“They do talk about it, the ‘newies.’ But I want to live, not chatter. I love being a funky, dirty young man. I love pouting my sexy lips and being outstanding at tennis. My serve could knock your face off! You should have seen me before. I’ve got the photographs somewhere. What’s the point of being rich if you’re lopsided and have a harelip? It was a joke, a mistake that I came out alive like that! This is the real me!”

“What I miss,” I said, “is giving people the pleasure of knowing about me.”

He was unstoppable. “Soon everyone’ll be talking ’bout this. There’ll be a new class, an elite, a superclass of super-bodies. Then there’ll be shops where you go to buy the body you want. I’ll open one myself with real bodies rather than mannequins in the window. Bingo! Who d’you want to be today!”

I said, “If the idea of death itself is dying, all the meanings, the values of Western civilization since the Greeks, have changed. We seem to have replaced ethics with aesthetics.”

“Bring on the new meanings! You’re a conservative, then.”

“I didn’t think so. I guess I don’t know what or who I am. It’s always uplifting, though, to meet a hedonist—someone relieved of the tiring standards that hold the rest of us back from the eternal party.”

“You still think I’m just a playboy, do you? Look at those books!” He pointed at a shelf. “I’m taking those in! Euripides, Goethe, Nietzsche. I’m dealing with the deepest imponderables. You know what happened to me? I was seventy-five years old. My wife leaves me—not for some virile fucker, but to become a Buddhist. She prefers old fat stomach to me! Some other cultures go for different body shapes, you know.” He went on, “Mostly, my children don’t bother with me. They’re too busy with drugs! My friends are dead. I can buy women, but they don’t desire me. I didn’t just work all my life, I fought and scrambled and dug into the rock surface of the world with my fuckin’ fingernails! I lost it all and I was dying and I was depressed. You think I wanted to check out in that state?”

“It sounds hard to say it, but that’s a life, I guess. It’s the failures, the hopeless digressions, the mistakes, the waste that add up to a lived life.”

If he’d been in a pub, he’d have spat on the floor. “You’re only an intellectual,” he said. “I deserved a better final curtain. I bought one! I can tell you, I’m doing some other pretty worthwhile things. Let’s hear from you now. What are you doing with your new time?”

“Me? I’m only a menial at the Center.”