2.

The desk toy clicks smartly, sending the silver balls swinging in shortening arcs.

He is a fidgeter, a foot-tapper. He bounces his pen on the desk and brushes his hair back from his eyes, the specks of dust from his shoulders. In the flat beneath him the couple complain of the constant footsteps that punctuate their evenings and track their dreams. At work he paces and gesticulates and fizzes with frantic energy. He has never slept in the same bed as a lover as he twists and turns like a fish in the net of sheets.

The man is never still.

He says, I am in perpetual motion. He says, I will never die. He says, I am a part in the machine and the machine never stops.

They roll their eyes and clap him on the shoulder, and inform him that what he says is impossible. They indulge his ticks and whisper behind their hands and notify the people who know what action to tale.

He bounces off the walls of his cell. I am not a physicist, I am not a philosopher. I am not mad. He says, there is no such thing as the impossible, only that which exists beyond the known rules.

His eyes are wide and steady and unblinking, deeper black than the sky at night.