Then—eighteen months ago—he moved to Brooklyn. Historical periods, according to Marx, produce both recognizable types and anti-types, and late capitalism, at around the time Mark was moving to Brooklyn, was producing its own antibodies, its antitheses, in the form of young women who thought that Mark was just fine, that Mark was just dreamy. They loved that he didn’t have any money; they adored that he didn’t know how to go about getting it. He was so cute! thought the women. Where did you come from? thought Mark. The answer was that the colleges produced them. Then bought them plane tickets, gave them Mark’s address. “The workers have no country,” wrote Karl Marx—but Mark Grossman did have a country, as it turned out, and that country was New York. In his first two weeks there he met more attractive, articulate women, in person, than he had in the previous four years of multimedia dating in Syracuse. He bought a cell phone and the women of Brooklyn called him on it, texted him on it; he set his ring tone to the opening theme of the television show Dynasty, and they caused it to chime from his phone at all hours of the day. What could he do? He canceled his Internet dating profiles, ceased his interminable e-mail negotiations with girls he’d never seen. At the age of thirty, Mark Grossman had finally solved the problem of sex.

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?”

That was a month ago, and it had inaugurated a period of Mark’s life that was bound to end badly. If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in Russia in March 1917, hopeful March after the tsar’s abdication, the appointment of the provisional government, the short-lived democratic process, then they were well into anarchic June or even forbidding July. Was Gwyn his Kerensky? His Kornilov? Ekh. Ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life.

Sidorovich was definitely not in Brussels in 1903; he may or may not have been in Petersburg in October; but he was, finally, at the Constituent Assembly in January. He had even produced a witticism on the subject. “The Constituent Assembly was like the opera,” said Sidorovich. “It was very boring but you felt, given how much it had cost, that you had to stay.” It had cost nearly a hundred years of tireless labor; the fight for an all-Russian democratic congress—which is what the Constituent Assembly was—had destroyed the lives of countless men and women. And when it finally came, during the early months of the Bolshevik dictatorship, it lasted exactly one day. When it became clear to the delegates on that day that they would not be allowed to return, they decided not to leave. At 4:00 a.m. they were expelled from the building. And it was over. A Bolshevik, asked by a journalist before the event what would happen if the Mensheviks and others tried to protest against the regime, had made a witticism of his own. “First, we will try to dissuade them,” he said. “Then we will shoot.”

Sidorovich didn’t really have a comeback for that one. Neither did the Mensheviks. Even in Russian, some things aren’t all that funny.

Mark was already at his building, and now he got off the phone. Would he really give her away? Really? The thought of them getting back together was blasphemy, it was socially taboo. You made a certain promise when you gathered all your friends and were married, and accepted their gifts, and congratulations, toasts and well wishes. When, in the course of time, you broke that promise, when you divorced and told your friends and gathered them, together or singly, to announce it, and accepted their condolences, their regrets, their well wishes—well, you soon found you’d made another promise, this time that you were apart. Now you had to stay apart.

But he had to break up with Celeste; he began catechizing himself again the next day as he rode down Classon on his bike. Break up with Celeste, he said. You are both unhappy. You are not, it turns out, such a great couple. Misanthropes should not marry. At least not each other. And your failure to end it now would be purely the product of fear—and some misguided loyalty to Syracuse Mark, poor lonely stupid Syracuse Mark. In his mind he defended his decision to the dissertation committee: This is a relationship of convenience. We cannot keep it up. We are desperate and we’ve tugged on this last straw. We don’t love each other!

“You loved her before,” answered the dissertation committee.

“That was a long time ago. We were both different.”

Mark laughed. He was not Mick Jagger either. Celeste was twenty-nine years old. In general, this was a pretty good age to be, a pretty happy age. But in Brooklyn in 2006, with every other weekend a wedding save-the-date from a college friend in her mailbox, it was less so. Celeste concentrated momentarily on her food as Mark watched her. You could hold out against the calendar of the system for only so long; you could remain steadfast for only so long. This was her last chance at something; Mark of all people was her last chance at something, before she crossed into a different phase of her life.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some lost puppy you’ve taken in! Shithead.”

“Sorry.”

He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed—Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she—but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn was a little straitlaced, like Sasha, and she was a little awkward, like her, and also like Sasha and very much unlike Celeste she was meant, clearly, for existing with someone in the world—and perhaps all the things he’d done wrong with Sasha, all the mistakes he’d made, all the money he didn’t spend on taxicabs, on dinners, on better coffee, that of course in retrospect he should have spent (poor Sasha, and all those nights that they’d spent on subways instead), all the things he said no to that he should have said yes to, all the years in Syracuse they wasted, and all the words, yes, the unkind words that, because of his stupidity, his inexperience, his callowness, he’d allowed to slip through his lips—not to mention his sexual inexperience, had he neglected to mention this? He was just a boy! Boys should not marry! Oh. They should not marry. But now—he wondered now, as his lips unlocked from Gwyn’s and only their foreheads touched, looking down on her lips, her chin, he wondered if perhaps he couldn’t do right all that he’d once done wrong.

“Mark!” Arielle called after him. “Choose wisely!”

“Hey.” Toby cut in again.

“No, I need to say this,” Arielle insisted. “I’ve known guys like you, Mark. You think girls need to be saved. But we don’t. We’re OK. Save yourself!”

We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don’t want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one’s hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one’s hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I’m sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can’t. We can’t. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we’ll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.

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?