“I’m not going back to New York with you,” she said.

He started to laugh. “It is true that I enjoy making money, I won’t deny it. Thing is, I feel the same. I don’t think I am a materialistic person, you know. I never wanted stuff.”

She leaned her head against the window. Conversations in cars are the strangest, because you don’t look at each other even though you are sitting close enough to touch.

“What it comes down to is I just don’t want to look at other people’s garbage my whole life. There is always garbage blowing around the street outside our apartment. Life is too short. All I want is a clean, quiet place. Beauty and order and peace. If Allegecom contributes—as it most certainly does—to the world’s degradation, undermining, at least in a global sense, order and peace, as well as multiplying garbage, and—let’s face it—suffering, then it also mitigates, quite directly, my own contact with garbage and suffering.”