With it, a flood of memories: the husband named Simon blowing out candles on a birthday cake, tacking a sailboat through clear lake waters, having a street monkey in Lahore steal his kulfi dessert right out of his hands as Leslie loses her breath laughing. Or: Simon in the wreckage of an intersection, his face cut and gushing, picking up his dying wife and carrying her through crowds and traffic, sirens blaring somewhere far away, hurrying down an alley, weeping, dizzy, lost . . . Ken’s persona is tossed about. He cannot be safe from Typhon’s grief. He cannot find a mooring; it is him and he is it and it occurs to him now that he’s not in control of anything, he’s just a cog in this machine of meat and data, just a buzzing bee in the hive who dances when the queen tells him to dance—he tries to stop it, tries to cry out, tries to force himself on the system. To imprint rationality and caution and reason— But something swats him down. A great pressing weight, a crushing depth.
