It had even been a joke of Neil's at one point, asking Thomas if he would like another 'Neil-me-down'. The man collected old girlfriends the way others gathered recyclables. Where everyone else talked about 'hooking up', Neil talked about 'plugging in', insisting that sex was the only circuit that mattered. According to Neil, men were bullets, fired from pussies at pussies. 'Time to meet your maker!' he would cry out at the bar, steering Thomas toward some new quarry. How could Thomas not be an avid accomplice? Insecure. Tipsy with testosterone. He even congratulated himself from time to time for 'anchoring' Neil's rather high-flying team.

One of their female friends, Marilyn Kogawa, used to rake them over the coals about their sexual habits and attitudes. Even though it was 'them', Thomas always understood that Neil was her real target, that she simply spread the blame to avoid making her personal stake too obvious. Neil had slept with her as well, several times, playing on the emotional margins of that wondrously ambivalent phrase, 'fuck-buddy.'

'What are you doing?' Thomas had asked him once (probably because he was nursing his own crush—Marilyn, as it turned out, would be another 'Neil-me-down'). 'Can't you see that she loves you,'

'I don't make the rules,' he replied. 'I just play the game.' Apparently the whole 'fuck-buddy' thing had been Marilyn's idea.

'But you're hurting her.'

Neil had winked. 'Well, she does howl a lot.'

At the time, Thomas had chalked up this insensitivity to what he referred to as 'Neil's strange obliviousness.' But now he could see that this was what Neil had always done in every aspect of his life: worked the rules to his own advantage. Things like embarrassment, hurt, or the fear of confrontation were simply tools to him. If you could catch him on a technical violation he would apologize readily enough, and in a manner that made you feel like a hard-ass for crying foul in the first place. But he was utterly deaf to anything that appealed to the spirit of the game. If friends or lovers got hurt, then they should mind the fucking rules.

The more Thomas thought about it, the more he realized that Sam was probably right. Neil had been a high-functioning psychopath, even back then.

And now, not even the rules mattered.

Sam and Thomas fell silent upon reaching Washington's outskirts, out of verbal exhaustion more than anything else. Thomas imagined that Sam, like him, was busy soaking in the underclass ironies of their nation's capital. It dawned on him that he knew nothing of her politics, but he decided that he didn't care. It all just felt like a futile reflex now. He could remember reading somewhere that Martin Luther King Jr was the last true citizen to visit Washington, that it had been tourists and businesspeople ever since. Thomas imagined that he was no exception.