This isn’t the way the husband talked, you understand. Not in the mediation sessions, and not in the part of his life he called “real.” Often the husband didn’t talk at all, but he was possessed with an uncommon talent for communicating without words: sentences such as the above would be contained and conveyed within a routine activity that involved an intricate series of small motions—making a coffee with the stove-top espresso pot, for example—voiced only by the endemic sounds of those motions, along with an occasional sigh or an extraneous clearing of the throat. By the time the funnel filter was emptied with a single knock against the metal trash can; by the time the stove had been lit with a match and the faucet run to clean the rubber gasket and the stainless-steel filter plate and to fill the lower body of the carafe with water; by the time the boiling coffee had burbled up through the stem and into the upper body, a mug had been retrieved from the cupboard with the creaky hinge, half-and-half pulled from the droning fridge and stirred into the mug with the back end of a butter knife wrested from the clattering, overfull dish drainer, the sum total of the sounds and their instigating movements would convey, wordlessly, the husband’s claim.

If you remember from Part One, E, acting as our narrator, dispensed suddenly, unceremoniously, with the husband and the wife, or with E’s speculations, which is all they were, about the husband and the wife. The wife, regular witness and audience to dramas like the coffee-making scene above, was no more an avatar for E than was the husband himself, but both made E uncomfortable, and she shoved them off, a by-product of her mentor’s disappearance. Now, with the first time approaching just as quickly or slowly as the beleaguered and unpredictable thruway was moving the afternoon before the day on which S and the others were slated to show up in the place where Anti-Love met, E found herself thinking again about the husband and the wife, about how she’d more or less abandoned them and about what had happened offstage that might be relevant to her now.

She was about to lay her eyes on S, and that meant that something was going to happen to her expectations, because something always happens to expectations when time and opportunity force them out of hiding.

She had no rulebook; she had only the disappearing clerk, some others before and since, and the husband and the wife—failed experiments all—to turn to for context and preparation.

This is where we have arrived.