As the bus pulls to a stop and begins disembarking passengers, Kierk steps down onto the pocked underground of the city, breathes it, and is enchanted and disoriented at the same time. He makes his way through the bustle of Port Authority, down the long hot tunnels and veins of motions, advertisements, the clicks of polished business shoes. The boxed tunnels of the subway are haunted by jazz, the trembling notes of a saxophone clear, constant, real. He spends some awkward time standing in front of the big subway map, checking the address that’s written on his hand.
Eventually Kierk exits in hot breaths of steam up the steps to the surface of Union Square Park. It had turned dark while he was underground. Smoking a cigarette and feeling that bone-deep tiredness that comes from a day of travel, he realizes that the program starts tomorrow morning and he still needs to buy new clothes. He picks at his falling-apart jeans and fingers the rips in his T-shirt, knowing this had been poor planning. Standing he mutters aloud—“New life. Don’t fuck it up”—and then looks around the dark walkway to see if anyone heard. He’s been talking to himself too much lately.
Eventually he locates an upscale clothing store on Broadway that’s still open. Into the affair of wooden floors, brick walls, well-lit displays, and quiet indie music, slips a bearded and disheveled Kierk. A staff member spots him and comes up, looking wary with hands clasped.
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re actually getting ready to close.”
Kierk can see a number of customers still browsing. There’s a two-second pause and then Kierk’s face transforms in emotive animation.
“Excuse me, but I’ve been backpacking around Europe and only just arrived at JFK and goddamn Air France lost all my bags, bags which contained not only irreplaceable souvenirs such as a Burgundy rosé I’d been anticipating for days but also my sartorial good side. La vie est une chienne, if you know what I mean. I simply look a mess but I have to breakfast with my fiancée’s family, the Forbes, on the Upper East Side first thing tomorrow, and I’m going to need your help.”
The program had set him up in NYU’s grad-student housing, in which he finds a spartan apartment where the lights flicker on in pulses. He notes that the windows are suicide-proof.
After setting down his backpack he strips and enters the bathroom to run a bath, rubbing at his beard. In the light the geometric designs tattooed across his pale white back form stark black lines, geometric wheels and circles that move as he moves. Across his inner left forearm there is tattooed writing spelling out three questions.
Kierk stands nude, quickly making a tangled nest of hair in the sink. There is still the yellow bruise on the side of his mouth, matching the fist that had recently caused it. Shaving away the last of the hair around the discoloration, Kierk is struck by this younger face in the mirror, a face with eyes expansive and a clear deep green, his nose more hawkish, his mouth wider, his cheekbones higher than he remembers. The top of his hair has begun thinning. But still, this is a face he had thought left behind, resembling for the first time in a long time his driver’s license. Standing back and looking at his naked body he can tell he’s lost a lot of muscle mass but still has those long legs and broad shoulders. His eyes are again acute and discerning, young and viridian, and Kierk can feel himself returning, catching fire just like he used to, ready to fall in love with something.
He wants this to work, wants this more than he’s wanted anything in a long time. In this new apartment, among these new streets and new sounds he wants to create something, and knows he is so lucky, unbelievably lucky, to be given a second chance. He will not make the same mistakes as before, he will not go chasing what is impossible to catch. Instead he will focus on his career, become one of those ordained academics who get tenure young and line their shelves with their own books published by Harvard University Press. He thinks—I will become fully what it is my destiny to become, and everything prior to this will have been just events, spatiotemporal instances, and they are vanishing because the universe is merely one state transitioning to another with no memory of the past, whereas my destiny, to be an intellectual, a great scientist, is teleology pulling me toward it from the future.
He says to the mirror—“I choose this.” Then wet and sopping over the tiles he gets down and does as many push-ups as he can. He takes a minute wheezing on the tiles, and then does another rep to exhaustion. And then again.
Later he lies on the bare mattress lolling about. Dim recollection causes him to root around for a long unworn watch and set an alarm. The city is a strange surf crashing in the distance, and slowly, but
