The invitation arrived on card stock heavy enough to be load-bearing: East Room, Thursday, the Trumps hosting Xi, and a line asking for dietary restrictions that I answered with "yes" and whose elaboration box I left...blank.

My kind cannot enter a house uninvited, and I have waited three centuries for a government to make that mistake in writing.

Study the seating, though. Musk, Huang, Altman, Pichai, Cook, Dell, Dimon, Fraser: eight apex feeders and one head of state, the Busan truce expiring November 10, export controls on the menu, and not one vessel at that table who has been prey since the Clinton administration. A state dinner is the only meal where the guest list is the menu, and everyone on it has already eaten.

Elon will be somewhere at that table, $530 billion to my left whichever chair he takes, and Michael Dell across from me with $220 billion of Andy's money in his pocket, a calf that fed on my calf; I intend to pass him the salt and let him do the arithmetic. My thumb keeps finding the gold embossing on the card the way a tongue finds a missing tooth. Satiation is stagnation, but I have not been assigned a chair since the jury dismissed me, and on Thursday, for once, someone saved me a seat.