MY BODY-SURFING scare had reminded of an episode in my childhood friendship with Matthew, one that I would much rather have forgotten. In the following days, he kept popping into my thoughts like an advertising jingle. Almost against my will, I found myself wondering about him, and then trying to construct a likely life for him, based on the boy I had known: a dour little fellow, pale and fretful, convinced that most people are contemptible, that most things will turn out badly. It didn’t take long for me to develop a profile for him as he might be in the present: a businessman, vice president of something, recently divorced, graying, obsessed with sex but sexually frustrated, a man with dreads and regrets dogging his heels. 
    I asked myself, “Where would a guy like that live?”  Somewhere, I decided, where living is a struggle, where the weather keeps misery always in the air, somewhere like Boston.
    At the library, I checked the Boston telephone directory. No number was listed for Matthew Barber. This intrigued me. Did it mean that I’d been wrong, that he wasn’t living in Boston, or did it mean that he was living in Boston but had an unlisted telephone number? Why would he have an unlisted number? Was he involved in something that might invite crank calls? 
    Then the thought struck me that he might be living under an assumed name. Why would he do that? If he had taken an assumed name, what name was he using? Some twist on his own name would appeal to his mathematical mind. I tried looking under Matthews, but didn’t find anything there. I wondered what I had expected to find. Something like Barbara Matthews? It wasn’t likely that he would suppose he could get away with masquerading as a woman—unless he’d had a sex-change operation or something. Had he? Had Matthew undergone a sex-change operation in Denmark? It didn’t seem likely, but it’s best to keep an open mind when conducting an investigation of this sort and not turn away from any alleyways of inquiry until one is quite sure that they lead nowhere.
    Maybe he would choose a false name that was an anagram of his own. I tried a few, but didn’t find any of those in the telephone directory either, so I gave it up.
    Still, I wondered what might have happened to him, and finally my curiosity demanded satisfaction, so I drove to Boston and spent a couple of weeks there—just to see what life would be like for him if he had settled there. I even thought that there was a possibility—remote, I admit, but still a possibility—that I might run into him on the street or in a restaurant, so I spent most of my time either walking around or eating. I was sure that if by any chance he did happen to be in Boston and I did happen to run into him, I would recognize him, even after all these years, even after the sex-change operation, if he had had one. I’d know him anywhere.
    I ate in some interesting restaurants, including one that claimed to serve real honest-to-goodness New England food; I read some fascinating graffiti on my walks, very neatly printed expositions of a personal philosophy, a kind of twisted Epicureanism too deep or mad for me to fathom; and I marveled at the beauty of Boston women; but I didn’t see Matthew. He may have been on vacation. Maybe he was in Denmark. 
    Perhaps I should have stayed longer, even if it felt like persisting in a folly, but, one otherwise lovely autumn day, the first wind of winter blew in. Funneled by the buildings, it pummeled me, and it seemed to moan, “Memento mori.” The next day all Boston was wearing galoshes and the spring in their step was gone. They trudged along, heads bent, repentant. I got out of town.

I HADN’T FOUND Matthew, but I had developed a feeling for the kind of life he might be living there in Boston and I think that, as a result, I understood him better. Of course, there was still much more I wanted to know. I wanted to know how he spent his time, day to day, minute to minute. I would stand in my workroom looking out into the fog on the bay and ask myself, “What will become of him? What is he doing right now? What watchwords does he live by? What are his favorite foods?” Wanting to know those things led me to the writing of this book.
    Every book is a means of discovery. I discovered things that I would just as soon have left hidden, but I wasn’t really surprised by what I found. Along the way, I felt myself trying to reach Matthew, to show him that he didn’t have to be living as he was. To the graffitist’s neat messages I added some of my own, trying to echo his style but also to show—as Erasmus tried to show—that the true Epicurean isn’t a bibulous glutton, but someone trying to understand the nature of things and to make out of his share of it all a life of happiness, goodness, the pleasures of the mind and heart—but who understands that, since a guy’s got to eat and drink along the way, he might as well enjoy himself.

OFTEN, while I was writing, I felt that I was struggling with Matthew, trying to pull him in a direction he didn’t want to go, and finally I gave up and let him go his own way, just as I had had to do those many years before, in the episode I mentioned earlier. It happened one summer when we were boys at summer camp together. There we took a course of instruction in lifesaving. Matthew was not a strong swimmer. I was. In the final test, each boy had to swim from shore to the middle of a small lake and bring back a victim, another camper who had paddled out in a canoe, thrown himself into the water, and begun thrashing convincingly. The instructor impressed on all of us the likelihood that the victim would resist help, and he urged the boys playing victims to resist fiercely, to work themselves up to a witless panic. Matthew played victim to my lifesaver. By the time I reached him, treading water had tired him. The panic he simulated was very convincing. He fought me with a furious irrationality that I couldn’t tell from the real thing. I couldn’t get a grip on him, but he certainly got a grip on me. He pulled me under, and I was taken by surprise, caught without a breath. When I fought free of him and regained the surface, I was gasping, spluttering, and humiliated. A maniacal fire flamed in Matthew’s eyes, and he reached for me again. I turned away from him and swam back to shore. The instructor pulled Matthew into his rowboat. Neither of us ever got our lifesaving certificates.
 

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The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.