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by each other’s blather; they regularly removed fear from one another’s path and never let the other feel foolish, even when his businesses crashed and fizzled or she played some pretty bad songs in some pretty public places to raucous derision. They were an all-time great couple, one of those who even argued respectfully, like two nations stopping warfare to let the other bury their dead. After they divorced, I suspected it was the hope he might win her back that inspired him, each time he was ruined, to get back on his feet.
    I always knew my insolvent friend was about to remount the entrepreneurial horse when he started talking about untapped markets. The aging population! Women over forty struggling to conceive! Couples with mismatched libidos! Honeymooners with creeping malaise! Insomniacs with global dread! Shoppers with ecoparalysis! Corporate bandits ashamed of their bodies! Upscale couples one set of genitals away from being totally interchangeable! Under-tens with overweening narcissism! Baby boomers in terminal decline! Rich space tourists! Face-transplant recipients! Speakers of all 6,909 living languages! Thatwas Aldo, always trying to solve a dilemma. How does one delineate between hope and false hope? How can one tap into the nauseating pandemic of public marriage proposals? How do you sell a product to anticonsumerists? Where should one go to manufacture clothes for obese toddlers and newborns in the 97th weight percentile?
    It was the answer to the last that took him to India. I drove him to the airport, and can still remember the thick veil of fear on his face as he disappeared through the departure gates. One month later he came back with a beard and mysterious scars and monkey bites and another series of rabies shots (his third!) and even further in debt, with only scraps of information about problems communicating with the tailor, about waists too high, crotches too low. I suggested he take a break. Just get a regular job like a regular person. Three months later he opened a steak restaurant on King Street called High Steaks, but Newtown, famous for its vegans, did not bite and High Steaks shut its doors. He stopped reading self-help and prosperity literature, wanting to go deeper into the psyche of his customers, and moved on to psychology texts, both popular and academic, and read people like Jaspers and Binswanger and Hoogendijk and Achenbach and Skinner and Piaget and Adler and Horney and Laing. Then he moved on to reference books: The APA Dictionary of Psychology ; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ; Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology ; Clinician’s Guide to Neuropsychological Assessment . He said he needed a product that would appeal to people’s solipsism, their unembarrassed love of self and abiding fondness for their own point of view. He seemed desperate to make anything on an industrial scale. Yet he had substandard luck and submental ideas: for instance, transdermal chocolates, patches that transmit after-dinner mints and dark almond whirls through the skin into the bloodstream, a product line that Time Out Sydney gave a devastating (if amusing) one-line review ( a confectionary Willy Wonka wouldn’t touch with an Oompa Loompa’s dick ). Aldo sold off the remaining merchandise for this last idea and came out even, which somehow, for him, was worse than complete failure. He said, “Often the thing that drives you crazy about failure is its proximity to success.” Still, he bore his losses uncomplainingly. If only his investors would too.
    The last time I was conscripted into action to assist him, he phoned me when I was at my desk gazing at a basket of pens, waiting for a transformation of the spirit. “I’m being chased!”Aldo hollered in a panicked tone, puffing theatrically as if to prove he was running. Agonizing quagmires and near-fatal setbacks were Aldo’s specialty, so I had no reason to doubt the urgency of