All the while, I told him about my visit to the lab in Arcade, Dr. Kriss’s reaction to my pushback on the report, and the upcoming Mimico interview.

“Would that help it pass fact-check,” I asked, “if a subject who’s a year out of the trial is all clear?”

To my annoyance, Lane wouldn’t give me a clear yes or no. I suppose that’s one advantage of the fact-checker—they can lord their veto power over you.

He disappeared into the living room, where he unfolded a table and arranged it with a single candle, a bottle of wine and two folding chairs. Jazz of the nondescript sort you choose when someone has scorned your taste in contemporary music was now coming through the speakers.

Then he leaned out into the fire escape and plucked a sprig of rosemary from his garden.

—

When I complimented the duck, Lane looked pleased, but he gave all the credit to the writer in the Times. He seemed familiar with the various styles of all the paper’s food writers, while I never, ever read anything about food. But again, Lane had the almost nineteenth-century air of someone committed to knowing everything, albeit secondhand and filtered through various New York publications.

“I want to ask your advice,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of pitching something to Mort.”

“What’s the idea?”

“It’s about this new style of barbershop. Actually, it’s more like an old style, but these young barbers are reclaiming that very classic barbershop look, you know, checkered floor, straight razors, a stag’s head on the wall. It’s a Brooklyn thing. You go into these places and you see a lot of young men in there, just hanging out, and it’s very, I don’t know, not metrosexual, exactly, but they’re comfortable being groomed.”

He searched my face for a reaction.

“Because one thing they’re reviving—and this is what the piece would be about, mostly—is an old-time code of civility, something we’re losing with technology and all that, just being in the moment, getting your hair cut, treating other men with respect. It’s like a male kind of feminism, maybe.”

I’d seen several of these places open up, and of course they’re everywhere now, but I associated them more with the grotesque masculinity of hunting lodges and beer halls than with some moral rejuvenation.

“Maybe there’s something there,” I said, trying to be nice, “but you’d probably have to take a more critical view. I’m not sure Mort would run something that was enthusing about a bunch of Brooklynites trimming each other’s beards.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be like that.”

I didn’t mean to sound discouraging, but the idea was so boring, I didn’t want to lend it my support even in the privacy of his apartment.