At the table where the migrated members of Love and the current members of Anti-Love (or however it may refer to itself now) had gathered, people sat with their mugs of coffee and took up E’s invitation to introduce themselves. It was orderly; everyone took their turn. Something about the circumstance—the emergency that wasn’t, or that was not yet a personal emergency for any of the gathered—something about the abstract thinking that had led to the concrete decision to gather, brought a calm to the room, a collective low blood pressure that translated into something like a collective restraint.

Of course there would be an exception to this. There is always an exception to a provisional state of calm.

QUESTIONS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT UNDERLYING ISSUES

Marina stared at the page in Pablo’s notebook. The figure he had drawn had nothing to do with what she had seen across the tent; this didn’t surprise her, or rather it surprised her without surprising her, in that way that surprise can become, temporarily or openendedly, the norm—not “the new normal,” a phrase Marina hated unequivocally, but just a matter of course, the way watching a person move from one stage of life to another seemingly all at once, as a child moves into adolescence or a parent into old age, can feel both real and surreal at the same time. At least for a person whose age falls squarely between the two.

Or the way, she imagined, a military coup might feel, though she had never experienced a military coup. Marina was a mediator but not on the level of governments, of nations. She hated nations. And to be honest, she didn’t love the people she knew professionally who worked with them. She was a mediator on the level of pairs, of family units of all kinds, collaborators, and small groups. She had worked with a theater troupe and with a bicycle-repair collective. She had worked with countless court-assigned teens and their guardians. Her bread and butter, or maybe just the butter: bourgeois divorces, of which she needed to take on only two or three a year to effectively subsidize the rest of her work.

She didn’t know why she was thinking of a military coup now. It had nothing to do with the figure Pablo had drawn in his notebook, though it was true that the object he’d sketched seemed somehow more threatening than the pillar or tower or pedestal she herself had seen.

“What’s the worst collective trauma you’ve lived through?” she found herself saying out loud, both to Pablo and not to Pablo. She said it into the room.