Don’t we know already that pleasure is not transferable like cash? Between participants in a scene like this one, who or what owns any surplus pleasure that might result? How much of a difference—qualitative, or quantitative—does it make if it turns out that, contra expectations, a fantasy is shared?

I am visited by Giorgos the Greek, leaning forward across his cup of cold coffee, urging me on: “Yes, exactly, if the fantasy is shared, and whether fleetingly or not—that is the axis on which we determine the difference between eros and erotas!”

I am visited by the report from my friend about her theorist—“He said gather”—

I take his hand and turn it over, palm up. Is freedom transferable? Is that the same as asking if it’s zero-sum?

I want the shirt off, but without disturbing his well-positioned limbs, so I open my toolbox—a metal lunch pail, matte black, bearing the logo for M*A*S*H, a family heirloom (don’t ask)—and choose the smaller of my two pairs of scissors, start to snip.

An instant before reaching the neckline, I have an intuition, a vision, that there will be nipple piercings—it’s not that I want them, I just know they’ll be there. And when I separate the two halves of the capitalist’s T-shirt, two deep-brown nipples pierced with standard hoop-and-ball rings are revealed, set in a field of sparse, salt-and-pepper parentheses of hair.

Is the fantasy shared? There is always an obvious place to go—you’re going there now, the rings are ready to be threaded with something, some cord or twine or dental floss, pulled from the domed lunch box. A scene in which the slow and steady application of pressure—or, in this case, a pulling, which amounts to the opposite of pressure, in diametric relation as dehydration is to drowning—creates the conditions for a limit state.

“Trust me,” I say to the capitalist, though not yet speaking aloud. “You like to trust; you sleep easily—don’t you?—like a baby.”

PEAK / END

Instead of reaching for rope or twine, for a strand or two of the landscaping grass that edges the sandbox in the newly renovated playground, I grab the rings with my fingers and, very slowly, begin to pull.

“You know Kahneman, right?” I ask the capitalist, whose body has perceptibly stiffened in response to my action. “You brought him up when we were designing the session on decision architecture.” He nods, then turns his head to face me, makes a point of engaging my eyes, but no more words come.

“Describe to me,” I say, pulling a little harder on each ring, “the peak-end rule.” A tiny smile forms on his face as he turns it away again, again making me think of a made-up corpse; the smile, as I pull up one more fraction of an inch, flickers to a grimace.