These weren’t new questions: in Anti-Love we had read not one but many dozens of arguments against the tyranny of the pair, of pairing, of the couple before the invention of marriage and, certainly, after it, many dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. Now, in some circles, the popularization of this choice to break with habit and finally dismantle the traditional family—this politics’ slow and incomplete migration from the active margins to the passive core—was cast in sensationalist family-values messaging as the nuclear option. A weak joke: it was more like the anti-“nuclear” option (a linguistic knot familiar to both Love and Anti-Love).

To the capitalist, I replied privately: “I vote against vegan pizza and for vegan salad.” To S, I related the news about the various disintegrations, the rampant decouplings and recouplings and the thinking that surrounded them, ending my letter with a short postscript: “Did you know that in chemistry, a dyad is a divalent chemical, a radical?”

(While we were reading, in Anti-Love, about the near-inevitable and total failures of the romantically bonded pair, somewhere in the memories of the members of Love who predated my invitation to the group lived the remnants of a discussion—there must have been a discussion—about the second text on their syllabus, one of three inclusions from ancient Greece, the one containing the argument between Socrates and Aristophanes in which the latter proposes a primal division of one into two, followed by the lifelong search for a reunion between separated halves. Two halves make a whole. As if math. As if chemistry. In my reconstruction of the scene, Love’s members turn to this question: whether, if Aristophanes was right, the dyad, radical in the literal sense, could become radical, too, in the political sense that—months later, in a different locale with a different climate and altitude and economy—formed the center of so many discussions in Anti-Love.)

What I did, instead of following this convoluted thought further, was pack my notebooks and sunscreen and my jacketless hardbound copy of The Psychedelic Reader into my bag and head for the corner café.

It was crowded. It is crowded: I find a table next to a woman who is sitting quietly, reading a book I don’t recognize—I can’t even discern the type of book, it’s incognito, which means she, too, is incognito—but who, as soon as I settle in beside her, begins to cough painfully, desperately, at length, preventing me from remembering that I had a plan for my time here (a plan for paragraphs to compose, pages to read).

I put my fingers to my mouth—unconsciously—and recognize, from the inside, a pose. What is the pose of thinking? An embarrassment, for one. But also a sign of suspense, or suspension, between the first recognition of a knot and the first intuition about how it might be made to come apart.

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