Recently, however, there’d been some kind of shift. Celeste, truth be told, wasn’t quite who Mark thought she was, from Syracuse; or rather he wasn’t quite who he thought he was. Too long a sacrifice, Mark sometimes said to himself, when he began to notice their problems, can make a stone of the heart. But that wasn’t really it. Objectively they were in trouble. “We’re not twenty-three anymore,” Celeste said once as they settled down at Frank’s, in Fort Greene, to get drunk. “And I’m tired.” She kept having to fly off to Chicago, to Miami, to cover their so-called news. Mark’s roommate, Toby, would have known that the only news that mattered was the daily increasing hegemony of the global corporations and their destruction of the earth. But still Celeste had to fly. And her sleeping pills and eating habits, and above all her many mood stabilizers, had some troublesome effects, inhibiting important intimate functions in addition to the depression and anxiety ones. “Can you stop taking them?” asked Mark. “I’d be weepy all the time,” said Celeste. Mark said, “That sounds nice.” “What about curled up in the corner with a knife?” “Less nice.” “OK then.” They sat in Frank’s and eyed each other semi-warily. The newspapers, the magazines, the television, and Mark’s in-box were selling youth elixirs and penis extenders. One possible explanation was late-imperial decadence and corruption: life was too easy. Another explanation tended in the opposite direction. The television sold youth because life was not simple and not easy; because you did not emerge from your twenties smiley-faced and full of cheer and love for all existence.

“You know,” Mark began, “the Mensheviks would have said that—”

“Will you stop it with the Mensheviks? I mean, can we have one conversation where we talk about something else?”