It has happened, the talk between the husband and the wife, a season or two behind schedule. It was efficient and it was kind. (The scene appeared; I couldn’t help it, anymore than I could, without dialing their numbers, help those performing it.)

“There are two types of people,” said the wife to the husband, or said the husband to the wife.

“There’s the type of person who hates to fly in a passenger plane, because to do so means putting your life in the hands of a stranger, and letting chance—booking agents, online travel sites, all the different reasons people pass through the same place—determine the last faces you will behold before you die. And there’s the type who loves to fly—the longer and higher and more turbulent, the better—precisely because of these circumstances. Because handing it all over is an ecstasy, a balm.”

Of course, we know there are more than these two kinds of people, including those who are indifferent to flying and those who have never flown, so don’t know. But this wasn’t a thorough exploration. This was a talk that was over before it began: an emblem of all that was irreconcilable between the wife and the husband, and also a story about two people who love each other but who are no longer in love sitting together on a plane.

Only now may S return to the scene, by writing a letter that will arrive—this is a story about fate, or coincidence—on the same day as a new email from the capitalist.

Two letters, one on paper and one delivered to a screen, at dusk, as the last children exit the playground accompanied by their adults, the streetlights shudder and alight, and the bodega owner steps outside for a cigarette.

I reach for a cigarette. This is a story about free will.

THE NEWS REPORTS

A Dialogue on Love is a book I ordered used from the internet after reading about a different book by the same author in a book by a different author whom I didn’t know personally but who struck me as kindred at the time.

In A Dialogue, which tells the story of a love theorist and her experience with psychoanalysis, which includes what appear to be intact quotations from the analyst’s notebook written in real time, a formal strategy announces itself on the first page and continues to the end.

Small poems—not always but often approximations of haiku—interrupt the flow of the prose

as if not to let us get too comfortable (in the flow of the prose) in the story