“Moschovakis’s characters are celebrations of the information-collecting prowess of women, of the way in which her characters ‘weigh and consider’ … an overwhelming amount of data throughout each day.”

—Rain Taxi

ALSO BY ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

FICTION

Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love

POETRY

They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone

Dedication

for Jo

The only pressing reason for changing a theory is disagreement with facts.

—Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

I can’t position, I can’t assure anyone of their ethical well-being.

Take this engine, the clerk says. You are living your electric life.

—Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk

ONE

TWO GROUPS

I never made it to Love, and now I hear it’s defunct.

Anti-Love meets regularly, though attendance is spotty. At least I’ve done most of the readings.

Love, by contrast, will be a recuperation project.

Anti-Love is not, to be fair, billed as Anti-Love. It’s billed variously as resistance, revolt, revolution. Sometimes it’s billed (tentatively or defiantly) as Self-Love.

Love bills itself as itself, eponymous and proud.

Without the beginning of the story, it’s enough to know that there is a drafty corner apartment, an all-night bodega out the window, a playground across from the bodega, quiet at night. There is an abundance of emotion—enough years, enough fucks and near-fucks and pseudo-fucks, enough expectations unanswered because unheard or unsaid—and it is that abundance that is known: a partial knowing, as excess is always, paradoxically, partial.

Without the beginning of the story, it is insufficient but still necessary to have a picture of the surround: not only the bodega and the playground, but the news reports filtering up from the apartment below. The news reports appearing at the top right of the screen, a stack of small explosions, almost registering, then, compulsively, swiped away.

There is a stack of books—on a coffee table, for example. An archive of future attention, or else a morgue.

Love isn’t defunct, exactly. It’s been reduced to a virtual form of itself. Flesh into type, an assembly turned list. I enter it, when I enter it, through a screen.

Don’t be fooled by the present tense, the future tense, when they occur, which they will. This is a story about the past. It’s already over.

When I say that the story is over, I mean that a merger has happened, which is not to say an acquisition. (This is a story about two groups.) I am also insisting on the safety of storytelling, to protect myself, and you, from a certain pain.

Story is a safe emergency.