“None for me, I’d like to be on tonight,” Chidi said, virtuously refusing a hit of my sativa-indica blend, which made me anxious that I’d already begun. “It’s a useful skill to be able to walk into any room and get along with people, Neil. Especially a room with a collective net worth of”—he frowned, doing mental math—“call it tens of millions?” He rubbed his hands together gleefully, prepared, as always, to charm, persuade, finagle, and fundraise. “If you thought more creatively, you could get one of these people to endow you a chair one day, or rethink the whole concept of a university, really bring it into the twenty-first century….”

I was already walking away.

Upstairs, inside, we found the room arranged by twos. It reminded me of the opening of those Madeline books Prachi read growing up: twelve little couples in two straight lines; in two straight lines, they talked tech shop, they ate their Brie, they swirled their wine. The betrothed, Avi Kapoor, tapped on his phone, while Prachi, next to him, picked at red grapes and chatted with one of her Duke sorority sisters. Chidi shook hands with Avi, whom he knew from incestuous, elite tech circles. I spied, with great relief, Manu Padmanaban, gripping a Blue Moon and being talked at by Prachi’s friend Hae-mi. Manu had grown into himself after coming out in college. He’d briefly been Prachi’s colleague at a midsize start-up, and sometimes wrangled an invite to her affairs, where he was my life jacket. He didn’t see me.

“I own our tardiness,” Chidi lied to the happy couple on my behalf. (I’d dozed through the afternoon following a late night out with the girl I’d been sleeping with. I remembered little of the prior evening’s party, save the gas station whiff of coke and a dreadlocked white guy wearing a vial of ketamine around his neck, plucking solemnly at a sitar.) “My call with Fabian Fischer ran long,” Chidi went on. “He sends his best, Avi.”

Chidi had dropped out of Caltech when a billionaire awarded him a hundred thousand dollars to pursue a 3D printing venture. He’d since launched a wetware product dealing with longevity; that is, attempting to prolong the human life span to Old Testament proportions. He lived off a uniquely Californian income in the interim—exit money from the first company’s sale, supplemented with Bitcoin investments. He was half-Nigerian, the product of an Oakland Hills secular Jewish mother and a transplanted Lagos doctor, and I attributed all differences between us—his proclivity for risk, his openness with his parents—to the nonimmigrant side.

Avi appeared duly impressed. “Are you guys raising? I’m surprised you’re out.” Then, to me: “Book going okay, Neil?”

“Dissertation. A book implies someone’s going to read it. It’s coming.”