"Wolfowitz went to the World Bank. That was exile," he said. "This is different, a spiritual retreat. The house used to be owned by someone in my first wife's family. I came here on and off for years. Came to write, to think. Elsewhere, everywhere, my day begins in conflict, every step I take on a city street is conflict, other people are conflict. Different here."

"But no writing this time."

"I've had offers to do a book. Portrait of the war room from the viewpoint of a privileged outsider. But I don't want to do a book, any kind of book."

"You want to sit here."

"The house is mine now and it's rotting away but let it. Time slows down when I'm here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape more than see it. I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour. I don't get old here."

"I wish I could say the same."

"You need an answer. Is that what you're saying?"

"I need an answer."

"You have a life back there."

"A life. That may be too strong a word."

He sat head back, eyes shut, face to the sun. "You're not married, am I right?"

"Separated. We separated," I said.

"Separated. How familiar that sounds. Do you have a job, something you do between projects?"

Maybe he tried not to dose the word projects with fatal irony.

"Sporadic jobs. Production work, some editing."

He looked at me now. Possibly he was wondering who I was.

"Did I ask you once before how you got so scrawny? You eat. You throw down food same as I do."

"I seem to eat. I do eat. But all the energy, all the nourishment gets sucked up by the film," I told him. "The body gets nothing."

He closed his eyes again and I watched the sweat and sun lotion runneling slowly down his forehead. I waited for him to ask about filmwork I'd done on my own, the question I'd been hoping not to hear. But he'd lost interest in the conversation or simply had the kind of teeming ego that forgets to attend to such details. He would say yes or no based not on my qualifications but on the play of his mood, in his good time. I went inside to check my laptop for e-mail, needing outside contact but feeling corrupt, as if I were breaking an unstated pact of creative withdrawal.