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.”