“Oh, I go out,” I said too quickly, as a joke. “I’m constantly out.” No, of course I didn’t hang out in bars. I had been in my converted garage for the past fifteen years, working at the table with one short leg. And when I had gone out, it had been to attend my own events or the events and openings and premieres of my friends and peers. The bar was having trivia night and people were excited about that. They had time for that. I hadn’t planned on becoming this rarefied; I had just spent every waking moment trying to get across what life seemed like to me, only allowing undeniable things—the child, a bad case of the flu, hunger and thirst—to take me away from this trying. And apparently time had, meanwhile, been passing—great swaths of it, whole decades. Indoor smoking had been banned and this young man was leading me to a table outside. The air was perfectly warm. We drank tequila and I wondered if the upside-down triangle of his upper body—his bony but broad shoulders narrowing down to his small waist—was perhaps a classic proportion with a kind of ancient resonance. Something to do with Michelangelo’s drawings or Da Vinci or whoever it was. The Da Vinci code. Like if you measured the angles of his upper body would you discover those same measurements in the Bible or inscribed on a Greek vase and would they also correspond, if scaled up, to a larger, cosmological measurement, perhaps between stars? Celestial music—what was that? If I’d been at home, working, I’d pause to look it up. But, stunningly, I wasn’t at home working and I wouldn’t look it up and I didn’t really want to look anything up, ever again. We were sipping our drinks and talking; I was trying to explain what my work meant to me. How life, usually so frustratingly scattered and elusive, came under my spell; I could name each thing, no matter how obscure, and it would open to me as if it loved me. Working was a romance with life and like all romances always seemed on the verge of ending, was always out of my control. I said this last part half standing, with my arms grasping the air as if to catch a bird. I really got why people drank to unwind after work, this was great. I tried again to guess his secret passion.