So here’s a story I know how to tell: a fantasy—not a dream, a fantasy that filled the precise duration of this morning’s train ride between the (former) locale of Love and the (also now former, though for different reasons, and only temporarily) locale of Anti-Love. A fantasy I finally had about the capitalist.

A FANTASY

He is a tall man: a cis man, a straight man, a freewheeling, grinning, doe-eyed, gentle-dad, go-to-the-key-party-but-leave-your-keys-in-your-pocket man. Olive skinned, from some combination of countries that all border warm, salted seas. He claimed once, in passing, never to have pulled an all-nighter to meet a deadline.

An organized man. An organization man. A kind of man who thinks he wants you to call his bluff. I found myself wondering: What would that mean?

I found myself letting the wondering extend into something more vivid than wondering: a model, to scale, of an encounter intended to perform the extraction of pleasure I’d felt the urge to accomplish those months ago.

He lies before me, on a bed of sand: the sandbox in the playground across from the bodega and the café, a sandbox shunned by germophobic parents in a playground from which the childless (we call them—ourselves—the child-free, in Anti-Love) are forbidden entry; but it is after hours. His eyes are closed, his head—close-cropped black hair, two-day stubble—is turned gently to the left, to face in toward the seesaw and climbing bars, away from the streetlights. His lips form an inscrutable smile, like what I imagine would be found on a wealthy, professionally primped corpse. His arms and legs are splayed, his expensive jeans fully tented at the crotch. He’s wearing a putty-green T-shirt bearing a vaguely retro logo in yellow, some tech start-up or indie-rock band or just a corporate clothing-chain simulacrum of either. I want it off, but without disturbing his well-positioned limbs.

I have said that this fantasy is a fantasy about the extraction of pleasure from a capitalist, as a form (I understood at the time) of redress, of compensation. And I haven’t even yet begun to describe the unfolding event to you—my toolbox and its deployment, and the capitalist’s response—but before going on, I need to say something more about fantasy than what this scenario would suggest.

In Anti-Love, I once shared an additional reading—nobody else bit, but that’s not unusual—which included this claim: “It is well known that stout persons throughout the ages have found that they had some sense of freedom, even an enhanced sense of freedom, when in states of physical restraint.”

What needs asking is how this proposition, if it is correct, might alter my intent: if freedom is pleasure, or if it is related to pleasure, then I can know what I’m doing to the capitalist, in the sandbox, after hours, only to the extent to which I understand his relation to the formulation above.