“The peak-end rule describes a multiply tested and experimentally verified phenomenon,” he begins as I pull incrementally on his nipples, their tents becoming smaller versions in duplicate of the tent at his crotch, which is not remaining stagnant but is itself wavering, trembling, undecided about which direction it’s headed, “in which the values of experienced pain and of remembered pain are pitted against each other, causing a” (he emits a small gasp in response to another pull) “conundrum where decisions pitting quantity and quality of pain are concerned.”

In response to another tug, his hands are on my forearms, not pulling them away, just freezing them. A tear rolls from the corner of his left eye into his left nostril (his head is still in profile, cheek on the sand). I let him slowly, incrementally, lower my arms and watch as all three tents deflate. (Why am I spending this time on the capitalist? Accessibility, availability, lack of imagination, perhaps. Also, it’s been some time since I’ve heard from S; I’m lonely.)

When I remove my hands from the rings, he takes a long breath in and out, and tent number one begins to rise again.

The train conductor walks by, chanting the name of my station and pulling the little card on which its initials are inscribed from the rail above my head. Good-bye, sparkling river view. Good-bye, capitalist. Good-bye, nipples and parenthetical hair. Good-bye—oh, good-bye tent, before you have had the chance to fully raise yourself. “Five minutes, five minutes,” says the conductor. “Exit to the rear.”

The voices of two women who must have boarded, or found their way to the café car, while I was deep in my fantasy about the capitalist are suddenly unbearably present behind my left shoulder. “… And at the party, he doesn’t look at me, he’s flirting with that woman’s cousin—she’s so young!—and everyone keeps telling me how lucky he is, how beautiful I am, how exotic, you know, they don’t know anyone from South America, but he’s all over this blond …” “I would be livid! Livid!” “And so you know what I did? I dragged his ass out dancing the next night and you should see the dress I wore, oh wait, I have a picture …”

I gathered my things, not easy because of their heterogenous shapes and materials—“Are you kidding? He did not!”—and exited, bag on shoulder, unpacked belongings in hand.

The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

According to the peak-end rule, our memory of past experience (pleasant or unpleasant) does not correspond to an average level of positive or negative feelings but to the most extreme point and the end of the episode.