“Jeremy had a dream. It was for a prison. But being a progressive, kindhearted man, Bentham shied away from the kind of dungeon intended to either kill you or terrify you into behaving yourself for the rest of your life. He envisioned a Panopticon Penitentiary, a prison built in such a way that the inmates would all be visible from a central watch post, but would be unable to tell if they were being watched. They might be being watched all the time; they might not be watched at all. He believed that even the possibility of being observed would change the behavior of even the most hardened of sinners. He said it was a new mode of obtaining power over people in a quantity ‘hitherto without example.’ But even his ambitions pale into insignificance now.”

“Not even LinkedIn, Peter? It’s for business.” He shuddered visibly. We were both wet. There were tiny droplets on his glasses, and his face was gleaming not only from the rain but with the come-to-life quality he took on when speaking about something he was interested in. I didn’t quite believe him, was sure there was a Romeo or Grindr account somewhere with his profile picture on it, if not his name. But perhaps not. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Peter’s angel.

By lunchtime, my insides hurt, as though something within me was rupturing, perhaps the place in which I kept the past safely lidded. I gave up on getting anything done. Instead, I googled Jeremy Bentham and read that along with his other achievements, he had coined the term “deep play,” which he defined as a game with stakes so high that no rational person would engage in it. There was a portrait of him, a fleshy man, with shoulder-length white hair and a bald pate. His face wore the expression of someone eminently capable of filling heavy books of tissue-thin paper with minuscule print, the kind that with a pistol pressed against your head and forced to choose, you’d rather eat than read.

The news websites were full of atrocities and celebrities. There was more about the endless rain, and on a couple of sites these stories ran side by side with updates on the latest leaks, as though there was a connection between them, the falling rain, and the drip of confidential information about offshore bank accounts and secret payments and highly prominent world figures. It was all there, from tax avoidance by famous actors known for their public moralizing, to billion-dollar money laundering schemes run on behalf of criminal empires. And the corruption and embezzlement and outright theft were on such dizzying scales that the celebrity articles were a relief, a mildly poisonous anesthesia with which I tried to obliterate the feeling of helplessness.