I never actually made the decision to stop working. For a year after my meeting with the idiot, I told people I was “between contracts.” Then, over the next year, the state of between-ness somehow became permanent. I did volunteer work for a group that helps nonprofits with computing problems, but gradually a sort of miasmatic depression took me over, a dreary kind of fog in which it became harder and harder to do anything at all. When you’re working and hurrying to the laundry before it closes, it seems that having all the time in the world will be glorious. But then, suddenly without the structures of a job, why get up at any particular hour? Why get to sleep? It takes great internal discipline, I found, to make up each and every day for yourself. I began to tumble around in time. I went to movies in the morning. I drank in the afternoon. I began going out to dinner with friends every night. There are three or four very good restaurants in town that have come to consider me a regular. No longer having an office to go to, no place to offer the sort of formal friendliness business acquaintances give you, I found in these restaurants a substitute impersonal solace: the welcome at the reception stand, the satisfaction of being seated ahead of everyone with reservations, being treated as if I’d come home. It’s possible that those places have indeed become what I can count on as home.

Whatever guilt I felt at my extended idleness (which was considerable; my mother worked until the last months of her life) was tempered by the admiration I received from the new paper millionaires the Internet boom was creating by the thousands all around me. Young people I met admired me—though they found me a bit slow, retired as I am at forty-eight, not thirty-three. It did no good to remind them that the companies I’d worked for had had to show a profit before they could even think of going public, two consecutive quarters in a row, actual revenues in excess of costs. It seemed so quaint to them, passé, the notion of having a product, paying customers, profits. They believed the public markets should finance their fantasies. “What is your business plan for revenues?” I asked a young man I met at a party who had founded a start-up. “Go IPO!” he said.

That could have been Ethan Levin, I think, as I watch the man’s nervous swipes at his hair and remember the whole story again, like it or not. Ethan had eight times the stock options I did. He wouldn’t have had to work for the next six start-ups, wouldn’t have had to do consulting. He’d be long retired by now, well into his own life of compensated idleness. He would have traveled the world, would have sat in business-class lounges everywhere, drinking a complimentary alcoholic beverage as he watched his fortune melt away. Money as transient as electrons. Wealth as weightless as data broadcast through the air, rising and falling in currents like weather, beyond anyone’s control. Yes, that’s how it should have happened: Ethan Levin was supposed to be rich like me.

His flight was early. I had to race downstairs to meet him.

“Shitty flight” was how he greeted me. “Where’s the car?”

There are some disappointments you simply can’t let yourself feel right at the moment. There were obstacles to negotiate, after all—the luggage cart to be gotten through elevators and onto ramps, the car to be found, the Bay Bridge to be crossed—and how could I have attended to them if I’d given in to the feeling that was pulling me? An actual sort of sickness is what it felt like, an invader in my chest, some rogue organism hurtling around in me. Then anger: a flash of bitter anger.