If an Amazon shipment comes in for Nico, Bob lets him walk right past, and only as he turns the corner for the elevator does he call out: “Berengo? 8D? Package for you.” The thought that a man who doesn’t acknowledge his presence actually knows his name is deeply upsetting to Berengo. “It’s humiliating. Everything I buy—a new pair of pants, a jacket, comics, posters, PlayStation games—all of it has to pass through those hands. I feel ashamed every time.”

Berengo is convinced that all the concierges and porters and doormen are acting out of hostility, that they’re talking about him behind his back and discussing his reactions, that of the hundreds of Americans and foreigners that live in this skyscraper near Times Square, they find him to be the most amusing, the most worthy of their mockery. “Their hostility is a weapon,” says Berengo. “It’s an instrument of class warfare.”

[...] Then, finally: “Look, I’ve been holding back for over half an hour. All I want to say is: I’m here to be abused. I’m fully at the mercy of your psychic power. I think you’re a tremendous woman”—Vera is taller than him, steadier—“and I want you to use me as you wish, to use me and then discard me. But we have to remain friends.” This is when the “deal” is made—it’s the moment Berengo is careful to stage at the beginning of each of his relationships. He believes that he is always acting in nothing less than good faith, but he is careful to stipulate an agreement: the boundaries of the exchange have to be established, the parameters of the playing field defined. What he believes he’s making clear are the boundaries of his involvement, the very grammar of their encounter. Certain lovers will later reproach him for holding back, for not pursuing a relationship with them, for being self-contained and unable to loosen up. At which point Berengo will remind them of what he said, of the way he denied the possibility of a love story from the very beginning. It is all, as far as he can tell, rather explicit. These statements are usually hyperbolic, and his lovers often confess, some time later, that they did indeed treat them as hyperbole, that they hadn’t taken them literally, even though they were key to their relationship. In this case, the abuse Berengo refers to in his original statement finds a form in their relationship: he and Vera develop a habit of engaging in Greco-Roman wrestling during their lovemaking.

Not taking into account the many waitressing jobs she had in Los Angeles while she was staying at her aunt and uncle’s when her parents were fighting too much, she worked as an intern at a casting agency (still in Los Angeles), then spent a year at a kibbutz in Israel, came back to study political science at Columbia, went back to the kibbutz, came back to Columbia for j-school. After graduating she started traveling around using her father’s money, stringing and writing wire stories she’d try to sell to the agencies. She started taking pictures while working for the wires and has now stopped writing. She has been through war, and so whenever he is with her, what Berengo thinks to himself is: “The fact that Vera is going out with me means that what she does is worthless. You can’t stare death in the eyes and then fuck me. I am the Untruth. I am Unimportance. And I’m not even your husband, in which case at least I’d understand that you needed stability to compensate for your adventurous lifestyle.” Maybe, I said to him, what she sees in you is a sense of death that’s similar to what she feels when she’s actually in the war zone. “That’s a very flattering reading,” Berengo said. “But my actual issue is: I think these photographers are posers. Their entire life is a pose. They have these conversations where they call each other bro. They look after each other. They host these beautiful dinners. There’s the one who’s great in the kitchen and the one who’s really, really terrible, and that’s just more reason to love him. You eat by candlelight. The people there always look like they just got back from a Vanity Fair party that they didn’t really care about going to or from a charity block party in Harlem. Or from Lebanon. They have the same attitude whether they’re coming back from Lebanon or the Vanity Fair party: it’s hell out there. Their conversations are uninteresting because they all say the right things. They’re intense. They pick up nice tans while they’re out taking pictures of torn-up bodies and piles of rubble. They dress well. Their coats, their shirts. They get along. Their walnut bread is delicious and homemade. And then when you’re busy hating on them, a friend suddenly calls, and you overhear the following exchange: ‘Hey, buddy, you dickless cunt,’ Vera says. She’s calling someone a faggot, then hands the phone over to another photographer who says: ‘Hey shithead, two months in the hospital doing nothing, you should be ashamed of yourself!’ All those around the table look at each other, sort of uncomfortably. Vera’s eyes well up, and she has this angry look on her face. Someone gets up to take the cheese board into the kitchen, all of this in candlelight, by the way, and someone says into the phone: ‘No, no, I’ll come over myself and stick it up your butt!’ When they hang up I find out it was a friend of theirs who lost a leg. I’m not sure where, some war zone. He’s gone through surgery over thirty times, and they even removed a flap of skin from his asshole to patch up another hole in his stomach or leg—again, I’m not sure, I didn’t totally follow. Talking to each other like that is their code, the way they show their brotherhood: they grieve, and they’re brave. And then Vera fucks me, which means her bravery is a pose. She should despise me. I mean, these people make you think that God has to be a hipster, because he allows people like that to see the truth. The affectionate gatherings, the perfect dinners, the perfectly formed sentences about how hard it is, actually, to be there on the front line, but oh the memories. The only possible escape from this is to think that if you fuck me, then maybe you’re a fraud. I mean, I’m sorry to go on about this. It’s just that they’re real people.”

“You go in, and they give you an iPod. You listen to the album, the new album, which hasn’t been released yet. It’s a hesitant album—you can tell it was made by a star who is unsure if they’ll go on being a star or not, whether they’ll make a comeback or fade away. You listen to the songs, and you wonder if they’ve lost the fight. You hope the artist will make it; you hope it works it out for him. Lenny Kravitz is roaming around the room holding out his laptop, trying to connect to the wi-fi so he can see how many views his new video has on YouTube. He’s shorter than you think. The artist is tired and kind and twitchy. They’ve made it, and now they face the problem of having to account for it. Maybe they act tough for the camera but not for the interviewer. ‘Can we start with the first question? What’s the first question? Can we start from the first question?’ As if they’re in a trance.”

He is a cold and childish man. He’s loving and intense, and he’s doesn’t do much with his time. He has no steady relationships. He seems incapable of building anything. He is paralyzed by complexity and criticism, especially of his loved ones. I experience the exotic thrill of finding my Oblomov. Some days I revel in his frenzied apathy. He’s my Stranger.

We met in 2008, at a party at Gary Shteyngart’s apartment. We sat on two stools Gary had bought at an auction that had once belonged to James Brown. (It was the night the DFW news broke. That may be why we bonded immediately. I had started teaching at Columbia, and I remember feeling awful, thinking about how Dave was going to become God.)

“You never let your characters just fuck. You never have them enjoy it and just leave it at that. There’s a conflict or anxiety or regret every fucking time! It’s like you don’t know that there’s actual pleasure in the world. It’s really puritanical.”

Also: “How come in Godspeed the bad news always breaks after someone fucks someone they aren’t supposed to? Like, Dad was supposed to pick up the kids after school, but he was late because he was banging his lover, so the kids go home on a friend’s helicopter and they die. Then people write about the helicopter metaphor, and they don’t even notice the function of pleasure in your work.

My take on this is: “You don’t solve loneliness with pleasure.”