“Unlike anything you’ve ever read before!” the cover announces. And: INTIMACY, in letters redder than the woman’s mouth.

Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive. What could S be trying to tell me? Was this book on the syllabus, just in a position too far down the list for me to have determined it a priority? I check the document: no Intimacy. But that isn’t what I really want to know from S.

You wanted a story and I’m sorry, it’s difficult, things are not proceeding along linear lines. What other lines exist? Those used to describe impossible objects, tesseracts; lines that stand in for something other than a line, for something other.

Not long ago, at lunch with Giorgos, a Greek poet, in a humid garden café in Athens—background, if you let it in: a nation of austerity, collapse, paralyzing debt (swipe, swipe)—the trio of eros, philia, agape is expanded (it’s important that Giorgos is Greek). A term gets split, to pry open an impossible space. The new, fourth term gives rise to a question that Giorgos will (he is a talker) readily answer:

“The fourth term—erotas—gets added in order to protect eros from itself. What is the difference? Erotas disorients extremely, but temporarily. We all know what that’s like: you can think of nothing else. But when it vanishes, it’s as if a fever has broken—the fact of it may remain in memory but the feeling, the sensation, becomes instantly inaccessible. We all know that too.” A pause as we sip our coffee, which has somehow grown cooler than the thick midsummer air. I ask: “And eros? I understand what it’s being rescued from, but for what is it being saved?”

There is no pause, this time. “Eros, real eros, doesn’t disorient; it rather reorients. Definitively.” He grins—“Or so I’ve heard, at least”—and waves his hand to summon the bill.

You, too, have questions. Where are we in time and space? For example. Some answers are easy: It’s summer. I am in the corner apartment, alone, for a week; my part-time roommates are away; the café-bar in the village to the north is temporarily closed so the plumbing can be repaired. I have one last push with my job for the capitalist, one more paycheck on the way.

Other answers are less forthcoming. The trick—like the joke where the drunk keeps hunting for his keys in the wrong place, a phenomenon referenced earnestly in the mediation manual as “the Streetlight Effect”—is not to look only where the light falls.

When I said that Pablo is needed now, I am referencing an event that will occur but hasn’t yet.

Another term for the Streetlight Effect is “the Drunkard’s Search.”