THAT and nothing else was the color of this sunset. Like clay, red and boorish, before it clots. In the morning sweats of that day, the rain had washed the campsite with mud, and our boyish feet, kicking around muck, had spoiled the pleasure of our examinations. The bark beetle went back to its wood-boring, its tunnels sprawling out as if miming us, spread on the grass, sipping curiously at the sky. Then, soon, it is dark and the black sky looks like a void.

Two years younger, my brother has taken to furtive prayer. Before bed he kneels like a pilgrim, his white shirt stained by wet grass and the dark, congealed blood of the poor beetles we had crushed. Looking at the sky, he thinks about heaven. The black sky is but a tinted, darkened floor, above which beautiful streams rush. He imagines pillars of marble, walls of jasper, gates made of single pearls. It is a lightless city, for it needs no light, and in-etched upon its arches are the words of philosophers, kings. He thinks about Avicenna.

After a while we crawl into the tent. The sleeping bag zips over my brother, cocooning him, and he sleeps easily. To me, the black sky looks still like a void.

Consider, then, a man generated in air — crafted floating in space, unbuffeted by any perceptible current — his limbs segregated and sectioned off, so that they cannot feel or sense one another. Such a man is created at a stroke, his deposits of memory and imagination empty, and yet he emerges from his womblessness on hind legs, fully mature and formed. Would this subject affirm the existence of his self? Assuredly he would. Think on the drunk in his drunkenness, the sleeper in his sleep. That-ness.

Scraping and crushing with the flat of his ornate knife, the court philosopher serves up remedies of dried insects and sucked-dry beetles. And then drinking wine at a light-giving lamp alone in prison, dreaming fittingly of logic. Cloaked in the darkness he could not but see his hands. Floating man. Answer me this.

So my brother is snoring. And there is a thrum in my lungs. I listen to his snoring to take my mind off the heaving in my chest. There, like the dry tick of the bark beetle at its boring. This din oozes and stretches until the sound of my own blood crushes in thick churning bubbles and rises against the veins in my neck. Cut to the bone.

I reach for the sleeping bag, whose warmth, with panic I register, has come to feel like nothing. So I, with effort, unclench my fingers and join them devoutly. In the settled dark, I witness a brief lightening. I close my eyes. I thought of the stars. The night sky is blacker than the inside of my eyelids.

Avicenna, physician of princes and anatomist of the soul, was in his last years afflicted with colic. He went back to his books, and consulted his pages, and treated himself, and gave away his goods, and freed his slaves, and had scripture read over him, and failed, and died at Hamadan.

In the morning, the mud is dry. I awake to the gush of the river, chugging and clogged, moving forward now with dirt and yesterday’s fuel and waste. I can feel the heat on the back of my ears. I unzip the tent and with my brother’s help dislodge it from the rockface. He pulls up his shorts, bristling with beggar’s lice. We laugh then, and throw our snacks at one another, and lick our wrappers and fingers after. His dirty shirt hangs from the tree, whipping in the wind. The light skipping off the trees, giving them shape. In the dry wind of last night the earth had turned up a row of dead beetles by the big tree. My brother pokes at them with his stick a few times and turns them routinely over to expose their undersides. I take the stick from him and poke a belly too. My brother, sort of casually, scrapes the dirt back over them.

Thrum of traffic under the blinking night. My hands on the steering wheel, fingers drumming its back. Excessive and misdirected skyglow. The radio hums. Every night should burn like noon. My brother is in Chicago now. Every sightline terminates. The floor of a fire, after all. Static grows, and I can feel the whirr and light of a thousand projectors and headlights heating the backs of my ears. I try to see the black behind my eyelids. Nothing here is black at all.