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  Among other notables, his godfather, Tom, gave the most. He cashed a five-thousand-dollar savings bond and decreed that his godson never speak of it again; Tom didn’t want any frigging shares, either, it was a gift. Wesley Latsch invested his life savings: the three thousand dollars his grandmother had given him for graduating from college.

  The morning of the first snowfall, Sam awakened at eight, sat at his computer, and by nine-thirty had successfully applied for four credit cards with a combined credit line of six thousand eight hundred dollars.

  Nearly halfway to his rock bottom budget, Sam hadn’t broken a sweat. He felt lucky, fated, charged—he had asked for money, and people had given it to him.

  Several more inches of snow had fallen when, a few days later, his winning streak was confirmed by a twitchy junior film student named Brooks Hartwig, Jr.

  3.

  A solid crust of snow sealed the Russell grounds. It was months yet before the scheduled start of production. Sam was there to scout the college’s remote south meadow, which was the setting for Russell’s annual May Festival, where much of the film’s action took place.

  It was a Sunday morning. If there were any students awake at this hour, Sam assumed they were up only to use the bathroom and would promptly return to bed.

  Perched on a bench at the edge of the meadow, he panned around his handheld camera. The diffuse winter light threw a blue cast over everything. Through the eyepiece, he took in the acres of untrammeled snow and tried to imagine the summer scene, the potential arrangements of tents and rides, how to fit them together for sight lines and continuity and whether it would be possible to—

  “Hey!” said someone. “Hey, hey, hey! Sam!” A blond tuft flipped into the foreground, creating the illusion that some alien grass had sprouted up through the snow.

  Sam lowered the camera.

  Cheeks ablaze, bangs covering his eyes in a white-blond shag, a purple scarf knotted around his neck, Brooks Hartwig, Jr., waved his arms as if trying to signal a rescue chopper. “Sam! Sam! Hey! Hey!”

  “I see you,” said Sam.

  “Yeah?” Brooks sounded unconvinced.

  “That’s what happens when you stand in front of a lens, Brooks. You appear on the other side. That’s what makes the magic.”

  “Magic! Yeah, yeah! That’s what it’s all about, right? That’s crazy.” Brooks clapped excitedly.

  Sam suspected his only hope of getting rid of Brooks was to agree with him. “Yes. Magic is crazy.”

  Brooks blinked several times, grinned. “But hey, right. Sam. I heard you were making a movie. I was thinking that I could be your assistant director.”

  “Ah,” said Sam. “I don’t know, Brooks.”

  Brooks continued to grin. “Uh-huh. So what are we doing right now?”

  Sam’s acquaintance with Brooks was limited: a film history seminar a couple of years earlier, a handful of other encounters in and around the film department. Someone had told him once that Brooks was the heir to a fortune, either pharmaceuticals or paper products, he couldn’t remember. Sam was familiar with Brooks’s work. The previous spring he had survived a viewing of the sophomore’s Intermediate Film short. The film concerned a taxidermist (played by Brooks) who is bullied into committing suicide by his collection of judgmental animal heads. At one point, a massive and intimidating elk’s head—marbled horns like lance tips, oily black eyes, gums exposed as if in rage—languidly castigates the taxidermist, “I’m sorry to say it, little man, but the more I see you slopping around formaldehyde like that, the harder I find it to conceive of any reason for your continued existence.” Shot in deep-focus black and white, the whole thing had made Sam feel as though he were trapped in some seamy theme park where everything was designed from the nightmares of the puberty-ravaged fourteen-year-old son of Dracula and Jane Goodall.

  “Look, I’d love to have the help, but I’ve got all the crew I can afford, Brooks. I’m producing it myself, and it’s just a little movie, you know?”

  Brooks brought a finger to his mouth, and as he spoke, he began to gnaw at a hangnail. “Oh, but I was thinking that I could chip in, maybe. Pay my own way. Like, what if I gave you, like, oh, maybe, five thousand bucks? So I could be a sort of partner, you know? Team up, you know?” A tic started above Brooks’s right eye, and his white-blond eyebrow began to wiggle.

  “Seriously?” Sam asked, and Brooks said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” and after eight to ten seconds of thought during which time his heartbeat filled his ears and his breath swelled in his chest and he realized that a golden egg had practically rolled up against his shoe, Sam decided to be greedy. “Could you make it ten thousand?”

  Finger still in his mouth, Brooks nodded eagerly. “Sure!”

  “You know,” said Sam, “I did like the puppetry in your movie a lot. No strings. It really looked like the elk was talking. And not just talking but pissed off. That was impressive. The whole mise-en-scène was—I won’t soon forget it.”

  “Thank you. It was a very personal film.”

  “That’s great,” said Sam. He told Brooks he was hired. “Now stop that.” He pushed Brooks’s hand away from his mouth.

  Brooks’s eyebrow leaped dramatically, as if in celebration. “Yay!” he whooped. He spat out the hangnail and asked, “Oh, so what does the assistant director do?”

  “Whatever I tell him to.” Sam clapped Brooks on the shoulder and sent him on his first mission. “Go stand in the middle of the meadow. I need some scale.”

  “I have a little bit of a cold,” said Brooks. The meadow lay beneath two and a half feet of crystalline powder.

  “That’s okay,” said Sam.

  Brooks set off, with each step dropping crotch-deep in the snow. Once he reached the middle of the field, Sam directed him to move around in a wide circle. After Sam filmed this, he commanded Brooks to head for the woods at the far end of the field. “Don’t fucking stop, okay?” he yelled. “Just go and go!”

  The little figure waded away, sinking into drifts and bobbing back up, purple scarf occasionally flapping like the tattered standard of a listing ship. About five hundred yards out, at the edge of the woods, Brooks stopped and looked back.

  This was far enough. Sam put an arm up and waved for him to turn around. The blond dot of the AD’s head nodded, but instead of looping back, he continued in the opposite direction and vanished into the trees.

  Sam waited, shuffling back and forth along the bench for a couple of minutes, before retreating to his car. He put the heat on full blast and noted the dashboard thermometer: fifteen degrees.

  On a studio-style production, an assistant director performed more of a managerial position, but Sam didn’t have a big enough crew to require that kind of help, and in any event, he wouldn’t trust Brooks to manage the night shift at a Zoney’s Go-Mart. In his mind, he decided to drop the “director” part and just go with “assistant.” Brooks was a weird fucker, and his puppet psychodrama was less a work of cinema than it was a plea for analysis; but for ten thousand dollars, he could be allowed to perform a few basic tasks.

  Half an hour passed. The light dimmed. From around the perimeter of the field, the shadows of the trees leaked out, forming rows of black dominoes. It was toasty in the car, but the thermometer on the dash said that it had dropped to ten degrees outside. Sam had a vision of his AD walking on and on, carrying out his orders indefinitely, like one of those legendary World War II Japanese soldiers who, in their decaying uniforms and their dotage, supposedly continued to guard remote islands in the Pacific. The possibility occurred to him that Brooks might fall into a snow-disguised culvert, break a leg, and freeze to death. A bear might eat him; Brooks Hartwig, Jr., in his blond twitchiness, looked like a perfect snack for a ravenous bear.

  Sam was beginning to grow worried when he realized the potential instructiveness of the situation. His policy of self-forgiveness was being put to the test. The question he needed to ask himself—that every director needed to ask himself, perhaps—was this:
if the success of his film depended on it, was he willing to let a bear devour the AD?

  There were some movies—Citizen Kane and the like—that unquestionably passed the worth-feeding-an-AD-to-a-bear threshold. For that matter, there wasn’t an urbane jury in the world that would have held Truffaut responsible if he had let bears eat as many as three or four ADs in order to get every priceless frame of Jules et Jim in the can. But as much as he didn’t like to admit it—as much as he believed that it could, and believed that he had to believe that it could—Sam knew that it was impossible to say whether Who We Are would rise to that level.

  “Fuck.” Sam would have to go reel him in. He reached for the door handle, swiveled in his seat—and met the gaze of Brooks standing at the driver’s-side window.

  “Did you get what you needed? I can go back out.” The window muffled Brooks’s voice. His blond eyebrows were tipped with frost, and his nose was the gory scarlet of a Christmas carnation.

  “Yes. I got it. Thank you, Brooks. Now get in.”

  “Yay,” croaked Brooks. He came around and climbed in, accompanied by a shroud of arctic air. Rocking back and forth in his seat, he put a bare hand up for Sam to see, fanned it in front of his face. There were faint blue moons under the fingernails. “I can’t feel anything. I could put it in a furnace and, like, whatever—feel nothing.”

  Sam felt an unwelcome spasm of conscience. His new AD’s earnestness was unsettling, as well as nearly palpable, like a dog’s pant. “Please don’t put your hand in a furnace, Brooks.”

  “Of course not! I would never!” Brooks rocked and giggled. “I saw a guy get struck by lightning when I was a kid and, like, people are much, much more flammable than you might think. He, like—he really went up, the guy.”

  “I bet,” said Sam.

  They drove to the College Center, and Brooks went to fetch coffee, as well as a five-hundred-dollar advance on his investment from the ATM. When he returned, they sat in the toasty cab and Sam explained Who We Are—the characters, the time scheme, the changing details, the high-speed shifts in characterization. After he finished, he asked Brooks what he thought.

  “Neat,” was Brooks’s underwhelming reaction.

  “Glad you approve.”

  Brooks blew his nose on his purple scarf. “Hey, you know what’s weird?”

  “What’s that?” The response was out of his mouth before Sam realized what a mistake it was—in the area of weird, his new AD needed no encouragement.

  “I sometimes have this sensation, right? That I’m being filmed by a documentary crew.” Brooks blinked a few times. Filaments of snot glistened on the scarf’s fringe.

  “But why?” Sam couldn’t seem to help himself. “Why would they want to film you? What’s the documentary?”

  Brooks slapped his knee and shook his head. “That’s what I can’t figure out! That’s the weird part!”

  “No, Brooks. That is not the weird part,” said Sam.

  “Huh?” The AD grinned.

  “Listen.” Sam sighed, then extended his open hand. “Don’t be any stranger than you have to be, Brooks.”

  The AD gave an eager nod and placed the packet of money in Sam’s palm.

  4.

  Sam had already made overtures to a fledgling production company called Bummer City, located in Queens and run by two young Russell alums. Now, after considering the script for months and making numerous suggestions that Sam promised he would take—while simultaneously promising himself to never, ever take—the Bummer City boys had signaled their willingness to write a check for forty thousand dollars. Together with the money and credit already on hand, this gave Sam a total of nearly seventy thousand dollars, his dream budget.

  Which was why he needed to take Bummer City’s last proviso seriously: that he convince An Actor to play the small but pivotal role of Merlin, the only character in the script who never changes at all. A middle-aged drug dealer, Merlin operates out of the far stall of the basement bathroom of the science library, dispensing pharmaceuticals to the other characters. Parked on the john, wearing the same clothes, reading the same issue of The Economist, he is immune to time and, in an odd way, the story’s sole adult.

  ■ ■ ■

  Located in a residential section of Astoria, the Bummer City Productions office was a house, and the house was basically a man-size playroom. While Ted Wassel and Patch Brinckerhoff, Bummer City’s copresidents, apparently had offices on the second floor and a screening room in the basement, the first floor—their conference area—featured several wall-mounted televisions, an array of video game systems, and a wet bar. Posters for lousy seventies movies lined the walls; among them Sam immediately bird-dogged a framed Devil of the Acropolis—Booth cowering before a snarling, toga-wearing werewolf—identical to the one he had pawned.

  “You need some cred at the front of the picture,” said Wassel. “You need you An Actor.”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing,” Patch Brinckerhoff reiterated. “An Actor.”

  “An Actor,” repeated Sam.

  “An Actor. A Name. A Name Actor.” Wassel put his hands out and pantomimed the weighing of two immense balls. “A Real Actor.”

  At Russell, Patch and Wassel had been film majors two years ahead of Sam. They had codirected a pair of inexcusably sincere documentaries: one about a majestic and dying elm tree on the quad, the other about the brutality of the campus police. They were computer science majors—geeks—but lacked the social inhibitions that rendered most of their brethren harmless. Their enthusiasm was always on full display, and success only made it worse.

  Post-graduation, Wassel and Patch had amassed a small fortune through the development of an image-based search program known as WOUND (We Open Up New Diagnoses). If you were a subscriber and had, say, an anomalous-looking blister on your arm, you could take a digital photograph of it and submit it to WOUND, which then sent you back a series of matching images along with potential diagnoses.

  Sam had tested the program by taking a photograph of a smashed pigeon. WOUND had responded by e-mailing several images of hairy men with chest gashes and the advice that he go to the nearest ER. Sort of impressive, he had to admit.

  The three men had gathered around one of those enormous wooden spools that Sam recalled from the basements of his youth. These spools had seemed to hint at the secret pleasures of male adulthood. The fathers who had them in the basement were the same fathers who were liable to have dartboards, neon beer signs, and lots of sports-related knowledge. Sam had fantasized about having one himself someday. In reality, they were shitty tables. The spools were too tall to set your elbows on, and you had to be careful not to let anything fall into the hole in the middle, because if it did, you were never getting it back.

  The use of the spool as a conference table exemplified why dealing with Bummer City was so disheartening: Patch and Wassel made him feel like a toy. Before long, he imagined they would be dressing him in a San Diego Chicken costume and demanding he moonwalk, but there was no getting around it. Investors were hard to find, and harder still when your project—an indie film—had no realistic financial prospects. Sam had printed an investment contract off the Internet, promising a minuscule rate of interest; and to make them feel like they were legitimate participants in the process—that Bummer City Productions meant something—he had added a clause that put them above the title. When you got right down to it, however, what he was essentially asking for was a donation.

  “Well, who are you thinking about, Wassel?”

  “Hoffman,” said Wassel. “Dusty.”

  “Rainman,” said Patch. “Ratso.”

  “Guys,” said Sam. “That’d be great, but—”

  “—John Paul Jones.”

  “Yes! He could definitely do it. Good one, Wassel.”

  This suggestion momentarily stumped Sam. He was not aware that the bassist of Led Zeppelin had ever acted. He couldn’t even remember which symbol represented the guy. “Really?”

  “He’s a grea
t actor.”

  “Great, great actor.”

  “Last of the Mohicans, bro.”

  “Ah,” said Sam, understanding that they meant Daniel Day Lewis. He opted not to correct them. If they wanted to believe that the world’s greatest living thespian, whose name they couldn’t get right, might be interested in playing a role that took place entirely in a bathroom stall, that was their privilege.

  Wassel presented Sam with a list of other possibilities. It was written in magenta crayon on the back of a crinkled flyer for a shoe store. The third name on the list, after John Paul Jones, was Johnny Deep. Toward the bottom he noticed Meryl Strep, and below that, John Belushi.

  Both men dressed like little boys but from different periods. In a checked short-sleeve shirt buttoned all the way up, big black-framed glasses, and a buzz cut, Wassel represented the fifties. Patch was the seventies: jeans with a blooming rose appliqué on the butt, cowboy shirt, Yoo-Hoo baseball cap, and flip-flops.

  “These are some great names.” Sam tucked the shoe store flyer into his pocket. He realized that he truly did not like these men. “I can try.”

  “You can try,” cried Wassel, “and you can fucking succeed, brother!”

  Wassel and Patch exchanged high fives. Patch rode an invisible bucking horse around a circle. “A drink for the Abyss!” yelled Patch, and poured the rest of the Woodchuck cider he had been drinking into the hole in the center of the spool.

  Sam could feel his self-respect plummeting like a fat kid shoved off a high diving board. He waited until he heard it hit the water with a flab-scalding splat, then said, “So. We have a deal?”

  “You get us An Actor, then fucking A, we have a deal.”

  Patch broke into an air-guitar solo, culminating in a violent crank of an air whammy bar. Wassel said they’d better get some coke, ASAP.

  ■ ■ ■