Ian didn’t bother to respond to Phyllis, which offended Owen. Sitting in his tattered plaid wing chair, stained on its arms and where his head—greasily long-haired in artistic fashion—habitually leaned back, Ian clutched his fresh drink with his yellow fingers and spoke to Owen without deigning to turn his head; the two women on the sofa might as well not have been there. His goateed profile, stony-pale, snarled as if in a trance. “You nerds. You’re squeezing the juice out of life. To you we’re all just statistical constructs to be manipulated. I don’t blame Ed, he can’t help it, poor slob, being a nerd; if he wasn’t a nerd he wouldn’t be anything, a short-order cook at an all-night diner perhaps. But you, O. old boy, you know better. You have a soul, or had one once. Let me put it this way—you know something’s missing, and still you’ve signed up, a good soldier for Moloch. Whatever you call it. Industry. The defense establishment. Defense, death, pollution, and mass-produced crap for the crappy masses.”

“Actually,” Owen said, enjoying the other man’s meltdown into hostility, calculating that he had less and less reason to avoid fucking his wife, “a lot of our present work involves putting insurance records on tapes or, the newer thing, disks, and devising systems for hospitals, cutting down on paperwork. Or are hospitals and insurance companies part of Moloch’s armies? Ian, what’s missing began to go missing a long time ago, with Copernicus and Martin Luther, and you can’t blame technology for not bringing it back. Technology works with what, as Wittgenstein said, is the case. Some would say, incidentally, that the women’s magazines you do your illustrations for are good soldiers for Moloch, selling cosmetics and tampons and dishwashers and sexy underwear and whatever else women can be persuaded they want. It’s the Devil’s bargain, Ian—medicine and electricity and rocket science in exchange for an empty Heaven. We’ve all signed on to the bargain, and a bunch of kids going up into Vermont and doing without flush toilets isn’t going to cancel the deal.” He wondered why he had become so heated; he didn’t want to believe this. He wanted to have technology and illusions, too: both were the ameliorative fruits of human imagination.

Phyllis loyally said, “Owen isn’t anti-art, he’s always going to museums. DigitEyes was all about that, sublimated.”