I nodded, though this seemed to me patently false. It assumed, for example, that you didn't want conflicting things at the same time. Case in point: I love my family dearly, and yet I'd boarded a plane to San Francisco that afternoon with a breezelike feeling of escape. I'd been up since 5:00 a.m., when my son tended to begin screaming. He was 18 months old and had yet to wake up in a way that was anything less than cataclysmic. That morning, I left my wife sleeping in bed and carried Clem into the kitchen to make coffee, but he would not let me do this. "Mama!" he yelled at me, shaking his head. He insisted on calling me "Mama"—his revenge, probably, for our having named him Clem. He cried until I took him to the window, where he could look at the backhoe parked across the street. I couldn't move from the window without incurring his wrath. When I finally put him down, the screaming woke up my daughter, Tess, who burst out of her room and collapsed on the couch.

"Which Pokémon do you want to be?" she yelled over Clem's screams.

"I don't know, sweetie. I haven't had any coffee yet."

"You can be a Basic or a Legendary if you want. Do you want to be Ho-Oh?"

If someone asked me to prove my undying love for my daughter, I would tell him that I have pretended to be over fifty different Pokémon characters. I have watched an entire Pokémon Advanced Battle DVD, which is essentially like roasting your soul on a spit.** **

"I don't want you to be Ho-Oh. Giratina is actually really powerful. He can do Shadow Force, DragonBreath, and Ominous Wind."

I looked over at Clem, who'd stopped crying and appeared to be passing some ominous wind. I took a moment to imagine the rest of my morning, the frantic work of keeping two children happy while getting them fed and dressed and ready for school,** **doing my best to bring Giratina to life while trying to clean the shit from my son's scrotum.

I mention all this not to complain about my life but to explain the buoyancy I'd felt on the flight to San Francisco and then later walking to a bar at one in the morning with my cosmic double, the person who'd fulfilled all the unfettered, bohemian dreams I'd had for myself right out of college. I'd imagined living in a house of hungry, half-crazed artists somewhere, a place with secondhand furniture and thirdhand lovers, all of us thumbing our noses at society while we aged gracelessly into fame. Like the Beats, the Lost Generation, the Merry Pranksters—whatever they ended up calling us, we'd have a "the" before our name. But aside from a brief bacchanalia in San Francisco that involved a weirdly polite orgy, I never found the bohemia of my dreams. Instead I went to grad school and stumbled upon the woman of my dreams. It took us nine years to get married—mostly because we believed it to be the last nail in the coffin, the apogee of conventionality—but we tied the knot eventually and had two kids and settled into an apartment with tastefully worn furniture and a fancy espresso machine that we never use. The truth is, despite the mornings of hellish Mr. Mom frenzy, there are plenty of blissed-out moments when I'm cuddling with my son or daughter on the couch and feel like I've found myself, that I've been blessed. Still, I can't help wondering.

Kyle and I ordered beers at the bar and then ended up stationed around the pool table while his bandmates played eight ball. The music was hip and deafening, and I worried about the elfin roar of tinnitus that had recently begun in my left ear. All around me, twentysomethings seemed to be having the time of their lives. Kyle was in fine form, making everyone laugh in his skipper's hat, but it was hard to tell if he was captain of an enchanted boat or a sinking ship. This was why I was visiting, to experience his life for a couple of days. Was my doppelgänger happier than I was?