year I lost my nerve. By now there are only a few bits and pieces. The Sophists, for example. I can’t remember which one argued that might is right, which one contrasted law and nature. Dewey’s critique of traditional philosophy is a total blank.
“Excuse me?” he says, and takes his time looking up.
The thing is, he’s been watching me for I don’t know how long. I didn’t even notice him when he first sat down, but a while ago I felt him stealing looks over the top of his beer while pretending to be absorbed in his book. He’d started out with it flat on the bar, but little by little he raised it, until I could see the title and know what a brilliant superior intellectual he was.
“I hope you don’t take him seriously,” I said.
He gives me a contemptuous look. “Oh, right,” he says. “God forbid we should touch on anything serious.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I glance at the salesman, who pushes a french fry suggestively into a blob of ketchup. I feel the shrimp sliding down into my stomach, tossing cold and forlorn on a turbulent sea. I’m thinking I should have stayed home after all. I could have rented Dawn of the Dead and watched zombies stagger around the mall.
“What I meant,” I say, “is that if you take him too seriously, you end up being a menace to society. All that superman and will to power stuff. The idea you can make up your own rules, that conventional standards of good and evil don’t apply.” I’m impressed with how much I suddenly remember. For a minute I see myself in front of a podium in a large auditorium, rows of students taking down every word I say. On everyone’s desk, my book On Moral Life is open, passages highlighted in fluorescent yellow.
“Ah,” he says, “a fellow philosopher.” He’s turned his book face down on the bar, but in case that’s giving me too much credit, he leans back away from me on his stool.
“Not really. I majored in it. In a previous life.”
“And what do you do in this incarnation?” He’s still leaning back, trying to be cool, but I bet anything his hands are sweating. I bet he can’t believe he’s met a woman who actually knows something about his precious Nietzsche. He’s probably, in his mind, already got me naked on his mattress on the floor in the crummy apartment he shares with four other losers.
“Guess,” I say.
“Stripper?” he says hopefully.
“No.”
“Model,” he says. “Caterer. Lawyer. Dot-Commer. Artist.”
“No. No, no, no, no. No.” He has no clue who I might be. I give Mona a look, but for some reason she’s amused by the pervy salesman, and she shakes her head.
“I’m a demon,” I say. “I steal infants from their cribs, drain the life out of men as they sleep. That kind of thing.”
“Perfect,” he says. “I’m a warlock.”
More drinks have appeared. I look around at the walls, and where the bright, glittery plasma images of Klimt paintings were, there are now portraits of solemn men and women in dark tailored jackets, who look like they’re presiding over a board meeting. I look at one of the men, and his eyes slowly blink. Mona nudges me.
“Drink up,” she says, “we’re moving the party.”
One thing about Mona. She has bad judgment. The night we met, she announced this to a group of people at a party, and I immediately wanted to know her. I went over and struck up a conversation, and we ended up sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, doing shots of Añejo tequila. That night Mona slept on the couch, and I passed out naked in the host’s guest bedroom with his friend from out of town, who later credited my blow job with helping him leave his bad marriage. Tequila, as everyone knows, is a dangerous substance. Just last week, after a night of doing shots of Margaritaville, I woke up bleeding from the wrong part of my anatomy and had to call a friend to take me to the Emergency Room. After waiting an hour to be seen we gave up and went to get some wine. Going to this guy’s room is probably an error in judgment. But that’s where we’re headed—me, Mona, Don the salesman, and Nietzsche the warlock, who has introduced himself as Joseph.
We head down Geary Street two by two—me and Mona in front, arm in arm, the men following. That’s how it is in nature: stallions nickering after mares, boring-colored male birds having to sing just to attract a mate. I’m savoring the moment, because usually I’m alienated from nature, sitting by the phone. My last date was with a loser named George who made me pay for dinner, and then demanded BART fare when I refused to drive him home across the Bay Bridge. The one before him—Jack? Zack?—was overmedicated, and about to be evicted by his roommates for not paying his share of the rent. For our date, we sat in his living room sharing cheap chianti and takeout pizza, while his roommates walked in and out muttering “Asshole” under their breath. His hands never stopped shaking the whole evening. I woke up beside him at four a.m., watched him twitch for a while, then went to find some Ibuprofen to kill my wine headache.
The streets are full of people, but no one’s in costume. Women in short dresses and shimmery jackets, men in suits, homeless people saying “trick or treat” from doorways. Right now, in the Castro, men are mincing down the street in sequined gowns and tutus and leather chaps. In the Mission and Noe Valley, little gypsies and devils and ballerinas and hobbits are going door to door. Here on Geary Street it hardly feels like Halloween at all, but then we turn a corner and I see there’s a full moon, huge and orange in the sky above the Bay Bridge. I’m beginning to feel like maybe the night’s not as lost as I thought. Maybe Joseph will surprise me and turn out to have a real job and a live-work loft. He’ll let me move in, and he’ll selflessly support me through graduate school, disproving Nietzche’s belief that all altruistic sentiment is cowardice. We’ll tell our children how we met on Halloween under a full moon and they’ll roll their eyes and say, Mom. Dad. Not that one again.
“Look at that moon,” Mona says.
I wonder how she can sound so sober, when she’s had as many drinks as me; sometimes Mona seems impervious to alcohol. I wonder if she has ever woken up hung over and depressed, and had to drag herself to a job she hates, and offer friendly, polite service to people who are stupider, shallower, and more successful than she is. I think not. She points to the moon with one elegant finger, her hair blazing in its light.
“Mona, you are a goddess,” I say.
“We are in the company of goddesses,” Joseph says, and I want to lick his face.
Here’s what Hume thought: he thought that morality was basically utilitarian. We do things because they’re useful, not because they’re right. According to Hume, the rules get suspended when you don’t need them. In war, for example, the rules go out the window. Rape, torture, indiscriminate murder—that’s pretty much what happens in a war. Hume had other depressing things to say, too, like that our universe might be the fucked-up experiment of some retarded minor god. The god was probably blind drunk and messing around; he probably set our little planet spinning, slapped the first man on top of the woman like they were Ken and Barbie, and passed out. The next day his head was killing him and he’d completely forgotten what he’d done.
“Hume turned Plato on his head,” I tell Joseph and pour myself more of the champagne Don ordered
