I find that under the circumstances, certain body parts are easier to picture than others: the lips, the soles of the feet, the asshole, the shadowy region behind the ear. These become, when I think about S, the primary erogenous zones.

Sometimes, inadvertently, the image of these parts—the ones I have glimpsed, i.e., the first and last in my little list—on the body of the capitalist substitute themselves in for the mystery parts of S. In the back of my mind, I know I will see the capitalist again: at a scheduled meeting for work, at a series of scheduled meetings that runs no risk—unlike the Love sessions—of being suddenly discontinued. (This raises the question, of course, of the relation between availability and desire.)

Meanwhile, my mentor is still on the run. On the run, on the lam—my mentor is a mystery. I wonder if I have been sufficiently trained to continue our sessions with the clients, without supervision. There is an imbalance of access: I have the clients’ contact information, but they don’t have mine.

Should I call the wayward daughter and her harried single dad? Should I email the husband and the wife?

I am not sure who I should be, who I am. I have never found it easy to be clear about my role. I stare at the clients’ information on my phone’s bright screen.

My phone rings. The second worker at the café-bar is out with the flu. I put on my coat.

TRIANGULATION

“Did you know that Ethel Kennedy was administered LSD therapeutically, and that when it was outlawed by the newly formed FDA in ’66, Bobby protested its suppression and defended its life-altering potential?”

I was sitting on a friend’s couch with the friend’s partner, Pablo, talking about drugs. (The timeline’s blurry, this wasn’t long ago.) Soon the conversation turned to Pablo’s relationship with my friend.

“Duration and frequency,” Pablo offered, “are all there is, really, to measure. Why do we need definitions, labels, ‘primacy’? Shouldn’t comparatively large doses of duration and frequency be enough?”

Something had been troubling me, in the back of my mind, which moved to the front of it as a result of the question Pablo posed. The troubling thing is an old story, possibly the oldest (embarrassing to admit—in the same way that trying to get at something true about the erotic was embarrassing, last time Anti-Love met). It’s a question about the nature of reality, and whether it can be shared. The part that had been troubling me was the way this question intersects with the practice of mediation, the way it intersects, even, with the definition of the term.