“Have you heard of golems?” he asked at last.

“Like, Tolkien?”

“Golems were the proto-robot,” he said. “From Jewish mysticism. I was raised Jewish, am still… Jewish.”

He told me that in the Talmud, Adam, the ur-man, was described as a golem formed from dust. Golems appeared to be humans but were not. It was believed golems could be activated through an ecstatic experience induced by the shem, any one of the Names of God, written on a piece of paper and inserted into the mouth or forehead of the golem.

“A kind of mystical battery-pack if you will,” he said with a smile. “In some medieval folktales, the golem could be deactivated by removing the shem or by changing the combination of letters written on it.”

He mentioned being totally transfixed as a child by an old Yiddish story about the Clay Boy, a variation of the golem, in which a lonely elderly couple made a little boy out of clay. Much to their delight, the clay boy came to life and the couple treated him as their real child. But the clay boy didn’t stop growing. He ate all of their food, their animals, and eventually the elderly couple too, before rampaging through the village.

“So, you know, that same paranoia and fear of the humanoid from science fiction appears even here, centuries earlier, in the golem.” David looked up and watched the slow proceedings of the rehearsal. “We fear most what we desire most. Which, of course, is to be gods.”

That evening, after a breathless trek through the Tate Modern before it closed, I took the tube up to Mile End and walked the twenty minutes to Chisenhale, trying to imagine what it would have been like for Clyde and Giacomo to hang out on the fire escape of this former warehouse, smoking cigarettes with Michael Clark and being so fucking unbelievably badass it made me want to cry. I loitered around for a few minutes like Ebenezer Scrooge looking through a window at his own past with longing, except this past wasn’t mine. It had never belonged to me and never would.

On the tube ride home, I listened to the automated woman’s voice at every interchange station: “Change for the District and Hammersmith and City lines”; “Change for London Overground.” For some reason, every time she said the word “change” it struck me as exquisite. The word seemed to come a fraction of a second before the rest of the sentence — “Change… for the District and Circle lines” — as if the most important thing she was announcing was not the new tube line but, in fact, change itself. For the briefest of moments the world was pregnant with this word, as if the automated woman might be commanding any number of possible changes from us: Change… your mind. Change… your life. Change… is possible. Change… is inevitable. Change… is afoot. Change… everything. Change… now.