“I don’t know.” Pablo hung his head, or assumed the aura of a person hanging their head. Marina forgave him immediately for his self-congratulatory tone before.

“Nor I,” she said. “But given that nobody seems to be able to see or hear us, I’m inclined to agree with you that something weird is going on.”

COFFEE

While S and E were driving to the meeting, the others gradually assembled at the café-bar at which E still worked part-time, ostensibly, most businesses in the village having provisionally shut down because of the water situation, or just because owners and staff had been occupied elsewhere, otherwise.

The café-bar’s owner had been away on vacation when Ezekiel hit and had not been in touch since, and the second worker at the café-bar was stranded at home, cut off with eight or nine other houses tucked behind the collapsed bridge on Old County Route 12. E had given Leslie and Kim the code to the emergency lockbox, correctly assuming that of the Anti-Love group (herself included), one of them would be the most likely to arrive early and the most capable of double boiling a kettle of water and making coffee in one of the café-bar’s large-capacity, insulated French presses.

As it happens, they had arrived at the same time, in a carpool, since they lived not far apart, and figured the coffee out together, so that now, while E and S became the last ones to show up, the rest—five members of Anti-Love and four newcomers from Love—mingled awkwardly as they waited for it to brew.

An outsider would have thought it was an AA meeting or the first session of a therapy group. An outsider would have sensed that before long these strangers would be revealing more than an ordinary portion of themselves to one another.

FIGURE EIGHTEEN

Pablo saw it first. He covered his eyes with both palms, resisting the impulse to rub them, cartoon-style, instead waiting a few breaths and then pulling his hands away.

“What is it?” asked Marina. She was flipping pages in the Manual, agitated. “I know, it’s weird. It’s like nobody sees us.”

Pablo pointed.

“Oh. Yeah, and those things are getting realer.”

That Pablo knew what she meant by this didn’t surprise Marina any more than it surprised Pablo that Marina seemed to be seeing what he saw.

“How many do you see?”

“I count ten.”

“Me too. Do you think …”

“One for each table?”

“They don’t seem to be indexed to particular tables.”

“How do we know if they aren’t?”

“And there are eleven tables, anyway. Twelve, counting us.”

“That one’s empty. Its person never showed up.”

They fell silent. One of the ten figures became realer than the others—to use Marina’s term, which is as good as any—while the others reverted.