They did all of this in the context of the village, which itself was changing, both quickly and at a crawl; it turned out, E found, that the village wasn’t as underpopulated as she had believed, that there were just a lot of people who didn’t come to Main Street, who hadn’t wanted or needed to come into the café-bar or even to walk by its windows. Some of those people now came in while the two groups—formerly two groups, now one—met. The lights were still on (thanks to autopay, they assumed), and E’s pay kept showing up in her account too, though she didn’t know how long that would last. One day the second worker—Iana—walked in and joined the rest as if she’d been there from the start. Iana brought her own syllabus and added it to the pile; it came from the perspective of liberation theology, and expanded the group’s discussions in ways they did not expect.

Margaret came in daily, was now making other things from her leather: leashes, belts, wallets. Everyone bought a wallet, though they hardly used them anymore. The next time Margaret came in, she asked for a coffee and drank it quietly at the counter before shuffling off.

Most of these changes had to do with the collapse of the main bridge, which hadn’t happened right away but only after enough time had passed for the washed-out ground beneath it to fail. It wasn’t a permanent or complete isolation, but it didn’t have a known end. People settled in.

A game of musical chairs had deposited them here, where they were: in the village, or in the case of Pablo and Marina, in the neighboring town, and each knew how lucky they were to have gotten a chair at all. They were haunted both collectively and individually by the knowledge that despite their ability to adjust, their surprising ability to appreciate the chairs in which they’d landed, there is always one fewer chair than is needed. One person without a chair. That was what they knew, a fact as incontrovertible as time, as gravity.

But even gravity, or the conceptualization of gravity, had to be taught. Let alone the concept, or the conceptualization of time.

If the concept of the missing chair had appeared explicitly on the syllabus of their childhoods instead of being transmitted by way of a game, if it had been presented as a fact that could provoke instinctual dissent, things might have been different. Mightn’t they have? Not just for them, but for everyone?

LOSSES

The clerk, the other clerk, the capitalist, the husband and the wife, the runaway teen and her dad. The ideas of Love and of Anti-Love. Many people’s jobs. The Argentine analyst. The vendor from the eleventh table, and that vendor’s unknown sign.

The anarchist of Science, or anti-Science.

Z, of course.