Marina sat behind the table, continuing to flip through the Manual as the door opened and people began to file in and take their stations behind the other tables, unpacking bags and backpacks and neatening or continuing to set up their displays. She noticed them taking no notice of her; she wondered if she had been rendered invisible by backlighting, the way Pablo had been when she first entered the tent, or whether this was one of those forms of gathering where people assume familiarity with their roles because of the roles’ formality: you are sitting behind the desk, so you must be the receptionist; you are the one behind the DJ booth; you are the one collecting donations while playing the violin. Marina’s least favorite thing was to engage in those kinds of automatic and unspoken assignations, which is one reason she had gravitated toward mediation, where the airing out of unspoken relation is a large part of the task at hand. (It was not redundant or mere politeness, in Marina’s view, to walk into a room in which only a mediator is expected and to say, “Hello, I’m the mediator.” It was a small but potentially transformative act.)

But Marina’s favorite thing was to be in a place where, because she actually and honestly did not know where she was or why, taking a role either implicitly or explicitly became impossible. Those places, those situations, were hard to come by, but she was beginning to think that she may have landed in one.

The book—more a pamphlet or zine, a staple-bound thing on saturated blue-on-cream paper that he couldn’t remember acquiring until he recalled barely seeing it slipped into his bag by E’s friend (let’s call her Z) on the day she left him suddenly, stating without rancor that his level and kind of devotion weren’t enough. “Some people are born for loyalty and some for autonomy,” Z had offered as a reason—the way a person quotes scripture or the twelve steps, he’d thought with something less than generosity—“and we are not on the same side of that divide.”

It was a collection of images photographed in Thailand by a traveling artist, pictures of signs posted to trees. It was unclear to Pablo whether the images were photographic collages or undoctored found scenes, and whether, if undoctored, they were documentation of an art installation or of a cultural phenomenon.

Because Pablo was Pablo, he also wondered whether there was a difference between these things.