For the record, Angela Merkel would not be included in my fictional magazine Spiessig. Among other big names from the G.D.R., we discussed Christa Wolf, who was anti-unification — a position, we agreed, that was not insane to take. Jon said that she later wrote a book about having been an unofficial collaborator. ‘‘Until the advent of the Internet,’’ Jon said, ‘‘the G.D.R. was the most perfectly surveilled society in the history of the world.’’ Which presented a natural transition to Andreas, an East German in ‘‘Purity’’ who becomes an Assange-like leaker, except that while Assange seems to focus mostly on the secrecy of governments, Andreas believes in exposure as some kind of generalized goodness, and what he leaks is kept somewhat vague. At a late point in the narrative, Andreas compares the Internet to the Stasi itself, although it seems he feels its encroachment because he has a damning personal secret to protect. Assange, I said to Jon, had also made this comparison of the Stasi and the Internet, and Jon said, ‘‘Good for him.’’ But for Assange, I said, I believe it’s about Google’s relation to the N.S.A. While for Jon, and Andreas, the nature of the Internet itself is totalitarian in its sheer ubiquity. ‘‘I think the dream of radical transparency is a nightmare,’’ Jon said. ‘‘People saying how wonderful technology is and that crime will disappear because everything will be known about everyone.’’ I pictured ISIS beheadings, which are certainly related to a skillful use of social media, or that’s what everyone says, and I asked, but do people really talk that way? And he said, ‘‘Yes, just go to TED talks,’’ and I said I’d never watched a TED talk. The mere name, I thought, sounds so idiotic. A TED talk.

Then we were on to the subject of Edward Snowden, and Jon said he could understand both Snowden’s youthful idealism and Obama’s contention that the invasions of privacy are not grievous and are in the interest of fighting terrorism. ‘‘Obama’s position is that it’s just metadata and a rather small amount of metadata,’’ Jon said, ‘‘and that intelligent, patriotic people have talked it over and there are safeguards in place. I can see both sides.’’ I said that my understanding was that the spying by the N.S.A. was both illegal and unconstitutional. Jon said Snowden and Chelsea Manning were heroes in Silicon Valley and that Silicon Valley was suspicious of the government and saw it as the enemy. But this opposition, Silicon Valley versus the government, seemed to obfuscate things for me, as if the example of Judith Miller, to cite only a single emblematic name, did not itself argue emphatically for leakers and data dumps. Could it be possible, I wondered, that the Iraq War might not have happened if a Snowden, an Assange, had arrived on the scene just a few years earlier? But Jon and I didn’t take this path.

We moved on to other things, namely the commodification of personal data by the tech giants. ‘‘Capitalism,’’ Jon said, ‘‘hadn’t invaded every pore of your existence until the Internet.’’ He said that privacy invasions and data gathering far outstrip what the government is doing in that regard. ‘‘My character Andreas says that people should be more afraid of what Google can do to you than what the government can do to you.’’ But were the tech companies, I wondered, isolated entities or part of something much larger, the character of so-called neoliberalism? Jon, after all, had cited Evgeny Morozov, who has said that ‘‘no plausible story can emerge unless Silicon Valley itself is situated within some broader historical narrative — of changes in production and consumption, changes in state forms, changes in the surveillance capabilities and needs of the U.S. military.’’ Which to me seems exactly right (I read it after our discussion), and what I tried to say in my own less eloquent way, but Jon was tired and our night was coming to a close. I’ll take it up with him another time, I thought.

THE NEXT MORNING, as I drank coffee and ate toast in Jon and Kathy’s kitchen, we discussed Faust and Mephisto, who connect to ‘‘Purity’’ by way of its epigraph. Jon had said, the night before, when I asked him why Mephisto wants Faust’s soul, ‘‘Because that is his nature.’’ I had thought immediately of Wagner, and how such a thing works in Wagner, but I wondered how and if it works in fiction, to have a single fixated desire as a nature, or even to have a fixed nature. I mentioned ‘‘East of Eden’’ by Steinbeck, a book Jon loves, which features a character with a fixed and indivisible nature — a child who is born evil, a bad seed. Jon was quiet, and when he spoke, he told me that his cousin had been recently murdered. ‘‘My Aunt Margo used to call him a bad seed,’’ he said. ‘‘He was an alcoholic, and he was murdered by his best friend after they had spent a day and a half drinking together. You can investigate the psychology of it, but basically my aunt was right: He was a bad seed.’’ But then he went on to investigate not the psychology of bad seeds as types, but the psychology of his cousin, who was not a type, but an individual. ‘‘He and his friend were in a bar, and then they finally ran out of money, so they went home and continued drinking there, and apparently the friend got it in his head,’’ Jon said, ‘‘that my cousin was interested in the friend’s daughter, and that led to violence.’’ The details, Jon said, were horrifying. When his cousin was still conscious he was asked whether he wanted to be taken to the hospital, and the cousin said, ‘‘No, he’s my best friend. I don’t want to get him in trouble.’’

‘‘But that’s kind of beautiful,’’ I said. And Jon agreed that it was beautiful. He said his cousin probably thought, I’ll just lie here and suffer, and hopefully I’ll feel better in the morning. ‘‘So if he’d gone to the hospital,’’ I said, ‘‘he might have lived.’’ Jon said he probably would have. But loyalty, he said, was how this cousin made sense of his difficult life. ‘‘I’m a loyal person,’’ Jon said, adopting the subject position of this cousin, or at least his line of reasoning. ‘‘I may be a ne’er do well in all these other ways, but I’m not going to rat out my friend.’’

The way Jon described his cousin’s death, I thought, was a perfect illustration of why there is no such thing as a fixed and unshaded nature. It was also a demonstration of Jon’s singular talent to form story, striking narrative, out of life, and tragedy, and in this case honor the real person who was the tragedy’s subject, and victim. Honor, but not sugarcoat. He’d called the cousin bad. But then, almost despite his initial instinct, he had allowed for the cousin’s life to be truly a loss, and depicted to me the cousin’s final moment as a kind of sudden heroism. Whether or not he had intended to treat this cousin with love, to allow him such complexity, it was in Jon’s own unique nature to do so.