“One of these days we’re going to piece together something really significant, a tragedy by Euripides or a lost political history, or better still, some old comedy, some impossible fool’s journey to the ends of the earth and back. Those are my favorites, do you know what I mean?” He raises his eyes and flames flare inside Zeno. For an instant he spins out a possible future, an afternoon argument between Rex and Hillary: Hillary pouts, Rex asks Hillary to leave, Zeno helps clean out all of Hillary’s detritus, carries boxes, unpacks his own suitcase into Rex’s bedroom, sits on the edge of Rex’s bed; they take walks, travel to Egypt, read in silence across a teapot from one another. For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak it into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen. I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth, I loved you then, I love you now.

Rex says, “I’m boring you.”

“No, no.” Everything tilts. “The opposite. It’s just—” He sees the valley road, the plow blade, the swirling ghosts of snow. A thousand dark trees whisk past. “It’s all new for me, understand, late nights, gin and tonics, the Underground, your—Hillary. He’s reading Chinese, you’re digging up lost Greek scrolls. It’s intimidating.”

“Ah.” Rex waves a hand. “Hillary is full of projects that go nowhere. Never finishes a one. And I’m a teacher at a middling boys’ school. In Rome I get sunburned walking from the hotel to the taxi.”

The café bustles, a baby fusses, the waiter pads noiselessly back and forth. Rain trickles down the awning. Zeno feels the moment slipping.

“But isn’t that,” Rex says, “what love is?” He rubs his temple, and drinks his tea, and glances at his wristwatch, and Zeno feels as though he has walked to the center of the frozen lake and fallen through the ice.

The birthday party falls on Zeno’s last day. They take a black cab to a club called The Crash. Rex leans on Hillary’s arm and says, “Let’s try to keep it tame tonight, shall we?” and Hillary bats his lashes, and they descend into a series of connected rooms that get sequentially stranger and more dungeon-like, each stuffed with boys and men in silver boots or zebra leggings or top hats. Many of the men seem to know Rex, clasping him on the arm or kissing his cheeks or blowing party noisemakers at him, and several try to engage Zeno in conversation but the music is too loud, so he mostly nods and sweats in his polyester suit.