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He’s quiet on the drive to Red Hook. He’s quiet in the parking structure. He’s quiet on the escalator, which delivers us into the showroom, and then he stops – full stop, blocking traffic, a Swedish flag the size of a sail hanging above him – and takes in the arrows on the floor, the labyrinth of staged rooms stretching to the horizon, the signage in a language of pure vowels and optimism.

“Luke,” he says. “There are arrows on the floor.”

“Yes.”

“The floor is telling us where to go.”

“That’s the layout. It’s one path. It goes through everything.”

“It’s a behavioural experiment. This is a Skinner box with meatballs. Someone designed this – someone sat in a room in Sweden and designed a building you cannot leave – and I need you to understand that I respect it enormously.”

He walks the showroom the way other people walk the Met. He stops in every staged room. He sits on sofas and pronounces judgment. He finds a fake 270-square-foot studio apartment, staged for a fictional family of three, and stands in it.

“This fake family has better storage than we did,” he says. “Their fake baby has a closet, Luke. We had a clothing rack screwed into loose drywall anchors.”

He reads every product name aloud, in full Swedish commitment, rolling sounds he has no authority to roll. He develops opinions with alarming speed. By aisle four he’s a partisan in a debate he learned about nine minutes ago.

“The KALLAX is fine,” he announces. “The KALLAX is cubes. Anyone can be cubes. The BILLY is a bookcase with lineage. Eighty years, Luke. The BILLY predates the moon landing. You don’t buy a BILLY, you enter into correspondence with history.”

“It’s forty dollars.”

“That’s the other thing I want to discuss. How are these prices possible? Is IKEA allergic to profit?”

The marketplace is where I lose him entirely. He finds the kitchen section, picks up a whisk, turns it over, and goes still in a way I’ve only seen in trauma bays.

“Luke. This whisk is ninety-nine cents.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a price. That’s a rounding error. Who is subsidising this whisk? What is the catch? WHERE IS THE CATCH, LUKE.”

“There’s no catch. It’s a whisk.”

“There’s always a catch. I was raised by Catherine York. Nothing costs less than it should without a reason.” He puts four whisks in the cart. “Diversification,” he says, “in case one of them is the catch.”

The meatballs happen at 13:00, because I know better than to take Preston York through a furniture labyrinth unfed. He examines the plate with open suspicion – fifteen meatballs, gravy, the lingonberry situation – takes one exploratory bite, and stops chewing.

I wait.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“I have notes for every bistro in our old neighbourhood, is what I have. I’ve been paying nineteen dollars for worse than this in rooms with better lighting and worse honesty.” He points his fork at me. “This never leaves this table.”

The self-service warehouse nearly ends the marriage. Preston stands at the mouth of Aisle 12, staring at the industrial shelving, the flat boxes, the ordinary citizens loading their own furniture onto flatbed carts.

“We have to retrieve it ourselves.”

“Aisle and bin number. It’s on the tag.”

“We retrieve the furniture. Ourselves. From a shelf.” He looks around, possibly for a staff member to tip. “This entire building is a psychological profile, Luke. They make you walk the maze, they feed you, they show you the life you could have, and then they make you carry it out with your own hands so you feel like you earned it.”

He stops. He hears it. I watch him hear it, as the gears turn in his brain.

“Ah,” he says.

“Yeah.”