“I have followed your life from the beginning, in parallel to my own. I’ve spotted you in restaurants, even asked for your autograph. You have spoken my thoughts. My audition speech at drama school was a piece by you. Adam, I am older than you.”

“This conversation is difficult to believe,” I said. “Still, I always enjoyed fairy stories.”

He continued, “As I told you, I had made money but my time was running out. You know better than me, an actor walks into a room and immediately you see—it’s all you seehe’s too old for the part. Yet one’s s—tore of desire doesn’t diminish with age, with many it increases; the means to fulfill it become weakened. I didn’t want a trim stomach, woven hair, or less baggy eyes, or any of those … trivial repairs.” Here he laughed. It was the first time he hadn’t seemed earnest. “What I wanted was another twenty years, at least, of health and youth. I had the operation.”

“You had your brain removed … to become a younger man?”

“What I am saying sounds deranged. It is unbelievable.”

“Let us pretend, for the sake of this enjoyable fantasy, that it really is true. How does it work?”

He said the procedure was terrifying, but physically not as awful as open-heart surgery, which we’d both had. When you come round from the anesthetic in this case, you feel fit and optimistic. “Ready to jump and run,” as he put it. The operation wasn’t exactly common yet. There were only a handful of surgeons who could do it. The procedure had been done hundreds of times, perhaps a thousand, he didn’t know the exact figure, in the last five years. But it was still, as far as he knew, a secret. Now was the time to have it, at the beginning, before there was a rush; when it was still in everyone’s interest to keep the secret.

He went on to say that there were certain people who he believed needed more time on earth, for whom the benefit to mankind could be immense. To this I replied that although I didn’t know him, it was his mildness that struck me. He didn’t seem the type to lead some kind of master race. He wasn’t Stalin, Pol Pot, or even Mother Teresa returning for another fifty years.

“That’s right,” he said. “Needless to say, I don’t include myself in this. I had children and I worked hard. I needed another life in order to catch up on my sleep. If I’m back, it’s for the crack!”

I asked, “If you really were one of these women or men, what would you want to do with your new time?”