“So,” Marta says. “‘Aboulomania’?” She laughs dryly, as if she had months ago privately predicted that Loudermilk would write this very poem. Beans reflects, not without a snap of rage, that she does not seem entirely displeased—though whether Marta is in larger part satisfied with her own prognostication or with Loudermilk is by no means certain. She has not, after all, secured her current status through self-abnegation. “Otherwise known as pathological indecisiveness. A disorder in which the patient is beset with anxiety and mental anguish, overwhelmed by the possibility that all decisions lead to uncertain ends. See also, paralysis by analysis. A terrible thing, to be sure, but also, one must imagine, fairly common, given the diversity of choice in the postindustrial world.” Marta pauses. “I thought the conversation in class was fine. It was a bit limited but essentially fine. I wanted to offer a few mechanical remarks.”

Something happens.

“Oh,” Marta continues, none too impressed by whatever the something is, “I’ll take that as a sign of your approval.” She sighs. Possibly she’s stretching. Her jewelry makes a sound. “Obviously, there is much to recommend this poem. It shows a staggering mastery of contemporary idiomatic speech and the many styles of lie in which we indulge, perhaps through a strange sort of necessity, to ‘get by,’ as it were, in the present-day U.S. Formally, if not thematically, it cites ‘The Waste Land,’ I suppose, the obsessive use of quotation. In a way there’s something a bit cynical about this—but you do take it somewhere else. I feel—exhaustion. Maybe a kind of dissociation? Maybe I prefer to think of the whole thing as a sort of golden bough, the poem as an offering for my entry into hell? Some late republican context for you! In any case, I love the language, the sick mania. The images! The thing about ‘sofas,’ yes, the banality but also the very scale of crimes of contemporary culture. Government as endlessly prognosticating talking head. Who are ‘they’? Who is ‘he’? Who is ‘I’? It’s a great treatment of the notion of propaganda and the mystification of agency that is so necessary to it. Now—” Marta coughs once, sharply, and then, with far too much warmth for Beans’s comfort, sighs again. “I do think there are a few points at which the lines sort of lag. For example, when we come to ‘Operational flexibility and social bravado,’ I think there’s a weak sort of vagueness and you aren’t doing yourself any favors. But you cut those two phrases and bring up ‘The / Old ways.’ You’ll have to change ‘had’ to ‘that,’ ‘taught cadets to be bullies, and I fought the team’s traditional kelly green,’ etc., but you get to keep the original sense. It’s even clearer, tauter, firmer.”

There’s some silence.

Marta asks, “Don’t you agree?”