Marc came across Josecho online, on a fashion website. What drew Marc to him was that, according to the site, Josecho was an exponent of a surprising kind of literature. A little more digging revealed that he lived in Madrid, was 35 years old, held Saint John of the Cross and Coco Chanel in equally high regard, was a practitioner of a truly fanatical solitude and that he, too, cited Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and the Unabomber [though instead of Cioran on his list he had Tarzan] as examples of authentic fermions [though he did not use this term], of solitary souls par excellence. Then again, Josecho did not have a word to say about the great Henry Darger, who for Marc was an exemplary fermion. He also learned that he was looking to science for the poetics of the century to come and that, again like him, he claimed to resonate with all of the lyrics to the song “Bad Poets” by the band Astrud. On the same site he discovered that Josecho was a fervent practitioner of an aesthetic tendency he himself had termed “transpoetic fiction,” which consisted of creating hybrid artifacts somewhere between science and what is traditionally known as “literature.” Marc grew more interested but took it no further until he found that Josecho also lived in a hut on a roof somewhere in Madrid; the seduction was complete. Josecho, in emails with Marc, quickly showed an interest in the Fermionic Solitude Theory, which seemed to him an almost unadulterated example of “transpoetic fiction.” Marc sent emails with attachments detailing the different phases of his theory. Once a certain trust had grown between the pair, Marc revealed that he had met another transpoet, a tall, bearded man who went around in a tweed jacket in summer, and who had come up with an exceedingly interesting theory he called Open Ball Theory or Hopscotch B. But, Marc said, he’d only seen the man once, a fleeting encounter, and hadn’t learned his name or where he might be found. Over time, Josecho told him about his other projects, all of which Marc found deeply exciting. Their bond grew. Then one day Josecho stopped answering Marc’s messages. Marc carried on trying, but nothing. It had been this way for a year.