I hit the snooze button on my internal alarm, figuring I needed to give him a chance, but it was too late. That week was like an extended nightmare. Matt was cool and funny when we were alone. When other people were around, though, he would either ignore me or make me the butt of some joke or other. I’d look surprised, and he’d say he was only kidding.

Leaving work on the second day, I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing was wrong, that I was taking things the wrong way.

On the third day, on the way back to my apartment, I asked him what his problem was.

“There’s no problem,” he said. “Here’s the problem, though: You need to stop doing what you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop doing what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make a product when you don’t know anything about what your customers need. You gotta talk to people, to end-users and experts, you find out what they want and how they want it, then you design.”

“I don’t know if you remember, but I am an expert.”

“You are not.”

“Look, I know you were always hot about pirating software and all back in the day, but I was always more serious in hacking circles than you were.”

“You were not.”

“No, I was. I—”

“You might think you know a lot, but you’re not the customer. You’re not going to pay money for the service. You shouldn’t do shit until you find those people and find out what they need.”

And the worst part of it was, all other things being equal, he was right. But other things were far from equal.

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s super clear what we’re making here, and it should be super dumb to use or it’s not going to be successful. Besides, we have this meeting Phil’s been planning for next Wednesday. We need to show some basic version of what we intend to do if we’re going to win the chance to make something.”

Softly, he said, “That is the bullshit you tell yourself that keeps you from being successful. You already have the chance. Just follow my lead. Everything is going to be all right.”

“It doesn’t feel like you’re helping me. It feels like—”

“You brought me out here because I know how this shit works, and you don’t. I’m going to make it work, and you’re going to be happy. You have to trust me on this. It’s going to be okay.”

But by the end of the week, the other people on my team began turning to him when talk came up about the Web site, not to me. When I brought up the work I’d done before, he’d wave it away, laughing.

As we wrapped up work on Friday, Mary swung by to wish Matt a good weekend. She didn’t say anything to me. I saw Phil leaving, and he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

I put on some music and watched Matt eat the pizza I’d ordered for us while he crowed about how we were on top of the world, and wow, if only the people we used to know back in the day could see us.

For the weekend he wanted to meet up with some friends in the city, and he urged me to go with him, which is to say he wanted me to drive him. After watching him chat and laugh with his friends for about an hour, my mind began to drift, playing back our conversations. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was lying to me, but I’d known him half my life; I was finely attuned to when he was lying.

Then I had a calming realization. He hadn’t been lying to me: things really were going to be okay — for him. The crucial difference was that he didn’t care about me, beyond how I could help him.

My oldest friend had become a sociopath.

I stood up. “I’m gotta go,” I said. “You can stay, though.”

“Stay here?” he said, glancing at his friends. “How do I get back, motherfucker?”

“Take the train. The train’s awesome.”

“Oh, the train,” he said, nodding quickly. “That’s right! Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I take the train? It’s awesome.”

I agreed. He stayed the night in the city, calling me the next morning.

“Hey, come get me,” he said.

“Take the train,” I said.

“Yeah, but who’s going to pick me up at the train, asshole?”

“You can walk to my place from the station. It’s a couple blocks.”

“It’s a quarter of a goddam mile, first, plus I picked up some sweet luggage from this antique place we went to, total old-school, huge-ass wonderful shit.”

“So take a taxi.”

“I don’t have any cash, you know that. Fucking come pick me up.”

I agreed to pick him up. I got there early. A few minutes before he was supposed to arrive, he called.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“At the station.”

“Well, you’re not at the same station as me. I had to get off the train early because the one I got on wasn’t stopping at your station. So get here. Jeez.”

He hadn’t been kidding, the luggage was not small. I had to put the top down for the taller piece to fit, and he had to hold the other one between his legs. He cursed at me the whole way home, and all evening.

“You have no fucking idea what you are fucking doing,” he said. “You just have to follow my lead and do exactly what I say. That’s all you have to fucking do.”

I stayed calm.

“You’re like that girl in Colorado. She is the most frustrating person in the world to talk to. She’s all like, ‘You always say things that hurt my feelings,’ and I’m like, ‘You don’t understand. I am just saying things. This is how I say things. It’s up to you how you choose to take it.'”

“But that’s like punching someone and saying, ‘Oh, that’s how I hug people, by punching them, so when I punch you, just think, ‘Mmm, he just hugged me, that’s awesome, I love hugs.'”

“Exactly,” he said. “You control how you choose to take things.”

“You mock up your own reactive mind,” I said, which was what the sign had said that was carried by poor Keith, the Scientologist protester, on my first day of work in Silicon Valley.

Matt thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I should say that to her next time she pulls that bullshit on me.” He grinned. “That’s genius, actually.”

If I hadn’t already made up my mind, that would’ve pushed me over the edge.