“I go to these parties to practice,” he’d said. “There are factions, alliances, secrets, debts, and a lot of messing around—I mean, of course, sexual messing around. And they all see themselves as Iranians, Brazilians, whatever, but I—I don’t see myself as an American: I’m an atom, I bounce all over the place, like a mercenary. No, not a mercenary, a free agent—a free atom—isn’t that something in chemistry? I’m always at the outside orbit of all the other, um, molecules?”
