He was bundled in his bathrobe and an overcoat that would have left Richard Evelyn Byrd sweating in Antarctica. We exchanged a cautious greeting, but that in itself provided a strong disincentive for my returning to the game, for I was pricked by a small but nagging guilt that I should be applying myself to the tuba instead of freezing, self-indulgently, to death on his cracked playground. After that I stayed in my grotty room. Abby would bop in on me for our desolate chats.

“What are you taking at Georgetown?” I asked one day.

“I already told you, I think. Sociology, diplomacy.” He stood at the window, his back to me, staring out. “I would like to make her my queen,” he added. “It’s very awkward.” He bowed his head, chagrined.

“I suppose it is, you and Derek being so tight.”

“I suppose we are. Ur haft yik gorill.”

That’s what it sounded like. “What’s Ur haft… what you said?”

“A gorilla, in my language. Dialect really, spoken where I come from.”

“Which is?”

“Iraq. A province called Assama. Never heard of it, right?”

“Exchange student?”

“No. I have a full ride, courtesy of the U.S. government.”

“Who’s a gorilla?”

He didn’t answer.

“Derek?”

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

To my mind Derek wasn’t an ape. He was an insult to apes. Still, coming from Abby, it was an epiphany of sorts. “Why is Derek an ape?”

“Well… literally it means, ‘one who is like people but cannot talk with us.’”

I grinned at him and slowly he rearranged his sad face and grinned back. It was the beginning of friendship.

“What else about Derek?”

“There’s nothing that you don’t already know. He’s like a celebrity.”

“In what sense?”

“Have you not seen those people on TV?”

“Has he been on TV?”

“No. But he acts like he has—as though millions of people are aware of him. Isn’t that what a celebrity is?”

“I suppose.”

“Yes,” he said, “he is like King Kong in the cinema. A celebrity gorilla.”

He grinned again and then the fingers of his right hand played a few silent notes on his left wrist and he held out a watch on a fine leather strap.

“Here,” he pushed his Patek Philippe toward me.

“I can’t accept this.”

“I got another one. I want you to have it.”

“Why?”

“Because you are a sympathetic listener.”

I hefted the watch in a palm. “You must be a wealthy man,” I said, tempted by the overture.

“There are gradations of wealth. I am moderately rich, not princely rich.”

“Only princes are.”

“But I am.”

“Rich?” The conversation had gyred toward a confusing circularity.

“No. A prince. Well, sort of a prince. Heir to the throne of Assama.” His face was set in a somber, quizzical half-smile, as though I were feigning unawareness to the obvious. “No one told you?”