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.