I worked at a nonprofit that attacked the military-industrial complex, but I’ll tell you right now it did nothing. I might as well have been talking into a phone flipped upside down. It would be hard to explain exactly what we accomplished in our self-justifying fantasy of left-wing liberal dogshit.

I’d stop by and see him working and even the tiniest tic, the way his leg shook when he spoke, the way he filed papers by throwing them on the floor, seemed magnified, intentional, smart.

They won a big case and he got to be in the televised press conference. He sat up tall and straight. He’d cut his hair short for it. Every answer out of his mouth was like a perfectly fired javelin. The camera refused to move from him. He’d starved himself on those long trips to Mississippi, and now with no hair he looked like an astronaut.

Soon he was having chats with Janet Reno, riding with her over to Congress. He wasn’t lawyering as much. He’d moved up. “It’s titular.” What’s titular? “We do planning.” They had some sticky problems in Immigration and Naturalization: They were trying to figure out how to throw Haitians back in the water. When I phoned him at work he could only whisper. He gave the impression that things were hectic and constantly needed his attention. We still talked about our old plans to do good—we wanted to open a soup kitchen in a motor home and drive it around—but he liked seeing himself on the news, and the next time we were together he did a long analysis reworking the performance I saw on TV. He went to events at the White House, standing in for the attorney general. “After Memorial Day,” he explained, “you wear the white dinner jacket.”

Time passed. He met everybody. He called Barbara Walters at her home. He had four thousand names in his handheld electronic Rolodex. I swung by his apartment. He stuck handwritten notes from King Hussein on his refrigerator, photos of himself coming down the staircase of Air Force One, looking pale and tired. He’d become important, and I was hypnotized and gladly took what he handed me, a box of candies, an opened bottle of peach schnapps, outpourings of guilt he felt at the sight of me.