Most of these places had declined or changed—they were not for me, just then—but Morris Binkel’s articles in the New American were a different story. His mind was ablaze. It was his belief that American culture was corrupt; that it was filled with phonies, charlatans, morons, and rich people. Also their dupes. Binkel called for a renewal of an adversary culture—the young writers of today, said Binkel, were social climbers, timid and weak; they stood around at parties in New York waiting to be noticed, waiting to be liked. He reserved his especial scorn for his own people, for young Jewish writers, who had once been the bravest and the most outrageous, and now were the most timid, the most polished, kowtowing to their elders’ ideas of orthodoxy and demeanor. (None of them, I read between the furious lines of Binkel, could lift a couch in a Mount Vernon apartment and toss it in the back of a U-Haul truck.) No one spoke anymore from the heart, said Binkel, and it was a shame.

Walking over to the subway—Morris told me to take a cab but I wanted to ride the subway—I passed through Chelsea. I had never seen so many beautiful people. I was sweating, tired, gruesome, and these people had left their houses looking like movie stars— perhaps they were movie stars? One fell behind on such things in college, or anyway I did—and, oh God, what would it take to live in such a place? What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash? And yet I thought that I could do it. These people looked soft, for all their movie-star hard bodies. They looked like they were unsure of what they wanted in life but that they suspected they’d gotten it. They hoped anyway that this was it.

What did I want from Morris Binkel? The man was practically a sociopath. He had been in New York so long, had ingested there so many values that he at heart despised, that he knew to be false and cruel, that, in angrily rejecting them, he felt also the extent to which he was beholden to them, and grew angrier still. He could no longer read five pages of anything without losing his temper, without clutching his chair in rage. Surely he’d be dead by forty. And yet the great ones were like this. And Morris, I think, had greatness in him, even if he squandered it. His anger at his era rose like vomit to his throat.

I was twenty years old. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty, and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha—so that’s who you are. But these people themselves, laughing and not-laughing, kissing and not-kissing, they themselves are young, and so then you begin to think, if you’re twenty or twenty-one, when you are young, that these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed-up friends and girlfriends—that it’s not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it’s so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you’ve got it. You can be like me, if that’s what you want.

That was the turning point in the evening. Pretty soon Morris took both me and Emily home in a cab, and they set me up nicely on the couch, and they did not make too much noise in Morris’s room, which was considerate, and in the morning they made me eggs, and I sight-translated some passages from Babel’s story “Guy de Maupassant,” about a young man, like me a little, who helps a rich man’s beautiful wife translate some stories by Maupassant and then seduces her. I had not seduced anyone, but I had seen something, or I had begun to see something, there was a glimmer that I saw, of how things worked—and that was what the story was about. I explained this to Morris and Emily, though leaving myself out of it, of course, and they were pleased, Emily especially. “Keith’s a lot smarter than I was when I was twenty,” she said. It had turned out that Emily was closer to thirty than to twenty. “Is he smarter than you were, Morris?”

I nodded gratefully, and that was that. In between sips of coffee Morris had concluded that I was a mediocrity—or a genius. I happened to know already that I was neither—that if I applied myself, I’d be fine, more than fine, and if I didn’t, I would probably fall through the cracks. I knew that. What I hadn’t known was something else. Looking at Morris looking out the window across the Hudson, I suddenly wanted very badly to cry. Not for myself, for the first time, maybe, in my life—I had managed just by sitting here quietly to get the better of Morris, to cause him to falter into rudeness—but for myself in ten years, because the other thing I suddenly knew was that Morris’s life was a very likely life, the sort of life one could end up having, if one was not very careful, and I knew, already, in addition to knowing that I was neither mediocrity nor genius, that I was not very careful at all.

In 1936 Gorky died. “No one will protect me now,” Babel told his wife. Three years later, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and shot. He was forty years old.

I still remember—how well I remember—looking out the window of that train. We were blazing down the final stretch of rail before Baltimore, toward the roads and multitudinous lacrosse fields and the late-night ice cream shop of my youth; Ali was going to meet me at the train station in exchange for a six-pack of beer. No one would ever arrest me at my house, take me to the basement of Lubyanka, and shoot me in the back of the head. Nonetheless I knew what Morris’s book was telling me, what the book he never finished was telling me. In that train, on those rails, some premonition of the truth brushed against my side.

No, no, that wasn’t it, exactly. It was more as if life, the life he’d known, had begun to seem so slippery to him. Who could say what had happened and what it had meant? There’d been so much drinking! He had been close to people—but not quite close enough; and he had given himself to people, but not quite, ever, quite the full of him. So there was a consolation to be had in these lists, he now thought, when he thought about it. With Talia he had been kind, and with Arielle he’d been dashing, and with Lori he’d been eager, and with Rachel Simkin, that time, he’d been an utter failure. And if you put them on a list, was the idea, if you added them up: there he was, finally, a human being.

It took balls to do what he did because if he failed—and he had failed—he’d end up where he was. He hadn’t accomplished the things of which he’d dreamed, and now he couldn’t even get done the very basic things that most adults did—like pay his bills, for example (a most unpleasant form letter—and purple—was lying on his cluttered desk, somewhere, from Commonwealth Gas), or alphabetize his books. And when he tried, when he took the books off the shelves in order to put them back in alphabetical order, he became so discouraged at the impossibility of categorizing them properly that he just left them lying there, heaped upon the floor. He worked out a lot but he didn’t apply moisturizer to his skin at night, and he seldom flossed. And then there was the Google. . . . Whereas Katie, Katie was the sort of girl who, when she replied to e-mails, spliced her responses into segments, in which she answered specific points, which were set off from the margin by little arrows. This just wasn’t something Sam could do. He was always writing people back about other things.

And yet Katie seemed willing to sit there. Was she dumb?

“Right. I just can’t get over how programmed it all feels. It’s like right now”—Sam looked at his watch, it was almost midnight, any minute now Katie would announce that she had an early flight; he needed to suggest that they go home, but he couldn’t figure out how!—“all across America, diligent men who’ve been studying your sex columns are lighting three candles in their little bedrooms and demanding of women, ‘Does this feel good?’ ‘Does this?’ ‘Does that?’ It’s like three candles and twenty questions.”

“So what you’re saying is”—Katie looked up and her eyes flashed at him—“you don’t want to take me home?”

“Oh,” said Sam, losing his cool, “I do. So much. You have no idea.”

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.