THERE WAS RISOTTO WITH MARROW ON THE MENU, BUT THE waiter said they were out of marrow.

This sent us to studying anew the menus we had pushed aside. The waiter made several suggestions as we did so, but waiters seemed always to suggest what the kitchen was trying to be rid of. We each ordered a dry-aged young Hereford sirloin steak for two, telling the waiter that we wanted them burnt on the outside and very rare on the inside. Spuds with some kind of fancy name, peas with same. I told Keith I wasn’t drinking. “Well, I am,” he said, sipping his Campari and soda and looking over the wine list.

“Remember the last time we had dinner,” I said, “I asked you if you’d ever drunk blood?”

“Yes.” He laughed. “And how is the old vein-broaching business these days?”

“You were all, like, oh, God, no, don’t go there. You said you could tell by my eyes that I was headed for trouble.”

“As I recollect, you seemed half insane. Looked it, too, if you don’t mind my saying. ‘Barney Google with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes.’ ” He indecisively ordered a bottle of some grand cru or other. “My grandmother Emily used to love that song.”

He palpated the cork, took a snort of the wine, knocked off the taste in the glass, nodded, and the sommelier decanted and poured.

“I thought it was the dope or the booze that was dragging you down by the yoke. Believe me, mate, you were not you.”

“And what was all that about seeing things coming out of people?”

“What?” He laughed. Then: “Oh, that. I did at one time or another. I saw things come out of people. I didn’t say that things came out of them. I said that I saw things come out of them.”

“And you said it led to their death.”

“Well, hell, look, they are now pushing up daffodils, but my seeing things coming out of them had nothing to do with it.”

This was somewhat like getting him to try to remember what he had said about Paganini, or whoever it was.

“Did you ever hear of Magnan’s sign?” he asked. “It’s a type of—what the fuck do they bloody call it?—some sort of, some kind of paraphasia, or paraesthesia, or para-something-or-other where you feel things moving under your skin or coming through your skin or whatever. It’s mostly an end-of-the-line coke thing.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, maybe I had a spot or two of it in reverse, seeing it in others rather than myself. Or maybe their ranting about what they felt under their skin and saw coming through it made me, in whatever state I may have been in at the time, see it too. Worms, I think it might have been, or little baby snakes, some such nonsense.”

The steaks arrived, and the spuds and peas with the fancy names.

“That was the first song I ever learned to play properly, drop-down, on guitar: ‘Cocaine.’ I learned it from an album, ten-inch album, that Jack Elliott put out in England in 1958 or so. I learned that in the john of my art school. It was so pretty. I had no idea what cocaine was. I just surmised it was some weirdo grown-up perversion. I really didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what cocaine was.”

He burst out in laughter, shook his head, cut off a piece of steak, swabbed it in the blood that ran from it.

“I don’t use cocaine,” I said. “The only times I ever did, it was to help me stay awake to drink more. Never really saw much in it.”

“You never had the good stuff, the real Bolivian marching powder.”

We chewed awhile in quiet.

“Anyway, all the same shit,” he said. “Smack, coke”—he gestured with his fork to the glass of Médoc before him—“booze. All the same.”

“Well, all I know is I wasn’t fucked-up that night.”

“You’d checked your mind in the cloakroom of a place you couldn’t remember.” He laughed.

Schizophreniform disorder. Drive-by psychosis. Magnan’s sign.

“I saw ghost-rats, shadow-rats come out of me,” I said.

“Worms, rats, snakes, belching frogs. Whatever. We could start a zoo of empty cages and terrariums. People have paid more to see less.”

“You had me going that night,” I told him.

“Ah, you know me. Preaching is the one thing I’ve never been accused of. But I wanted to give you a kick, a gentle kick, in the right direction.” He ate some of the spuds with the fancy name. “Right direction,” he repeated. “Sometimes I wonder what direction that might be.”

I finished my peas with the fancy name. I always dispose first of what I like least.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ll take you any way I can get you, but I prefer you like this. Nobody at this table is getting any younger. And you’ve got that diabetes thing, like my old man, Bert.” His tone lightened. “He looked just like Popeye, old Bert did.”

I asked him how the Hoagy Carmichael album was coming along. He looked at me as if he suspected that I was trying to give him a dig, which I was.

“We will sell no wine before its time.”

He told me that he didn’t even have a record label these days. Then we were on to the evaporation of the recording business, and the publishing business, the downloading from the ether of both music and books, all executed with the suckers’ shibboleth of “back money.”

We were lucky, we reflected, to have grown up as boys in a world full of magic vinyl and cheap paperbacks all about and waiting to be discovered for a few coins. The best stuff was happened upon by accident. Discovery after discovery in the oddest of bins in the oddest of shops. But now the age of discovery was over. All were reduced to industrially bred cows at the same trough of the same slop.

Suddenly we realized that we had not taken a cigarette break.

“If only our forgetfulness could have gone on forever,” he said as we made our way out of the restaurant into the street.

I asked him if he knew whether or not English Ovals had originated in England.

“Oh, those things. The ones that come pre-sat-upon. I’ve no idea. I don’t much remember seeing them around there when I was coming up.”

We stood silently smoking awhile.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“I don’t know. Maybe because lately I’ve been concerned inexplicably with meaningless things. With questions whose answers have no meaning. I don’t know.”

We smoked awhile more in silence.

“It’s all meaningless,” he said. “And it all has meaning.”

I looked at him, flicking my butt toward the gutter.

“And I have not the least fucking idea why I said that,” he said‚ laughing, “or whatever it could possibly mean.”

He flicked his butt. We returned slowly to the restaurant. As we did so, he glanced at the night sky and sang a few lines.

Barney Google tried to enter paradise,

Saint Peter saw his face, he said “Go to the other place.”

The sky above the spiritless electric haze of this island of dead souls was about as black as it ever got. It was good to imagine that someday black night would reclaim it, and the firmament would again be one of stars near and far.