But Michael wasn’t having any détentes, any patched truces: not with me. For I was, he said, sitting there, intolerable to him in mysterious ways. My hands enraged him. The way I wore my collar, the fact of my neck itself inside my collar, the half-inch of cuff protruding from my coat sleeves, filled him, he said, with loathing. Sitting or standing; walking or breathing; my mouth open or my mouth shut: he couldn’t abide me. Counseling him, advising him, aiding him: it was all a bag o’.

“God. Asher on art,” he said. “Asher on politics,” he said. “Asher on the state of the world.”

I should be listened to: by whole communities; I belonged in the history books. A whole chapter to myself. The besieging of the city of Asher. How Asher was taken. Overrun by. Factional disputes during the reign of. Agrarian problems in the first presidency of.

Asher.

My name convulsed him. Born from the Ashers, Michael said. The phoenix rising from the Ashers, he said. Asher thou art and to Asher returneth. He could have gone on endlessly.

“Perjury, cowardice, the easy accommodation: why, old Asher here thinks of those as his sins, and the sins of his generation,” Michael said. The player with the green eyeshade got up and went to the john, the analyst yawned, nobody really cared, nobody was really listening. “He’s got all these problems of guilt and expiation on his mind. Yes, sir. He just worries his little old self sick that the stuff out there has to have a meaning. Down at the bottom of the crackerjack box there’s a little old prize and that’s what all the crackerjacks are for. Old Asher here, he likes things to be real. Don’t you, Asher?”

“Do I?” I said, stiffly.

The boy nodded.

“Real theatre,” he said. “Real people. Real life.”

He looked around the table: at the fingers idly counting the stacked chips, at the eyes irritated by the smoke, at the indifferent and impatient faces.

“And you know what?” he said. “Old Asher here believes he has a built-in reality detector. A little old gadget, battery-powered, that just tells him when the stuff’s authentic.”

He shook his head.

“Man,” he said. “Imagine going around with a gizmo like that inside you? I mean: giving you the absolute lowdown on everything. A thing like that has to be the greatest little gadget since the invention of french ticklers. Yes, sir.

“And I’ll tell you how you get one of these little reality detectors that tells you what’s what,” Michael said. “You can’t just go out and buy one and have it fitted. No, sir. That would make the thing available to everybody and the whole point is old Asher here thinks he’s got it exclusive, if not the world rights at least the American franchise. Him and his generation: they got the rights. Manufacturing and distribution. And the way they got the franchise is that they got themselves born at one of the great moments of historical truth. Gentlemen: I give you the Depression. That moment in America when everything was real.”