All of this was, of course, predictable: the near miss and the full hit being experienced at the same time, but by different people; the disappearance of the café-bar’s owner and second worker; the appearance of Margaret on cue. There is very little that is not, as Leslie pointed out, predictable. There are other outcomes that would have been equally so: the full-blown Armageddon suggested earlier (the disaster-novel plot); a smaller, more intimate apocalypse of cruelty between these particular few; or any number of ways the circumstances could have conformed to a different dice roll. But what happened was both a lot and not very much. Somehow, each person around the table (not everyone was still around the table; some had risen to explore the café-bar and inspect the contents of the fridge, others had gone out front to smoke) had wound up here.

A philosopher of Choice whom E had learned of from Marina held the view that “difficult” choices are made not by deciding which path is right, but by deciding—by intuiting—which choice the chooser is able, at the moment in question, to commit to.

This was a room of people who had committed to being in this room.

PABLO SENDS A POSTCARD

It’s lucky he has only a postcard’s worth of sentences to communicate to Z, he thinks.

He was thinking about her on the bus ride, and he was thinking about her as he smoked outside, between exiting the tent and reentering it, only half noting the typed sign’s third and final transformation.

He was thinking about her, or rather about that parting conversation with her, as he smoked and as he watched a pair of crows chase each other through a cluster of leafless trees. Loyalty, autonomy, loyalty, autonomy. He felt like the most loyal person on earth; it had hurt to hear Z suggest that wasn’t true. Now he laughed. Who but a sociopath or a utilitarian would self-define as not loyal?

A person who doesn’t like laws, he thought. And a person for whom the etymologies of words are, for better or for worse, always announcing themselves, for whom a word’s origin is worn on its sleeve. Loyal. Legal. Royal. Regal.

So, an anarchist. So, a translator. An anarchist translator may be the least loyal non-sociopathic person in the world, he thought. (Leaving aside actual utilitarians, and Pablo never knew quite what to make of them.)

He pulled the fuzzy-edged postcard out from his notebook, where he was using it as a bookmark. It had on the front of it the picture of a waterfall foregrounded by a grouping of sightseers seen from the back, with a pair of gleaming 1950’s cars in a parking lot at the edge. He couldn’t remember when or where he’d picked it up.

The back was age stained but free of handwriting. Pablo wrote on it without thinking first about what he’d write: