The Buck Fuck Bus disturbed Mark’s equilibrium. It wasn’t that he wanted to operate his own porn site, exactly; he was fairly certain that was not why he’d let Sasha go. And the anonymity of the filmed and very graphic sex did not appeal to him—it was the only site to which he ever subscribed, and he’d quickly canceled his subscription. Really it was the principle of the thing. If there were men Mark’s age driving around in a ratty van, having sex with women, with complete strangers, and paying them a dollar for the pleasure—even if the women were their friends, or aspiring porn stars, or were being paid a lot more than a dollar—still, even then, what was Mark doing in the library? “I have spent,” he had said the other day to Celeste, “most of my life in libraries.” This was not quite true: he had spent most of his life in hockey rinks and gyms. And the time he spent in libraries these days was mainly spent looking at naked people on the Internet. But he’d not spent—this was the point—a single minute on the Buck Fuck Bus. Now he watched the wasted hours drift away, all those hours he had spent with Sasha, those warm gentle hours, gone forever with their marriage’s collapse. Mark was like those stunned post-Soviet Russians during the draconian free market reforms, watching their ten-thousand-ruble lifetime savings, still active in their memories, turn overnight into fifty dollars. The Devaluation, it was called. And it hurt.