I stood in a corner of the deck, out of the sun, and asked him about the essay. He waved it away, the entire subject. I asked him about the first and last sentences. They seem out of place in the larger context, I said, where crime and guilt don't get mentioned. The incongruity is pretty striking.

"Meant to be."

Meant to be. Okay. Meant to unsettle critics of the administration, I said, not the decision makers. Flat-out ironic.

He sat in an old reclining chair he'd found in the shed behind the house, a beach chair out of its element, and he opened one eye in lazy disdain, measuring the fool who states the obvious.

Okay. But what had he thought of the charge that he'd tried to find mystery and romance in a word that was being used as an instrument of state security, a word redesigned to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced.

But I didn't ask this question. Instead I went inside and poured two glasses of ice water and came back out and sat in the chair alongside him. I wondered if he was right, that the country needed this, we needed it in our desperation, our dwindling, needed something, anything, whatever we could get, rendition, yes, and then invasion.

He held the cold glass to the side of his face and said he was not surprised by the negative response. The surprise came later, when he was contacted by a former university colleague and invited to a private meeting at a research institute just outside Washington. He sat in a paneled room with several others including the deputy director of a strategic assessment team that did not exist in any set of official records. He didn't mention the man's name, either because this was the kind of sensitive detail that must remain within the walls of a paneled room or because he knew that the name would mean nothing to me. They told Elster that they were seeking an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint. His time in government would follow, interrupting a series of lectures he was giving in Zurich on what he called the dream of extinction, and after two years and part of another here he was, again, in the desert.

There were no mornings or afternoons. It was one seamless day, every day, until the sun began to arc and fade, mountains emerging from their silhouettes. This is when we sat and watched in silence.

At dinner later the silence held. I wanted to hear rain drumming down. We ate lamb chops that he'd grilled over charcoal on the deck. I ate head down, face in the plate. It was the kind of silent spell that's hard to break, becoming more dense with every bite we took. I thought about the dead time, the sense of self-entrapment, and I listened to us chew our food. I wanted to tell him how good it tasted but he'd cooked the chops too long, all traces of sweaty pink lost in flame. I wanted to hear wind in the hills, bats scratching in the eaves.

This was day twelve.

He looked at the beer glass in his hand and announced that his daughter would be coming to visit. It was like hearing that the earth had shifted on its axis, spinning night back into budding day. Significant news, someone else, a face and voice, called Jessie, he said, an exceptional mind, otherworldly.

I never asked the old woman what the reason was. I'd see her coming down the stairs backwards, clutching the handrail. I'd pause and watch, I'd offer to help, but never asked, never inquired into the problem, an injury, a matter of balance, a condition of mind. Just stood on the landing and watched her come down, step by step, a Latvian, this is all I knew, and New York City, this too, where people do not ask.

A great rain came sweeping off the mountains, too strong to think into, leaving us with nothing to say. We stood in the covered entrance to the deck, we three, watching and listening, world awash. Jessie held herself tightly, each flung hand clutching the opposite shoulder. The air was sharp and charged and when the rain stopped, in minutes, we went back to the living room and talked about what we were talking about when the sky broke open.

In those first days I thought of her as the Daughter. Elster's possessiveness, his enclosing space, made it hard for me to set her apart, to find some semblance of an independent being. He wanted her near him all the time. When he said something meant for me, he always included her, drew her in through look or gesture. His eyes showed an eager glow that was not so rare, father regarding child, but it seemed to have the effect of smothering a response, or maybe she wasn't interested in making one.

She was pale and thin, mid-twenties, awkward, with a soft face, not fleshy but roundish and calm, and she seemed attentive to some interior presence. Her father said she heard words from inside them. I didn't ask what he meant by this. It was his job to say such things.

She wore jeans and sneakers, same as I did, and a loose shirt, and she was someone to talk to, which made the day pass. She said that she lived with her mother on the Upper East Side, an apartment she dismissed with a shrug. She did volunteer work with elderly people, shopping for food, taking them to their doctors. They had about five doctors each, she said, and she didn't mind sitting in the waiting room, she liked waiting rooms, she liked doormen hailing cabs, men in uniforms, it was the one uniformed thing you might see on an average day because cops were mainly hunched in cars.

I waited for her to ask where I lived, how I lived, with whom, whatever. Maybe it made her interesting, the failure to ask.

I said, "I had a studio out in Queens somewhere. I could afford it, then I couldn't. I work out of my apartment, which is more or less in Chinatown. I start projects, talk to people, think about other projects. Where will the money come from? I think about gap financing. I'm not sure what that means. I think about equity funding, foreign money, hedge funds. Every project becomes an obsession or what's the point. This is the one right now, your father. I know he's right for it and I have a feeling he knows it too. But I can't get an answer out of him. Do it, don't do it, maybe, never, some other time. I look at the sky and wonder. What the hell am I here for?"

"Company," she said. "The man totally physically hates to be alone."

"Hates to be alone but also comes here because there's nothing here, no one here. Other people are conflict, he says."

"Not the ones he chooses to be with him. A few students through the years, then there's lucky me, then my mother once upon a time. He has two sons from his first wife. Wrack and Ruin, he calls them. Don't even think of bringing up the subject of his sons."

Most of the time we talked about nothing, she and I. We had nothing in common, it seemed, but subjects kept flying by. She said she got confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't functioning. This happened at the airport in San Diego, where her father was waiting to meet her. She stepped onto an up escalator that wasn't moving and she couldn't adjust to this, she had to self-consciously climb the steps and it was difficult because she kept expecting the steps to move and she'd sort of half walk but not seem to be going anywhere because the steps weren't moving.

She didn't drive a car because she couldn't do commands with her hands and feet. One of the people she helped care for had just died of multiple something-or-other. Her mother spoke Russian on the phone, blizzards of Russian day and night. She liked winter, snowfields in the park, but didn't go too far in, squirrels in winter might be rabid.

I liked these talks, they were quiet, with eerie depth in every stray remark she made. I stared at her sometimes, waiting for what, a return look, a show of discomfort. She had ordinary features, brown eyes, brown hair that she kept brushing back over her ear. There was something self-determined in her look, a blandness that seemed willed. It was a choice she'd made, to look like this, or so I told myself. Hers was another life, nowhere near mine, and it offered a release from the constant self-tunneling of my time here and also a kind of balance to her father's grip on my immediate future.