I keep failing to address the insufficiency, the wrongness, of the name “Anti-Love.” And of “Love,” for that matter. Maybe I missed my chance at the beginning. Maybe I’ll get to it later. Maybe I assume it’s obvious to you. I won’t fail, though, to address my questions to the clerk, now that I have the chance.

The bar is air-conditioned, so I arrive early to cool off, take out my notebook and a pen.

QUESTIONS FOR A CLERK

When you were positioning us on the rug and guiding our engagements with each other, were you thinking about our pleasure, or your pleasure, or the pleasure of one of us over the other of us, or is it possible you weren’t thinking about pleasure at all? Did you wear that bright lipstick so you could mark each one of us; was it a thrill to see its traces, like an artist autographing her work? Did it bother you when we all, or when some of us, had done too much blow and lost interest or just wanted to talk? Did you care when someone had done too much dope and couldn’t get it up, or couldn’t come? Did it embarrass you when you misread someone’s availability for a particular kink?

The questions were such obvious ones I grew bored by them; I grow bored. It’s too cold in here. But it’s too hot out there. She’s late, by a half hour, more. I get that feeling that happens when a blizzard makes you miss the party you didn’t know you wanted to miss.

As I’m contemplating leaving, a chorus of grating, upper-register bleets, along with the sound of phones vibrating on hard surfaces, overtakes the bar. I think, for the first time in decades, about what we learned in grade school to call Mexican jumping beans (Were they Mexican? Were they beans?) and look around at the handful of afternoon drinkers (startled) and their collaborators behind the bar (nonplussed), and then I look at my blinking phone, an emergency flash-flood alert, just as the sky starts to pummel the bar’s metal roof with rain.

THE NEWS REPORTS

The book I removed from my bag while stranded at the bar beneath pummeling rain—Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman—was the book I had wanted to find at the bookstore before visiting my clerk in its basement, and it was the book I did find when I returned upstairs after our nostalgic session of groping-turned-laughter had run its course. I remove it from my bag and set it next to my notebook and pen.

Stood up, now, by my clerk and stranded by rain, in one-hundred-degree heat, in a bar in which, it becomes clear (first by semiconscious deduction, later confirmed by mutual interrogation) most of the dozen people present are un- or underemployed—