Those other places, the places that used to matter-France, Germany, Britain, “Brussels”-these were obscure and poor and miserable places. Their names and locales were badly spelled.

Cheap black ink was coming off on my fingers. I no longer had questions for Massimo, except for one. “When do we get out of here?”

Massimo buttered his tattered slice of black bread. “I was never searching for the best of all possible worlds,” he told me. “I was looking for the best of all possible me’s. In an Italy like this Italy, I really matter. Your version of Italy is pretty backward-but this world had a nuclear exchange. Europe had a civil war, and most cities in the Soviet Union are big puddles of black glass.”

I took my Moleskin notebook from my jacket pocket. How pretty and sleek that fancy notebook looked, next to that gray pulp newspaper. “You don’t mind if I jot this down, I hope?”

“I know that this sounds bad to you-but trust me, that’s not how history works. History doesn’t have any ‘badness’ or ‘goodness.’ This world has a future. The food’s cheap, the climate is stable, the women are gorgeous… and since there’s only three billion people left alive on Earth, there’s a lot of room.”

Massimo pointed his crude sausage-knife at the cafe’s glass double door. “Nobody here ever asks for ID, nobody cares about passports… They’ve never even heard of electronic banking! A smart guy like you, you could walk out of here and start a hundred tech companies.”

“If I didn’t get my throat cut.”

“Oh, people always overstate that little problem! The big problem is-you know-who wants to work that hard? I got to know this place, because I knew that I could be a hero here. Bigger than my father. I’d be smarter than him, richer than him, more famous, more powerful. I would be better! But that is a burden. ‘Improving the world,’ that doesn’t make me happy at all. That’s a curse, it’s like slavery.’”