“Oh.” She laughed and gestured at the other chair. “I didn’t come here for that.” Anyway, she said, Bob had a superb network of friends, and they’d all been saying wonderful things. She waved her hand as though, there beside her, was the network: twenty-five-year-old World Bank vice presidents, New York Times bureau chiefs, hedge-fund stock pickers, rich fucks who had been campaigning since they were five years old and got everything on a silver platter, lived in unbelievable apartments with wide doorways and African carpets, and took turns powdering each other’s bungholes. She said he was up for a job that was tremendously important for the Democratic party. “We’re in a formula-one race. We’ve got to keep the distance between us and the guy behind us.” She spoke as if she were reading the directions off a box of cake mix. She said Bob could make the difference. “He’s brilliant.”

“Keep saying that and it’ll come true.”

“You’re obsessed with him.”

I thought back to when Bob worked at INS, Immigration and Naturalization, at Justice, how he had whole families, Rwandans who were here seeking asylum, removed from the homes where relief agencies had put them, shipped back to Africa for sure death. I asked if she knew why the U.S. stood by and watched the Hutus slaughter a million defenseless women and children with machetes.

She asked what I had against him. I said, nothing. She asked what I did for a living. “I’m a midlevel analyst at a nongovernmental research institute whose aim is to demilitarize the Western conglomerates.” When I told her where, she’d never heard of it. “It’s nothing. We’re not important.” She nodded.

I said, “When does a person stop doing what they’re doing because they believe in it, and start doing it for some other cockamamie reason?”

She said, “I think it happens when you turn thirty.”