She looked at him with a hint of scorn in her eyes and the hint of a smile on her face. And then she shook her head.

“Do you love him?” asked Donny.

“Do you even know what the fuck that word means, Donny?”

Donny wasn’t sure if she was asking that as an accusation, or a genuine question, like some existential version of asking if you know what time it is.

“Not the first clue,” said Donny. “How about you?”

She shrugged. “I bet your grandma knows. She also knows how important it is to police one’s tendencies toward animalistic territoriality.”

Donny nodded. “I bet you’re right,” said Donny. He pushed ant eggs around on his plate, and then changed the subject.

“What’s it like there now?” he asked. “In Nicaragua.”

Nicaragua was a free state, liberated by a coalition of revolutionaries, urban elites, and foreign backers who had installed an experimental new government six months earlier.

“It feels like a future you would actually want to live in,” said Joyce. “True freedom, equal rights for all, a sense of real community. Even for an outsider.”

“They won’t put up with that for long. Anything that makes you not cynical is way too dangerous.”

“Well, one thing you learn when you leave the country thinking you have found sanctuary is that there is no such thing. Not with the virus of power and dominion that infects the world.”

“So when are you coming home?”

“Another word whose meaning you don’t really understand. Because it doesn’t really mean anything. We’re all nomads, Donny. It’s in our genes.”

“I don’t know,” said Donny. “I really like my apartment.”

She laughed. “You really like your books. I’m just saying, we need to be thinking about our problems on a planetary scale. And locally, at the same time, at least tactically. But dream big, for change that is real, and permanent.”

“How do you do that?”

“It has to be almost like a religion. Like a religious movement. Like when Christianity or Islam or Buddhism swept over a swath of the planet. Like that, but green. Transcendent and grounded at the same time. A deep politics of the whole planet and every living thing. Even every inanimate thing in the natural world, which has its own kind of life.”

“We the Creatures,” said Donny.

“Exactly,” said Joyce. This time the smile was real.

She raised her glass, and Donny joined her. Then she turned more serious.

“You should help us,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what it sounds like.”

Now Donny was looking around for eyes and ears.

“I can’t leave my practice,” said Donny. “You know that. I made that decision three years ago, when I missed my chance to stay here with you.”

“We’re not asking you to leave your practice, Donny. Quite the opposite.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ Joyce?”