Here’s the thing. Remember when E was on the train and everything lurched? And then she went into the train’s bathroom—or maybe first she went into the bathroom, and then everything lurched, the order doesn’t really matter—and she tried to describe what it felt like to be overcome, without warning or explanation, by a feeling of being especially (she would cringe at this description, though the word is hers) alive?

The entire world revolves in your mind. A fact, described as simply as description will allow, as translation will facilitate. People who understand anxiety or depression—E and S firsthand, but also the analyst from Anti-Love—know that this is a truism that is also a trap.

When Pablo was told by E’s friend Z, by way of breaking things off with him for good, that some people are raised for loyalty and some for autonomy, Pablo’s heart rate rose. “That is a false dichotomy!” he protested, and he believed in his protest wholeheartedly (which, for Pablo, who could be a gadfly even to himself, was not always the case). The truth was, he did not want to be forced to choose which type of person he was—any more than E, in the car with S, wanted to choose whether or not to eat the squirrel at the end of day, or of the world.

The truth was, too, that despite his wholehearted protest, Pablo sensed some validity in the binary—loyalty, autonomy—but he also sensed that, like most things he cared about, whatever validity it had was suspect. Desire is a moving target—that’s really all he meant to communicate in his conversations about exclusivity with Z—and the kinds of social desire that translate to apparent loyalty could easily get confused for the kinds that translate to apparent autonomy. Just watch people trying to decide which way to go midprotest, into the kettle or back to safety.

Or back to obligation, safe or not.

Just watch a person like that, he thought. Or be one.

Pablo was getting muddled. He was only half paying attention to these thoughts, because he was also half paying attention to the scene in the tent. Marina had stepped out as soon as he entered—she didn’t say why, or where she was going—and he was sitting at the table feeling invisible, literally as if the other vendors (Is that what they were? Was he vending “communication”?) could not apperceive his existence. He was muddled, but he knew at least that he didn’t want to be thinking about arrests at protests right now; the last time had left a bad taste in his mouth. In a sense, it’s what drove him east to the village (Pablo was not from the city to the south but from a different, more distant city to the west). And going east to the village was how he’d met Z.