He had left Sasha, he had allowed Sasha to leave, because he could no longer abide the person he had become with her. He lied and lied and when the lies had mounted festering in the corner he covered them with further lies. Then he had suffered in Syracuse alone. Or rather the loneliness was the suffering. He had dated. He had Internet dated. And even when he’d solved all these problems of dating he—well, continued to date. As if only the women he dated could tell him who Mark was. As if he would not be a full person, a full Mark, until he’d found the perfect complement. Except every woman he dated took a chunk of Mark with her. And vice versa. So that if you looked, if you walked around New York and looked properly, if you walked around America and looked properly, what you saw was a group of wandering disaggregated people, torn apart and carrying with them, in their hands, like supplicants, the pieces of flesh they’d won from others in their time. And who now would take them in?