We boarded the train. I was exhausted and didn’t feel like talking. For a while we bumped along in silence. Lucessi was the first to speak.

“Sorry about all that.” He was drawing meaningless shapes on the window with his index finger. “I’m sure you were hoping for something more exciting.”

I hadn’t told him what had happened and, of course, never would. It was also true that my anger had softened, replaced by a budding curiosity. Something altogether unexpected about the world had been glimpsed. This life his family led; I had known that such wealth existed, but that is not the same as sleeping under its roof. I felt like an explorer who’d stumbled upon a golden city in the jungle.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I had a great time.”

Lucessi sighed, settled back, and closed his eyes. “They can be the stupidest people on earth,” he said.

—

What fascinated me, of course, was money. Not just because of the things it could buy, though these were appealing (Lucessi’s sister being Exhibit A). The deeper attraction lay in something more atmospheric. I had never been around wealthy people but had not felt this as a lack; I had never been around Martians, either. There were plenty of rich kids at Harvard, of course, the ones who’d gone to exclusive prep schools and addressed each other with preposterous nicknames like “Trip” and “Beemer” and “Duck.” But in day-to-day existence, their affluence was easily overlooked. We lived in the same crappy dormitories, sweated through the same papers and tests, ate the same atrocious food in the dining hall, like co-residents of a kibbutz. Or so it seemed. Visiting Lucessi’s house had opened my eyes to a hidden world that lay beneath the egalitarian surface of our lives, like a system of caves under my feet. Except for Lucessi, I actually knew very little about my friends and classmates. It seems improbable to say so now, but the thought had never occurred to me that there could be something so fundamentally different about them.

In the weeks after Thanksgiving, I took clearer stock of my surroundings. There was a boy who lived down the hall whose father was the mayor of San Francisco; a girl I knew slightly, who spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, was said to be the daughter of a South American dictator; one of my lab partners had confided to me, apropos of nothing, that his family owned a summer house in France. All this information coalesced into a whole new awareness of where I was, and the thought made me incredibly self-conscious, even as I longed to learn more about it, to penetrate its social codes and see where I might fit.

Equally fascinating to me was the fact that Lucessi himself wanted nothing to do with any of it. Throughout the weekend, he had made no secret of his contempt for his sister, his parents, even the house, which he called, in typical Lucessian fashion, “an idiotic pile of rock.” I attempted to draw him out on this subject but got nowhere; my overtures actually made him angry and snappish. What I had begun to discern in my roommate was the price of being too smart. He possessed an intellect capable of calculating reams of data without taking pleasure in any of it. To Lucessi, the world was a collection of interlocking systems divorced from all meaning, a surface reality governed only by itself. He could, for instance, recite the batting averages of every player on the New York Yankees, but when I asked him who his favorite was, he had no answer. The only emotion he seemed capable of was disdain for other people, though even that possessed a quality of childish bewilderment, as if he were a bored toddler in a man’s body, forced to sit at the grown-ups’ table and listen to incomprehensible conversations about the price of real estate and who was divorcing whom. I believe this pained him—he wasn’t aware what the problem was, only that it existed—resulting in a kind of nihilistic loneliness: he both despised and envied everybody else, except for me, to whom he attributed a similar vision of the world, simply because I was always around and didn’t make fun of him.

As for his unhappy fate: perhaps I didn’t value him enough as a friend. Sometimes I think I might have been the only friend he ever had. And it is strange, after so many years, that from time to time my thoughts still turn to him, even though he was, after all, but a minor actor in my life. Probably it is the idleness of my circumstances that draws me to the recollection. With so many years to fill, one inevitably gets around to everything, opens each drawer of the mind to rustle around inside it. I did not know Lucessi well; no man could. Yet the failure to know a person does not rule out his importance in our lives. I wonder: how would Lucessi regard me now? Were he to wander, miraculously alive, into this prison of my own making, this becalmed memorial to things lost, ascend the marble staircase with his graceless Lucessian gait and stand before me in his clunky shoes and ill-fitting trousers and Yankees’ jersey stinking of unwashed Lucessian sweat, what would he tell me? See? he might say. Now you get it, Fanning. Now you really get it, after all.

—

I returned to Ohio for Christmas. I was glad to be home, but mine was the exile’s gladness; none of it seemed to pertain to me anymore, as if I’d been gone for years, not months. Harvard was not my home, at least not yet, but neither was Mercy, Ohio. The very idea of home, of one true place, had become odd to me.

My mother did not appear well. She had lost a great deal of weight, and her smoker’s cough had worsened. A glaze of sweat appeared on her brow at the smallest exertion. I paid this little mind, accepting at face value my father’s explanation that she had overdone it making ready for the holidays. I dutifully went through the sentimental motions: tree trimming and pie baking, a trip to Midnight Mass (we never attended church otherwise), opening my presents while my parents looked on—an awkward ceremony that is the bane of all only children—but my heart was nowhere in this, and I departed two days early, explaining that with exams still ahead of me, I needed to get back to my studies. (I did, but that wasn’t the reason.) Just as he’d done in September, my father drove me to the station. The rains of summer had been replaced by snow and biting cold, the warm wind through open windows by a blast of desiccated air from the dashboard vents. It would have been the perfect time to say something meaningful, if either of us could have imagined what such a thing might be. When the bus pulled away, I did not look back.