. Inside Kierk grabs a bottle of hydrogen peroxide off the shelf which he uses to douse his bleeding forehead and then stands bent over swearing in the aisle when some of it gets in his eye. A young clerk is paused a bit away, one hand out, eyebrows raised.
“Wait, you’re gonna need to buy that first.” Then he sees the blood. “Whoa, are you okay, man?”
Kierk, standing in the aisle, stinking of smoke, blinded, holding his hands to his face while the hydrogen peroxide leaks between his fingers and makes small fizzling bubbles on the white tile, smiles, and responds—“As well as Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.”
“What?”
“Do you know the Caravaggio? The second one of course. He didn’t really get cooking until the second one. Next time you’re in Rome, please, treat yourself and go see it. Paul’s revelation is reified in the viewer. It’s in the basilica off the Piazza del Popolo. Ack! This stings.”
“Listen, if you don’t leave I’m going to have to call the cops.”
“I’m, um, being forced to reconsider my life choices here, so of course you will. But before you do: where is the nearest payphone?”
The clerk, after directing him to a payphone down the street, watches mutely as Kierk leaves clutching the brown bottle and a package of bandages without paying. Kierk walks up the street listening to the babbles and fizzes above his eye, trying to wipe away some of the blood on his cheek and spitting black globules on the sidewalk.
He had called the number on the letter last week, unsure if it was a lifeline or a temptation back into a world that had almost destroyed him. A professional voice had introduced itself as the director of a new scholarship program that was being assembled at New York University, the first of its kind. Eight positions in a research program on the neuroscientific basis of consciousness. Kierk had applied for the so-called Francis Crick Scholarship over a year ago for a potential postdoctoral position, before he knew he’d be abandoning his PhD, his research career, everything. But apparently the obscure workings of the government funders had kept the schedule and viability of the program in doubt until the last minute, and everyone was now rushing to put the program together. The director had said that Kierk was one of their top choices, even despite having never technically finished his PhD, and had offered Kierk a seventy-thousand-dollar stipend, dropped the names of the famous researchers who would be leading the program, and told Kierk that this, right here, was the opportunity of a lifetime. And most importantly, it was a chance to pursue consciousness again. Kierk had said no. Last time the pursuit had all but broken him, and the only solution had been to cut himself off from it completely.
Now, standing on that stretch of road outside of San Diego, his car with its crumpled hood a few miles away, everything worth anything in this ragged backpack, his clothes spotted with blood, listening to the operator’s voice, hating himself for his stubbornness and pride, Kierk is praying that same voice will pick up and be his deliverance. When it does, he can barely croak his hello. But soon he’s yelling into the receiver as cars whizz by. “I said: you told me last week you didn’t have a replacement, right?”
“Oh, well, yes, that’s right. We’re working on—”
“I accept.”
“What?”
“I accept the position. I officially accept. I’m coming to New York. There’s an apartment, right, you said so last week?”
“The program starts in two days!”
Kierk says that he’ll be there and hangs up before there can be any argument and he’s left alone with just his ears buzzing and the fizzing of his eye. Eventually, after wrapping his head with comically misshapen and bloody bandages, he’s able to call a local garage and offer to sell them his broken-down car for a few hundred bucks if they tow it. The rest of the day is a blur of activity and logistics. Later in the San Diego Public Library frantic emails between him and the scholarship program make everything official and get an emergency stipend transferred into his account. The only overnight flight with an available seat to the East Coast is to Boston, and that plane, that deep rumble when it finally reaches liftoff, is to Kierk like the sound of an angelic steed breaking atmosphere.
TUESDAY
Kierk wakes up from the first sleep he’s been able to catch in the odyssey of cross-continental travel. Roused by the shudder of the bus over a pothole, shaken from his sleeping slouch against the window, Kierk’s eyes blink open and the scene outside resolves into perception. Beyond the smudged glass is a busy sidewalk where people are fanning themselves with magazines, waiting for the walk signal, shielding their eyes as they exit the glare of glass doors, moving quickly carrying suitcases and purses and airs of motion. Dogs explore on leashes like searching filopodia as baseball caps are adjusted under lances of sun. There are vendors with coolers full of bottled water. People emerge from and disappear into the stark shadows the buildings cast like great sundials. The bus trundles along Manhattan’s capillary-like streets, heading for the city’s heart.
Kierk wipes at his mouth, sitting up straight. The woman next to him goes back to reading her magazine after eyeing the young man with the wild scraggly beard who had just woken from fitful, small-noised dreams. In his startled waking his arm had hit her thigh. There is another lurch and Kierk drops the notebook which had sat
