E: This one feels like a Rorschach test; it makes me anxious. I recognize two logical symbols, greater than and less than, facing each other. (Why is it so hard to resist anthropomorphizing everything—it’s just a couple of lines bent at angles and symmetrically arrayed!) I wonder if it would be different if the lines felt machine-made, if they were straight, perfectly measured. If this were an artwork, I’d give it multiple titles.

S: Tell me some of them.

E [without hesitation]: “Detranslation,” “Kinds of X,” “A Match,” “Let Me Tell You a Story about Your Life,” “Inflection Point,” “Choice or No,” “Participation,” “Get Here Now.”

THIRD FIGURE

S: They seem to want us to move quickly from one to the next, but do you notice how the first and second figures have faded and are disappearing? As if our descriptions fulfill their being, as if our address is mortal. This one implicates me, I can feel it, but I can’t tell why. The flourish in the center, that curl, feels both decorative and necessary: if the figure is a path, the curl is a detour, making the line a flaneur. I stand silenced.

E [after a pause]: Do you see yourself as a flaneur? What does that mean to you?

S: I waste time. I’m happiest when I’m being unproductive. The guilt I feel for this is a guilt I disavow, but disavowal is not enough to make it go away. Let me try again to explain what I mean. I’ve written to you already of my obsession with eavesdropping, and of my inability to strategize. That curl in the middle of this figure? It’s my happy place.

FOURTH FIGURE

E: A boat! With a fucked-up sail. And a fucked-up shape. And no mast, and no crew, and no flag. No way could this boat sail. We’d be playing cards below, canasta or Omaha or Oh Hell! We’d be so caught up in it all, a little drunk or high but only enough for time to get screwy, sitting across from each other at the built-in wood table with its marine-grade varnish, vaguely aware of our reflections in it, or else trying to use the reflection to cheat … We’d be so engrossed in either the game or the conversation or the ambient hum of the boat’s cavity—our common heart—we wouldn’t notice as the water level out the porthole windows crept slowly up. It wouldn’t be a dramatic death, we’d just drop silently, incrementally, to the bottom together, and stop being alive without really dying.

[E put her hand to her mouth and looked up to the nighttime kitchen window, at S’s reflection, which was waiting there to meet E’s eyes.]

E: Isn’t it crazy what can happen outside time?

FIFTH FIGURE